Here a more serious posting than usually mustered.
Bob Yoon mentions pedagogical and psychological approaches to curing
piano-stammer. I mentioned (probably too frivulously)in an earlier posting
a suggestion about starting to practice pieces at the end rather than from
the beginning. Thus the reasoning:
Everyone hears about reaction times during everyday life. That tenth
of a second between seeing the lights in front of you and slamming the
brakes on? The time needed to receive information visually, relate this
to experience and apply muscular effort to the prevention of an accident
for example.
Playing musical instruments, from a set of instructions on paper such as a
piece for piano is no less than a miracle in itself. Here comes a set of
notes into view and lo and behold the pianist is pressing the right keys
with a reaction time far less than is probable.
So, without going too much into the depths of why this works and the same
guy can't catch a 100 dollar bill between his fingers, I would think one
can safely deduce that success in sight-reading has quite a lot to do with
human conditioning.
It's all to do with the brain recognising patterns of notes within it's
experience-base and issuing the muscular directive impulses which get the
fingers moving, correctl
Now, IF somehow the conditioning is wrong, mistrained, missing or whatever,
a stammer may well occur. Eyes read instructions, brain not quite up to
speed, needs more time than allocated by desire and whoops... Forcing
oneself to continue will probably not really do the job, it's really a case
of training the brain to react subconsciously and correctly and yes, really
it's PRACTICE that trains the brain, SLOW, MONOTONOUS, TEDIOUS, practice,
practice. Don't run before you can walk otherwise you will stammer, your
brain just ain't ready to interpolate the will with the way.
Unfortunately I am quite convinced that technique can live without music
but it's difficult to make music without technique. Some really musical
musicians do practice three hours a day and get nowhere with their careers,
some insensitive boores practice ten hours a day and get orchestral
positions.
It's amazing to see good pianists sight-read Chopin Sonatas. Then there
are some who take it to extremes; I witnessed many times conductors and
conducting students not only sight reading but reducing orchestral scores,
including transposing D clarinet, E Horns, Viola, Bflat trumpets, and other
masses of information in real time from a 22 stave orchestral score as if
it were childsplay. Maybe at one time they also stammered, but, if you
start one measure at a time at the end of a piece for a while, your brain
too will become impregnated with patterns of notes not distracted by
overall form which will become second nature after, yep, hours of practice,
I don't think there is a quick solution, or a particular problem that slow
practice can't solve. I'm just repeating what my teachers told me and I
ignored them of course, that's why I can't play the piano, I have a
computer that does that for me now:-)
Anthony G Morris
agmdigital
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