Practice Tips Part 1 from "Notes from the Green Room" by Paul Salmon & Robert Meyer

I have been reading this book just for leisure. It is a pretty interesting study of stress and anxiety in dealing with musical performance. The book delivers some insights into performance issues and I hope that helps me understand people who have a hard time being on stage. I have found the book to be a little more of a psychology study and at times just found it boring. Also reading about performance anxiety and stage fright just agitated me so I decided to just read what I wanted to read. Here's what I found most interesting:

Practice Tips or Problem-Oriented Experiments p. 39
Troublesome Learning
- Do competing tasks.
(eg. pedal while moving a pencil ...How am I supposed to do this exactly? Oh, this example is meant for an organist.)

- Vocalize polyphonic lines one by one.
May be a good sight singing exercise on its own. This would heighten awareness of the other parts in a piece and help the encoding or memorizing process.

- Learn a new piece from end to beginning.
Hmm do they mean by sections or measures. I think some pieces would be cool to put in retrograde motion although I would not like to sightread that way.

- Transpose challenging passages.
I think I'm going to try this one. The author suggests that this will help one achieve a stable cognitive representation that does not depend on a certain set of notes or fingerings.

Buy Notes from the Green Room