Author: WhitePlainsDave
Date: 2015-04-02 18:16
Sylvain:
I have carefully watched the video you attached to your thread. Although I don't agree with it, and will explain why below, I think its author Jason Sulliman is well intentioned.
In short, Mr. Sulliman advocates, rather (or at least more) than slowing down a metronome to accomodate a difficult phrase, taking, one note at a time, only small pieces of a difficult phrase, at tempo, only incorporating additional notes when the prior subset of notes is perfected. He demonstrates 3 ways to do this, 1) forwards, 2) backwards, 3) and "middle working out" through a phrase.
Mr. Sulliman's rationale is based on this being a better approach than the classical one of taking music at a pace it can be handled at, and slowly speeding up, because not only is less change required to neural pathways using his method, but because the neural changes are smaller than when the player moves from the conscience thought of individually played slow notes, to the subconscience ones of playing a series of notes fast.
Even assuming Mr. Sulliman is correct as it regards how most players learn quickest, I'm not sure its the [quickest] way to learn "best." Maybe it has applicability to learning fastest how to play a fast technical passage correctly, but I have my doubts.
To my mind, Mr. Sulliman's method is not dissimilar from the way a Parrot mimics human speech. The parrot has no concept of the individual words it speaks, simply memorizing a series of sound patterns at one tempo.
The "fly in the oitment" here, I think, is that should the player be faced with playing at even a slightly slower or faster tempo by say a conductor, Mr. Sulliman's approach may be more likely to cause the player to stumble. Worse, the player isn't playing music so much as "a series of notes married to a specific speed."
I'm not beyond the pragmatic need for players to come up to speed (no pun intended) on things quickly to make a living as performers. I just feel that at least as it regards clarinet, not Mr. Sulliman's trombone, we need to slow things down do expose where in a phrase of music lies our points of most likely failure and why. Is our tongue out of line with our fingers? If so, which of the two is more culpable and how do we get them in line. Mr. Sulliman might have a point in phrases where all notes are equally difficult to make, but I believe this to rarely be the case. Slow play first allows the performer to not just be a technician, but a musician too.
Few if any player's brains work fast enough, I think, to reveal this data when trying to learn at concert speed.
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