If you’d like an idea of what I had to put up with every Friday in college:

This is the most important moment right now, which is: We – are about contribution. That’s what our job is. It’s not about impressing people. It’s not about getting the next job. It’s about contributing something. Everyone was clear that you contributed passion to the people in this room, right? Did you do it better than the next violinist? Or did he do it better than another pianist? I don’t know; I don’t care! Because in contribution, there is no better. And that’s all. And what happens is the faces light up.

And that is all…

In response to @HansOngchua regarding how to best use a metronome for efficient practicing, I came up with this list, which was too long to fit into a Twitter message:

1. Plan your practice session. Organize which sections of which pieces you need to work on. Figure out how much time it is going to work on each section and to play through an entire piece if that’s part of your plan.
2. Practice in chunks. Don’t just set the metronome and plow through your music. Mark off the sections that need attention and deal with them separately – working out the kinks – before you try to play the piece all the way through.
3. Start your metronome at a tempo where you can play the section absolutely flawlessly – everything is in place: technique, rhythm, notes, phrasing, tone, etc. No compromises. Starting anywhere faster and you’re going to be practicing making mistakes.
4. Take the above tempo and lets assume it takes 4 minutes to get through it at an 8th-note tempo of 60 bpm. Up to the target speed, it takes 1 minute at 120 bpm. If you’ve set aside 10 minutes of your practice schedule to work on this passage, then you should set the metronome for ♪=60, ♪=80, ♪=100, ♪=120.
5. Don’t set the metronome for faster than you can play it. If the above scenario is unplayable at ♪=120, try a lower target and compress the in-between metronome markings to fit proportionally.
6. Subdivide. I indicated eighth notes above, but these could just as easily turn into quarter notes, half notes, or whatever. It is not uncommon to start in eighth note subdivisions and wind up later on in quarter note subdivisions.
7. Make sure the metronome is loud enough. Plug it into speakers or headphones if necessary.
8. I almost never use a metronome when playing a piece all the way through. The exceptions to this are when I’m learning notes and want to build technique for a work up to a certain point. But after a while, I break it out into separate sections to work on, so that I can keep certain parts open for rubato, phrasing, and pauses.
9. But the key question @HansOngchua asked was of course how to keep tempo during a performance. Unless the piece is some robotic vivacissimo etude, I think the tempo is likely going to fluctuate a bit based on human interpretation regardless. But in general, I try to keep an internal sense of tempo. When I’m performing a work, I go back to that internal sense of tempo from time to time to get things back on track. I think this has less of a chance of being “off” when the performer is confident and not distracted by nerves.

Today I came across this article from Peter Bregman on the HarvardBusiness.org site, titled: The Easiest Way to Change People’s Behavior. It’s an excellent read and highly recommended.

What Peter discusses in this article is that one of the most important motivational factors in our lives is environment. If you put the right things in front of you, you’ll tend to use them more. Move them away, and they’ll get used less.

This goes for good things as well as bad things. On the positive side, consider proximity of the things that are beneficial: The gym is only a block away, so you go regularly. If the gym is far, you don’t go. Some examples based on the article:

• Use a bigger spoon or plate, and you eat more. Use smaller ones and you eat less.
• Live near a liquor store or a Burger King and people tend to drink more and eat more junk food. Place yourselves farther away from those and you tend not to indulge in such sins.
• For musicians, keep your instrument and music in an area where you’ll most likely use it. Designate a practice area and have your instrument either out of it’s case or put the case in an easily accessible area. Music on the stand. Metronome on the desk. Ready to go. (I personally have found having a tuner (iStrobeSoft) and metronome (Dr Betotte TC) on my iPhone to be one of the biggest music practice productivity boosts yet. No searching for gadgets…)
• Want kids to do their homework? Give them a clean, organized place to do it and make sure the homework is there and not floating around the house in some random place. (I know this from experience…)

In a Web 2.0 context, this equates to the usability of your software. Make it easy for your users to get things done, and they’ll do it without a hitch. Throw up roadblocks, and they’ll get stuck. It doesn’t matter how small the roadblock is or whether or not the construct was well intentioned or not – if it impedes usability, then it will impede usability.

In a greater sense, there’s a lesson for the nation or the world: If you want people to change the way they are doing things, make them want to do it. Make it easy for them. Remove any and all barriers to getting things done. You want people to vote? Put voting booths in more neighborhoods or promote the option to vote by mail. Need people to get immunized? Set up neighborhood clinics. Want your employees to be more productive? Find out what is it about your office environment that is getting in the way or not helping promote the results you want to see. For kids, for employees, for citizens, provide the right environment and make it a place they want to be.

Great post over at Scienceblogs.com by Dave Munger titled “Musicians have better memory — not just for music, but words and pictures too”

As musicians, we are constantly training ourselves to memorize. We spend hours upon hours memorizing music, and using mnemonic cues such as melodies, song form, harmony, music notation, and so on to help us memorize. Many of us start at a very early age.

Not only that, but practicing music is really doing repetitive calisthenic exercise on the parts of your brain that process technical thinking. We count over and over again (one and a two and a…), those beats are subdivided into fractions and complex mathematical iterations begin to permutate in both rhythm and harmonic elements of music performance.

It gets better: Music composition is really just another flavor of writing code. Musicians who read music are trained to read code from an early age. Musicians make excellent programmers.

So it is clear to me that music instruction is a critical component of education, and should begin consistently and from an early age. This is the best way to develop inherent technical thinking skills, improve memory, and help kids survive in an age where the people who know how to write code, or at least can think in code-like patterns, have a far greater chance of success professionally.

The past three years have been grueling. Working full time, taking classes towards a masters degree, and being a dad all at the same time was taking a toll. The last few months were especially interesting since I was working on a book project on top of everything.

Well, life has returned to a new kind of normal for the past couple of weeks, and it is good to have a little free time again. The masters degree is done – I am now a graduate of of the University of Denver in computer information systems, with concentration in web design and development. And the book is done – an introductory guide to standards-based web development. More on the book details in a later post…

So it is nice to experience a little rest for a change. I actually have had time to relax a bit and get back in touch with cooking, taking the kids on excursions to places like zoo and the Exploratorium, reading a geek book or two that I actually want to read, and of course practicing.

Hey, perhaps I’ll even have more time to post items here in the ‘ol blog! But don’t hold your breath…

Jason Heath recently noted some book recommendations for musicians from Chicago bassist Greg Sarchet. I have a few of my own that I’d like to add to the mix!

• Zander, Rosamund, and Benjamin Zander. The Art of Possibility
  –I complained loudly when I was in Ben’s orchestra rehearsals, and thought he was a nut in class. To this day he is one of the most influential figures in my life. This is a must-read.
• Green, Barry, and W. Gallwey. Inner Game of Music
  –We can’t forget Barry Green’s book!
• Hofstadter, Douglas. G√∂del, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
  –Because you are an effing geek. Seriously, this book is a key component for my theories on the correlations between music and science.

Below is the talk I gave at the opening of the memorial service for my grandfather, Edwin Lee Ellis, last Saturday night at The Athenian School in Danville, California:

My grandfather was always very eager to start off each holiday meal with the tradition of giving thanks���saying grace. I always hated that part ��� I���d just roll my eyes around and wish I could start eating already. But I always looked forward to it, because that meant that our family was together. We were all holding hands, we were having fun, and we were all about to enjoy a delicious meal.

I think it would be appropriate to start this talk off, on behalf of the entire Ellis family, with a few notes on thankfulness:

• First of all, we would like to thank the Athenian School for hosting this event, and everyone that has been involved in putting this together. We are thankful for Athenian being such a wonderful institution. We would especially like to thank Eleanor for your caring, your dedication, and acts of kindness too numerous to mention. You are an angel on this earth.
• We would like to thank the entire Athenian and Chadwick communities for all of the love and support that you all have shown over the years, and especially these past few months. When I organized and printed out all of the get-well email that was sent to my grandfather while he was hospitalized, it came out to be 82 pages long. We read each one of those messages to him. And while he could not always verbally respond very well, he clearly acknowledged each one. Some made him laugh. Some made him cry. Two of the emails we read left him shaking his head in disgust ��� these were confessions of debauchery that both involved master keys.
• I personally would like to thank two people who are not here today. Without these two my own personal experiences growing up here at Athenian would not have been nearly as rich: They are my next-door neighbor Lester Henderson, who taught me my whole life how to solve problems and how to love music, and my grandmother Georgia Ellis, who taught me how to enjoy life and how to love others. If asked who were three people that shaped who I am today, I would immediately pick Ed, Georgia, and Lester. Thank you to all three of you for everything you have given me.
• And finally, again on behalf of the entire Ellis family, we are truly thankful to all of you who are here with us on this beautiful evening with this immaculate scenery as a backdrop to celebrate the life of this wonderful person. We are thankful that so may people cared so much about him.

—

Ed had built a long list of experiences prior to his arrival at Athenian in 1966.

He was born the so of Presbyterian missionaries in Iran, and by the age of 15 he had traveled through the Middle East, Europe, and even Japan. He attended the Stony Brook School on Long Island while his parents continued their mission in Iran, and it was there that he first began his interests in wrestling and football.

Ed then went on to attend Davidson College in, North Carolina, which he chose for the most part because of their wrestling and football programs. It was there that he began studies in education, and near his graduation he was invited by his aunt Margaret Chadwick to join them as faculty at their newly founded school in Southern California. He married his southern sweetheart, Georgia Mae Burroughs, and they immediately drove across the country to California to begin teaching there.

Ed spent the years 1942 to 1949 at Western Reserve Academy in Ohio coaching wrestling and football and teaching math, but by 1949 he and Georgia had three girls and one boy. Since WRA was an all boy’s school, the thought it best to find a school that was co-ed. They returned to Chadwick in ’49, and he served as dean of students and director of athletics there until 1966, when Dyke Brown called him up to ask with some help building up the institution where we now stand.

Ed was always an example of strong moral character, loyalty, trust, dedication and perseverance. In his retirement, Ed remained very active with the alumni associations for all the schools at which he taught and attended, and was very highly regarded by the students whose lives he touched over his long career.

—

When reflecting on my relationship with my grandfather in the days after he passed away, I recalled one item that kind of summed up how many of us related with him. It was summed up on one small, typewritten scrap of paper taped above his office doorknob, placed just about where your eye would look, if you were opening a door and not exactly beaming with pride about what you were about to talk with him about. If you weren���t looking, you easily would have missed this. It read:

Don’t trouble trouble,
until trouble troubles you�Ķ

Those were ominous words for those that had just ascended the long staircase leading up to his office. Does anyone else remember that besides me??? It was there for years ��� just a little yellowing scrap of paper held in place by cellophane tape. I remember it well only because I opened that door about several thousand times in my life, without even thinking about it. And yet, when I was thinking about what I���d stand up here and say, somehow that was the first damn thing that popped into my head.

Don’t trouble trouble,
until trouble troubles you�Ķ

For Father���s Day, it is common to give a gift such as a mug, T-shirt, or card that says ���World���s Greatest Dad.��� I think that I am OK in saying that in the context of Edwin Ellis, this statement takes on a somewhat elevated meaning given the staggering number of persons that saw him as a paternal figure. My grandfather passed away just two days before Fathers��� Day this year. This Father���s day I was reminded of exactly what he meant to me. For all intensive purposes, and for lack of having one myself, I can certainly say that I saw him as my own father. I know that many of us here have similar feelings.

—

There is an old Sicilian proverb that says: “Only your real friends will tell you when your face is dirty.” Ed was always open with his opinions, spoke with us directly, and told us the facts right straight to our faces ��� he might have been brutally honest at times, but it was also done with a true sense of caring. He told us exactly what we needed to hear.

This was the most important lesson that my grandfather taught me. I have to say that the hardest moment in my life was sitting with him in that hospital room and telling him what the facts were ��� telling him that stroke, pneumonia, and cancer were not his friends right now, giving him a straight assessment of what his prognosis was, and telling him what he had to do if he wanted to have any hope of recovery. And yet at the same time, it was easy for me to find the will to do it, because he taught me how to behave in these situations: Be direct. Look ���em in the eye and speak the truth. Be brutally honest, but at the same time with a true sense of caring. Tell them exactly what they need to hear.

And lastly, I would just like to close with saying that we should not feel sadness in Ed���s passing. The way I see it, there is nothing sad here; nothing to regret. A wonderful, productive, and meaningful life does not end in sadness. We should instead feel great pride in having known him, having learned and grown from him, and having him as a friend and a father figure. So let us now celebrate Edwin Lee Ellis, thank him for all that he gave to us, and be thankful for all the ways he helped us become better persons.

I’m done. I was up until 3:30 AM last night finishing up final papers, got three hours of sleep, and woke up and kept at it until just now. I am so done with this quarter. Now on to the task of thinking about absolutely nothing for a day or two. My brain is cooked.