“I don’t understand. I played that perfectly at home.” 

…I just wondered how he would be able to make the way of the warrior samurai relevant to the way of the 21st-century harpist.

How many times have you uttered those words in a lesson after the wheels flew off the bus while playing a piece for your teacher? It’s definitely a line teachers often hear when a student is trying to make sense of how things could go so right in the practice room, only to go wrong in the performance. Every time this happens, I am reminded of a mantra my high school basketball coach repeated nearly every day: the way you practice is the way you will perform—consistency is key. If you approach practice the same way you approach a performance, you can expect similar results in both. If you approach them differently, you will have wildly varying outcomes.

Any time a student doesn’t perform as well as they would have liked, I ask questions about their practicing. There is almost always a discrepancy between the focus, intensity, and awareness of a student in the practice room versus the performance stage. If you practice with at a different level than you demand of yourself in a performance, you can’t expect yourself to perform with any consistency.

Basketball coaches are not the only ones who understand this concept. Those who study the martial arts take it to a much deeper level, as Motoshi Kosako shows us in his article A Path of Harmony. 

Kosako is a harpist whose music and career we have followed for quite some time at Harp Column. (See our interview with him in our July/August 2014 issue.) He’s a fascinating person whose harp origin story doesn’t follow the same ol’ script. Kosako shares some relevant plot points of his life’s story in the article, but here’s the nutshell version: he started playing the harp as an adult, he experienced paralyzing performance anxiety, and he drew on Bushido principles to overcome his stage fright. Obviously, there is much more to Kosako’s story than that, but he has certainly experienced many of the same struggles other harpists have—performance anxiety, self-doubt, lack of harp/life balance, inconsistent focus, etc. 

When Kosako proposed an article on how Japanese Bushido principles can help harpists become better musicians, I’ll admit I was skeptical. I didn’t doubt the truth of Kosako’s pitch, I just wondered how he would be able to make the way of warrior samurai relevant to the way of the 21st-century harpist. Sure, it’s nice to draw philosophical connections between the two, but Harp Column is practical news for practical harpists, not theoretical news for theoretical harpists. 

Not only did Kosako assuage my practicality concerns within the first paragraph of his article, but by the end I was making plans to use these principles in my own life. 

No, this is not another one of those “new year, new you” fads that pop up  this time of year, only to fade into irrelevance by February. The wisdom of Bushido principles have endured over thousands of years, and Kosako’s article lays out how you can apply them to your life in 2025. It’s not a magic formula or a quick fix, but if you are willing to do the work and trust the process you can see real improvement in your harp life. In fact, the next time a student wonders why they aren’t playing as well in their lesson as they did at home, I’m going to hand them a copy of Kosako’s article.