At their "best," institutional practice rooms tend to be pretty sterile. A quick Google search of practice room images will prove this. To be fair, the large rooms with numerous instruments and a bit more color are probably recording studios, not practice rooms. And that one guy looking at the New York skyline is in the Juilliard dorm, not a practice room. The images of medium-lengthed hallways, which some photographer mistakenly thought would become fun by having students poke their heads out of the doors, show the immediate environment of practice rooms. (By the way, I've been that photographer.) And the small, neutral-colored rooms with no windows but maybe a mirror and a piano - those are practice rooms. Aesthetically speaking, spartan. For all their sound-proofing, not so musical.
Many college-aged musicians have tender spirits. Their artistic temperaments can make them very sensitive to their physical environments. Their hearts and psyches are open and that which seems merely drab to another can be downright oppressive to these young people who are feeling so much and are still learning a lot about managing their very being. What they're going through is a normal stage of development. It's something along the lines of negotiating being in the world but not of the world.
In addition to those issues related to the physical environment that can cloud the innocent eye, there are all sorts of things lurking in practice rooms waiting to catch us all off-guard and alone:
- doubts about our talent
- self-esteem issues that we brought from home or from our first teachers
- the concern that performance practice is something everyone else knows but we can't quite figure out how to really know it for ourselves
- the infinite longing for the ultimate answer to technical questions
- the great unknown of the future which often feels more like a tightrope walk off a cliff than a broad plain rising to majestic peaks
I think all of the above are possible and likely happenings in most any practice room. On the campus where I work, we have practice rooms in an old nursing home which became a dorm which became practice rooms. An interesting story, I think, but in the highly landscaped, new-construction world of Florida, it's unusual. If you transplanted our building to a setting shaped by a culture that puts great stock in making use of existing structures, it wouldn't be unusual at all. And while I was initially picturing Scotland when I wrote that last sentence, downtown Richmond or Savannah would do just fine. For that matter, even in our local culture, the re-purposing of an old warehouse as a church would most likely be thought of as something awesome.
Nonetheless, it seems that interpretation is sometimes needed to help us appreciate the real beauty of the spaces in which we live and work, the goodness that is deeply woven into their fabrics. And so I share the following paragraphs which I wrote on Facebook this morning as several students discussed their return to campus for the new school year.
As rooms go, even the finest practice rooms rarely have a lot of nice things said about them. In general, I think practice rooms rank somewhere around hospital rooms on the great continuum of rooms.
My point is that the primary issue with any practice room is psychological, not physical, in that we shut ourselves up in them alone for hours at a time to do the disciplined work of really changing ourselves. It's hard to be excited about that day in and day out because it frequently involves coming face to face with the things in ourselves we'd rather not be aware of.
Our practice rooms have character and a history. In addition to the normal hard work mentioned above, they have housed prayer meetings, intense emotional support from peers, and creative moments when students have learned by being goofy. Caring faculty have sought out students in those rooms when a jury went badly or a question wasn't answered well or when a tragedy had turned a student's world upside down. Perfectly soundproof, no. But in Spence, you know that music is not made in a vacuum. Indeed, community is just beyond the door. One is not as alone in such a practice room. It is a real human environment like where a family lives. And yes, it was a nursing home. When you sit quietly before your instrument, you might just more deeply sense the relationship of your music making to the big picture. Your path is not just about the perfection of counting and control of sound. In your very room, questions of old age were asked such as: "Why am I still here on this earth?" And, we hope more often than not, daughter or little grandson appeared at the door to give an answer with their presence. Or a pastor fulfilled the ministry of showing up at the bedside of a demented one when no one else was there to see. And loved ones gathered as their resident moved on to another world. In that very hallway, they started to process their grief and sought the beginnings of a way forward.
I also can't imagine that as dorm rooms or practice rooms, marriage proposals haven't happened there. Plus, half the rooms have a lovely view of the lake. I become inspired when I see the various water birds drifting in for a landing - light, legato, Spirit-like.
Which brings me to what I think my real point must be. What has happened there makes it hallowed ground. When you go to a shrine, it might have some holes in it. It might be a little dingy. It might make you think of another time. It shows signs of the use of many pilgrims. And in its worn-ness, it has great potential for connecting you to others and to the Spirit that has woven beauty into daily life there. So I'm going to think of it as sacred ground, because it is.
P.S. It won't be there forever.
P.P.S. Blair, sorry for hijacking your nice post.
Here's a picture of the way I plan to see it - a bit like a cathedral beside the lake.
