MÉTODO

Practicing is effortful, and fatigue is likely to lead to playing mistakes and use-less practice. It is advisable to distribute practice time over several shorter prac-tice sessions than to cram a whole day’s work into one sitting (the same is true for studying academically). The reason is partly neurological: During rest and sleep, cognitive restructuring (consolidation) takes place, giving the brain time to digest the learning material. A good example of how your brain gets clogged with material occurs when you practice a passage and it deteriorates instead of 78 Musical Learning

improving (psychologists call this “proactive interference”). In short, the brain cannot sort out the different attempts because they are confusingly similar.

Working on something markedly different in between passages releases this in-terference.

When a musician has physically practiced for some time, the body may be tired, especially when pain is present and rest is required; yet the mind might still be fresh. How could one practice in the meantime? This is where mental practice (also mental rehearsal) is helpful. When skilled musicians are thinking through music (in terms of its sound or movement), the same brain areas that are activated when hearing and producing music are stimulated. Movement areas are coactivated even when the piece is only heard! Although research on the topic is complex, mental practice does seem to work (Driskell, Copper, &

Moran, 1994), especially when the cognitive aspects of the movement task pre-vail. When a student’s technical skills are barely sufficient to master the piece, mental practice is less likely to show positive effects (see Williamon, 2004, chapter 12, for a review). However, practice away from the instrument is proba-bly most beneficial for someone who is mentally fresh, who has the technical proficiency, and who possesses a vivid image of the piece. A review of existing research suggests that 20 minutes of mental practice provides the most benefits (Driskell et al., 1994, p. 488). Mental rehearsal with some degree of physical practice is best, probably because it reinforces the mental image and the motor programs. Sometimes our students claim that mental rehearsal does not work, but further questioning often reveals that their experience is based on a single try after a long day’s work. Mental rehearsal is in itself a skill and requires a certain learning process just like other mental skills, such as yoga or relaxation (see chapter 8 on performance anxiety).

Automaticity

An established model of the stages of skill acquisition (Fitts & Posner, 1967;

Proctor & Dutta, 1995, chapter 1, for a recent discussion) suggests a cognitive stage, an associative stage, and an autonomous stage. During the cognitive stage we use higher mental processes to acquire a task and develop motor programs;

during the associative stage we practice the skill and focus on how the move-ments feel; and in the autonomous stage the execution of the skill requires little conscious effort, freeing up the performer’s cognitive resources to deal with other matters than the skill itself.

The ﬂuency of the autonomous stage that results from practice, the practice-based automaticity of sensorimotor skills, is a much-desired outcome. For ex-ample, fast runs and ornaments should be performed without thinking about them.

By running unmonitored, those programmed movement sequences allow the per-former to attend to more important aspects, such as shaping the performance, communicating with co-performers, or dealing with performance anxiety. When Practice 79

80 Musical Learning

attention is directed to those self-reliant processes during performance, skilled performers may experience a sudden decrement in performance, whereas when attention is drawn away from them, performance may even improve (Beilock, Bertenthal, McCoy, & Carr, 2004; see chapter 5, the section on developing an explicit representational system). Novices, on the contrary, need to monitor their performance, and introducing tasks that compete for attention decreases accuracy. Does this imply that thinking about performance is bad? The answer is no; it simply means that the processes that are intended to run by themselves have to ﬁrst be rehearsed using conscious thinking and that, once automatized, such processes should be left alone during performance. Given the musician’s basic understanding of the music, problems during performance can be solved with recourse to the conceptual information. Conversely, motor processes that have become incidentally automatized during practice, or that have simply been rote-memorized and are thus not supported by mental representations, can be-come a liability during performance (see chapter 6 on memory). This effect can sometimes be observed among children who experience catastrophic memory lapses when they play at year-end recitals.

To conclude, practice can be viewed as a holistic behavior, comprising effortful striving for improvement along with more relaxing or enjoyable phases. But there is also a more restricted view, namely that which focuses on the skill-building components. The duration of practice is more important than previ-ously assumed, but quality of practice is still central. Quality and quantity change as novices start to progress. To some extent, the suggestions regarding good, successful practice that psychologists can offer (e.g., Williamon, 2004, chapters 5–8) overlap with the true and tested wisdom of experienced teachers and performers. Most important, the mind and the body have to be fresh enough to work. Musicians have to learn to practice (often under supervision). There-fore, teachers should take great care to teach their students how to practice cor-rectly (Barry & McArthur, 1994). The experts’ strategies vary considerably but are all guided by effective self-regulation, that is, ﬁnding out what is needed and having the right tool to address the problem. This is the reason a large repertoire of practice methods is useful. The goal of practice is to establish mental representations that help the musician to understand the music. This deep understanding allows for smooth performance, as well as for all necessary problem solving—even on stage.

Study Questions

1. Why does practice have to be learned and what exactly is learned in the process?

2. Discuss whether or not retrospective estimates of practice durations are always true indicators of achieved level of performance.

3. What do the macro and micro perspectives of practice describe and how do parents and teachers inﬂuence them?

Automaticity

Study Questions

Further Reading