We resume Part 2 of this book review and interview with our special guest Dr. Molly Gebrian, author of Learn Faster, Perform Better, a professional violist with a background in neuroscience, and a faculty member of the New England Conservatory. Whereas Part 1 covered more overarching themes—mental practice and taking breaks—this second part will showcase specific applications and cool examples from our lively interview conversation.
External focuses of attention
If you have been following my blog, you will already be familiar with external focuses. When you focus your attention on the effect you want your body’s movements to produce—the lush tone, the creamy sound, the crisp ring—instead of trying to consciously control the movements themselves—curve the fingers, relax the wrist—you will be more successful in mastering the skill for your desired outcome. “An example of this that people intuitively understand is when learning to speak a second language,” Dr. Gebrian offered. “If you hear a native speaker say a word you don’t know, you ask them to say it again slowly and try to repeat it by mimicking the sound. That’s an external focus. The native speaker would not instead say, put your tongue here on your teeth and then do this with your lips. That’s an internal focus, and it would be so hard to figure out how to say a word that way.”
When trying to identify external focuses in music playing, recognizing the subtle distinction between external and internal focus is key. Dr. Gebrian gave many fantastic examples in her book. In string playing, a common error is to hold the bow with a straight thumb that presses into the stick. A typical internally-focused instruction is to “bend the thumb and contact the bow lightly without pressing”, whereas an example of an external focus is to “pretend you are picking up a water bottle sideways and let your thumb be a shelf on which the bow rests”. (You would never pick up a water bottle with a straight thumb, and a shelf does not press into whatever it’s holding!) This ingenious instruction illustrates the use of analogies, as well as how to conceptualize one’s interaction with the instrument, both of which are fundamental concepts for applying external focuses in practical situations.
Imagery
We dove in depth into imagery—a form of external focus, despite it all occurring in your head, because “it’s not focusing on the specific muscle movements of your body.” Dr. Gebrian explained that a lot of research literature emphasizes using analogies to create a unified image that communicates to your body what to do. “Brains have a hard time with information that feels disconnected and random, like your arm or your wrist or your elbow, which all feels like separate pieces of information that are hard to integrate. But if you have something to unify it, it is much easier for your brain to hold onto that information.”
“Imagery is very personal, isn’t it?” I suggested. Everyone has their own way of seeing the world, and one analogy that works for one person may completely not make sense to another. Dr. Gebrian recounted an experience with a student, while teaching him how to produce a deep rich sound from the viola, who found it hard to relate to the many analogies that she tried with him. Eventually when he devised his own analogy and described it to her, it was so cryptic that she herself couldn’t understand it! As she does with all her students, she meticulously took notes on the “Golden String Sound” analogy that her student came up with, and made sure to use it with him whenever she needed to prompt him to regain that deep sound. I was really impressed with her student-centered teaching philosophy of catering to her students’ unique learning processes!
Uniquely-Piano Challenges
One topic I was particularly interested to ask Dr. Gebrian was on tackling uniquely-piano challenges: coordinating hands with independent lines, figurations and rhythms, as well as navigating the spatial layout of the keyboard. “The visual component is especially important for keyboardists as it informs the spatial awareness and proprioceptive sense of where you are in space, but it’s too easy to rely just on your eyes for knowing where you’re going.”
How can pianists develop their spatial awareness and sense of proprioception needed to play and execute leaps accurately? Dr. Gebrian’s answer: mental practice! “Can you feel in your head where you are on the keyboard? Can you feel the shape of the chord in your hand and the topography of the keys under your fingers? Can you visualize what it looks like on the keyboard?”
Dr. Gebrian also points out the difference between mental practice and another popular method among pianists of playing with their eyes closed: with mental practice, “the hands do not produce any sound, so you have to know in your mind what’s supposed to be happening without getting the physical feedback from the instrument. But with the feedback from my mind, I know when it wasn’t right and need to try again.” To be able to vividly play through a piece of music in your mind without receiving auditory or tactile feedback helps to develop a richer mental representation of the music and stronger muscle memory.
Other hot piano topic: polyrhythms. Dr. Gebrian’s advice is to think of the polyrhythm as a unit, rather than as separate entities. “You have to figure out how the composite sounds like if you put these two rhythms together. You don’t want to be thinking the 3 is this and the 4 is this.” This ties into the notion of chunking: organizing information into a single chunk “is similar to what we were talking about with analogies, that the brain needs things under a large umbrella instead of as separate pieces of information.” This is where mnemonic devices, such as the phrase “pass the goddamn butter” that represents the 3-against-4 polyrhythm, can help with recalling the composite sound patterns. (Pro tip: there are also apps that will play any polyrhythm so you can hear the composite.)
Audiation
In order to achieve the sound you want to create, you first have to know how it should sound.
In her book, Dr. Gebrian discussed the role of audiation and singing in music learning. Some of her examples involved string instruments: singing trains audiation which in turn is essential for good intonation. No surprise, because audiation is the act of imagining music in one’s head—pitches and rhythm, as well as expression, phrasing, tone, etc. It is essential when mental practicing, too: “if you don’t know how it should sound, you’re losing half the information.” Imagining how it feels to play is just half of the equation, while imagining how it should sound is the necessary other half.
But why is audiation important when playing fixed pitched instruments like the piano? Dr. Gebrian shared this video [link] of a masterclass by renowned pianist Leon Fleischer, where he explains that in order to achieve the sound you want to create, you first have to know in your mind how it should sound. This process of actively imagining and predicting the music while playing, in real time, is audiation in action. It serves as the guidepost for how you would craft the sound that you elicit from your instrument—an internal metric by which you try to match your produced sound with your imagined sound. This is such profound advice, and it ties in beautifully with a quote I remember hearing as a teenager: “Technique is the ability to play what the inner ear hears.“
There were so many more questions I would have liked to ask Dr. Gebrian, but with only limited time, we had to draw our interview to a close. Our interview discuss was highly stimulating and a wonderful learning experience as well. Even as someone who had adopted motor learning theory for many years now, I found her depth of expertise gave me added insight and confidence in the science. Her book contains many more fascinating topics—memorization, rhythm and tempo, building speed, and more—and I strongly encourage you to read it!
Q&A Candy Part 2
We continue with more insightful Q&As with Dr. Gebrian, transcribed and lightly edited for brevity.
Q5. My next question is a bit of a devil’s advocate: on the one hand, as learners, we need to trust in the process, even if we don’t see immense improvement immediately. But on the other hand, could some of these practice regiments themselves become a rote formula?
For sure. People often practice according to a rote formula where they’re not actually thinking critically. Good practicing is active problem-solving: looking at what is not working for what you want to achieve, and figuring out how to get there. Is it a specific technical problem? Are you not able to be as expressive as you want on stage? Those have very different solutions. But many people are never taught to practice, or they have one or two methods that they apply to everything. Say, some people were told that it’s good to practice in rhythms, so they practice everything in rhythms. That’s like using a hammer for everything, when you might need a screwdriver sometimes. Having a large bag of practice tools that you can draw from lets you find the tool that fits the problem. Maybe you found the perfect tool to solve the problem. But often people get stuck with a tool that worked for a different problem in the past but does not work now, yet they keep trying to apply that tool. So, being creative and adaptable with problem-solving is the way to go.
Q6. Do adults learn differently from children? There’s a common misconception that adults prefer to learn things “analytically”.
The answer is both yes, and no. No, in that our brains are all human brains that obey the same principles of how we learn. That being said, kids’ brains have a different neurochemical soup that allows them to absorb information more readily than adults. Of course, children will learn a lot faster if they use the same practice methods in my book, but they don’t need them in the way that we do as adults because their brains just soak up information with minimal effort, whereas adult brains typically don’t have the same facility. So as adults we need to have much more intention and focus in our practicing than kids do.
The difference, in regards to an analytical way of learning, is that as adults we have developed prefrontal cortices, and kids haven’t. The prefrontal cortex is how you apply the analytical way of thinking. That’s why many child prodigies have a hard time transitioning to an adult professional. They didn’t have a prefrontal cortex when they were young, and relied purely on muscle memory and intuition. Then after their prefrontal cortex developed, they started getting in their head and overthinking things. The prefrontal cortex is really helpful but you have to learn how to use it effectively without letting it get in your way.
Q7. When working to overcome bad habits, what timeline should we expect for re-learning good movement habits? In my personal experience revamping technique in both piano and figure skating, the magic number is 2 years.
That is about right in my experience too. I had a lot of deeply ingrained bad habits in my playing that I had to totally re-learn. It took about a year to be able to do the new habit reliably in the practice room, but it took another year or more before my new habit was consistent in lessons, performances and high-pressure situations. That was the most frustrating part of the process—I can do this fine in the practice room, so why is this old habit coming back the minute I get on stage? But it’s normal when we’re under pressure to revert back. I can’t put any literature to it, but for a deeply ingrained physical habit, yes, I would say the two year timeline seems accurate in my personal experience and also from observing students.
Q8. You talked about setting goals for practicing and when preparing for a big performance. What about setting goals for a performance itself?
It is very helpful to set a goal for the performance, otherwise it’s too easy to fall into a perfectionistic mindset. My goal used to be play everything perfectly and so I was always disappointed. For a long time, my goal in performance was to control my performance anxiety better than I had in the previous performance. So even if I still didn’t control it very well, if it was at least better than the last time, that was a success. This is a more realistic, healthier way to set goals. These days, my goals for performance usually center around expression, taking risks, and connecting with the audience. If we have realistic, achievable goals for performance, it helps us stay focused on what’s actually important to us while on stage, rather than getting into a negative spiral when we make little mistakes here and there.
If you missed Part 1 of this book review, read it here. Do also read the full interview transcript of my hour-long interview with Dr. Gebrian, which is a treasure trove of insightful information.
- Purchase the book on Amazon: https://a.co/d/7NtzIPB
- Visit Dr. Gebrian’s website at http://www.mollygebrian.com/
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