December 12, 2024 • 56 mins
How does practicing music change our experience of music? We speak with an expert, Molly Gebrian to learn more. Her recent book, Learn Faster, Learn Better presents approaches to practicing that are supported by research into how humans learn music. Musical Memories by Alec Stutteville, Andrew Song, and Carlos Utrilla guide our discussion. One technical note regarding this episode of Lifetimes of listening: there are a few audio issues with Dan’s track that we could not easily fix. After a few moments, you will stop to hear them, but we wanted you to know that the issue is in the sound file, and not your speakers. Please enjoy, On Practicing Music!
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(00:00):
A technical note about this episode of Lifetimes of Listening on practicing music.
(00:05):
We ran into a recording glitch resulting in some audio issues with Dan's voice track,
which we were unable to remedy. In listening, please note there's nothing wrong with your
speaker or your system. It's a technical glitch with the audio at our end that unfortunately
we couldn't remove. Please enjoy the episode.
Lifetimes of Listening. I realized how music has like helped me in my life. Once I got good at it,
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that's when I saw potentially how to get better at it. Telling that story is really what music
is all about for me. Lifetimes of Listening. Welcome to the Lifetimes of Listening, a podcast
that seeks to understand why music is important in people's lives. In this episode, we'll be taking
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a close look at how people practice music. The act of practicing music primarily in order to
perform music has been the subject of lots of recent research, including neuroscientific research.
How do we learn and practice music? How can our practice be most efficient and helpful in creating
great performances? What's the value of mental practice? And how do we go about improving our
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rhythm, tempo, pitch, intonation? These are of enormous interest to working musicians around
the world. Dan, would you have any stories about practicing music that you can reflect on in your
own life? Well, yeah, there's one that has stuck with me for many years. It's been 20 or maybe 23,
24 years since this happened to me. I was an undergraduate student at the University of
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Arizona School of Music, and I was kind of drafted into the School of Music, the orchestra, the
UA Symphony, UA Orchestra, though that's not the ensemble that I usually played with. They were
performing a Hina Stera's harp concerto, and I was assigned percussion part number four,
which was a big load of bongos and toms and maybe a woodblock and a whole range of instruments.
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And it was to be performed at a very, very rapid tempo. Now, it wasn't impossible for me to play
the notes. The hard part was playing it at anything even close to performance tempo. So every day for
about three weeks, I would notch up my metronome by like one click and see if I could play it a
little quicker, but again, starting at about half tempo. Every day I did this until the day before
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the performance. I never got it right in practicing it. The only time I ever performed this piece of
music correctly, note for note, at tempo was during the one performance on a Sunday afternoon.
And I was so relieved that I thought, oh, I'm just going to make a mess of this. I've never played it
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right. Performance time came, something kicked in, adrenaline. I had some dear friends from out of
town in the audience and something happened and all that practice paid off. And I wound up performing
the piece, my part, a note for note, just the way it should have been. And that was a real strong
reflection on the serious practice that I had put into that piece of music. How about you, Brian,
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a particular memory of practicing music that sticks with you?
The thing that I have this clear memory of sitting out of the in front on a bench out in
front of the Coca-Cola Museum in Atlanta. So in college, I had to do a half hour recital my senior
year and a half hour of music on classical guitar that I had to memorize and play without music and
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perform. I had family in town, which is why I was doing all of these tourist activities. And when the
family went in to do the tourist activity, to go to the museum or whatnot, I would sit outside and
I wasn't practicing, I didn't play my instrument, but I was running the recital in my head,
imagining the various moments of the recital. And there were things that I was imagining,
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like there's this famous story of Andrei Segovia, where he came into a 3000 person hall and one
person was fiddling with a cough drop or maybe been a cough drop when he was performing this in
the early 20th century, but in the back of the hall and him staring bullets into the person that
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was making sound until there was utter quiet before he began performing. So I was even imagining
what I would do if somebody was disruptive in the audience. All of these things. So I was practicing
entirely in my head, purely imaginatory. Because physically I could only do, you can only play so
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much before your fingers and your body just gives out. So I have this clear memory of being in
front of the Koch Museum on a bench, sitting there moving my fingers. This is going to be a great
episode of Life Times of Listening. Our guest today will be Molly Gabrian, a violist with a
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background in cognitive neuroscience. Molly has written a book, Learn Faster, Perform Better,
that's now out on Oxford Press. And we can't wait to learn more from her in just a moment
here on Life Times of Listening.
Welcome back to Life Times of Listening. Now today we're discussing this whole area of
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practicing music. And we have a very special guest, Molly Gabrian. Molly is both a performer,
a violist, and a music scholar using her background in cognitive neuroscience to
translate the research on learning, practice, and memory into practical, actionable solutions
that musicians can use to practice and perform more effectively. She's a frequent presenter on
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the neuroscience of practicing at conferences, universities, and music festivals in America and
abroad. And her book, Learn Faster, Perform Better, a musician's guide to the neuroscience
of practicing was released just this last July by Oxford University Press. Molly incidentally just
recently joined the faculty at New England's Conservatory of Music to teach courses there on
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the science of practicing. As a performing artist, Molly centers her programming around the work of
historically excluded composers, particularly women and composers of color, as well as championing
the work of contemporary composers through commissions and premieres. Molly Gabrian,
welcome to Life Times of Listening.
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Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.
It's great to have you here.
Great to be here.
Brian, I want to first just chat a little bit with you. And I guess the first question I have is,
what spurred your initial interest in this whole area of how we practice music?
What got you interested in that?
Yeah, great question. It started when I was an undergraduate at Oberlin College. I went into
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college knowing I wanted to be a double degree student in viola and something else because I
always really liked school and academics. But I didn't know what the something else was going to
be. And then my freshman year in the course catalog, I saw a description of a freshman seminar on
neuroscience and the description looked really interesting. I was like, okay, I'll take that
class, you know, and instantly I was hooked. I was like, this is the most interesting thing I've
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ever learned about in my life. Like, I want to major in this. And so that's what started it.
And at first, it was truly just my own interest in the brain. I thought the class was absolutely
fascinating. I just want to learn more about it. I didn't have any plan or even desire really,
I guess, to bring it together with practicing. But I started to notice all sorts of parallels
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between what I was learning in my neuroscience classes and what I was learning about practicing
from my viola teacher. And so for again, for my own personal interest, I was like, well,
I want to look more specifically into the research on learning and memory so I can practice
better because that's what, you know, I spend my life doing as a performer. And somewhere along
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line, I was like, gosh, this would be really helpful to share with other people because I
was learning so many things that had been so beneficial to me and I saw how they could be
beneficial for other people. But yeah, it kind of started by accident.
Pete Is there a technique that you,
that musicians, like the common understanding of how to practice leads us to do something that's
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against how our brains might work that you would highlight?
Yes.
Yeah. What's your favorite to talk about?
So there's two and they're kind of interconnected with each other. So the first thing is that,
and this is the most counterintuitive thing in the world, but breaks are absolutely essential
for learning that you can't learn without taking breaks. And actually we make the most progress
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during our breaks, which is very counterintuitive, right? The analogy that often helps people
understand this better is building muscle. Like if you're working out and you're trying to get
stronger, you don't actually get stronger while you're lifting the weights. While you're lifting
the weights, you're creating micro tears, right? In your muscle. And then when you're resting in
between workouts, your body repairs those micro tears and it makes the muscle stronger as a result.
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So we actually get stronger when we're taking a break from working out. Our brains are the same.
It's not that we're creating tears in our brains and our brains are getting stronger, but when you
practice or study or anything, you're giving your brain input and then the brain actually like does
stuff with that input and has to make actual physical changes. And then when you come back,
you're at a higher level. And so we often in, especially in classical music training,
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there's this culture of practicing as much as you can for big blocks of time, right? And that's just
so much the opposite of how the brain actually learns. Connected to that, there's also a culture
in not just classical music, but in any pursuit of focusing on one thing for a long period of time,
sitting down for a marathon study session, for instance, to prepare for an exam or
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practicing one thing for like hours on end. And what the research shows is that that is not
effective at all, that our brains need us to again, take breaks, but also switch between
different things. And if you're just focusing on one thing for a long period of time, you can't
learn it as effectively or efficiently as if you're constantly switching between things,
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which seems chaotic, but it's very clear from the research that that's how the brain learns.
And when you say take breaks, one thing I've read is that sleep has something to do with how we learn
things and memorize things. Absolutely. Yeah. Sleep is like the ultimate break. So taking breaks
during the day is important, but getting enough sleep at night is super important. I do presentations
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all the time on this stuff, and I always talk about sleep and I always say if you take nothing
else away from my presentation today, take away that getting enough sleep is the most important
thing you can do to improve your practice because the brain does do a lot of stuff when we're
sleeping and it consolidates what we've learned during the day. And the next day you come back
to it at a much higher level than you left it because of what happened during sleep.
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So as you were beginning to learn these techniques and beginning to understand the research,
were there particular people that were guiding you or or was there a particular viola instructor
that sort of helped help you really implement these practices and your this this knowledge
into your practice or how did that come about? The answer to your question is no. It's oh it's
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been self-guided. I mean I have had the support of my professors in terms of them like encouraging
me and not saying stop doing this, you know, but it's it's totally been my own thing that I've done
looking into the research that was that was purely my own interest implementing in my practicing.
That was purely my my own interest and me on my own figuring out okay this is what the research
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says in terms of how we learn. What does that actually look like in the practice room? And that
sort of translation of the research into practical practice methods is sort of the basis of what I
I do because I I have a foot in both worlds right that I can understand the research but as a
performing musician I can then take it into the practice room and try it out myself and be like
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okay I think this is what this means for me in the practice room. Let me try this and see how it
works and then I can share it with people. So everything I share in my work is stuff that I
use myself in my own practicing because I've tried it out and I know that it works. But yeah it's been
totally self-guided. This this whole area of of the neuroscience of music what got me started with
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that was when Brian handed me a copy of Oliver Sacks Musicophilia about that's a great book 10
or 12 years ago and then seeing the film alive inside if you're familiar with it. I haven't seen
it but I'm familiar with it yeah. Yeah and then some years ago Dan Levitin was here on campus for
a speech language and hearing sciences conference and I started reading his stuff too. I'm no nowhere
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near as steeped in this as you are Molly but it's just such a fascinating field because I mean music
is a is a mind and body and heart thing and the more we know about that the better musicians we
can be or help people to become. It's a really wonderful pursuit. Yeah I agree. A lot of classical
performance is uh is technical and dry and and you know and yet a good classical performance often
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brings emotion into it in ways that shade the subtlest of expressions and and which are very
technical. How do you practice that emotional stuff? How do you get how do you get the feeling into
you know a quick little virtuosic run or passage or? Yeah that's a great question. I think a lot
of people separate the technical from the musical but I think that's a mistake because the way we
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bring across the emotion in the music is through technical means and the way to do that on each
instrument is is different right. Me as a string player I have to think a lot about how I use my
bow and how I use my vibrato and things like that. Vibrato and bow use is not something that a pianist
has to think about for instance right and they have other ways of of expressing things and so
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to practice that kind of thing I think first of all you have to know what you want to do expressively.
If you don't have an expressive idea you're not going to be able to express it because you have
no idea right and so the first step is is knowing at least on a rudimentary level what you're what
you're trying to do and maybe you'll change your mind but and being able to sort of hear that in
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your mind like can you hear yourself playing it the way you want that you have a sense of the pacing
and the shaping and the the dynamics and all of that stuff and then it's looking at okay how do
I do this on a technical level like how do I use the tools that are available to my instrument
to bring this across and that's part of our education as musicians right to learn about
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those expressive tools and how to use them and to gain better control over them but in terms of
employing them to play a phrase or something like that for me in the practice room a lot of times
it's a lot of experimentation that I'll have an idea that I want the phrase to have this shape
and I think I'm going to do that by using my vibrato in this way or my bow speed in this way
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or my contact point in this way like all these different tools and then I'll try it out and see
what I think either from what comes out of my viola or very often I record myself and I'll listen
back and either it matches what I want or it doesn't often at first it doesn't right because
I'm trying to find it and so then I have to you know go from what I heard when I played or on the
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recording and be like okay that's not quite right because of xyz reason and then I have to experiment
with something else then once I find it then I have to make sure I can recreate it right and it's
not that when I get up on stage I want to have a cookie cutter version that I'm just like
recreating exactly the same every time well that wouldn't be expressed that wouldn't be
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expressive right it would be it would be boring for me and for the audience right but I want to
have sort of a general sense of how I want you know to do this that I have sort of a range of
possibilities that fit with my vision for what I want to be saying musically and that I know how to
recreate that and so then I have to practice to solidify that mark things in my music so I don't
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forget it's what's occurring to me is that what what makes this particular thing you're talking
about so interesting is that what we want to express in music can so often simply not be put
into words right a musical phrase expresses something that is purely musical you can't say
oh that means I love you or that means the world is a beautiful place it's expressing something that
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it it's only expressive it's only expressive because it is expressing something that you can't
say otherwise and it's just it's kind of an elusive idea I agree and disagree actually so I
understand everything in the world through the lens of language even music I think this is
something that many musicians don't do that but for me everything comes through the lens of language
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that's how I how I understand everything about the world and so for me it is very language-based I
have a lot of expressive words always in my music and it's not language-based in a way that if I
put it into words it would make sense to another person because often in language like you can only
say one thing at a time right because that's how we talk but like if you think about a great actor
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for instance they can put a lot of different layers into what they're saying they may be saying
one thing but their tone of voice shows you that there's something going on behind the scenes
scenes and then their facial expression also tells you that there's something else going on
so a great actor will put those layers into their performance even though it's sort of linguistic
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and I feel like with music you can have all of those layers that if you tried to put them
into words they'd all be sitting on top of each other and you you couldn't understand it because
there would be words on top of each other but for me if I can't express it in language I can't
express it through my instrument. I've got one other kind of question with a couple kind of two
or three-part question. I'm curious whether one's approach to practicing effectively relates to
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any of these things one's own style of learning we all have different learning styles right
to the instrument being studied do certain practice techniques work well for certain
instruments do others work better for others or to the type of music being practiced if you're
if you're practicing a jazz tune versus a sonata by Beethoven that's just kind of an open-ended
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question but I'm curious. Yeah great question the the answer to all of those is yes and no.
So there are two to the idea of different learning styles different instruments different styles of
music there are general principles about how all humans learn all things not just music but all
things and so part of my work actually most of my work is talking about those general principles
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like brains need breaks you have to take breaks if you want to learn that's sort of a general
principle of learning and there's a whole bunch more and then looking at okay how do I apply this
to my specific situation sometimes the example I give is like raising children I don't have children
but like there are certain principles of raising children that are universal like you want to keep
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them safe you want to make sure they know that they are loved and supported but like the specifics
about that particular child are going to be different because every child is different right
and so in terms of different learning styles there's also a lot of misconceptions about what
what that work shows I think a lot of times people think that work shows that like if you're a visual
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learner then you need to learn things in a visual modality to like to learn it most effectively and
actually what the research shows is that if you're a visual learner for instance you need to make
sure you are not only learning things in a visual modality but learning things in the modalities
that are harder for you because when you learn things in a way that's more of a struggle for you
you learn it more effectively and so the learning styles research has been severely misinterpreted
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by the general public to say you should only be learning in your learning style no that's like
literally the exact opposite of what it says two techniques that work on certain instruments and
not others the general principles of learning work on all instruments and in all styles but the
specifics of how you're going to apply those are different instrument to instrument because of the
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different physical means with which we with which we play them and the different challenges inherent
in different instruments or or different styles in our very first episode we imagined what this
podcast might become and one of the things we thought is wouldn't it be great to have an
expert on memorizing music come and tell us how to do that better and how it might relate to this
so i just uh in a very open-ended way what what does um what what what do you now know about how
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to memorize music that uh you know like if you had to offer a kernel of of this advice what would you
offer a person that was seeking your help yeah definitely so i think one of the most important
things to know about memorization in general is that there's many different types of memory
um that are all separate from each other but work together so seamlessly that we as people
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experience them as one thing but we know from research on people who have been brain damaged
for instance that they are very separate things um and when we perform music from memory we are
relying on several different types of memory all at the same time um for instance we're relying on
our muscle memory what does it feel like to play this piece we're relying on our aural memory what
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does this piece sound like and we're relying on our declarative memory so what are the actual notes
and rhythms or whatever that i'm that i'm trying to play and all of these are separate types of
memory and all of us have one or more of them that is stronger for us and weaker for us and
we when we play from memory we tend to gravitate towards the one that's our strong suit so for me
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it's it's muscle memory it's sort of inconceivable to me that i would forget like physically how to
play something for many musicians it's their aural memory what does this piece sound like so they'll
remember how it goes but they won't remember how to do it physically um in order to perform
successfully for memory and feel confident that you're not going to have a memory slip
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you need to make sure that you're strengthening all the different types of memory that you need
when you're on stage and not just relying on your strong suit because if that one breaks down
you you kind of have nothing else and that's really scary but if you've made them all really
strong then you have a backup and they all reinforce each other and so it's like a double
backup kind of oh that's that is fascinating i i i really can't wait to get to that chapter of
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your book i'm not there yet or those chapters i think chapters yeah i think it's i think it's
two chapters yeah yeah well molly gabrielle we're um so glad to have you with us today on lifetimes
of listening in a minute or so here we're going to share with you several musical memories uh that
musicians have shared with us with me and brian and those memories reflect upon their experiences
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of learning or practicing music and then we'll ask you to after listening to them just to respond
to what they say to us so that's coming up that's next here on lifetimes of listening
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molly we have three musical memories we're going to share with you one at a time and then ask you
to comment on what these musicians have to say about their experiences practicing and learning
music and the first is by carlos utrio who was a international student in a class of mine and
shared this this story with with me and so here we go okay well hi my name is is carlos carlos
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utria i'm a freshman here at the university of arizona i was born in mexico in in chapeau
specifically my family like almost all my family knows how to sing or how to play an instrument at
some point so they always like told me that i needed like to like to learn an instrument so
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i i choose the piano like when i was six at that point i wasn't doing it so much
well like after like maybe two three years i was starting to hate the piano i was getting so stressed
like to to get the the musical sheets done and like to rehearsing like every every time
it was a kind of stressful at some point but at that point i wanted to quit to quit the piano
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my dad was mad at me because he was like oh you're like four years in piano right now like
if you quit right now it will be like a waste of your time like four years so then i stay on on on
on the piano and i keep progressing like like playing the piano like being better and at maybe
eight years or like seven to eight years like playing the piano i realized like how music has
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like helped me like in my life not just like to make friends because i made like a lot of friends
like playing music i i know like really really good friends that i made just by playing music
or like like playing a band back in mexico so it it also helped me to i would say like color
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like to coloring like my life i i start to to know in more time more types of music i start to to
enjoy more different styles of music and i start realizing that like music is just not like notes
because every every sound that that we have even like our voice or even like when we are walking on
we like we we hear like everything those sounds make make the life i mean i don't know if i'm
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expressing myself like correctly right now but like once a professor told me Carlos if if we
if we didn't have music we will not have life because every sound that we hear composes how
we like how we hear things and how we see the things around us so music for me it's been like
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a really important like part of of my life and i want to like to keep pursuing that like in like
as i go older molly what are your thoughts yeah that's a that's a really beautiful reflection
and i like i like the idea that like are the soundtrack of our lives is the sound not just
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the music we listen to but also the sounds sort of around us that we that we that we grow up with
makes me think about john cage actually and um 433 that it's it's about the ambient sounds and that
you could listen to those as as music we typically don't but you can there's something about
practicing music i for myself i know i fall into these moments where it doesn't really matter if
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the practicing isn't for a thing the practicing is for the way that it's nurturing me just hearing
it sink over me and it sounded to me like that's what carlis is describing there i don't know if
that and if that does that tie into what you were saying about having multiple a sort of multiple
modalities of experience the music in real time you were talking about it in the context of memory
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but uh i don't know does that yeah no definitely i mean when he was talking about not not enjoying
practicing and wanting to quiz it made me think about myself when i was in third grade i started
playing in first grade when i was in third grade i wanted to quit playing violin which is what i
started on and i i told my mom and she very wisely was like okay that's fine tell mr einfeld my
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teacher tell him at your next lesson that you don't want to play violin anymore knowing very
well that i would not be able to tell him myself that i wanted her to do it but she was just like
oh just tell mr einfeld that's fine um and of course i did of course i wouldn't go to my lesson
and say mr einfeld i don't want to play violin anymore so i i continued playing and i'm i'm so
glad i did right but i think that's a really common experience as as a child um to not not want to
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play when i teach children i try as much as possible to make the whole the whole practice
of practicing feel more like a game because i think it can feel especially to kids like drudgery and
it's just boring and it's not interesting and they're not they don't feel like they're being
creative or really listening to the sounds in the way that that he was describing um and i think
that that's such an important skill to develop the ability to sort of listen to what you're what
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you're doing um but i also think that i mean the research is very clear that games are in a very
effective way to learn especially for children but like for anybody but it can help get kids
through that hump of oh this is this is hard i don't i don't want to do this this isn't
enjoyable to me okay we have a we have a second musical memory for you here molly this is uh from
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a young man named alex studaville he's a multi-instrumentalist and i i think what's fascinated
me about this uh his story is some of the phases that he went through in learning how to how to uh
how to practice how to learn music and his obsession i mean i have this i mean maybe many
musicians do that it's just kind of always there right so here's the story of the musical memory
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from alex studaville i'm alex studaville uh i have you know i'm a freshman here at the u of a
um i've been playing guitar for about 13 years now and i have since taught myself how to play piano
drums ukulele and bass um so really just anything musical like i'm really all about it so i got my
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first guitar for christmas when i was about six years old um i was really big into like justin
beaver at the time my sister really liked him and that's just kind of i grew up around and i um and
i just thought like that's what i want to do someday like that's the kind of lifestyle i want
to have like person i want to be so um i started playing guitar learned it i was really bad about
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practicing at first as most people are um and then i just like eventually something clicked and i just
kind of fell in love with it and um and i thought like maybe i need to put in the work to be able to
get that far so once i got good at it that's when i saw you know the potential i had to get better
at it so i kept using that um to play bass i walked into my guitar teacher's class one day and he's
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like i'm trying to put together a band and our bass player just dropped he's like you've got a
week to learn this if you're willing to do it and i took it and i i learned all the songs in a week
so my first guitar that i got was like a squire electric guitar it's a pretty standard electric
guitar um and then i want to say a year or two later for christmas i got an acoustic guitar so
i would i was really back and forth between the two i figured acoustic was easier so i often stuck
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with that john mayer had this really unique sort of like picking like the strumming and um
percussive movement at the same time and i always thought that was really really cool so i felt i
had to learn it to kind of add to my bank of skills every single day i think about things musically
which is really like an interesting thing about myself is that you know i will pick out those
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little details in songs and i will think about it in such a way that helps me better understand it
i try to learn it by ear first see how far i can get with that and then once i kind of hit a plateau
get stuck i go and figure out how to actually play it you know i'd listen to songs so many times
there would be something in there that i'd just be infatuated with and i would try and figure out
(32:27):
what they're doing there musically and that has helped me by learning some of the songs it's helped
me be able to transfer that skill over and pick up songs easier you know maybe figure out a technique
that they're using in the song to to play it so molly any uh any responses reactions to uh alex
story there yeah i have i have lots of thoughts actually um i'll go in order so i don't forget
(32:50):
any of them so the the first thing he said about he said when he was younger like a switch kind of
flipped for him and and then he you know he started he realized like i really want to do this and
and i have to like put work into this if i if i want to get good at and that's when he started
really enjoying it that switch is something that i've seen so many times in students that they kind
of you know especially younger students like they'll be playing their instrument casually for back
(33:13):
lack of a better word and at some point there's this switch that flips either they play a piece
of music that they really love or you know they're in an orchestra or some musical situation that
really kind of like lights them up and they start just yeah practicing much better and then they get
much better at their instrument as a result um but that realization like oh i need to actually like
(33:36):
put work into this if i need to get good at this i think that's going back to our conversation about
talent i think that's part of where that that idea of talent can be so damaging because i've heard
students say so many times i just don't think i'm cut out for this right brian like you were saying
with oh i can't sing like none of us are cut out or not cut out for anything we're cut out for
whatever we want to do right and so in order to get good at any instrument anybody has to put in
(34:00):
a lot of work and i think a lot of times students will see oh i'm struggling with this therefore i
can't do this because i'm not quote unquote cut out for it yeah you are if you put in the work you
can get as good as you want and what happened with alec there was that he got to a certain point and
there suddenly there was a reward that sounds like he hadn't really anticipated oh if i get this good
it really feels good yeah and if i get better it'll feel even better it was a very self self
(34:25):
inner mode inner self-motivating sort of process he was going through there yeah exactly and i
that's what i've seen in my students too that they start really putting the work in and then
they see how rewarding it is and then there's this intrinsic motivation that just kind of you know
snowballs in a really really good way um the other thing uh that he was talking about towards the end
there about like you know listening to recordings over and over and over and trying to figure out
(34:50):
how is this person doing this thing i really want to be able to play this or do this technique
i think that's such an important skill to have to be to listen to something and be able to recreate
it yourself and i think a lot of times in classical music training there's such a focus
on reading the music and i think that's a real it's that's a real detriment i was i was a suzuki
(35:12):
trained kid so um in in the suzuki philosophy you learn by ear first and like for the first three
years of my playing life i didn't read music i learned everything by ear and that's sort of the
the suzuki philosophy and i can see both in myself and my students and and like classmates when i
was in school how beneficial it was for me to have that start where i was learning by ear and i had
(35:36):
learned to translate what i heard into what i wanted to do on the instrument rather than relying
on my eyes there's there's something about that that i i find a really interesting tension for
for me so i i uh i'm a picker and grinner guitarist for the most part i mean i i i was
a classical guitarist earlier but i don't practice in that way or and haven't in decades but um i can
(36:01):
open up you know like a real book with a hundred songs in it and i could go into a coffee shop and
i could do an hour set uh but i i because i i can just i can read it and i can i know how to
interpret the reading you know pretty quickly without a lot of effort but if i'm going to go
(36:21):
to an open mic where i'm not holding music and i'm going to perform i have to practice hours and
hours to get a 10 minute set tight you know to really like to just knock that if that's it and
i every once in a while i make myself i challenge myself to do that because i knew what's really hard
for me um and and i would rather just rely on this sort of like picking and grin and you know like
open up the book to the fun song and everybody everybody likes to sing the beach boys and let's
(36:44):
go um that and there's something about that tension between reading and performing and
and listening and and all that i i just i find that fascinating in myself and i i don't know why
uh i i don't there's no question here i guess i'm just i'm just reflecting on the way all this is
kind of coming in but what what uh is there is there research to suggest that other than the
(37:10):
fact that you need it all and so it's good to practice all of it is there what does the research
tell us yeah i mean your your experience with you know just going and opening a book and like
reading things down and that being really easy but then if you have to perform things like without
music and from memory that that feels a lot hurt there's those are just really different skills
and you know um for me i i would never in a million years go and just sight read something
(37:35):
in front of an audience absolutely not no way right that would be a disaster um right right well
it's levels though i mean like i said coffee shop you know i wasn't i wasn't saying concert all but
yeah right right but even so actually i would feel very uncomfortable going into a coffee shop
and sight reading a bunch of stuff i would know that no i would never do that um even easy stuff
that would feel massively uncomfortable to me to do something like that um in terms of research
(38:01):
so this is something that i i talk about in my book um because i think it's really really important
for musicians to have those aural skills of being able to you know hear something and know how to
play it on your instrument and vice versa and not always be relying on your eyes um this is uh
something that's the only thing in my book actually that is uh speculative that hasn't been totally
(38:24):
shown in the research but i think my speculation is well grounded in what exists in the research so
what the research shows is that um when you take professional in this case they were violinists
that were in this particular study when they played them um a uh when sorry i was about to say this
backwards they had violinists in a brain scanner and they had them finger a piece of music silently
(38:48):
so there was no sound involved they were just fingering it silently and they found that their
the auditory cortex in their brain was activated which normally the auditory cortex is only
activated when you're hearing stuff um but in the professional violinist their auditory cortex was
activated when they were playing silently it wasn't activated in the amateur violinists
on the flip side of this there was a study that was done on pianists that found that when they
(39:11):
played the pianist's recordings of pieces they knew how to play well their motor cortex was
activated even though they were not moving so normally your motor cortex is only activated
when you're like moving your body but they were sitting there and their hands were being monitored
to make sure that they were like stock still they weren't making any movements um and so taken
(39:32):
together so hearing something and having the motor cortex be activated playing something silently and
having the auditory cortex be activated this suggests that in professional musicians that
there is an auditory motor connection that gets formed that part is not speculative that part is
not speculative that part is clear in the research my speculation is that um i have noticed that um
(39:56):
suzuki trained kids like myself or other kids that are trained in traditions where you learn
by ear so bluegrass jazz where it's not notation based those types of students grow up to be
musicians who have a much easier time playing for memory and playing without the music and my theory
is that this auditory motor connection forms at a very young age in people that learn by ear and
(40:20):
this is the connection you need to have as a musician because music is an auditory thing
right it's a visual thing um and that if this connection doesn't form at a young age it's
harder but not impossible to to develop it um later and so another soapbox issue for me is that
every musician regardless of style should be trained by ear for the first at least six months
(40:40):
of their playing career and if they're going to go on to play in a style like classical music that's
very notation based that's fine um but it's it'll set them up better for the future if they're
learning by ear from the beginning fascinating well molly we've got uh we have one more really
interesting musical memory about practicing and learning music that we're going to share with you
that's coming up after a short pause here on lifetimes of listening
(41:12):
so
welcome back to lifetimes of listening and so molly we have one last um one last uh memory musical
(41:35):
memory to share with you this is from andrew song another student who shared the story with me and
it uh it was it was a very powerful story of uh uh the way that music has worked into his life and
i i i think i i'm curious to hear your thoughts on it well my name is andrew song um i'm a freshman
(42:01):
here at the university of arizona for me i've been playing piano since i was five that's been
a very large part of my life and a piano really ended up sticking um it's been one of my favorite
things to do it's kind of my second home in a way music has always been a very big part of my life
(42:23):
i think all of my favorite pieces um aren't exactly sad but are kind of slow slower and um even if it
is a minor cadence i feel like there's especially with you know the brilliant composers a beauty to
(42:44):
that and even a beauty to sadness sometimes in music where it's so moving there's such a
power and beauty and being able to portray that with my own fingers i've been playing harder
pieces and one of my favorite pieces to play is um fedrick shopan's uh nocturne opus nine number
(43:11):
two whenever i go to recitals there's always a little bit of nervousness but um most of the time
most of the time when you go in and you start playing especially if you really love the piece
then it becomes more about the fact that you're able to share something that you love which is
cool so i you practice a lot for those of course um i don't know there's a certain joy when you
(43:38):
practice for something that you love and then you're able to share with people and then just at the
end and you know i could tell like i did well and i was happy with how i played it and it was just
really great to be able to share that because it's really easy to you know tell like a a powerful
(44:00):
story through that music and you know you spend a lot of time not only learning how to get the right
notes and everything but then where phrases begin and end and how they flow into each other and
essentially tell a story like i said it's not like a story in words it's the story and kind of
(44:22):
emotions i guess telling that story being able to tell it well is really what music is all about for
me wow that was really beautiful yeah yes the sharing you know being on stage and knowing it's
not about you it's about what what is being shared it's not the music exactly yes not yeah
(44:46):
there's there's a wonderful moment on there uh dan harris has a podcast called 10 happier
um and he interviewed a few years ago a man named amos lee uh who is a singer-songwriter
a fabulous singer-songwriter just really worth uh worth exploring but i miss lee and dan harris
(45:07):
both suffer from severe anxiety and dan harris was a good morning america host you know and was like
a television person and amos lee as a performer and amos lee uh talks about how anxiety finally
like he was finally able to get it under control because he would just you know have severe stage
(45:28):
fright crippling straight right uh when he began to realize that his songs meant something to his
audience and that when he was able to give them that he when he was able to put himself into the
role of servicing others that the anxiety quelled and i i found that i found that such a powerful
(45:48):
idea and so i please you know go listen to the amos lee interview on the dan harris podcast
but but um i i wonder how do you like how do you practice that like how do you practice putting
yourself into these roles because i a lot of the music that i do i do in the context of a
i'm a church musician i do a lot of contact you know like literally my job is to to make music
(46:13):
move people and and it is on on any level and any venue and in any reason that's part of what we're
doing but how do you practice that how do you how do you you know because it because i mean i know
analytically it's like oh yes we're going to sing this phrase from louder we're going to do a
crescendo here and it's we got six beats to get there and so each beat's going to be microscopically
(46:34):
a little bit louder and that's going to make this word leap out of the texture in a way that will
make sense and i mean like we can analyze it to death but ultimately that's not what we want the
music to be about you know and and we and we find it dry i mean there are there are those performances
that are that analyzed and they feel dry and precise and over technical and we label them
(47:00):
as machine-like because it's you know technically flawless but without any passion i agree with you
i agree with you completely and and the idea of practicing this is something that like weirdly
did not occur to me for a very long time and like i would practice to be able to play my music but i
wouldn't practice performing it and then i would be distressed that it didn't go the way i wanted in
(47:23):
performance looking back like obviously i didn't i wasn't practicing performing it i was practicing
to be able to play it but it's a different thing just because you can do something it doesn't mean
you can perform that thing and so practicing performing is a really important part of of the
process and so there's all sorts of things that i do now too i mean one of the things that often
(47:47):
happens to musicians especially classical musicians i feel like because our music is so rehearsed
right because it's not improvised something that happens very often is you know we practice at home
and we can play it really well and then like things go wrong technically on stage right we miss notes
or we're out of tune or whatever and that's sort of very distressing also when you have excess
(48:07):
adrenaline in your system you're you feel like you can't control your body as well right and that
just really gets in the way and so part of practicing to perform well is to make sure that
you can like do things on the spot no matter what and so using different practice methods that force
you to do that something that we have to contend with in performance is unexpected things that
(48:31):
happen right be it our body activation be it you know you're playing in a concert hall that's not
at a busy intersection and there's sirens going on the whole time that are really distracting like
there's all sorts of things and so practicing what athletes call adversity training is is really
important so i remember after michael phelps won one of his many many many gold medals i remember
(48:52):
seeing him interviewed because apparently his goggles had fallen off or something in in the
race and he still won and he set a world record or something and they interviewed him and they
said well how did you how did you deal with that he's like oh it's just like how i practiced
because he had practiced doing races with his goggles filled with water so he knew how to just
like count his strokes or whatever and he didn't have to see and so like for me one of the things
(49:16):
that string players worry about the most is our hands getting all sweaty because then it's hard
to hold on to our bows and it's hard to shift on the instrument and so i will like put a bunch of
lotion on my hands and not rub it in so my hands are all like slippery and nasty and then i it's
gross right it's like so gross um but like then i'll go make myself perform for myself and prove to
(49:36):
myself that like yes i can do this this feels really awful i feel really really uncomfortable
but like i can i can still do this and i can still sort of be expressive and sort of ignore this nasty
sensory sensation and so in a performance when my hands get all gross like that um from sweat i know
i can i know i can play in terms of being able to sort of shut off that analytical side and just
(50:00):
just share the the emotion of the music with the audience doing practice performances i think is
really important to practice that skill either for people friends family you know people you feel
comfortable with or even just for yourself in a video camera it's amazing what turning on a video
camera will do to make you feel like you are being watched by by somebody else but then but by
(50:21):
extension a good leader a good conductor will rehearse will practice not just playing the piece
but will practice as you're saying performing performance of the piece right so that there
aren't unexpected surprises you know i i think in the world of percussion because there is so
much mechanical stuff yeah i think about moving instruments on stage and after we play this please
we got a reset for this that a good percussion ensemble conductor for example coach will really
(50:49):
talk through all of that stuff because that stuff is so complicated it's not just sitting there with
an instrument in your hand it's a brilliant and one logistical things have to be thought through
and that can go wrong like michael felton's losing his goggles during a race losing his goggles right
yeah no that those like practical aspects are are really really important and you know when i have
(51:09):
students preparing for performance i make them practice their bows walking on on stage bowing
putting their music down getting the you know because you get up there and if you haven't
practiced it you're like wait what order am i supposed to be doing this in and you feel really
awkward and so like in my studio class we would have a studio class every fall devoted to practicing
walking on bowing putting your music on the stand playing ending bowing taking your music and leaving
(51:32):
and while you're doing that you can be imagining what's the worst thing that could happen here
right and how would i deal with that right yeah just to be prepared fast very fascinating yeah
that was a uh one of the lessons that i learned from my undergrad study where we had a colloquium
series everybody had to perform 10 minutes of music every semester for every other music major
(51:53):
in the in the school because it was a smaller school and one of the very first colloquium every
every fall was we all had to practice getting up walking onto stage bowing and doing literally
that we always practiced that and then when we did it and and there was something about that
that uh i i make choirs when i'm you know a brand new uh choir whenever it's like up here's here's
(52:17):
how you get from point a to point b and and you always look like when you realize you walked into
the wrong voice section or in the wrong seat you stand and you look as and then you intentionally
move to the right place and you never betray that or you practice holding the music until the music
until the final sound is gone in the room before you allow that to release right so that you
(52:39):
give your attention to the sound as opposed to just like finally done let me leave you know and
and uh yeah ruining that moment all of those little small details that uh that are part of that
yeah it's so important yeah yeah well this has been uh just a wonderfully fascinating conversation
i mean we this is what this is episode 18 of our podcast now brian and uh they get more interesting
(53:06):
all the time this has been one of the most interesting conversations we're so glad
molly gabrielle that you could be our guest today uh to be here to share some of your expertise on
learning practicing and how neurosciences relates to our study and practice of music so molly just
want to thank you so very much for joining us today here on lifetimes of listening thank you
(53:27):
so much for having me it's been great to talk to you guys about this stuff thank you
so
so
(53:56):
well thanks for listening today to lifetimes of listening now if you haven't done so already
we'd love for you to follow or subscribe to our show on your favorite podcast app we hope you'll
also consider participating in our project uh maybe by telling us your story your musical memory we're
extremely grateful for the more than 200 people who've recorded a story for the arizona musical
(54:18):
memory archive it's allowing us to better understand the ways people value music if you
haven't visited our website at musicalmemories.music.arizona.edu please do so there you'll find
full-length interviews of the ones that we have used and played here and you can also on our
(54:39):
website submit a musical memory of your own say with a sound file if you like an essay or a poem
and even an illustration of some sort or suggest someone who you think we might want to uh interview
to capture their musical memory so please take a look at musicalmemories.music.arizona.edu
i'm dan cruise and i'm brian moon thank you for listening the executive producer of lifetimes of
(55:09):
listening the arizona musical memory podcast is brian moon the program is produced and edited
by dan cruise the lifetimes of listening website was created by cynthia barlow principal information
technology manager with the university of arizona school of music music is from zapsplat.com and
(55:30):
from pixabay.com special thanks to the university of arizona school of music and the ua college of
fine arts for their continued support of the lifetimes of listening musical memory archive
and this podcast for more information and to get involved in our research visit musicalmemories.music.arizona.edu
this is lifetimes of listening the arizona musical memory podcast
(56:17):
music
A technical note about this episode of Lifetimes of Listening on practicing music.
(00:05):
We ran into a recording glitch resulting in some audio issues with Dan's voice track,
which we were unable to remedy. In listening, please note there's nothing wrong with your
speaker or your system. It's a technical glitch with the audio at our end that unfortunately
we couldn't remove. Please enjoy the episode.
Lifetimes of Listening. I realized how music has like helped me in my life. Once I got good at it,
(00:35):
that's when I saw potentially how to get better at it. Telling that story is really what music
is all about for me. Lifetimes of Listening. Welcome to the Lifetimes of Listening, a podcast
that seeks to understand why music is important in people's lives. In this episode, we'll be taking
(00:56):
a close look at how people practice music. The act of practicing music primarily in order to
perform music has been the subject of lots of recent research, including neuroscientific research.
How do we learn and practice music? How can our practice be most efficient and helpful in creating
great performances? What's the value of mental practice? And how do we go about improving our
(01:20):
rhythm, tempo, pitch, intonation? These are of enormous interest to working musicians around
the world. Dan, would you have any stories about practicing music that you can reflect on in your
own life? Well, yeah, there's one that has stuck with me for many years. It's been 20 or maybe 23,
24 years since this happened to me. I was an undergraduate student at the University of
(01:44):
Arizona School of Music, and I was kind of drafted into the School of Music, the orchestra, the
UA Symphony, UA Orchestra, though that's not the ensemble that I usually played with. They were
performing a Hina Stera's harp concerto, and I was assigned percussion part number four,
which was a big load of bongos and toms and maybe a woodblock and a whole range of instruments.
(02:11):
And it was to be performed at a very, very rapid tempo. Now, it wasn't impossible for me to play
the notes. The hard part was playing it at anything even close to performance tempo. So every day for
about three weeks, I would notch up my metronome by like one click and see if I could play it a
little quicker, but again, starting at about half tempo. Every day I did this until the day before
(02:34):
the performance. I never got it right in practicing it. The only time I ever performed this piece of
music correctly, note for note, at tempo was during the one performance on a Sunday afternoon.
And I was so relieved that I thought, oh, I'm just going to make a mess of this. I've never played it
(02:54):
right. Performance time came, something kicked in, adrenaline. I had some dear friends from out of
town in the audience and something happened and all that practice paid off. And I wound up performing
the piece, my part, a note for note, just the way it should have been. And that was a real strong
reflection on the serious practice that I had put into that piece of music. How about you, Brian,
(03:16):
a particular memory of practicing music that sticks with you?
The thing that I have this clear memory of sitting out of the in front on a bench out in
front of the Coca-Cola Museum in Atlanta. So in college, I had to do a half hour recital my senior
year and a half hour of music on classical guitar that I had to memorize and play without music and
(03:43):
perform. I had family in town, which is why I was doing all of these tourist activities. And when the
family went in to do the tourist activity, to go to the museum or whatnot, I would sit outside and
I wasn't practicing, I didn't play my instrument, but I was running the recital in my head,
imagining the various moments of the recital. And there were things that I was imagining,
(04:09):
like there's this famous story of Andrei Segovia, where he came into a 3000 person hall and one
person was fiddling with a cough drop or maybe been a cough drop when he was performing this in
the early 20th century, but in the back of the hall and him staring bullets into the person that
(04:30):
was making sound until there was utter quiet before he began performing. So I was even imagining
what I would do if somebody was disruptive in the audience. All of these things. So I was practicing
entirely in my head, purely imaginatory. Because physically I could only do, you can only play so
(04:53):
much before your fingers and your body just gives out. So I have this clear memory of being in
front of the Koch Museum on a bench, sitting there moving my fingers. This is going to be a great
episode of Life Times of Listening. Our guest today will be Molly Gabrian, a violist with a
(05:13):
background in cognitive neuroscience. Molly has written a book, Learn Faster, Perform Better,
that's now out on Oxford Press. And we can't wait to learn more from her in just a moment
here on Life Times of Listening.
Welcome back to Life Times of Listening. Now today we're discussing this whole area of
(05:44):
practicing music. And we have a very special guest, Molly Gabrian. Molly is both a performer,
a violist, and a music scholar using her background in cognitive neuroscience to
translate the research on learning, practice, and memory into practical, actionable solutions
that musicians can use to practice and perform more effectively. She's a frequent presenter on
(06:10):
the neuroscience of practicing at conferences, universities, and music festivals in America and
abroad. And her book, Learn Faster, Perform Better, a musician's guide to the neuroscience
of practicing was released just this last July by Oxford University Press. Molly incidentally just
recently joined the faculty at New England's Conservatory of Music to teach courses there on
(06:33):
the science of practicing. As a performing artist, Molly centers her programming around the work of
historically excluded composers, particularly women and composers of color, as well as championing
the work of contemporary composers through commissions and premieres. Molly Gabrian,
welcome to Life Times of Listening.
(06:54):
Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.
It's great to have you here.
Great to be here.
Brian, I want to first just chat a little bit with you. And I guess the first question I have is,
what spurred your initial interest in this whole area of how we practice music?
What got you interested in that?
Yeah, great question. It started when I was an undergraduate at Oberlin College. I went into
(07:20):
college knowing I wanted to be a double degree student in viola and something else because I
always really liked school and academics. But I didn't know what the something else was going to
be. And then my freshman year in the course catalog, I saw a description of a freshman seminar on
neuroscience and the description looked really interesting. I was like, okay, I'll take that
class, you know, and instantly I was hooked. I was like, this is the most interesting thing I've
(07:44):
ever learned about in my life. Like, I want to major in this. And so that's what started it.
And at first, it was truly just my own interest in the brain. I thought the class was absolutely
fascinating. I just want to learn more about it. I didn't have any plan or even desire really,
I guess, to bring it together with practicing. But I started to notice all sorts of parallels
(08:06):
between what I was learning in my neuroscience classes and what I was learning about practicing
from my viola teacher. And so for again, for my own personal interest, I was like, well,
I want to look more specifically into the research on learning and memory so I can practice
better because that's what, you know, I spend my life doing as a performer. And somewhere along
(08:30):
line, I was like, gosh, this would be really helpful to share with other people because I
was learning so many things that had been so beneficial to me and I saw how they could be
beneficial for other people. But yeah, it kind of started by accident.
Pete Is there a technique that you,
that musicians, like the common understanding of how to practice leads us to do something that's
(08:51):
against how our brains might work that you would highlight?
Yes.
Yeah. What's your favorite to talk about?
So there's two and they're kind of interconnected with each other. So the first thing is that,
and this is the most counterintuitive thing in the world, but breaks are absolutely essential
for learning that you can't learn without taking breaks. And actually we make the most progress
(09:13):
during our breaks, which is very counterintuitive, right? The analogy that often helps people
understand this better is building muscle. Like if you're working out and you're trying to get
stronger, you don't actually get stronger while you're lifting the weights. While you're lifting
the weights, you're creating micro tears, right? In your muscle. And then when you're resting in
between workouts, your body repairs those micro tears and it makes the muscle stronger as a result.
(09:37):
So we actually get stronger when we're taking a break from working out. Our brains are the same.
It's not that we're creating tears in our brains and our brains are getting stronger, but when you
practice or study or anything, you're giving your brain input and then the brain actually like does
stuff with that input and has to make actual physical changes. And then when you come back,
you're at a higher level. And so we often in, especially in classical music training,
(10:03):
there's this culture of practicing as much as you can for big blocks of time, right? And that's just
so much the opposite of how the brain actually learns. Connected to that, there's also a culture
in not just classical music, but in any pursuit of focusing on one thing for a long period of time,
sitting down for a marathon study session, for instance, to prepare for an exam or
(10:26):
practicing one thing for like hours on end. And what the research shows is that that is not
effective at all, that our brains need us to again, take breaks, but also switch between
different things. And if you're just focusing on one thing for a long period of time, you can't
learn it as effectively or efficiently as if you're constantly switching between things,
(10:47):
which seems chaotic, but it's very clear from the research that that's how the brain learns.
And when you say take breaks, one thing I've read is that sleep has something to do with how we learn
things and memorize things. Absolutely. Yeah. Sleep is like the ultimate break. So taking breaks
during the day is important, but getting enough sleep at night is super important. I do presentations
(11:08):
all the time on this stuff, and I always talk about sleep and I always say if you take nothing
else away from my presentation today, take away that getting enough sleep is the most important
thing you can do to improve your practice because the brain does do a lot of stuff when we're
sleeping and it consolidates what we've learned during the day. And the next day you come back
to it at a much higher level than you left it because of what happened during sleep.
(11:30):
So as you were beginning to learn these techniques and beginning to understand the research,
were there particular people that were guiding you or or was there a particular viola instructor
that sort of helped help you really implement these practices and your this this knowledge
into your practice or how did that come about? The answer to your question is no. It's oh it's
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been self-guided. I mean I have had the support of my professors in terms of them like encouraging
me and not saying stop doing this, you know, but it's it's totally been my own thing that I've done
looking into the research that was that was purely my own interest implementing in my practicing.
That was purely my my own interest and me on my own figuring out okay this is what the research
(12:15):
says in terms of how we learn. What does that actually look like in the practice room? And that
sort of translation of the research into practical practice methods is sort of the basis of what I
I do because I I have a foot in both worlds right that I can understand the research but as a
performing musician I can then take it into the practice room and try it out myself and be like
(12:36):
okay I think this is what this means for me in the practice room. Let me try this and see how it
works and then I can share it with people. So everything I share in my work is stuff that I
use myself in my own practicing because I've tried it out and I know that it works. But yeah it's been
totally self-guided. This this whole area of of the neuroscience of music what got me started with
(12:57):
that was when Brian handed me a copy of Oliver Sacks Musicophilia about that's a great book 10
or 12 years ago and then seeing the film alive inside if you're familiar with it. I haven't seen
it but I'm familiar with it yeah. Yeah and then some years ago Dan Levitin was here on campus for
a speech language and hearing sciences conference and I started reading his stuff too. I'm no nowhere
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near as steeped in this as you are Molly but it's just such a fascinating field because I mean music
is a is a mind and body and heart thing and the more we know about that the better musicians we
can be or help people to become. It's a really wonderful pursuit. Yeah I agree. A lot of classical
performance is uh is technical and dry and and you know and yet a good classical performance often
(13:48):
brings emotion into it in ways that shade the subtlest of expressions and and which are very
technical. How do you practice that emotional stuff? How do you get how do you get the feeling into
you know a quick little virtuosic run or passage or? Yeah that's a great question. I think a lot
of people separate the technical from the musical but I think that's a mistake because the way we
(14:13):
bring across the emotion in the music is through technical means and the way to do that on each
instrument is is different right. Me as a string player I have to think a lot about how I use my
bow and how I use my vibrato and things like that. Vibrato and bow use is not something that a pianist
has to think about for instance right and they have other ways of of expressing things and so
(14:33):
to practice that kind of thing I think first of all you have to know what you want to do expressively.
If you don't have an expressive idea you're not going to be able to express it because you have
no idea right and so the first step is is knowing at least on a rudimentary level what you're what
you're trying to do and maybe you'll change your mind but and being able to sort of hear that in
(14:55):
your mind like can you hear yourself playing it the way you want that you have a sense of the pacing
and the shaping and the the dynamics and all of that stuff and then it's looking at okay how do
I do this on a technical level like how do I use the tools that are available to my instrument
to bring this across and that's part of our education as musicians right to learn about
(15:15):
those expressive tools and how to use them and to gain better control over them but in terms of
employing them to play a phrase or something like that for me in the practice room a lot of times
it's a lot of experimentation that I'll have an idea that I want the phrase to have this shape
and I think I'm going to do that by using my vibrato in this way or my bow speed in this way
(15:37):
or my contact point in this way like all these different tools and then I'll try it out and see
what I think either from what comes out of my viola or very often I record myself and I'll listen
back and either it matches what I want or it doesn't often at first it doesn't right because
I'm trying to find it and so then I have to you know go from what I heard when I played or on the
(15:58):
recording and be like okay that's not quite right because of xyz reason and then I have to experiment
with something else then once I find it then I have to make sure I can recreate it right and it's
not that when I get up on stage I want to have a cookie cutter version that I'm just like
recreating exactly the same every time well that wouldn't be expressed that wouldn't be
(16:19):
expressive right it would be it would be boring for me and for the audience right but I want to
have sort of a general sense of how I want you know to do this that I have sort of a range of
possibilities that fit with my vision for what I want to be saying musically and that I know how to
recreate that and so then I have to practice to solidify that mark things in my music so I don't
(16:42):
forget it's what's occurring to me is that what what makes this particular thing you're talking
about so interesting is that what we want to express in music can so often simply not be put
into words right a musical phrase expresses something that is purely musical you can't say
oh that means I love you or that means the world is a beautiful place it's expressing something that
(17:04):
it it's only expressive it's only expressive because it is expressing something that you can't
say otherwise and it's just it's kind of an elusive idea I agree and disagree actually so I
understand everything in the world through the lens of language even music I think this is
something that many musicians don't do that but for me everything comes through the lens of language
(17:25):
that's how I how I understand everything about the world and so for me it is very language-based I
have a lot of expressive words always in my music and it's not language-based in a way that if I
put it into words it would make sense to another person because often in language like you can only
say one thing at a time right because that's how we talk but like if you think about a great actor
(17:52):
for instance they can put a lot of different layers into what they're saying they may be saying
one thing but their tone of voice shows you that there's something going on behind the scenes
scenes and then their facial expression also tells you that there's something else going on
so a great actor will put those layers into their performance even though it's sort of linguistic
(18:14):
and I feel like with music you can have all of those layers that if you tried to put them
into words they'd all be sitting on top of each other and you you couldn't understand it because
there would be words on top of each other but for me if I can't express it in language I can't
express it through my instrument. I've got one other kind of question with a couple kind of two
or three-part question. I'm curious whether one's approach to practicing effectively relates to
(18:40):
any of these things one's own style of learning we all have different learning styles right
to the instrument being studied do certain practice techniques work well for certain
instruments do others work better for others or to the type of music being practiced if you're
if you're practicing a jazz tune versus a sonata by Beethoven that's just kind of an open-ended
(19:03):
question but I'm curious. Yeah great question the the answer to all of those is yes and no.
So there are two to the idea of different learning styles different instruments different styles of
music there are general principles about how all humans learn all things not just music but all
things and so part of my work actually most of my work is talking about those general principles
(19:28):
like brains need breaks you have to take breaks if you want to learn that's sort of a general
principle of learning and there's a whole bunch more and then looking at okay how do I apply this
to my specific situation sometimes the example I give is like raising children I don't have children
but like there are certain principles of raising children that are universal like you want to keep
(19:51):
them safe you want to make sure they know that they are loved and supported but like the specifics
about that particular child are going to be different because every child is different right
and so in terms of different learning styles there's also a lot of misconceptions about what
what that work shows I think a lot of times people think that work shows that like if you're a visual
(20:14):
learner then you need to learn things in a visual modality to like to learn it most effectively and
actually what the research shows is that if you're a visual learner for instance you need to make
sure you are not only learning things in a visual modality but learning things in the modalities
that are harder for you because when you learn things in a way that's more of a struggle for you
you learn it more effectively and so the learning styles research has been severely misinterpreted
(20:39):
by the general public to say you should only be learning in your learning style no that's like
literally the exact opposite of what it says two techniques that work on certain instruments and
not others the general principles of learning work on all instruments and in all styles but the
specifics of how you're going to apply those are different instrument to instrument because of the
(21:01):
different physical means with which we with which we play them and the different challenges inherent
in different instruments or or different styles in our very first episode we imagined what this
podcast might become and one of the things we thought is wouldn't it be great to have an
expert on memorizing music come and tell us how to do that better and how it might relate to this
so i just uh in a very open-ended way what what does um what what what do you now know about how
(21:27):
to memorize music that uh you know like if you had to offer a kernel of of this advice what would you
offer a person that was seeking your help yeah definitely so i think one of the most important
things to know about memorization in general is that there's many different types of memory
um that are all separate from each other but work together so seamlessly that we as people
(21:51):
experience them as one thing but we know from research on people who have been brain damaged
for instance that they are very separate things um and when we perform music from memory we are
relying on several different types of memory all at the same time um for instance we're relying on
our muscle memory what does it feel like to play this piece we're relying on our aural memory what
(22:13):
does this piece sound like and we're relying on our declarative memory so what are the actual notes
and rhythms or whatever that i'm that i'm trying to play and all of these are separate types of
memory and all of us have one or more of them that is stronger for us and weaker for us and
we when we play from memory we tend to gravitate towards the one that's our strong suit so for me
(22:38):
it's it's muscle memory it's sort of inconceivable to me that i would forget like physically how to
play something for many musicians it's their aural memory what does this piece sound like so they'll
remember how it goes but they won't remember how to do it physically um in order to perform
successfully for memory and feel confident that you're not going to have a memory slip
(22:59):
you need to make sure that you're strengthening all the different types of memory that you need
when you're on stage and not just relying on your strong suit because if that one breaks down
you you kind of have nothing else and that's really scary but if you've made them all really
strong then you have a backup and they all reinforce each other and so it's like a double
backup kind of oh that's that is fascinating i i i really can't wait to get to that chapter of
(23:21):
your book i'm not there yet or those chapters i think chapters yeah i think it's i think it's
two chapters yeah yeah well molly gabrielle we're um so glad to have you with us today on lifetimes
of listening in a minute or so here we're going to share with you several musical memories uh that
musicians have shared with us with me and brian and those memories reflect upon their experiences
(23:44):
of learning or practicing music and then we'll ask you to after listening to them just to respond
to what they say to us so that's coming up that's next here on lifetimes of listening
(24:20):
molly we have three musical memories we're going to share with you one at a time and then ask you
to comment on what these musicians have to say about their experiences practicing and learning
music and the first is by carlos utrio who was a international student in a class of mine and
shared this this story with with me and so here we go okay well hi my name is is carlos carlos
(24:45):
utria i'm a freshman here at the university of arizona i was born in mexico in in chapeau
specifically my family like almost all my family knows how to sing or how to play an instrument at
some point so they always like told me that i needed like to like to learn an instrument so
(25:06):
i i choose the piano like when i was six at that point i wasn't doing it so much
well like after like maybe two three years i was starting to hate the piano i was getting so stressed
like to to get the the musical sheets done and like to rehearsing like every every time
it was a kind of stressful at some point but at that point i wanted to quit to quit the piano
(25:33):
my dad was mad at me because he was like oh you're like four years in piano right now like
if you quit right now it will be like a waste of your time like four years so then i stay on on on
on the piano and i keep progressing like like playing the piano like being better and at maybe
eight years or like seven to eight years like playing the piano i realized like how music has
(25:58):
like helped me like in my life not just like to make friends because i made like a lot of friends
like playing music i i know like really really good friends that i made just by playing music
or like like playing a band back in mexico so it it also helped me to i would say like color
(26:18):
like to coloring like my life i i start to to know in more time more types of music i start to to
enjoy more different styles of music and i start realizing that like music is just not like notes
because every every sound that that we have even like our voice or even like when we are walking on
we like we we hear like everything those sounds make make the life i mean i don't know if i'm
(26:47):
expressing myself like correctly right now but like once a professor told me Carlos if if we
if we didn't have music we will not have life because every sound that we hear composes how
we like how we hear things and how we see the things around us so music for me it's been like
(27:10):
a really important like part of of my life and i want to like to keep pursuing that like in like
as i go older molly what are your thoughts yeah that's a that's a really beautiful reflection
and i like i like the idea that like are the soundtrack of our lives is the sound not just
(27:31):
the music we listen to but also the sounds sort of around us that we that we that we grow up with
makes me think about john cage actually and um 433 that it's it's about the ambient sounds and that
you could listen to those as as music we typically don't but you can there's something about
practicing music i for myself i know i fall into these moments where it doesn't really matter if
(27:56):
the practicing isn't for a thing the practicing is for the way that it's nurturing me just hearing
it sink over me and it sounded to me like that's what carlis is describing there i don't know if
that and if that does that tie into what you were saying about having multiple a sort of multiple
modalities of experience the music in real time you were talking about it in the context of memory
(28:17):
but uh i don't know does that yeah no definitely i mean when he was talking about not not enjoying
practicing and wanting to quiz it made me think about myself when i was in third grade i started
playing in first grade when i was in third grade i wanted to quit playing violin which is what i
started on and i i told my mom and she very wisely was like okay that's fine tell mr einfeld my
(28:40):
teacher tell him at your next lesson that you don't want to play violin anymore knowing very
well that i would not be able to tell him myself that i wanted her to do it but she was just like
oh just tell mr einfeld that's fine um and of course i did of course i wouldn't go to my lesson
and say mr einfeld i don't want to play violin anymore so i i continued playing and i'm i'm so
glad i did right but i think that's a really common experience as as a child um to not not want to
(29:04):
play when i teach children i try as much as possible to make the whole the whole practice
of practicing feel more like a game because i think it can feel especially to kids like drudgery and
it's just boring and it's not interesting and they're not they don't feel like they're being
creative or really listening to the sounds in the way that that he was describing um and i think
that that's such an important skill to develop the ability to sort of listen to what you're what
(29:30):
you're doing um but i also think that i mean the research is very clear that games are in a very
effective way to learn especially for children but like for anybody but it can help get kids
through that hump of oh this is this is hard i don't i don't want to do this this isn't
enjoyable to me okay we have a we have a second musical memory for you here molly this is uh from
(29:51):
a young man named alex studaville he's a multi-instrumentalist and i i think what's fascinated
me about this uh his story is some of the phases that he went through in learning how to how to uh
how to practice how to learn music and his obsession i mean i have this i mean maybe many
musicians do that it's just kind of always there right so here's the story of the musical memory
(30:14):
from alex studaville i'm alex studaville uh i have you know i'm a freshman here at the u of a
um i've been playing guitar for about 13 years now and i have since taught myself how to play piano
drums ukulele and bass um so really just anything musical like i'm really all about it so i got my
(30:35):
first guitar for christmas when i was about six years old um i was really big into like justin
beaver at the time my sister really liked him and that's just kind of i grew up around and i um and
i just thought like that's what i want to do someday like that's the kind of lifestyle i want
to have like person i want to be so um i started playing guitar learned it i was really bad about
(30:56):
practicing at first as most people are um and then i just like eventually something clicked and i just
kind of fell in love with it and um and i thought like maybe i need to put in the work to be able to
get that far so once i got good at it that's when i saw you know the potential i had to get better
at it so i kept using that um to play bass i walked into my guitar teacher's class one day and he's
(31:22):
like i'm trying to put together a band and our bass player just dropped he's like you've got a
week to learn this if you're willing to do it and i took it and i i learned all the songs in a week
so my first guitar that i got was like a squire electric guitar it's a pretty standard electric
guitar um and then i want to say a year or two later for christmas i got an acoustic guitar so
i would i was really back and forth between the two i figured acoustic was easier so i often stuck
(31:45):
with that john mayer had this really unique sort of like picking like the strumming and um
percussive movement at the same time and i always thought that was really really cool so i felt i
had to learn it to kind of add to my bank of skills every single day i think about things musically
which is really like an interesting thing about myself is that you know i will pick out those
(32:07):
little details in songs and i will think about it in such a way that helps me better understand it
i try to learn it by ear first see how far i can get with that and then once i kind of hit a plateau
get stuck i go and figure out how to actually play it you know i'd listen to songs so many times
there would be something in there that i'd just be infatuated with and i would try and figure out
(32:27):
what they're doing there musically and that has helped me by learning some of the songs it's helped
me be able to transfer that skill over and pick up songs easier you know maybe figure out a technique
that they're using in the song to to play it so molly any uh any responses reactions to uh alex
story there yeah i have i have lots of thoughts actually um i'll go in order so i don't forget
(32:50):
any of them so the the first thing he said about he said when he was younger like a switch kind of
flipped for him and and then he you know he started he realized like i really want to do this and
and i have to like put work into this if i if i want to get good at and that's when he started
really enjoying it that switch is something that i've seen so many times in students that they kind
of you know especially younger students like they'll be playing their instrument casually for back
(33:13):
lack of a better word and at some point there's this switch that flips either they play a piece
of music that they really love or you know they're in an orchestra or some musical situation that
really kind of like lights them up and they start just yeah practicing much better and then they get
much better at their instrument as a result um but that realization like oh i need to actually like
(33:36):
put work into this if i need to get good at this i think that's going back to our conversation about
talent i think that's part of where that that idea of talent can be so damaging because i've heard
students say so many times i just don't think i'm cut out for this right brian like you were saying
with oh i can't sing like none of us are cut out or not cut out for anything we're cut out for
whatever we want to do right and so in order to get good at any instrument anybody has to put in
(34:00):
a lot of work and i think a lot of times students will see oh i'm struggling with this therefore i
can't do this because i'm not quote unquote cut out for it yeah you are if you put in the work you
can get as good as you want and what happened with alec there was that he got to a certain point and
there suddenly there was a reward that sounds like he hadn't really anticipated oh if i get this good
it really feels good yeah and if i get better it'll feel even better it was a very self self
(34:25):
inner mode inner self-motivating sort of process he was going through there yeah exactly and i
that's what i've seen in my students too that they start really putting the work in and then
they see how rewarding it is and then there's this intrinsic motivation that just kind of you know
snowballs in a really really good way um the other thing uh that he was talking about towards the end
there about like you know listening to recordings over and over and over and trying to figure out
(34:50):
how is this person doing this thing i really want to be able to play this or do this technique
i think that's such an important skill to have to be to listen to something and be able to recreate
it yourself and i think a lot of times in classical music training there's such a focus
on reading the music and i think that's a real it's that's a real detriment i was i was a suzuki
(35:12):
trained kid so um in in the suzuki philosophy you learn by ear first and like for the first three
years of my playing life i didn't read music i learned everything by ear and that's sort of the
the suzuki philosophy and i can see both in myself and my students and and like classmates when i
was in school how beneficial it was for me to have that start where i was learning by ear and i had
(35:36):
learned to translate what i heard into what i wanted to do on the instrument rather than relying
on my eyes there's there's something about that that i i find a really interesting tension for
for me so i i uh i'm a picker and grinner guitarist for the most part i mean i i i was
a classical guitarist earlier but i don't practice in that way or and haven't in decades but um i can
(36:01):
open up you know like a real book with a hundred songs in it and i could go into a coffee shop and
i could do an hour set uh but i i because i i can just i can read it and i can i know how to
interpret the reading you know pretty quickly without a lot of effort but if i'm going to go
(36:21):
to an open mic where i'm not holding music and i'm going to perform i have to practice hours and
hours to get a 10 minute set tight you know to really like to just knock that if that's it and
i every once in a while i make myself i challenge myself to do that because i knew what's really hard
for me um and and i would rather just rely on this sort of like picking and grin and you know like
open up the book to the fun song and everybody everybody likes to sing the beach boys and let's
(36:44):
go um that and there's something about that tension between reading and performing and
and listening and and all that i i just i find that fascinating in myself and i i don't know why
uh i i don't there's no question here i guess i'm just i'm just reflecting on the way all this is
kind of coming in but what what uh is there is there research to suggest that other than the
(37:10):
fact that you need it all and so it's good to practice all of it is there what does the research
tell us yeah i mean your your experience with you know just going and opening a book and like
reading things down and that being really easy but then if you have to perform things like without
music and from memory that that feels a lot hurt there's those are just really different skills
and you know um for me i i would never in a million years go and just sight read something
(37:35):
in front of an audience absolutely not no way right that would be a disaster um right right well
it's levels though i mean like i said coffee shop you know i wasn't i wasn't saying concert all but
yeah right right but even so actually i would feel very uncomfortable going into a coffee shop
and sight reading a bunch of stuff i would know that no i would never do that um even easy stuff
that would feel massively uncomfortable to me to do something like that um in terms of research
(38:01):
so this is something that i i talk about in my book um because i think it's really really important
for musicians to have those aural skills of being able to you know hear something and know how to
play it on your instrument and vice versa and not always be relying on your eyes um this is uh
something that's the only thing in my book actually that is uh speculative that hasn't been totally
(38:24):
shown in the research but i think my speculation is well grounded in what exists in the research so
what the research shows is that um when you take professional in this case they were violinists
that were in this particular study when they played them um a uh when sorry i was about to say this
backwards they had violinists in a brain scanner and they had them finger a piece of music silently
(38:48):
so there was no sound involved they were just fingering it silently and they found that their
the auditory cortex in their brain was activated which normally the auditory cortex is only
activated when you're hearing stuff um but in the professional violinist their auditory cortex was
activated when they were playing silently it wasn't activated in the amateur violinists
on the flip side of this there was a study that was done on pianists that found that when they
(39:11):
played the pianist's recordings of pieces they knew how to play well their motor cortex was
activated even though they were not moving so normally your motor cortex is only activated
when you're like moving your body but they were sitting there and their hands were being monitored
to make sure that they were like stock still they weren't making any movements um and so taken
(39:32):
together so hearing something and having the motor cortex be activated playing something silently and
having the auditory cortex be activated this suggests that in professional musicians that
there is an auditory motor connection that gets formed that part is not speculative that part is
not speculative that part is clear in the research my speculation is that um i have noticed that um
(39:56):
suzuki trained kids like myself or other kids that are trained in traditions where you learn
by ear so bluegrass jazz where it's not notation based those types of students grow up to be
musicians who have a much easier time playing for memory and playing without the music and my theory
is that this auditory motor connection forms at a very young age in people that learn by ear and
(40:20):
this is the connection you need to have as a musician because music is an auditory thing
right it's a visual thing um and that if this connection doesn't form at a young age it's
harder but not impossible to to develop it um later and so another soapbox issue for me is that
every musician regardless of style should be trained by ear for the first at least six months
(40:40):
of their playing career and if they're going to go on to play in a style like classical music that's
very notation based that's fine um but it's it'll set them up better for the future if they're
learning by ear from the beginning fascinating well molly we've got uh we have one more really
interesting musical memory about practicing and learning music that we're going to share with you
that's coming up after a short pause here on lifetimes of listening
(41:12):
so
welcome back to lifetimes of listening and so molly we have one last um one last uh memory musical
(41:35):
memory to share with you this is from andrew song another student who shared the story with me and
it uh it was it was a very powerful story of uh uh the way that music has worked into his life and
i i i think i i'm curious to hear your thoughts on it well my name is andrew song um i'm a freshman
(42:01):
here at the university of arizona for me i've been playing piano since i was five that's been
a very large part of my life and a piano really ended up sticking um it's been one of my favorite
things to do it's kind of my second home in a way music has always been a very big part of my life
(42:23):
i think all of my favorite pieces um aren't exactly sad but are kind of slow slower and um even if it
is a minor cadence i feel like there's especially with you know the brilliant composers a beauty to
(42:44):
that and even a beauty to sadness sometimes in music where it's so moving there's such a
power and beauty and being able to portray that with my own fingers i've been playing harder
pieces and one of my favorite pieces to play is um fedrick shopan's uh nocturne opus nine number
(43:11):
two whenever i go to recitals there's always a little bit of nervousness but um most of the time
most of the time when you go in and you start playing especially if you really love the piece
then it becomes more about the fact that you're able to share something that you love which is
cool so i you practice a lot for those of course um i don't know there's a certain joy when you
(43:38):
practice for something that you love and then you're able to share with people and then just at the
end and you know i could tell like i did well and i was happy with how i played it and it was just
really great to be able to share that because it's really easy to you know tell like a a powerful
(44:00):
story through that music and you know you spend a lot of time not only learning how to get the right
notes and everything but then where phrases begin and end and how they flow into each other and
essentially tell a story like i said it's not like a story in words it's the story and kind of
(44:22):
emotions i guess telling that story being able to tell it well is really what music is all about for
me wow that was really beautiful yeah yes the sharing you know being on stage and knowing it's
not about you it's about what what is being shared it's not the music exactly yes not yeah
(44:46):
there's there's a wonderful moment on there uh dan harris has a podcast called 10 happier
um and he interviewed a few years ago a man named amos lee uh who is a singer-songwriter
a fabulous singer-songwriter just really worth uh worth exploring but i miss lee and dan harris
(45:07):
both suffer from severe anxiety and dan harris was a good morning america host you know and was like
a television person and amos lee as a performer and amos lee uh talks about how anxiety finally
like he was finally able to get it under control because he would just you know have severe stage
(45:28):
fright crippling straight right uh when he began to realize that his songs meant something to his
audience and that when he was able to give them that he when he was able to put himself into the
role of servicing others that the anxiety quelled and i i found that i found that such a powerful
(45:48):
idea and so i please you know go listen to the amos lee interview on the dan harris podcast
but but um i i wonder how do you like how do you practice that like how do you practice putting
yourself into these roles because i a lot of the music that i do i do in the context of a
i'm a church musician i do a lot of contact you know like literally my job is to to make music
(46:13):
move people and and it is on on any level and any venue and in any reason that's part of what we're
doing but how do you practice that how do you how do you you know because it because i mean i know
analytically it's like oh yes we're going to sing this phrase from louder we're going to do a
crescendo here and it's we got six beats to get there and so each beat's going to be microscopically
(46:34):
a little bit louder and that's going to make this word leap out of the texture in a way that will
make sense and i mean like we can analyze it to death but ultimately that's not what we want the
music to be about you know and and we and we find it dry i mean there are there are those performances
that are that analyzed and they feel dry and precise and over technical and we label them
(47:00):
as machine-like because it's you know technically flawless but without any passion i agree with you
i agree with you completely and and the idea of practicing this is something that like weirdly
did not occur to me for a very long time and like i would practice to be able to play my music but i
wouldn't practice performing it and then i would be distressed that it didn't go the way i wanted in
(47:23):
performance looking back like obviously i didn't i wasn't practicing performing it i was practicing
to be able to play it but it's a different thing just because you can do something it doesn't mean
you can perform that thing and so practicing performing is a really important part of of the
process and so there's all sorts of things that i do now too i mean one of the things that often
(47:47):
happens to musicians especially classical musicians i feel like because our music is so rehearsed
right because it's not improvised something that happens very often is you know we practice at home
and we can play it really well and then like things go wrong technically on stage right we miss notes
or we're out of tune or whatever and that's sort of very distressing also when you have excess
(48:07):
adrenaline in your system you're you feel like you can't control your body as well right and that
just really gets in the way and so part of practicing to perform well is to make sure that
you can like do things on the spot no matter what and so using different practice methods that force
you to do that something that we have to contend with in performance is unexpected things that
(48:31):
happen right be it our body activation be it you know you're playing in a concert hall that's not
at a busy intersection and there's sirens going on the whole time that are really distracting like
there's all sorts of things and so practicing what athletes call adversity training is is really
important so i remember after michael phelps won one of his many many many gold medals i remember
(48:52):
seeing him interviewed because apparently his goggles had fallen off or something in in the
race and he still won and he set a world record or something and they interviewed him and they
said well how did you how did you deal with that he's like oh it's just like how i practiced
because he had practiced doing races with his goggles filled with water so he knew how to just
like count his strokes or whatever and he didn't have to see and so like for me one of the things
(49:16):
that string players worry about the most is our hands getting all sweaty because then it's hard
to hold on to our bows and it's hard to shift on the instrument and so i will like put a bunch of
lotion on my hands and not rub it in so my hands are all like slippery and nasty and then i it's
gross right it's like so gross um but like then i'll go make myself perform for myself and prove to
(49:36):
myself that like yes i can do this this feels really awful i feel really really uncomfortable
but like i can i can still do this and i can still sort of be expressive and sort of ignore this nasty
sensory sensation and so in a performance when my hands get all gross like that um from sweat i know
i can i know i can play in terms of being able to sort of shut off that analytical side and just
(50:00):
just share the the emotion of the music with the audience doing practice performances i think is
really important to practice that skill either for people friends family you know people you feel
comfortable with or even just for yourself in a video camera it's amazing what turning on a video
camera will do to make you feel like you are being watched by by somebody else but then but by
(50:21):
extension a good leader a good conductor will rehearse will practice not just playing the piece
but will practice as you're saying performing performance of the piece right so that there
aren't unexpected surprises you know i i think in the world of percussion because there is so
much mechanical stuff yeah i think about moving instruments on stage and after we play this please
we got a reset for this that a good percussion ensemble conductor for example coach will really
(50:49):
talk through all of that stuff because that stuff is so complicated it's not just sitting there with
an instrument in your hand it's a brilliant and one logistical things have to be thought through
and that can go wrong like michael felton's losing his goggles during a race losing his goggles right
yeah no that those like practical aspects are are really really important and you know when i have
(51:09):
students preparing for performance i make them practice their bows walking on on stage bowing
putting their music down getting the you know because you get up there and if you haven't
practiced it you're like wait what order am i supposed to be doing this in and you feel really
awkward and so like in my studio class we would have a studio class every fall devoted to practicing
walking on bowing putting your music on the stand playing ending bowing taking your music and leaving
(51:32):
and while you're doing that you can be imagining what's the worst thing that could happen here
right and how would i deal with that right yeah just to be prepared fast very fascinating yeah
that was a uh one of the lessons that i learned from my undergrad study where we had a colloquium
series everybody had to perform 10 minutes of music every semester for every other music major
(51:53):
in the in the school because it was a smaller school and one of the very first colloquium every
every fall was we all had to practice getting up walking onto stage bowing and doing literally
that we always practiced that and then when we did it and and there was something about that
that uh i i make choirs when i'm you know a brand new uh choir whenever it's like up here's here's
(52:17):
how you get from point a to point b and and you always look like when you realize you walked into
the wrong voice section or in the wrong seat you stand and you look as and then you intentionally
move to the right place and you never betray that or you practice holding the music until the music
until the final sound is gone in the room before you allow that to release right so that you
(52:39):
give your attention to the sound as opposed to just like finally done let me leave you know and
and uh yeah ruining that moment all of those little small details that uh that are part of that
yeah it's so important yeah yeah well this has been uh just a wonderfully fascinating conversation
i mean we this is what this is episode 18 of our podcast now brian and uh they get more interesting
(53:06):
all the time this has been one of the most interesting conversations we're so glad
molly gabrielle that you could be our guest today uh to be here to share some of your expertise on
learning practicing and how neurosciences relates to our study and practice of music so molly just
want to thank you so very much for joining us today here on lifetimes of listening thank you
(53:27):
so much for having me it's been great to talk to you guys about this stuff thank you
so
so
(53:56):
well thanks for listening today to lifetimes of listening now if you haven't done so already
we'd love for you to follow or subscribe to our show on your favorite podcast app we hope you'll
also consider participating in our project uh maybe by telling us your story your musical memory we're
extremely grateful for the more than 200 people who've recorded a story for the arizona musical
(54:18):
memory archive it's allowing us to better understand the ways people value music if you
haven't visited our website at musicalmemories.music.arizona.edu please do so there you'll find
full-length interviews of the ones that we have used and played here and you can also on our
(54:39):
website submit a musical memory of your own say with a sound file if you like an essay or a poem
and even an illustration of some sort or suggest someone who you think we might want to uh interview
to capture their musical memory so please take a look at musicalmemories.music.arizona.edu
i'm dan cruise and i'm brian moon thank you for listening the executive producer of lifetimes of
(55:09):
listening the arizona musical memory podcast is brian moon the program is produced and edited
by dan cruise the lifetimes of listening website was created by cynthia barlow principal information
technology manager with the university of arizona school of music music is from zapsplat.com and
(55:30):
from pixabay.com special thanks to the university of arizona school of music and the ua college of
fine arts for their continued support of the lifetimes of listening musical memory archive
and this podcast for more information and to get involved in our research visit musicalmemories.music.arizona.edu
this is lifetimes of listening the arizona musical memory podcast
(56:17):
music
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