Page 70 - How to Shine on Stage

children (McPherson, 2005). It is unfortunate that, unlike in the edu-
cational contexts of jazz and ethno music, playing by ear is sidelined as
soon as a child learns musical notation, particularly given the research
findings which highlight its great importance at various stages of educa-
tion and in a number of instruments (Green, 2012; Zhukov & Ginsborg,
2021). Learning by heart is believed to help students learn more and at
the same time enable them to include more improvisation. Students are
also reported to have found such learning more enjoyable (Green, 2012).
68 Playing by heart has a long history in Western classical music,

but there is low agreement among musicians as to the functioning of
the memory with respect to musical performance, and the manner of
achieving reliability of such memory (Aiello & Williamon, 2002). Many
How to Shine on Stage person that it is best for each musician to devise their own memorization
musicians believe that musical memory varies so much from person to

methods (Ginsborg, 2002).
One of the most common memory training techniques is to repeat a
piece from beginning to end without stopping (Lisboa, 2008; Renwick &
McPherson, 2000). Each passage reminds the musician of the upcoming
passage in the sense of an associative chain. The latter develop quickly
and spontaneously and are extremely accurate (Rubin, 2006). The key
drawback of this memorization strategy is that we are only successful in
recall if we start playing from the beginning. If a memory block occurs,
one has to start playing from the beginning (Chaffin et al., 2009).
Experienced performers rarely stop and start over. They are aware
that memory slips are an inevitable part of live performance, so they cre-
ate a mental map of the piece that enables them to find their way even if
a memory slip occurs. This musical map contains points where the per-
former can continue playing if a mistake occurs (Chaffin et al., 2002).
In such cases, the audience often does not even realize that the perform-
er has made a mistake. Access to the necessary musical content is grant-
ed by performance cues built into a hierarchical organization based on
the musical structure (Chaffin et al., 2002). The cues represent all the
thoughts of the performer during the performance, e.g. “with feeling”,
“songful”, “softer”, or “repeat the note”. These content cues form a men-
tal map of the music that allows the performer to monitor the perfor-
mance. Performance cues are deliberately and systematically formed by
repeated thinking about certain musical characteristics during practice,
and thus eventually become mental automatisms directing the musi-
cian’s attention and enabling a conscious guidance of movements which
would otherwise be automatic. Content memorizing is significantly more