I’ve referenced this book before – if this seems redundant, I apologize. But the book was so good and recommend it very highly!
In a recent segment from Barry Green’s fantastic book, The Inner Game of Music, Green touches upon how music is not just a book-learned concept that can only be worked on with an instrument in hand.
Green goes on to share an experience he had with a colleague in a concert hall in Europe. His colleague, a cellist, was sitting in the chair next to him and as he watched the ensemble perform, Green looked over and noticed that his colleague’s right hand was acting out the note positions on the arm rest of the chair. Some time had passed and Green then noticed his friend’s left hand begin to mimic the bowing motion of the cello players on stage in sync with his right hand mapping the notes they were playing
“He noticed his colleague was very much part of the music.”
Green was interested by what he was seeing. He noticed that his colleague was very much part of the music. He was very much involved in it while being away from his instrument and not at all playing with the ensemble itself. Green wrote a section about this experience of his book and presented the idea that this sort of musical mimicry is another way of “getting in the zone” and keeping your brain aware and sharp of what’s going on from a musical perspective.
So what does this mean for musicians? How does this tie back into practice?
Well, have you ever found yourself tapping to a drum set on your steering wheel on your way home? Have you ever sang to yourself the lyrics to a song you happen to know? Or even mimicked the fingerings of a bass line as if you were playing it?
These are all ways to keep your head in the musical game (to take a real chunk out of Green’s work!). Even if you don’t have your bass in hand and you’re not sitting down trying to learn a new song, these almost knee-jerk reactions to finding the internal pulse of a song and honing in on one particular instrument at a given time is one way of practicing being aware of music and how music works from the perspective of an individual instrument.
Now, this isn’t something you can set time aside for. This isn’t something you can (easily) incorporate into your normal practice routine, however it might be arranged. This is however something you can get better at like any skill. This skill is a listening skill and you can exercise it wherever there is a radio playing, or a set of windshield wipers thumping across the windshield.
The takeaway: that foot-tapping motion you do that syncs with the bass kick of a song, that tapping on your steering wheel of the drums, those finger movements that resemble as if you were plucking at an air bass guitar – these are all ways to practice your awareness skills of individual parts of music. And it is certainly something you’d want to be aware of.
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