I caught Rachmaninoff, my white whale of the piano, thanks to The Inner Game of Tennis. As a child, my mother encouraged me to take piano lessons. While I enjoyed playing certain songs, I did not make it a hobby; so, when I was fourteen, I convinced her to let me quit and play the guitar instead. My piano skill level rested somewhere between intermediate and advanced four years later, when I began to play popular songs that I actually listened to. At some point, I came across Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C sharp Minor, a song that sat both squarely inside my list of songs I’d love to play and squarely outside my skill level.
Undeterred by trivial details like ability, I memorized it. And then, I spent the next twenty years unable to play the fast paced middle section all the way through. I didn’t have access to a piano that entire time, and I practiced sporadically even when I did, but it’s fair to say that I hit a skill plateau that not even hundreds of rounds of practice could overcome. Then I read Timothy Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Tennis, and within a few weeks I recorded myself playing the entire song, at the pace I wanted to, with only a handful of small errors.
The Inner Game of Tennis says that our minds are composed of two selves: Self 1, with executive function that tells, and Self 2, the subconscious part which actually does stuff. Many of us experience Self 1 as a hypercritical control freak that scolds Self 2 when we make mistakes. Gallwey contrasts this inner conflict with a state of relaxed concentration, where athletes reach their peak performance. To reach that state, one must improve the relationship between these two selves. Self 1 must give Self 2 a clear picture of an outcome, trust that it will achieve it, and then observe what happens — without any judgment. When Self 1 is focused this way, it allows Self 2 to either 1) effortlessly perform an action it has learned or 2) learn to perform ones it has not yet mastered. Gallwey points to the “natural learning” that children do as they develop motor skills. He contends that our subconscious is very skilled at figuring out the how when presented with clear images of a what. These concepts removed two roadblocks in my piano playing.
First, I discovered an inner critic that was crashing me into walls during difficult passages. In recent years, I’ve done a lot of work on improving my inner voice, but I had missed the urgent whisper I heard while playing: “watch out for this measure coming up you always screw it up!” or the positively toned “don’t forget that this chord change contains these particular notes!” You steer right where you look, and those words from Self 1 tightened my stomach and pushed me right into making the very errors I was focused on avoiding. Realizing this, while practicing a tricky part of different song, I began consciously saying to myself: “I trust that Self 2 knows how to play this”1 and worked to shift Self 1 towards a calmer, observatory role. Perhaps because of my previous inner critic training, this immediately worked. The tricky passage became easy; I play it reliably now. And Gallwey was right: each time Self 2 proved itself, I could sense increased trust in… well, myself. But Prelude in C Sharp Minor was a different beast. Despite all those years of practice, my fingers did not yet know how to play that middle section.
The second roadblock was my technical skill, or lack thereof. Now that I was training Self 1 to observe instead of judge, I pointed it at Rachmaninoff. I had played the song slowly many times, thinking this would train my fingers to play more quickly. But I realized that I had never carefully observed what was happening biomechanically as I did so. Once I paid attention, I noticed little hitches and moments of discomfort in my wrist, in my fingers, and in my arms. Following Gallwey’s advice, I let my body play around with different movement patterns until it found one free from tension. Then I would try the passage again, a little faster. Here’s a concrete example: I noticed that I tended to play the third note of some right hand triplets a little early. After experimentation, I discovered that if I tilted my wrist upwards during the prior note, my rhythmic accuracy improved. Much as Gallwey predicted, Self 2 quickly internalized these patterns and within a week or two I could play the middle section as fast as I wanted to play it. So, I connected my digital piano to GarageBand and recorded a perfect first take…
…just kidding. It took another week of trial and error, with additional forays back into observatory slow practice, for me to get through the entire song while recording. It remains near the limit of my skill. But, I did record it! I reached a goal I set decades ago, not through force of will, nor by simple repetition, but by learning how to improve. Here’s the result:
I’ve started experimenting with Gallwey’s techniques in other areas. When I sit down with cognitive work, I take a moment to ask Self 1 to set a clear goal and ask it to trust Self 2 to execute the goal. Gallwey has a whole series of “Inner Game” books, including The Inner Game of Work, but I can’t yet tell whether his wisdom extends beyond embodied cognition or not. There’s some social proof, or perhaps convergent evolution, to say that it does: the nonjudgmental observation and reflection reminds me of David Bessis’s System 3 Thinking, an idea which he formulated in his years as a mathematician. Regardless, I do expect to get mileage outside of music from Gallwey’s model of inner cooperation, even if the inner game applies primarily to physical activity.
As for the recording above, if you are a concert pianist, the few missed notes or slight rhythmic errors might scream at you. They definitely stick out to me, but I regard them without judgment. I’m grateful that, after such a long time, I can finally make my way through that song. I’m grateful to have the tools to improve my playing2. And I’m confident that I’ll record a better version in the future. Gallwey writes a meditation on the value of competition in the book’s penultimate chapter. He contends that a practitioner of the inner game needs competition, not for the ego boost that winning provides, but as a challenge that pushes them to test their potential. Maybe someday I’ll record a version of Prelude in C Sharp Major that I’m completely satisfied with, free from any errors, and which fully expresses my creative intent. By then, I’ll need a more difficult song, so I can begin the chase once again.