Introduction to The 4 Types of Music Editions Have you ever performed a piece of music for a teacher or coach only to learn that the printed edition you’re using contains errors or odd revisions? This post describes the 4 types of music editions: 1. Facsimile 2....
We professional musicians love to share music with others. Whether we perform in concert halls, nightclubs, informal gatherings, or recording studios, our hard work is most rewarded when we connect with listeners. The majority of students, though, spend little time in...
Let’s say that you’re about to practice a new piece of music: What’s your typical plan of attack? Researchers have observed that expert and student musicians display profound differences in their approaches to learning new material, and those differences lead to huge...
It’s 10:00 a.m., and I’ve already practiced for a couple of hours. I practiced yesterday, too, and I’ll practice tomorrow. Like musicians everywhere, practice is central to the rhythm of my life. What keeps us musicians practicing? Self-motivation is a big part of it....
Chapter 2 of The Musician’s Way spells out deep practice principles and provides frameworks that get fleshed out throughout the text. The individual sections are titled: Practicing Deeply Habits of Excellence Essentials of Artistic Interpretation Mental Imaging...
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...
The October 2009 issue of the UK monthly The Strad featured an article I wrote about memorization titled “Memories are Made of This.” I was invited to contribute to the magazine by its editor, Ariane Todes, after she attended a lecture I gave on the subject of...
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...
“The real reason that I haven’t performed live for a long time is that I have very severe hearing damage.” -Pete Townshend The Musician’s Way, p. 277 True story: A percussion professor was concerned about the sound levels at his music school, so he...
