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  • Noa Kageyama

    Administrator
    January 22, 2020 at 9:49 am

    Hi Alan,

    Interesting…a few thoughts:

    1. I would be curious to know if there’s anything that happens before the little botched parts/forgetting moments in performance that might help to explain why it happened. There may not be any pattern, but it could help to identify if there are specific things that might precede these moments – like a particular kind of distraction, or a spacing out, etc.

    2. I also wonder if it might help to have a system for exposing potential areas in which this could happen, if you don’t already? For instance, Met percussionist Rob Knopper did daily, cold, recorded run-throughs first thing in the morning to try to identify the things that are fine when practicing but may not be securely enough in muscle memory to be completely reliable. He also did dozens of mock auditions for different people to add more pressure and try to simulate the worst possible audition scenarios so that these potential glitches would expose themselves in advance of the audition.

    3. I’m not sure what your drills look like, but have you experimented with interleaved practice of these sections, perhaps? Sometimes too many consecutive repetitions of the same thing can lead to a deceptive level of comfort/security and make it harder to know if something is really in muscle memory or not.

    4. It sounds like it might also help to have a mental script to keep your thoughts in the present and make it harder for your brain to start worrying about the section coming up. Have you experimented with singing brain or found other specific task-relevant details that are helpful and engaging to focus on during performances that could keep your mind from going into the future?

    Noa

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