“I’m sitting down to practice…”

Every musician knows the complex emotions aroused by practice—the familiarity of sitting down to work with your instrument; the exhilaration of having music at your fingertips; the anxiety, frustration, and occasional despair at reaching for a goal just beyond your grasp. Every day you set out to achieve something better, something more beautiful than yesterday.

It is the same, I think, with anything you really love, any art or activity that demands and draws out the best of your ability. Whether as an artist, an athlete, at your job, or in love, practice gives direction to your work, gives shape to the longing for a music beyond you.

Practicing: A Musician’s Return to Music is a book about the dream of becoming an artist. Drawn from my experiences as a child performer and concert classical guitarist, Practicing tells the story of my youthful ambition to achieve musical artistry, the collapse of that ambition in my twenties, and my surprising return to music later in life. As a child and young adult, I practiced full of passion and expectation, certain I could change peoples’ lives with music. In my late twenties, despairing of a viable career as a classical guitarist, I quit in bitterness. For ten years, I couldn’t bear to touch the instrument. Now, in my forties, a lover of music chastened in my goals, I’ve returned to practicing to understand what went wrong, to learn to do it better. Practicing: A Musician’s Return to Music thus weaves together the intense, private experience of practicing and the thoughtful, healing reappraisal of a youthful passion. Along the way, I describe my wise and sometimes goofy teachers, flamboyant figures from the guitar’s history, and the viciously competitive young geniuses who stalk conservatory halls. Yet the core of the book is the deeply personal question, how do you return to a love that has broken your heart?

Making music—doing anything we really love—we are always on the verge of heartbreak. What matters is that we learn to continue.