I have a regular daily routine of music practice. This is not something I started out intending to make into a regular part of my life. What is now a very strong committment, even a devotional practice of sorts, came to me gradually. Little did I imagine that back in the spring of 2002 when I impulsively contacted Nikolai Ruskin and asked him if he could teach me the ney (at the time having had no previous experience playing any kind of melodic instrument!) that this would eventually lead me into a daily practice that would become the backbone of my life. Whatever difficulties I might run into from day to day in various aspects of my professional or personal life, I know that I always have this daily music practice to fall back on, to help me get grounded again in reality.
My current practice time is split evenly between practicing the shakuhachi and practicing my middle-eastern music for CMEMME (concert coming up December 6th!) on the ney and kaval. Sometimes when I am practicing a piece of music that I find to be rather difficult, and if I’ve been practicing it for a while, I can become aware of a gradual shift in my playing toward an underlying smoothness and clarity, a sense of the music starting to fall into place. Of course this is simply known as “making progress,” and is certainly not anything unusual, but psychologically it is a very interesting thing. This feeling of things falling into place reminds me of the feeling that I had when I was a serious student of math many years ago, and working on a difficult problem for a long time I would sometimes be rewarded with a profound feeling of things falling into place and a solution to the problem starting to emerge from behind a cloud of confusion. This feeling of things falling into place in the music is just like that, except more gradual. But it can be a powerful feeling nonetheless. At such times I feel like I am getting closer to understanding how the tune really works, i.e., what its true underlying personality and sense is.
