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PRACTICE TIPS #58: MENTAL DEXTERITY
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Brent Hugh
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Feb 25, 2001 19:05 PST
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PRACTICE TIPS is an occasional email newsletter with practical
piano practice tips and ideas, by Brent Hugh
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PRACTICE TIPS #58: MENTAL DEXTERITY
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This week's Practice Tips is from book about piano playing that I highly
recommend: _The Art of Piano Playing: A Scientific Approach_ by George
Kochevitsky.
This quotation from Mr. Kochevitsky falls in the category of "simple yet
profound". If, as he describes, you can learn to speed up your musical
thinking by mentally grouping EVERY note of EVERY piece you play during
EVERY practice session, your ability to learn music easily (and play with
real musical understanding) will increase many times.
Quoting from Mr. Kochevitsky:
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We cannot read a row of nonsense syllables quickly because we are unable to
unite these syllables into meaningful words and sentences. Practice in
repeating them would not be of much help; only when grasping the sense of
what we are reading can we read quickly.
As the swiftness of our speech apparatus depends on our ability to think
quickly, the agility of our motor apparatus depends more on our ability for
fast musical thinking than on long practicing and numerous repetitions of
movements. Practicing of the motor apparatus cannot be dispensed with,
however, in the development of this fast thinking.
If technical insufficiency (unsuitable motor activity) can sometimes be
caused by failure to End the appropriate position and movement forms of the
playing apparatus, it is usually a symptom of undeveloped musical thinking.
The reasons for the trouble should be looked for in the central nervous
system.
"A player's fingers cannot travel faster than the thoughts which direct his
fingers on the keyboard. Therefore his velocity depends first on his mental
agility in grasping printed music and coordinating finger movements."
In reading music the pianist should not read single notes but should unite
these notes in comprehensible successions: arpeggio or scale patterns of
any kind, any kind of sequence, harmonic complex, and the like. In order to
be able to play with speed, we have to organize our thinking in such a way
that it will flow rapidly and unhampered.
If we try to play a scale or passage without dividing it into several
groups with regular accents, then for each movement of each single finger a
separate will-impulse must be sent from the central nervous system. In this
way we would be able to play our scale in slow tempo only. Uniting two
notes In one group by an accent on the first note will enable us to play a
given succession somewhat faster because now only one will-impulse is
needed to produce two tones. The faster we want to play, the greater the
number of tones that have to he united into one group. Thus, many
volitional impulses, each directed to a single action, would be replaced by
a few directed to the compound action. For exceedingly rapid scale playing
(in the finale of Chopin's C minor Ballade, for example), we should unite
seven notes in one will- impulse. By doing so we gain the advantage of
playing the regularly repeated patterns of notes and finger successions
with octave orientation. Because of this orientation, it is easier to unite
seven notes in one group than six or eight. 'Thus, at each strong beat we
send a will-impulse and are not conscious of the notes which are played
between these strong beats. These links have been worked out previously and
stored in the motor region of the cortex.
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Happy Practicing!
--Brent
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PRACTICE TIPS is by pianist, teacher, composer, and internet nerd
Brent Hugh. Brent knows about practicing mostly because he *does*
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Please remember that this tip is but a small brown hair near the
elephant's left rear knee--it's not even close to the whole
elephant that is "how everyone in the whole world should practice
the piano".
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+ Missouri Western St College Dept of Music, St. Joseph, MO +
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