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Jotur - You have me laughing!

How fortunate that the kind of music you play not only doesn't require note perfect, it's considered to be good form to play a piece differently each time through. That's a real advantage to a musician when there is nothing to sweat!

And, I'm curious about "the 5 out of 8" which you are.

The science and math people I mentioned were to explain where the "nit pickers" of music making are coming from - their skills are exactness, rules, engineering, specifics, dimensions, accountalility and responsibility toward their work definitions.

We can live in dualities and have some of the characteristics of many different discriptions - such as random - abstract - concrete - sequential. It would depend on the task and our experience with it.

When the check book needs balancing, it is best to send the concrete-sequential part of you to do the task,

When it's time to spend the money impulsively, a "fix" for the shopaholic, it's best to be a random, abstract. Etc.

The random - abstract is probably going to take risks when cooking and throw in a bunch of stuff without referring to a recipe or measuring ingredients.

The concrete - sequential will follow every work in the recipe checking twice (or more) to verify, and then carefully follow, with time constraints and deadlines, the exact recipe. The concrete - sequential probably has a thermometer hanging in the oven permanently, and wipes every spill up as it occurs.

That doesn't mean that both aren't happy in the kitchen.

Doing as well as you can is all anyone can ask for and expect.

Betty

William Westney
Will teach “Basic Gestures: Healthy, Artistic, and Easy to Teach” - Mini Session
Friday 3:30pm-4:30pm
At the "Back to Basics" World Piano Pedagogy Conference - Dallas Texas,
October 22-25, 2008

Most recently, Westney’s book The Perfect Wrong Note – Learning to Trust Your Musical Self was released by Amadeus Press to critical acclaim.

Westney holds two endowed faculty positions at Texas Tech University, as Distinguished Professor and Artist-in-Residence. Winner of the Geneva International Competition, he has soloed with such orchestras as l’Orchestre de la Suisse Romande and Houston Symphony. A popular speaker and clinician, he has also been honored with many teaching awards, and his unique Un-Master Class performance workshop, which has been featured in The New York Times, is increasingly in demand in the U.S. and abroad.

A friendly note of caution... these terms ("random-abstract" and "concrete-sequential") come from a pop psychology approach proposed by Anthony Gregorc, and they don't have any basis in empirical personality psychology. (A search of the psychology literature reveals only two academic publications by Gregorc, one being his dissertation and the other being a 1984 article in a second-tier journal.) The dominant paradigm in personality psychology today is the Five Factor Model, which adopts a dimensional approach to understanding human personality rather than a typology.

The system Gregorc advocates is often popular in a lay setting because it is simple and can be explained easily, and it is fun to pigeonhole people and professions into one of a small subset of groupings. Unfortunately, there are no empirical data in the peer-reviewed psychology literature to back up those groupings.

Well, the "5 out of 8" was the counter example to the "science and math people" being characterized as "exactness, rules, engineering, specifics, dimensions, accountability and responsibility toward their work definitions" (tho I'm not sure what you mean by "work definitions"). If I am 5 out of the 8 professions/interests you mentioned - more than half - and I'm not primarily a personality with the attributes you assign to those professions/interests, then perhaps the suggested correlation between the professions/interests and the attributes needs to be rethought.

I've mentioned math specifically before, and will do so again here. It is not possible to describe all mathematicians as being alike, of course. Many, many of them are highly creative people and their original work is generally not, until the very final paper they publish, exact (and sometimes not then ), or by the rules, nor engineered. I'm really not sure what the "accountability and responsibility towards their work definitions" means at all! As with professional and amateur pianists, professioal and amateur mathematicians share some characteristics. I find them to be best captured in jokes

I suspect it's not likely I can convince you that mathematicians aren't, as a class, primarily the kind of people you describe them as, but perhaps I could recommend some biographies of mathematicians:

Hodges, Andrew: Alan Turing, the enigma
Ulam, S.M.: Adventures of a Mathematician
Wiener, Norbert: I Am A Mathematician
Halmos, Paul: I Want To Be A Mathematician
Kanigel, Robert: The Man Who Knew Infinity, A Life of the Genius Ramanujan
Singh, Simon: Fermat's Enigma (the story of Andrew Wile's proof of "Fermat's Last Theorem". Fermat formulated the theorem 356 years before Wiles proved it. Not a very sequential process )
Nasar, Sylvia: A Beautiful Mind, a biography of John Nash

Monica, thanks for that research. When I looked at Gregorc's website I didn't see any mention of research which would support his concepts of random-abstract-concrete-sequential being the basics of learning styles, and I was curious if it existed. Apparently not Perhaps it is an interesting viewpoint, but it seems to me there's a lot more to learning styles than what I saw here.

At any rate, I, and I suspect many others, don't fit the categories in Betty's post. It's a wonderful life -

Cathy

Geeeesh, you win!

I can't. Well, I can but it generally after the piece has been assigned for my lesson. Often if I'm frustrated with my lesson piece/pieces, I play backward to things I really enjoyed and firm them up. I've been told by my teacher several times that I strive too hard to be note perfect and it creates an un-natural plunky sound, the tension mentioned earlier. A year into my lessons, we are really working on technique - how my fingers are moving, how is the touch, is it pleasing to listen to??

Yes, I do try and get my lesson assignments done as well as I possibly can, the "get it right the first time" concept, but I'm finally starting to become more forgiving of myself. I know I spent a long time struggling with an adult idea of wanting an A on my paper, so to speak. It's *hard* for me to let go of not trying to be note perfect and keep trying remind myself that the lesson is for the learning - not graded and no expectation of performance level perfection.

I'm by no means an advanced musician, but I feel there's an element missing here: The nature of music. I haven't read any of the books mentioned above, but judging by the comments it seems the goal for some players is to avoid mistakes.

Music on the other hand, is about feeling the piece and is a much more positive approach. My guitar an piano tachers kept reminding me to feel the music and strive to liberate myself from the written notes. They did this on a very early stage (I couldn't read sheet music properly, much less find my way around the fret board or keyboard ) and I enjoy practice much more that way - it's a different world. Even practicing scales is fun. It is a process of internalization, not merely a mechanical thing.

My experience is that this mindset, which focuses less on the mistakes, helps eliminating them more quickly. Probably because the mind is too busy trying to get into the comfort zone and leaves less space for counterproductive impulses.

Just my two cents. :rolleyes:

Some of our reactions to what is going poorly in the music, cripple us in our thinking.

We do need to be doing our best work, and to be in music literature that is in the realm of possibility in the current level of which we play.

The agony is that our dreams take us to music for which we are not completely prepared.

I say, as a teacher, that if you can't begin to sightread through it, you certainly should not be approaching it at this time.

We want the music to flow from us - they the music we work on has to fit a criteria matching somewhat what we have established we can handle.

Expectations, intentions need to be treated respectfully. You can't produce what you don't yet have in your being. So why waste time complaining and dithering over why there are mistakes (still!) and get on to buckling down to work on pieces that are part of the platforming that takes you from one level upward to others. You can't leap and bound without having the resources.

And focusing less on mistakes, is deception. Focus enough to eliminate them, then you have a clear path ahead of you in confidence and ability.

I can really understand wanting to be flowing in your music, and getting away from stiltedness and inconsistancies.

There is no shortest path, but there are smart paths.

Betty