Yo-Yo Ma on Practicing Clarity

Tuesday Quotes are short explorations of music, life, and the daily endeavor of practicing classical guitar. Find more here. Enjoy!

“If you don’t have clarity of ideas, you’re just communicating sheer sound.”

Yo Yo Ma

There’s an old saying that if you don’t care where you go, any road will get you there.

But as soon as we ask powerful questions, our movements become more intentional.

• What do I want?
• What do I want to feel or communicate with this musical phrase?
• What’s going on here, specifically?
• What’s stopping this from happening?
• What would it be like if this were easy?

Questions like these rarely have a simple answer, but they help us build clarity.

Clarity isn’t something we “get”, like a loaf of bread on the way home. Clarity comes from exploration and experimentation. It comes from listening critically and examining our assumptions.

Clarity is a process, not an event.

When we practice a piece of music, what do we want? We want to play the notes at the right time with the right fingers. We want the notes to connect smoothly. We want intentional tone and volume.

Then, as we deepen even further, we want this passage to sound dark and brooding. We want the next to be bright and cheerful. We want these notes to get louder and those to get quieter. These to stand out and these others to fade into the background.

As we progress on guitar, we gain more and more clarity. We discover new possibilities. We encounter new problems and overcome them.

Even from day one in our guitar journey, we can seek clarity. At first, we’ll focus on the broad strokes. That’s as it should be. We need the basics.

With time, we travel deeper into the rabbit hole of musical expression. And that, too, is as it should be.

But it only happens if we ask questions. We only grow as musicians when we seek greater clarity. Otherwise, as Yo Yo Ma said, it’s just sound.