Have you ever been confounded by a thorny passage that wouldn’t come together? You know, the sort of material where even after days of working on the music, you notice no real improvement. Probably every musician encounters such problem spots from time to time....
Suppose that you’re preparing to play or sing in public. How do you bridge the gulf between personal practice and public performance? I’ve observed that many rising musicians underperform because they omit a crucial element from their preparatory routines: practice...
This is the first of periodic posts in which I summarize how I use The Musician’s Way in my studio teaching. Here, I focus on Chapter 1. My class of guitar students at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts includes graduate and undergraduate students as...
Why write about music and musical expertise? Is it as abstruse as that old saw – “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture” – would lead us to believe? In the Preface to The Musician’s Way, I wrote, “Words are destined to fall short when it comes to...
“Take the action and the insight will follow.” -Anne Lamott, author The Musician’s Way, p. 107 Whether we plan to create a performance, composition, essay, or mousetrap, we have to launch our project and work on it regularly. But we all know that creative ventures...
“There is nothing more fatal for our musical sense, than to allow ourselves – by the hour – to hear musical sounds without really listening to them”-Tobias MatthayThe Musician’s Way, p. 16 Imagine that you’re watching an artist paint in her studio: She spreads color...
To make music in groups, we require more than interpretive and technical know-how; we also need specific skills if we’re to work together harmoniously. Given that aspiring performers spend so much time practicing alone, are most acquiring expert collaborative skills?...
In The Musician’s Way, I encourage the singing of solfège syllables, scale-degree numbers, counting syllables, and letter names as part of the process of learning, memorizing, and interpreting music. In my own teaching and playing, I employ the fixed-do solfège...
“The path you take is your path and no one else’s, so welcome it.” -The Musician’s Way, p. 314 To build our abilities as performers, we have to develop personally effective ways to practice, collaborate, present concerts, engage with our communities,...
