And continuing our practice strategies to ensure effective learning and memory:
Sitting on an outdoor bench in a scenic spot may not be your idea of practicing, but it depends on what you’re thinking about while you sit there.
7)Reflection. Psychologists speak about reflection as a learning strategy – thinking about what you have learned and asking yourself questions to solidify what you know. Find a quiet place to sit away from your instrument and quiz yourself on what you know about the piece or about the segment you just learned. What are the key relationships, what’s the structure, where are the sections, patterns, motifs? The more you have to struggle to remember or perhaps check the score to verify, the more your brain fills in the missing information, consolidates, and makes the neural networks stronger. Continue reading →
And a few more practice strategies to ensure effective learning and memory:
5) Practice extremely slowly. There has been a controversy for some time about whether slow practice is beneficial for learning fast music. Many of us were told early in our musical lives that in order to play a passage of music that is very fast, we should practice slowly and build up speed. But not everyone agrees. Influential pedagogue Abby Whiteside (1881 – 1956) declared that “Slow practice can establish habits that are completely unrelated to the coordination demanded for speed.” Abby Whiteside on Piano Playing Continue reading →
Almost everyone who plays the piano has, at some point in his/her study, learned Chopin’s Prelude in A Major, Op. 28. Only 16 bars and lasting a bit less to a bit more than a minute (depending on the performer), the Prelude is deceptively simple. A few repetitions and it feels as though we have it “under our fingers;” a few more repetitions and hey! we’ve memorized it!
But wait – leave it for a couple of days, and all of a sudden, you begin to wonder: Continue reading →
None of my teachers ever spoke with me about how to practice. They didn’t suggest strategies or give me tips. I guess they assumed, since I memorized so easily, that I didn’t need any help. I had what’s called a “good ear,” and I could hear the piece in my mind. By the time I had developed the motor skills to play a particular piece, all of the melodies, rhythms, and harmonies were in my head, and I counted on that when I performed. I assumed that good auditory memory was all I needed. But after a couple of bad experiences following grad school, I decided that I needed to develop a more secure system for learning and memorizing.
The Starry Night isregarded as one of Vincent Van Gogh’s best works and is probably one of the most well-known images in art, having been appropriated for everything from mugs to mouse pads to desktop wallpaper.
Van Gogh’s The Starry Night
I recently happened upon a very unusual version of Starry Night – a video of the iconic image created by falling dominoes. As I watched the dominoes fall (or not, in some cases), it struck me that the falling dominoes are a perfect analogy for motor programs in the brain as we perform a piece from memory.
In music we often talk about auditory, visual, and motor memory. But outside of the music world, we encounter a dizzying array of memory terms. We read about short-term vs. long-term, explicit vs. implicit, declarative vs. procedural, semantic vs. episodic – and more. So what do all of these terms mean in relationship to memory for music? Continue reading →