Curiosity, Ownership, and How to Stop Practice with Kathryn Drake

In this week’s episode, we’re speaking with Kathryn Drake. Drake is a violin teacher, music educator, and co-director of Ithaca Suzuki Music Education in Ithaca, New York. As I got this episode ready to share with you and revisited our conversation, I found our conversation so inspiring and honestly so grounding – I think you, too will appreciate what they have to say about music practice, how everything in life is related can impact our music, how their background in Zen meditation influences how they think about music practice, and the importance of knowing when to stop practicing.

To Listen to the full episode with Kathryn Drake: you can find the Time to Practice Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Audible, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform. You can also listen directly from the link below: 

Highlights of my Conversation with Drake:

On Developing Curiosity & Ownership as a student: “I wanted to understand what I was doing. I wanted to understand what practice meant. I wanted to understand what playing an orchestra meant. I wanted to understand what the music I was playing, what era it came from, et cetera. And so slowly but surely through research working with Tim and Christie, I started pulling those threads. And probably the most, even more than any lesson probably the thing that helped me get into the world the most was that Tim had a book of CDs, hundreds, his music collection, hundreds of CDs, and any of his students could just literally pull a CD out and take it and borrow it for the week.

Something that feels really hard to do. Now, I’ve tried to recreate it with my students. So we had a booklet of CDs and we drove an hour to get to his house. And so my mom and I would just play that CD in the car and then I’d get home and I’d put it into my alarm clock radio and I could do with his CDs of the Tchaikovsky concerto and the Mendelssohn symphonies, what I had been taught to do with the Suzuki CDs or the Bach concertos or the partitas and sonatas, the solo repertoire. And I got to develop a relationship with that music and I got to come into the lesson each week and be like, oh my gosh, have you heard the third movement of Mendelssohn or something? And we could connect over that laugh about that and get excited about that. So it was less for me what was happening inside of the lesson in particular, inside of my practice in particular. But what was expanding my mind about what was possible and for what it’s worth, the same exact thing happened around sophomore year with teaching as well. He just happened to have a bookshelf of teacher books, and I started to pick them up. I read Helping Parents Practice, and Teaching from the Balance Point and I was like, oh, there’s this world I can explore. Oh, this is so much bigger than I realized.”

On Zen Buddism and Music Practice: “And there’s some stories of him (Suzuki) doing a lot of repetitive action and waking up early and being open to insight. That reminds me a lot of my time with Zen. But the fundamental training that I received at least is: there is only right now, there’s no such thing as a future or a past. I mean, there are conceptually, but we are right here right now.

And it is often the fear of, or the anticipation of the future or the regret of the past that’s getting in the way of right now being a special moment. And I love working with kids where we’re not on a curriculum where they have to be someplace sometime I get to be completely with them right now. And the thing that they’re learning today is just as important and vital and precious as the thing that they’re going to learn 10 years from now. And Mozart concerto is not more or less important than twinkle, but we have whichever one we have today, that’s where we are today. And when you’re sitting, so the practice often is just to sit yourself on a cushion and a comfortable posture and stay with yourself, stay with your breath for about 25 minutes.

And during that time, you completely dethroned the thinking. Conscious mind is being the most important part of yourself. And so you say, well, even if my mind tells me I’m thirsty, I’m not going to really get up and go to get a drink of water. I’m just going to stay here and experience that. Or even if I’m a little chillier, even if it would be preferable to close the window, I’m just going to sit with myself and experience that temperature. And the same being with in practice in time with students, even when we’re getting to that edge of it might be a little uncomfortable right now, it’s okay for things to feel uncomfortable or coaching parents on. Just because they feel upset about practicing doesn’t necessarily mean that they can’t bring that into practice. Do an upset version of twinkle, do an upset version of your bow hand. ”

On thinking big picture: ” Another analogy that gets used often in Zen of course, is weather. And that we’re not trying to capture only sunny days. We’re not forcing it to be a gloomy day. Whatever weather is there is, okay. And it’s the label of it that challenges us. And if we just take away that label and we just experience what is, and it is what is, and it’s that beautiful change, it’s precious and sweet. And I think there’s a lot of desire when you’re coming into practice as a new practice or a new family that you think that every practice should be perfect, but it’s actually the fluctuation of years of doing it. Often I’ll find myself telling parents, there’s a reason we do this for 10 or 15 years. It’s a long journey on purpose, and it’s the changes that we see over time that are often the most satisfying.”

Links in this episode:

Connect with Drake on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kbdrakevln/

Drake’s website: kathrynbdrake.com

Connect with Christine and share your takeaways on Instagram

This episode is brought to you by Christine’s book: Music Practice Makeover