A Quote from “The Listening Book” by W.A. Mathieu
Found this book on my shelf….about how to get started practicing music.
This really helped..A chapter from the above named book:
“At first, the idea of practicing music comes from afar, like the idea of going to the subtropics, or getting married, or building your own house. Little events might bring you closer to the big event–a chance musical workout with fortunate results, or a close encounter with an inspiring musician. But a wide river of work separates the sensitive listener who does not practice from the one who does. The river is crossed, in time. It may take years to form the practicing habit. But the length of time does not matter. The important thing is to allow the impulse to blossom in its own natural growing cycle.
These are things you can do to nurture the process. One is to make an alter, but not a physical one–a temporal one. Reserving a place in your daily schedule gives practicing a time to happen. Five or ten minutes may be enough, a half hour may be a lot. Eventually your practice time becomes a bright corner of your day, a haven, a meeting with a friend who gives you stuff you didn’t have before.
Clearing the forest is part of building the house. It takes a lot of energy to clear a little bit of land. Maybe it will take forty minutes to clear thirty minutes of practice time. You may have to telephone someone to drive the kids, or watch someone else’s kids in return for them watching yours, or change a meeting. You may have to make some coffee to get wired, or read the funnies to calm down, The preliminaries are part of the practice process, part of the flowering into music, part of the music. Even telephoning counts. While you are dialing the number of the babysitter you can say to yourself, “I’m doing music now.”
