The Practice Ingredients For Successful Performance, with Sarah Niblack

How can you feel safe, confident, and joyful when you perform music – especially if you’re pushing yourself to your limits?

Sarah Niblack of SPARK Practice is one of the leading innovators in helping musicians to practice better so that they can perform better.

In today’s mini-interview, you’ll get to meet Sarah and hear about her unique perspective on musicality, practice, performing and more.

So this is a really fun interview. It’s a short one, but it’s jam-packed. We talk about Sarah’s perspective on musicality, and the way she talks about it as bringing out the song from inside you just really lovely. She also shares how competitive sports gave her a distinctive insight into what was actually really lacking in the music conservatory world. And she talks briefly about her SPARK model of music practice, making sure you’re building all of the neurological pathways you need to make for a great performance in the real context you’ll be playing in.

This ties in with yesterday’s episode about becoming a rock solid performer. If you enjoyed those five tips yesterday, you’re going to love what Sarah has to share.

And I’ll be back tomorrow with a clip from the masterclass she gave just after this interview, so please enjoy this mini-interview with Sarah Niblack!

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Christopher: Welcome back to the show! Today I’m joined by Sarah Niblack of SPARK Practice.

Sarah is a violist, a competitive rower, and an educational innovator who brings her own experience with both sports and music, as well as neurodiversity and autoimmune challenges to the topic of music practice and performance, and particularly how to accelerate your learning while making it more joyful, too.

Now, if you’ve been around Musical U for any length of time, you’ll know that’s speaking a language that’s near and dear to our hearts! And so we’re super excited and fortunate to have Sarah with us as our Guest Expert here at Musical U this month. She’s going to be presenting our monthly masterclass today for all members, and then she’ll be in with our Next Level members this week, providing coaching for them, which we’re all super excited about.

Sarah, welcome to the show!

Sarah: Thank you so much, I’m so happy to be here. I love what you’re doing, and I’m so glad to be part of it.

Christopher: Thank you. Well, I’d love to start with my favorite question to ask musicians and music educators, which is:

What does musicality mean to you?

Sarah: So good question. Also, tough question!

But honestly, I think it’s the song that we have inside of us. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be musical. I think it can be visual. I think it can be in cooking. I think it can be so many different things.

But in this pursuit of musicality, in the sound sense, it’s not even how we get it out into the world. It’s something inside of us anyway.

And then we get to jam with our friends and learn different tools and learn different ways to help it sparkle and shine and be part of the world around us.

Christopher: I love that answer! D’you know, I’ve asked so many people this question, and you might be the first person who has interpreted “musicality” in that much broader and more profound sense, that a poem can have musicality to it or your cooking can have musicality. That innate spark of creativity, of humanity can be seen in terms of music, even if it’s not literally musical. I love that.

Sarah: I totally believe it. Which is also why nobody is tone deaf, because we all have this inside of us. And you know, some people have less blocks in the way, but it’s something that’s part of all of us. And our favorite medium to get it out is different for everybody, but that’s part of why life is cool.

Christopher: Absolutely. And I’ve given a little teaser of bits of your bio there, but I’d love to hear a bit more of your backstory and where this really diverse and interesting perspective came from.

Tell us a bit about your musical background, your background in sports, and how it’s all kind of culminated in SPARK Practice.

Sarah: Sure. Well, thanks. So my background didn’t make sense to me or to anybody for a really long time, and I spent a lot of time being confused about it, honestly. I grew up in Seattle, Washington, and I was always a nerd and super interested in medicine and science and stuff like that.

And then my big sister played the violin, so superhero, right? And I absolutely wanted to get into music. And along the way, I always played sports, and I always did a lot of water sports. And I found myself as a competitive rower, working with national team and Olympic team coaches in this amazing rowing center, and then all of a sudden was in, you know, school orchestras and stuff like that.

And I’d never really taken it seriously, and I didn’t always have a private teacher, either. And I got the bug to go to music school, so I had to figure out pretty quickly how to level up. And somehow got into CCM, which is a big school in the States.

And my viola teacher was Masao Kawasaki, who taught violin at Juilliard and viola in Cincinnati, who believed in me. Even though my first lesson with him was “So I listened to your audition, and you sound good, but you have no idea how to play!”

Christopher: I guess better that way around!

Sarah: Yeah. I was so lucky because I thought “great, that’s why I’m here”. And instead of taking it in a way that was like “oh, no, I’m not good enough”. Like, all the things I could have thought that so many of my colleagues thought about themselves because they’d been in this, like, very high-pressure pressure cooker for a while.

I was like “alright, let’s do this. What you got?” And I learned a lot. But at the same time, in conservatory, we don’t learn how to practice. We don’t have the same level of support as we do in elite sports.

In elite sports, even on internationally competitive levels, we have a coach with us between 60 and 80% of the time. Imagine if 60% to 80% of the time that you had your instrument in your hands it was a lesson!

So besides that, not knowing how to practice, not knowing how to structure my preparation for performances, have vocabulary to talk about it in a way that wasn’t based in judgment. I got totally burnt out, injured, and depressed.

So I definitively quit the instrument for five years. I did other stuff for a while. And then, like we were talking about earlier, my musicality was stronger than I was and I needed to figure out the tools to come back and get it out.

So through a lot of research and a lot of super geekiness, because that’s my vibe and neuroscience research and all of that, I came back to music and moved to France. I live in Paris, started auditioning, studied with the principal violist of the opera here. I’ve always had incredible opportunities for teachers.

Got to a point where I was a super performer – but I was horrible to myself.

And so my missing piece was mindfulness. I had the neuroscience elite, sports taught, musical training, and then once mindfulness came into it, it was a whole different game.

So through all of those things, and besides the fact that I’m a super geek who loves systems and complex things and making them very easy, my goal then became, alright, I have my own passion for playing and creating and sharing this conversation, but I see so many people suffering and I see so many people struggling with how to get their musicality out, that I started SPARK Practice. And I teach practicing and I teach mindfulness in, you know, productive, mindful productiveness, being awesome on stage and also nice to yourself.

Christopher: I love that. And why the name “SPARK Practice”?

Sarah: Because it’s an acronym and I’m cheesy.

Christopher: What does it stand for?

Sarah: It stands for the five elements of music which are: Sound, Performance, Attuned intonation, which is also harmony, because intonation and harmony is really about listening. So we’re attuned to harmony. Rhythm and Kinetic integration.

And the whole idea is that we visit each element of music when we practice, so that we’re building in these performance skills and we’re building in all of the neurological superhighways that we need. So that when we get into a stressful or vulnerable situation, all of this is already packed in.

It’s like a cake. If you have a cake, you can’t expect your cake to have other ingredients when you pull it out of the oven if you didn’t put them into the recipe.

And so performance is exactly like this. We have to bake it into our cake. And oftentimes we learn how to do things, but we don’t learn how to do it in context. And if we ask musicians, why do you want to be a musician? So much of it is getting that musicality out and sharing that conversation, and yet we didn’t necessarily bake it into the cake.

So that’s why SPARK visits these five things and helps us find our spark.

Christopher: That’s fantastic. Yeah, we’re big proponents of kind of blurring the line between practicing and performing here at Musical U, and for exactly the reason you describe, that if you treat practicing as this kind of dry, scientific thing you do alone in your bedroom, and then you go and step out on stage, you’re like, why can’t I perform really well? Well, you didn’t really practice any of that stuff!

So I love that you’re helping to bridge the gap for people in that sense. Tell us about the kinds of things you do at SPARK Practice in terms of what you offer and how people can get involved.

Sarah: So I love to work with a bunch of different kinds of people.

I tend to work with classical musicians who are either professionals or pre-professionals in that vein, just because I do have the experience of elite performance.

However, I’m also the practice professor in a couple schools where I work with different studios to boost their practice, develop healthy habits, and then also how to get from where we are today to our best performances ever.

So I have a couple online classes, and then I work with curriculum in conservatories as well and partner with teachers to support them in what they’re doing for their students.

Christopher: That’s super cool. I love that. And today, you’ll be presenting a masterclass for our members.

I believe the topic is “Intentional Practice as a Performance Superpower”. Could you give us kind of a little teaser of what you’ll be sharing with our members today?

Sarah: Yes, so SPARK Practice is part of the intentional practice system that I developed, and I want people to be able to know what they’re doing in the next five minutes in their practice room. Unload the mental charge of that.

But why are we doing that? Where do you want to go, when we set our intention and we raise our eyes and we look a little further along?

We have so much more agency in organizing our tools, getting the right tool at the right time, and really connecting with that superpower to find our spark on stage.

Christopher: Terrific. Well, I know our members have been looking forward to this one and getting some of your insights and unique perspective. We do need to make sure we’re on time for that masterclass! So as much as I would love to dive into seven different things you mentioned there and unpack them more, we’ll do a longer interview another time.

If you’re interested to know more about Sarah and her work, you can check out sparkpractice.com, she has a get started guide as well as a “five secrets to easy onstage confidence” freebie waiting for you there. So do head on over and check that out. We’ll have the link alongside this episode.

Thank you so much, Sarah, for joining us for this quick pre-masterclass interview. And I look forward to having you back on the show for a more in-depth conversation very soon!

Sarah: There is so much awesomeness to explore and share! Thank you so much. I really appreciate being here.

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Isn’t Sarah awesome? I love the spirit she brings to this topic. It’s so nurturing and supportive while also being super concrete and high impact.

And that cake analogy! You can’t expect things to be in the cake when you take it out of the oven if you didn’t put those ingredients in to begin with. What an elegant way to think about factoring those performance skills into your practice.

You can learn more about Sarah and everything she does at sparkpractice.com, we’ll have that link in the shownotes.

I’ll be back tomorrow with a clip from her awesome masterclass on “Intentional Practice as a Performance Superpower”, a bit where she talks about our fear responses in our brain and our body – fight, flight, freeze or fawn – and how to find your antidote to which one of those you most experience.

That’s it for this one. Cheers! And go make some music!

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