Yup, I think you've got it, and I wanted to reemphasize that point about sounding so good during practice (which was also made a few times earlier in the thread).Alex C wrote:I think I've finally got a handle on this topic, at least for me.
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Listening to the "basement tapes" of Arnold Jacobs, I'm reminded of how polished his performances were; those tapes are his practice. I bet there are hundreds of tubists who'd kill to sound that good on stage, much less in their basement.
Perfection is desired, of course. But it has to be dependably perfect, which means that it's already at a performance level way back in the practice schedule. It then becomes more of a habit than an effort, really.
It wasn't until I was in a group that practiced and performed a LOT that I realized something -- no performance is as good as your best rehearsal. Of course there's a magic in the air when you get under the lights in your Supersuit with an audience to feed off of, and all of that makes a performance more exciting. But, technically speaking, there's always something that's didn't happen quite as nicely as it did back in rehearsal.
The goal of rehearsal then becomes to make perfection happen over and over again. It's way beyond making sure that everybody can play the right notes at the right times. You'd make it sound GREAT, and you'd know what to listen for, what to anticipate, how to correct for mistakes, and how to stay mentally focused enough to achieve that level of performance for any length of time.
In other words -- make the performance easy.
On an individual level, like I posted earlier, it's about making fundamentals into a habit. Over and over, I heard about pros' warmup/practice sessions where they'd spend at least half of the time on basic techniques. I got away with pretty good skill -- comparatively speaking, that is -- for quite a few years. I didn't start to actually see real improvement until I grew up enough to sit there after classes with a couple exercise books and a metronome. That's when I began to spend less effort on translating my thoughts to playing the horn and more energy into making the music sound right.