DISCOVER YOUR REAL POTENTIAL
Enjoy Freddie Mercury & Montserrat Caballe on “How can I go On”, from the album, Barcelona. Freddie wrote 12 songs that they recorded together including the opening song for the Winter Olympics in Barcelona, Catalonia.
Noa Kageyama, Ph.D., performance psychologist and musician teacher, shares his take on rhythmicity and performance.
Like every other instrumentalist, I had to take piano lessons in grad school. I had a very thoughtful student-teacher who observed that I had a tendency to play at a tempo which matched the most well-learned sections of the piece. So when I was playing parts that were comfortable for me and felt secure, I sounded great (not “great” in the literal sense, but you know, passable, for a non-pianist who practiced maybe 10 minutes the night before the lesson). But when I got to the sections which were less secure, I’d often fumble around in a panic or even flat-out stop while I organized my fingers for the next phrase. And even if I got the general rhythm of the music ok, played the notes mostly at the right time, and kept things going, the rhythmicity of my movements was off.
He acknowledged that it’s fun to hear ourselves playing the good parts in tempo, but encouraged me to put my ego on hold, and play at a more sustainable tempo, based not on the best-learned sections, but on the weakest passages. So that when I played through the piece, I would be able to comfortably play the most difficult parts without feeling quite so rushed and frantic when I got there.
To be clear, this is not about practicing with a metronome per se. Because you can still play in time, but with herky-jerky shifts that have poor rhythmicity. The idea, is that if faced with a difficult shift (as an example), it’s probably not enough to just practice the movements involved in the shift, and functionally getting from note A to note B. If we really want to maximize consistency and accuracy, we may have to practice the rhythmicity of the shift as well. So that whether we are practicing slowly, at tempo, or even above tempo, the rhythm of the shift is itself a target of our practice efforts.
Photograph by Hugo Enrique Garcia Ximenez.
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Research suggests that the performers were able to evaluate the quality of their performances more accurately when they did so based on a video of their performance. When relying on only their memory of the performance, their evaluations were less accurate.
Why the difference?
Well, the major difference between dress rehearsal and concert performances, of course, is the amount of anxiety we experience. Might it be that our nerves make a difference in how we perceive the quality of our playing?
How to self-evaluate?
So if you want to avoid triggering the downward spiral of negativity and doomsday thinking, don’t try to evaluate how well you are playing in the middle of a performance. Save it for later – there will be plenty of time for beating yourself up afterwards, if you’re so inclined.
Photograph by Matthew Parrish Bassist.
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Richard Elliott, Lecturer in Popular Music at the University of Sussex, has this take on the purple icon:
… A truly eclectic and classical artist.
For this is what Prince was: not in the narrow sense of his interest in Western classical music, but in a far more liberated and liberating understanding and extension of the varied streams of a black classical music tradition that incorporated gospel, jazz, R&B, rock and roll, soul, funk, hip hop and more. Continue Reading.
Guitar masters like Jimi Hendrix are capable of bending the physics of waves to their wills, plucking melody from inspiration and vibration. But how do wood, metal, and plastic translate into rhythm, melody, and music? Oscar Fernando Perez details the physics of playing the guitar, from first pluck to that final shredding chord.