The Inner Game of Music by Barry Green

Author:Barry Green [Green, Barry]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-03-11T05:00:00+00:00

Awareness Skills

Jackie, a harpist, described to one of my classes how she used awareness techniques to draw her concentration away from her anxiety and concern to play accurately, and focus it on the music. “I’d been practicing during a break in an orchestral rehearsal,” she told us, “when a voice behind me said, ‘Don’t be nervous.’ I turned around and saw it was Barry Green. Now if there’s one remark in the world that might be calculated to make you nervous, that’s it. I told myself Barry was crazy if he thought he would manage to get me off balance.

“Just before my entrance, that voice was there again: ‘Don’t shake,’ it said, ‘I’m back here watching every move.’ Barry was grinning like a kid who knows he’s being bad, and I told myself, ‘He’s nuts—I’m not going to be nervous.’

“The possibility was there, though, so I decided to make use of the opportunity to use what I’d learned about awareness. I began to go through the way I wanted my part to sound, and mentally explored how the strings would feel when I played my glissandos. And I paid special attention to what was going on in other sections of the orchestra.

“Barry was a little devious, but he really made me put my awareness techniques to the test. I was delighted to find I was able to concentrate on one thing at a time—and the techniques worked.”

As Jason, a young violinist, walked on stage to play a concerto, he found he was in a total panic. He decided to focus on the pianist’s introduction, and listened so intently that he began to discover new sounds in the concerto. “When it was my time to play,” he told us, “I was eager to get involved. I had forgotten about the audience, and where my desperation went I never knew.”

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