Practising the tension in: when repetition backfires
Repetition does not only drill the notes — it drills whatever the body was doing while the notes were played, tension included.
The advice to repeat a difficult passage is so old it barely registers as advice. Play it again, slowly, until it is clean. The assumption underneath is that repetition trains the right thing — the fingering, the timing, the shape of the phrase. It does. It also trains everything else that happens to be present at the same time.
What repetition actually trains
If a passage is hard, the body usually meets it braced — the shoulders a little higher, the jaw set, the grip firmer than the music needs. Repeat the passage in that state and the bracing gets repeated too, stroke for stroke, alongside the notes. The phrase “practice makes perfect” quietly becomes “practice makes permanent.” What is rehearsed is not the music alone but the whole coupling of music and effort, learned together and stored together.
Why it goes unnoticed
The reason this is so easy to miss is that the notes do improve. The passage gets faster, cleaner, more reliable — every visible sign points to progress. The tension comes along as a passenger, invisible because it is not the thing being measured. Attention is on the result, on whether the run came out even, not on the shoulders that climbed a degree with each attempt. By the fiftieth repetition the bracing is no longer a reaction to difficulty. It has become part of how the passage is played.
The fiftieth repetition was cleaner than the first. It was also more braced, and nobody was counting that.
What it looks like from outside
Seen as a timeline rather than a feeling, the pattern is plain. The same passage recurs every minute or so, and each time the same small rise appears at the same bar — a shoulder lifting, a jaw tightening, right where the music asks the most. Across a session the rises stack into a habit with a shape: not random tension, but tension drilled to arrive on cue. The body has learned the phrase, and learned to brace for it, as one inseparable thing.
None of this is a correction. There is no rule here against repeating a passage — only the observation that repetition is faithful, that it keeps whatever it is given, and that what it keeps tends to show on the outside long before it is felt on the inside.