Month: October 2017

It really isn’t enough to just be able to play the music. What we want is the confidence and control that allows us to play it, understand it, and even feel comfortable varying and modifying it on the fly. We want to be in the moment, with the music as our natural vocabulary, used in a conversation, both…

Two kinds of practicing When working on a passage of music, it seems like there can be two different mental states we can assume. The first, a focused, precise, detail-oriented one, is probably the typical one we think of when we think of the idea of “practice.” Indeed, this is the kind of concentration we…