 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: ThatPerfectReed
Date: 2014-03-12 20:52
I learned hard passages by taking them slow at first.
Nothing new right?
Over time my repetition got me memorizing the fingerlings ( "muscle" memory if you will) to the point that if 5 years later you asked me to play it extremely slowly, I might find myself looking closer at the musical notes on the page---as the muscle memory seemed to be based on a certain speed, and almost site reading a difficult passage I'm not that familiar with.
While there's no way I could play from memory, it's also true I'm not reading the notes on the page as carefully as when I first learned the piece.
I always suspected but wondered if others share this experience.
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Author: jonok
Date: 2014-03-13 05:06
Yes. I was shocked to discover how little I actually "read" music when I'm looking at it.
In relation to the learning of a new piece, my teacher recently told me to say the notes mentally as I play them. I thought that was the craziest idea I'd ever heard. I can read music - I know that's a "b", that's an "f" and that's a "g#". I don't have to "think" the note names to know what they are - that's just going to slow down the mental process. So, you'd think, knowing how to read music, that it would be easy to read the music and say the notes out loud. It might just be me, but it was much harder than I could ever have imagined.
She calls it "KNOWING what you're playing".
So after that shock, I started to pay attention to what was going on when I'm "looking" at the music, thinking I'm reading it. It's frightening how quickly it stops being reading and starts being "fingerlings" (I think that's my new favourite term
It's made me much more careful when I'm chunking a new piece: the tendency being to move on to the next one way before I KNOW the current one.
Jon
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aspiring fanatic
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Author: Bruno
Date: 2014-03-13 02:41
After a while you are able to look at a rising or falling series of notes on the staff and identify the group as a certain arpeggio. Major 7ths have a look, minor 7ths have a look, dominants have a look, etc, etc., and you don't have to read each note. Same for ascending and descending runs.
Pianists learn this early on - they have two different staffs to read and finger simultaneously. There's no way they could become proficient pianists reading each note.
Bruno>
BTW Jon, I think your teacher's method will slow down your reading of groups, which is the ultimate aim. She's off base here.
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