The Cellist Who Practised in the Dark

A cellist in her second year at conservatory had been struggling, quietly and stubbornly, with a passage in the third movement of a Brahms sonata. Her teacher had been asking her about it for six weeks. She had been telling her teacher that she was working on it. She had, in fact, been working on it — she practised the passage, every day, for about forty minutes. It was not getting better. It was, in some respects, getting worse. She could not understand why.

One winter evening, working alone in a practice room, the lamp above her music stand blew out. The overhead lights were on a timer that had already switched off. She was, for a moment, completely in the dark. Rather than get up and hunt for a switch she could not remember the position of, she decided, mostly out of laziness, to play the passage from memory. She knew it well enough. She had, after all, been practising it for six weeks.

She played it once through, in the dark, without the score in front of her. She played it better than she had played it in six weeks. She sat, still holding the bow, in complete confusion.

She played it again. It was, again, better. Not perfect; not finished; but noticeably, obviously better than anything she had produced with the lamp on. Her intonation was steadier. Her phrasing was longer. The awkward transition at the end of the passage — the specific thing her teacher had been asking her about — was not awkward. She sat in the dark for a further ten minutes and played the passage six more times. Each time it was, roughly, the same version of better.

When she eventually found the light switch and sat down with the score, she began, slowly, to understand what had been happening. In six weeks of practice with the score in front of her, she had, without knowing it, been playing the passage while reading it. Reading it, unbeknownst to her, had been making her body slightly tenser, slightly more careful, slightly more supervised. Her right arm, in particular, had been holding itself back by a small unnoticeable amount, waiting to be told what to do next by her eye. In the dark, with nothing to read, her body had done what six weeks of technical practice had already taught it to do, without a supervising eye getting in the way.

She took the discovery to her teacher, expecting to be told this was a well-known trick. Her teacher said, mildly, that it was well-known among performers but was not, in fact, taught to students in the way it should be. She spent the following semester deliberately practising, at the end of every session, with the lights off. Her playing, over three months, developed a new steadiness that her teacher noticed and named. She began, six months later, to win small competitions.

There is a class of problems in any craft in which the very act of watching yourself do the thing is what is stopping you from doing it. The problem does not appear when you are still learning the motions; it appears once the motions are already inside you, and the supervising eye becomes a form of drag. The remedy is not to stop practising. The remedy is to remove, for short deliberate periods, the supervision. Turn off the lamp. Play from memory. Write the paragraph with your eyes closed. Deliver the speech without notes. Let the thing you have already learned come out without you standing over it. Some of your work — the deepest, most personal, hardest-earned part of it — will only come out when you finally leave the room.