Bassoonfluencers: The World of Instagram Practice Accounts

Perviously, I have never been a fan of these things. Sure, with Hillary Hahn it is a great thing to be able toget a glimpse how someone that amazing approaches practice, but the smaller accounts were bot at all something I liked: they generally play ok-ish at best, and whatever students I had that were in on it were the ones with the least motivation and willingness to ACTUALLY practice. I have been seeing most social media as nothing but digressions from what actually matters. To become any good, you will probably need 3-4 hours of focused practice 5-6 days a week. Spending one or two of those hours of practice also doing Instagram often means one or two hours wasted.

At least that is what I thought until this year: I am so thankful that my students can connect with others. I am having a hard time motivating myself, even moreso with my students. Any positive bassoon interaction they have, and anything that makes them think "hmmm... Maybe I should try doing it like this" is fantastic.

It's a nice way to feel part of a community, too. If there was a way to get on stream with a bunch of other people practicing, I find that more motivating to practice myself.

Indeed, this is what I miss most about not being in the office: seeing people modeling good working behavior. I find it much more motivating to have that in my immediate environment.

They had very different models for learning: with the violin you’d spend weeks or months in solitude on a piece, each week trying to improve some particular passage, and then you performed in front of lots of people, and then it was done.

The drawings I did, on the other hand each consumed a few hours at most. Each drawing made me a bit better, and I got constant feedback. There wasn’t one single important moment, where things could go wrong and invalidate months of preparation, and drawings were also fairly mutable.

This is interesting because it’s a sort of union of the two — practice becomes performance. Maybe I’d have been a little more motivated if I’d been able to see my peers practice violin.

I'm a data engineer now but I started college on a bassoon scholarship.