Old joke: How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice. But according to Itzhak Perlman, that’s exactly the wrong way to get to Juilliard or any other competitive school.

“Whenever a student asks me for my autograph,” he claims, “I don’t say, ‘Best wishes.’ I say, ‘Practice slowly!’ Practicing is really the main component in achieving something very satisfying when you play any stringed instrument, but the problem with practice is sometimes people put in the time, they’ve practiced four hours, five hours a day, and can’t understand why it isn’t getting any better.

“It comes down to listening. What are you listening for when you practice?

“Here’s my favorite example of how not to practice: You have a couple of notes that are out of tune, and you repeat them over and over for 20 minutes and it’s not working, and while you were doing that, the bow was going in all bad directions because you weren’t paying attention to your bow because you were only paying attention to your left hand. So your left hand is not working well yet, and you’ve practiced for 20 minutes with the bow wrong.

“So now you have to undo that, but you’re not paying attention to the intonation, so you’ve practiced for 20 minutes out of tune.

“So just reduce it to small increments, two or three bars, and try to get a hold of everything at the same time. It’s difficult to concentrate on everything. You can accomplish a lot more in less time. Practicing slowly is extremely important. Then you can figure out what’s going on.

“Nothing escapes you.”

Quality Time
“Sheer time is not necessarily good; what’s good is the quality of the practicing. If somebody’s really serious, five hours a day is almost too much; no more than that. After five hours, the body doesn’t absorb any more. When I was growing up, I didn’t practice more than three hours a day. And when you practice, it’s got to be 50-minute hours, with 10 minutes of rest.”