The Musician's Mind by Lynn Helding

Author:Lynn Helding
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

In the audiotape of this interview, the listener can hear this musician trying to rationalize the disparity between the highly unnatural setup and his ability to improvise. Limb himself later coauthored a paper, allowing that

if a creator is placed in an abnormal, constraining environment during the course of a scientific study, the creative process itself is threatened, calling into question the validity of any observations made thereafter.[74]

Indeed, and seconded. Outside the laboratory setting, there remains a world of difference separating practice and performance or between a rehearsal and the real deal. In research, this problem is known as ecological validity. This, along with other challenges when conducting psychological research, have upended the entire field and ignited a full-on “reproducibility crisis.”[75] We should keep in mind that fMRI studies can only reveal brain activity during an experiment—not how performers actually think in performance, much less how they mentally prepare for them.

These questions are posed by research psychologist Roger Chaffin in his longitudinal case studies of expert musicians, which offer a treasure trove of information for musicians in training and those who teach them. Chaffin’s partnerships with expert pianists, cellists, and singers have revealed that these musicians develop and access “memory retrieval cues,” which he has called performance cues:

Performance cues are the landmarks of the piece that an experienced musician attends to during perform­ance, carefully selected and rehearsed during practice so that they come to mind automatically and effort­lessly as the piece unfolds, eliciting the highly practiced movements of fingers, hands, and arms. Performance cues become an integral part of the performance and provide a means of consciously monitoring and con­trolling the rapid, automatic actions of the hands.[76]

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