It's not just another piano lesson… It's a physical, intellectual, and spiritual journey!
Did you know… that you cannot “try” to relax. Did you know… that you cannot command yourself to relax. But what you can do is cultivate the conditions that allow you to relax. While performance pressures have the power to take our brains and bodies to mental/physical places where relaxation seems impossible, there are several fast and easy
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One of the most unsettling, but valuable, discoveries you will make on stage is that you will suddenly start asking yourself questions that you never asked, much less answered, during your study-practice sessions. For example: Which finger plays Eb in my right hand in the middle of the second phrase of Wayne Shorter’s “Footprints”? If you
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Welcome to a lesson in how to exploit our practical knowledge of working memory in order to help tame the stage fright beast. Recall from How Your Brain Works: Memory Fundamentals that your working memory, also called short-term memory, is like a cup with very limited capacity… nominally the size of a seven digit phone number. This limited
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The most absolutely worthless and destructive advice regarding anything unpleasant or undesirable is this: “Try not to think about it.” Don’t think about it?! Now all you can do is think about IT! Instead, what we need is something active and positive, something to DO, not something to NOT do. We need something that launches our entire
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To a larger extent than we care to admit, we do not have direct control over our thoughts. One thought triggers the next thought, which triggers the next, and so on and so on. One might go so far to say: We don’t think our thoughts; our thoughts think us. In order to illustrate the point, let’s play word
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Let’s adjourn the series on How to Study-Practice with a meditation in gratitude, a virtue that should permeate each and every one our study-practice sessions… Close you eyes… Breathe deeply… Center yourself… … body, mind, and spirit. Graciously accept this precious gift: the freedom and opportunityto enjoy the wonderful world of music-making. Smile. Drop your shoulders. Slowly exhale.
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