What music did you learn
yesterday? Think you can still play it? Wanna bet? My experience is that
whatever I learned yesterday is probably only logged into short-term memory. In
fact, if I let a couple of days lapse between playing anything new, it will
feel as though IÕm learning it for the first time. As with just about any
practice, repetition is paramount, and with each passing day, a certain amount
of recently learned material can fade into nothing.
This can actually happen
during a single session, which is why you have to know when to quit as you are
learning new material. ItÕs a judgment call: if the work is getting tedious or
just not progressing, just relearn the stuff you already know. You donÕt want
to make tomorrowÕs reworking of the stuff you barely know from today to be
reinventing the wheel, so to speak. But, what if youÕre on a roll and the
learning is coming quickly? No sense in quitting now. Sometimes you have to
just go with whatÕs working. (This might be a good time to take note of the
time of day. IÕve found that certain learning activities seem to be most
effective at specific times of the day). This part of the session is
cumulative: in reworking the material you learned yesterday, you canÕt forget
do reinforce the work you did two days ago, three days ago, etc. How far back
that equation goes can depend on the length of the piece, how quickly you can
learn new music, and how long you can remember what you have already
accomplished. This ÒDay XÓ exercise is a larger picture of how you go about the
ÒLearn New MaterialÓ work.
I prefer to do this kind
of work before learning new material. First, I hope to enjoy a modicum of
success by playing something relatively familiar. Learning new material comes
more slowly to me, and rehearsing the familiar is usually easier. That helps me
to get my brain in gear for the more difficult task. Second, there is always
the possibility that I could run out of time, remember that I am late to a
meeting, or something urgent arises that needs to be attended to and that will
interrupt my practice time, or completely preempt it. If I have to let the day
go by without reinforcing yesterdayÕs work, tomorrow will be more challenging.
If you are a student in
school, your teacher has probably given you an assignment that he/she considers
an appropriate amount of material to cover between lessons, say within a week.
So, with a finite amount of music to learn within a week, this makes the
schedule in the table simple to implement. If you can get the music learned in
that amount of time, the teacher might increase that amount to see how quickly
you can learn. Still fits into the schedule? Great. Needless to say, there is
an upper limit on how much anybody can learn in any given amount of time. When
my students surpass their capacity, I see at least two results. The first one
is that all the material is Òalmost there.Ó The following assignment consists
of most of the same material to finish and a slightly smaller amount of new
material to learn. Another result is that some of the material is well done,
and the rest is a little farther behind in the process. As a teacher, I find
this formula a little easier to work with. I can spend time with the
well-prepared music discussing things in greater depth: concepts that the
student can apply to the stuff yet to finish. If the student is not able to
accomplish any part of the assignment to a high level, itÕs difficult for me to
know where to start. ItÕs really difficult to work on musical concepts when the
student still canÕt execute the notes and the rhythms. But both results are
something that all of us have encountered, and in any given week there will be
combinations of either.
Retain everything
correctly: start at a slower speed than where you ended on previous days so you
can get everything you have already accomplished reinforced. Some people prefer
to concentrate on only notes and rhythms first and save the other parameters
for later: things such as dynamics, phrasing, memorization, and the things that
might take a lot of technical drill. I often learn that way myself. I make
better decisions about the musical aspects if I donÕt have to concentrate on
hitting the notes. The problem with that method is that those musical concerns
might alter the sticking I originally learned the notes with or seemingly
simple and self-evident musical decisions affecting the piece become more
difficult or even less effective as I strive for faster tempos. Adding anything
different to previously learned material can also introduce too many new things
to concentrate on, so it might have been more effective to incorporate those
musical concepts the first time around. However, I have found that allowing
myself to let the music affect me is just as effective as the other way around,
so whichever method you use, it is important to keep yourself open to just how
organic good musicianship can be.
Since ÒLiterature Learned
on Day XÓ is a cumulative exercise, each successive day will include more and
more material. That means increasing spans of continuous concentration. A
weekÕs worth of concentration is the goal for a weekly lesson. In the Practice
Schedule Chart, Day 1 includes material learned on Day 6. That has more than
one application: it is often constructive to call Òday 1Ó the lesson day and
spend that session rehearsing the weekÕs work before the lesson. However, I
consider Lesson Day much the same as Performance Day, and IÕm a bit
superstitious about run-throughs just before performances. I prefer to use
performance day to get ready in a different way: play everything slowly except
for the really difficult passages that need to be played at performance tempo.
When I was taking lessons regularly, I would practice after the lesson while everything I had just learned
would still be fresh in my mind. Besides, some things donÕt go so well during
the lesson and I want to be able to say, ÒI really can play this.Ó
If Day 1 means starting
from scratch on a new project, there wonÕt be any material from Day 6. So
either the material from Day 6 goes on the shelf, or into the maintenance
category. Often I am working on a larger piece- something I know I wonÕt be
ready to perform in a week. It could even be a year-long project. Sometimes I
find that learning new material has come more easily than I anticipated and I
am ahead of schedule. Students find that the more quickly they learn, the more
often an assignment can be completed midweek. Well then, make it better. Or
branch out on your own: learn more than what was required, maybe learn
something else that was not assigned.
Copyright © 2008 Tyler-Rounds
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