This course has been postponed, please do not purchase it unless you are happy to have a credit for when it actually does run! Thank you for understanding ♥️

Summer School 1 was a real-time look at the way I break down a brand new [difficult] piece. The lab will be a similar brief, but instead of an overview, I’ll be taking one or two very difficult passages and getting it/them under my fingers to a much higher level.

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I was going to refer to the end point of the session as mastery, but that is genuinely not possible in a single session. Let me explain why:

I’m going to take this passage to something that will look nearly identical to mastery in one shot. The reason it will not be actual mastery is time.

The only way to master something that represents a real challenge is to acquire the skill necessary to do it, and then repeat that skill over time. It’s the fallow period between sessions that does it, actually. The way the brain works to move stuff from working memory—a region that holds onto information we have decided will need to be recalled in the near future—to long term memory (where mastery lives) requires downtime. I call this the gestation period, where the skill goes from an idea your body has an inkling of to a fully formed concept, ready for deployment.

An example: when you pay for one of those gas station car washes at the pump, you frequently get a receipt with a code to enter before driving in. When you look at the receipt and hold the numbers in your head, you’re into the realm of working memory. Now, if you know you’re going to lose the receipt between the pump and the entrance to the wash, you might work a little harder on those numbers, parsing them into groups that are easier to recall, or saying them more times than you normally would. This can make the memory stickier, but it’s still working memory, and it gets cleared out with frequency in favor of the other things that need to occupy that space: where you’re headed on that errand run, what you need to get, emails you want to reply to, small behavioral modifications you’d like to turn into habits, etc. That is not the place your musical acumen lives, ever.

If that car wash code was something crucial to your ongoing existence, like your phone number or post code, then you’d be interacting with it more often AND would have prioritized it differently.

Circling back to the appearance of mastery: last year, one of the cellists left early due to illness just before the Tamarack summer program’s final concert. As it was a chamber music centered event, I volunteered to learn the music so the ensemble could have a complete feeling performance. I had 75 minutes plus an ensemble rehearsal to get some pretty gnarly music under my fingers. While it was certainly not perfect, I think most observers would have given my playing a thumbs up, and non-musicians might have even mistaken it for mastery. The thing is…if I went over to that music right now, I would have to start the whole process nearly from scratch. Perhaps the ghosts of the ideas would remain, but the skill has left my body, because I didn’t need to take this music into my long term memory. I in no way mastered it.

So no, I will not be mastering something for this class. I will, however, be taking a passage or two and getting them to the point where my working memory recognizes that I am planning on recalling this information repeatedly. I will have all of the major problems worked out, a clear idea of how it sounds and feels, so that all I will have to do is conscientiously repeat the thing to trigger mastery.

Learning a movement (like I did in Summer School 1) and drilling a tricky passage are loosely related in approach but prioritize different things. It’s this shift in mindset—and the subsequent alteration of the scope of the task—that I want to clarify for you.

Summer School 2: practice lab

When: Sunday, August 24. 6pm eastern time.

Where: Zoom

What: an open practice session where I tackle a tricky passage or two to highlight the difference between spot work and generic practice. You are welcome to bring your instrument to try and apply the strategies demonstrated in real time. Questions are welcome and often enhance the quality of the lesson! A recording will be made available afterward for people who cannot attend at the time or would like to re-watch.

How much: $25, whether attended live or viewed via recording later. A Zoom link will be provided a day or two before the event.

One note about attending live: there can be a tendency for students to be passive when attending online classes. Perhaps in person, information can wash over you and you come away with a real sense of understanding afterward. I love Zoom classes, but they require a lot more of both student and teacher. Even compelling topics can border on tedium if care is not taken to cultivate attention. You MUST participate in order to get more than a vague notion of what is being discussed. Humans pay better attention when we know there is a test. In the case of these courses, the test happens when you’re alone in your practice room, and alas, I will not be there to correct or guide you. Even if it’s a simple paraphrase, showing up more actively benefits every aspect of the course.

I am sympathetic to students with social anxiety. If the idea of talking in a Zoom class makes you want to die, put the question in the chat! You can also type/ask “would you say that again?” or “can you explain that in a different way?”. These classes are meant to be a conversation. Take charge of your end of things and watch the amount of information you synthesize expand.