An experienced cello soloist recorded her practice as she learned and memorized the Prelude from J.S. Bach’s Suite No. 6 for solo cello and gave 10 public performances over a period of more than three years. She described the musical structure, decisions about basic technique (e.g., bowing), interpretation (e.g., dynamics), and five kinds of performance cues she attended to during performance (expressive, interpretive, intonation, and basic technique separately for left and right hand). The 38 hours of practice provide the most comprehensive empirical account to date of preparation of a new piece of music for performance. The cellist repeatedly took the piece apart section-by-section and then re-integrated the sections into practice performances in each of five stages: exploration, smoothing out, listening, reworking and preparation for performance. The location of starts, stops and repetitions identified the changing focus of practice in each stage. The cellist organized her practice around the musical structure, developed interpretation before working on technique and practised memory retrieval at each stage. When she wrote out the score from memory, better recall of expressive and structural performance cues showed that they served as landmarks in a hierarchical memory retrieval organization.
The global COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted music education across the world, resulting in radical changes to the field of practice, accelerating a 'turn' toward online digital musical experiences. This digital 'turn' is likely to influence the future of music education in a variety of complex and inter-connected ways. In this special issue, we explore the implications of such a 'turn' for music educators and their students / participants, and highlight some of the ways in which music researchers and educators have responded to the crisis. We hope these narratives will help illuminate some of the ways in which music education might recover its equilibrium, as well as make a contribution more generally to the complex business of human recovery in a post-COVID world.
Given the current state of understanding surrounding musicians' experiences while performing, this study sought to investigate musicians' thoughts and perceptions during performances and the perceived impact their evaluation of those thoughts and perceptions has on their subsequent musical activities. Twenty-nine student and professional classical musicians were interviewed concerning factors perceived to contribute to the quality of performances, experiences prior to and during performances, and their responses to performances. Self-perceived successful performances were often connected with feelings of sufficient preparation and positive mind-sets, and presented a high yet attainable level of challenge. Less successful performances were typically linked with inadequate preparation, negative mental outlooks, frustration, and lack of enjoyment during the performance itself. Furthermore, the results pointed to the relevance of facilitative versus debilitative perfectionism, locus of control, interpretation of anxiety symptoms, and the interaction between self-talk, self-efficacy, and performance quality to musicians' performance experiences and satisfaction.
This article presents a longitudinal case study investigation of three young cellists' selfdirected preparation of a new piece of music for an informal performance. The investigation considers how musical understanding starts to emerge in children's practice and performance. It explores practice at early stages of learning and examines the children's thoughts and action through a comparison between what they say and what they are able to demonstrate through playing. The participants were filmed both in practice sessions and in informal performances. A multi-method approach was used in which detailed analysis of the children's playing, semi-structured interviews and the children's own appraisal five years after the research were combined. The results show that when left to their own devices, the children developed an internal representation of the music that incorporated rhythm and pitch mistakes of which they were unaware. The participants' appraisal five years later confirmed that they all adopted a mainly technical approach to the piece, through repetitive practice strategies, with no focus on musical matters and, therefore, no particular understanding of the structure of the piece. Overall, their interpretation was limited by their technical and conceptual difficulties and there were only a few signs of musical expression.
Musicians generally believe that memory differs from one person to the next. As a result, memorizing strategies that could be useful to almost everyone are not widely taught. We describe how an 18-years old piano student (Grade 7, ABRSM), learned to memorize by recording her thoughts, a technique inspired by studies of how experienced soloists memorize. The student, who had previously ignored suggestions that she play from memory, decided to learn to memorize, selecting Schumann’s “Der Dichter Spricht” for this purpose. Rather than explicitly teaching the student how to memorize, the teacher taught her to record her thoughts while playing by marking them on copies of the score, adapting an approach used previously in research with experienced performers. Over a 6½ week period, the student recorded her thoughts during practice (five times) and while performing from memory for the teacher (three times). The student also video-recorded 3 weeks of practice, three performances, and the reconstruction of the piece from memory after a 9½-weeks break. The thoughts that the student reported were prepared during practice, stable over time, and functioned as memory retrieval cues during reconstruction. This suggests that the student memorized in the same way as the more experienced musicians who have been studied previously and that teaching student musicians to record their thoughts may be an effective way to help them memorize. The speed and durability of her memorization surprised the student, inspiring her to perform in public and to use the same technique for new pieces.
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