The Science of Practice, Intro

I recently re-read The Art of Practicing by Madeline Bruser. While the author occasionally would swerve into a more empirical mind set, much of the time was spent in what my great late friend Ralph Bus would have called the “ooo eee”. Being a bit more analytical and empirical in my thinking, I usually do not get much out of this “new age” approach to problem solving.

When I was much younger and feeling very intimidated by my classmates at college I asked “Why can they, and I can’t?” This question propelled me for most of the next 20 years to find the answer to that question. It was actually a very difficult subject to explore and find meaningful information. The vast majority of cognitive psychology research which I was able to find focused on language as a subject matter. The cognitive processes used in the study of music and the learning of an instrument are orders of magnitude more complex than learning a list of words. Only in the past decade or so has the field of music psychology begun to take shape. Yet, despite the difficulties in finding useful research which could shed some light on the learning of music, I was able to develop a pretty complex and nuanced understanding of the mechanics of learning music.

The human mind is a very complex electro-chemical machine and while most of its functions are still unexplainable,
enough is known to create a number of working models of the how and why of the human mind and memory.

Years ago I started to outline a book on this subject which I will use throughout this series. Some of the ideas I will present may strike you as too mechanical to be used in an artistic endeavor but becoming an efficient learner is no different than developing an efficient technique. We don’t hesitate to work on scales and etudes in the hope of having a better mechanical command of our instrument. It is very difficult to play artistically if you are fumbling around mechanically. Understanding how the human mind learns, retains, and recalls information will help us learn, retain, and recall our music more efficiently and effectively.

In the same way that concert artists often make very poor teachers because they often don’t fully understand how they do what they do or how they learned to do it, they may not be aware of how their learning processes may be unique to them, giving them a great advantage in learning literature. Through the course of these articles I will explore what science can tell us about how we learn, retain, and perform our music.

Andrew Remillard
President
ANRPiano.com