#1 The Circle
This is "Music for Life", episode 1 of my new blog about learning music and how it can influence life in general.
I will be sharing lessons I have learnt from music, tips for making practice more efficient and my favourite part - Mordechai’s Marvellous Musical Metaphors, which my students make fun of constantly because I am always thinking of metphors to explain the finer points of how music (and life) works.
The first one is The Circle.
Inside the circle is everything you know about music. This is true about anything in life and there is the connection to life in general, but we are just going to talk about music and you can draw your own conclusions about life.
So the centre of the circle is what you know how to play best and the edge of the circle is the limit of your ability as a musician.
The purpose of learning music is to widen that circle.
How do you do that? You go to the edge and you push. My job as a teacher is to find those pieces, concepts and techniques that are just outside of your circle and are tempting enough to make you want to venture outside your circle and bring inside.
So that’s how you know if you are growing - when you sit down to play and you look at a song and say, phew I can’t be bothered to play that one! Well, there it is, the edge of your circle - spend a few minutes on that one and you will begin widening your circle.
After that effort go ahead and reward yourself with some minutes of playing something fun from inside your circle. Soon that piece that is hard will become the piece you have fun with, then we will have to find something more difficult for you to work on!
Good luck!