RadioLab podcast on Beethoven's metronome

Really enjoyed this RadioLab.






Typical rehearsal arguments about tempo ("too fast/too slow") are usually based on an assumption about what the music should convey. When we have clear (metronome) indications from the composer, perhaps we should rather ask what the tempo he or she gives would convey and give thought to whether, perhaps that is in fact what was meant to be conveyed, even if this is not what we are accustomed to or had previously felt.

Rather than figuring out how to make the music answer our own questions, we can ask if the music as written is already the correct answer to some other question.

Deliberate Practice Described

The term "deliberate practice"  (or variants including "deep practice") is all over. Below is one of the better descriptions I've found of it. It comes from this post on a blog called Study Hacks, written by a computer scientist on the broad subject of what patterns lead to success. Plenty of good, thought-provoking stuff there if you are interested.

Traits of Deliberate Practice:

It’s designed to improve performance. “The essence of deliberate practice is continually stretching an individual just beyond his or her current abilities. That may sound obvious, but most of us don’t do it in the activities we think of as practice.”

It’s repeated a lot. “High repetition is the most important difference between deliberate practice of a task and performing the task for real, when it counts.”

Feedback on results is continuously available. “You may think that your rehearsal of a job interview was flawless, but your opinion isn’t what counts.”

It’s highly demanding mentally. “Deliberate practice is above all an effort of focus and concentration. That is what makes it ‘deliberate,’ as distinct from the mindless playing of scales or hitting of tennis balls that most people engage in.”

It’s hard. “Doing things we know how to do well is enjoyable, and that’s exactly the opposite of what deliberate practice demands.”

It requires (good) goals. “The best performers set goals that are not about the outcome but rather about the process of reaching the outcome.”

Atlantic article on pinky fingers

For what it's worth, here is the article: 

Study: Violinists' Fates Resides in Their Left Pinky Fingers

For what it's worth, my response:

I strongly suspect that this ability to move fingers independently is something that can be developed rather than something that is fixed, and that perhaps it would be useful for a teacher to find little exercises to build this kind of coordination in any student.

Inattentional Deafness?

I heard this story on NPR the other morning. It's about some really fun studies on something called "inattentional blindness" which occurs when you are really focused on something challenging. During this state, it is very easy to miss even really obvious things that are going on but are not part of what you are paying attention to. The NPR story discusses a study in which radiologists (highly trained  and practiced at finding cancer in scans) do not see a picture of a gorilla waving at them from within a scan because they are looking for hard-to-find signs of cancer.

Many musicians will be familiar with the feeling disbelief one sometimes experiences when listening to recordings of oneself. "How did I not hear that?!!"