‘…Knowing how to read a score is by far the most critical skill a classical musician must posses.’ ‘Theory, analysis or harmony classes should not be skipped.’ I’ve made a ‘what/how’ distinction, what to intend, how to execute; this is a pure statement that ‘what’—intention—is primary.
Buy Inside the black box here.
Of the authors reviewed Viloteau is the most focused on ‘always play music.’ There’s an echo of language learning here: we learn to speak because we want to say something. Kids (unless in special circumstances) don’t do ‘speech-sound-making’ exercises. As a result of this approach, he’s much less a fan of, e.g., isolated RH arpeggio practice, preferring learning while playing songs.
Viloteau (with Kappel) devotes a lot to how to physically hold/touch/play the instrument. ‘Minimum effective stress’ is the common theme, that is, finding the easiest possible way to play (correctly). The minimum effective stress is not at all apparent to the beginner. The easiest way that scales to the entire repertoire may or may not be the same as the easy way to do it badly or approximately for this one thing you’re looking at right now. Much of Viloteau stays close to the instrument, elucidating various aspects of correct technique. For instance, Viloteau writes about the angle of the nail on the string for piano or forte.
This does not mean Viloteau is not interested in how to learn. He divides practice at a high level into two phases, assimilation and accommodation.
Assimilation is being able to play a difficult section in practice. ‘Repetition of perfection’ to build the foundations that make it possible for us to truly progress. ‘You cannot let mistakes pass, whether small or large. When repeating a passage, it should be played perfectly every time.’ Mathews’ ‘path across the field’ is similar: learn the physical procedure by doing it exactly the same way, both hands, every time.
For motor learning, it’s easy to use ‘same’ as an approximation. Viloteau, who continually emphasizes meticulousness of performance, makes it clear that ‘same’ is ‘indistinguishable even on the closest listening.’ Same in millimeters of placement and attack measured in newtons. Musical intention is central, but here Viloteau is directing us to refine our physical intention to the highest degree our capacity allows.
Viloteau recommends subdivision of the material to be learned into working memory-sized parts, where he refers to George Miller’s 1956 ‘Magic number 7 +/- 2′ paper on short-term memory. In a more recent tonebase piece he refines this down to five, the now commonly used number for working content-neutral memory.
The term of art ‘short term memory’ is less-used in cognitive psychology, now, than working memory, as depending on the semantic content working memory can hold a lot. (Episodic memory is for things that have happened, typically a mix of agents [persons, dogs, anything to which intentions can be ascribed], objects, and an event or closely-related events that tie them together. Semantic memory is for what things mean.)
Viloteau, I think, misses an aspect of learning here. Regardless of the underlying mechanisms (how our minds do it), how much of a song can be held in mind at once varies greatly with musical understanding: our working memories can be expanded by practice and experience. Imagine a path or trail or route with which you’re very familiar. You can hold long sections in mind at once, perhaps even the entirety. Someone new to the trail, though, is likely only to see that which is visible from a current location. Practicing imagination, a la Iznaola, (presumably, hopefully) expands working musical memory.
We’re dealing with execution as well, though, and thanks to the wonderful anatomical ‘opportunities’ presented by the guitar, musical ‘chunks’ and their execution patterns may be quite different. Viloteau’s focus here is on decomposition for execution. He recommends making practice elements very small, as he appears to include notes, slurs, shifts, time, &c, as countable elements in his ‘five things at once’ recommendation. His examples show single measures or even parts of single measures. Repetition 10x perfectly, as slow as it needs to be, full concentration. Can go up to 20 or 30 times. Gradual upping of metronome to 10-20 bpm (beats per minute) above target tempo (perfectly!) This requires rigorous discipline, since the subdivision can be to ‘below’ the level of music. Repetitions should begin slowly enough that you can consciously feel and control every movement, that is, for most of us, very, very slowly.
This seems like a contradiction—always play music, decompose the score into possibly-sub-musical sections. I think Viloteau’s intention here is that we are always hearing the music in our mind’s ear. We’re to train our musicality at all times. Though Viloteau doesn’t use the phrase or refer to the research, this seems to me a good example of ‘desirable difficulty:’ maintaining and centering on the musical content while at half-speed or slower over a third of a measure can only be done (it seems to me) by using the mental and emotional content of the music to ‘drive’ the physical performance. The desirable difficulty is in selecting for oneself the size of the part and monitoring one’s own concentration and performance.
This is also an elegant kind of meta-practice (practicing practicing). Our goal is musical expression, which we (or at least I) typically think of in songs or groups of songs. Here, Viloteau is instructing us to practice musical expression in the very small, as a microcosm of the large. A meticulousness of musical intent to parallel our care in execution.
An implicit aspect of this approach, if I understand it correctly, is that we are never mechanically manipulating the instrument to make music. We’re always intending music, manipulating the instrument then to express it. Recalling that learning is encoding new material into complex networks, Viloteau is asking us to ‘run’ multiple networks concurrently, viz., musical intention, physical control, self-regulation, aural monitoring, and so on. This is a massive activation and concentration task.
A minor but important aside: meticulous prolonged repetition risks injury. If for instance clarity of a six-string barre is the issue and one dwells as recommended on it, there’s likely to be significant stress on one’s tendons. Viloteau is emphatic about practicing perfectly, but his writing tone is such one imagines he’d energetically urge caution about potential RSIs (repetitive stress injuries).
There’s a more serious learning issue with exact repetition. We learn more deeply with variation. Recall the Langer study cited in the discussion of Mathews, and this for a deeper look at possible mechanisms. This is a case where even if the goal is the capability for playing exactly, Mathews’ notion of exaggeration is likely to be a more effective learning approach than Viloteau’s exact reproduction. By analogy, if you want to run your target mile race in even splits (time per lap), restricting your practice to running laps or parts of laps at target pace is a thoroughly ineffective training regime.
Spacing is missing from Viloteau’s discussion of practice. Spacing is necessary to motor learning: we learn in the spaces between actions. It is a surprising lacuna.
After assimilation, accommodation is the reality of playing the song in its entirety. The fingerings laboriously figured out per section may not work in the song as a whole, or errors arise regularly even when the isolated practice was perfect, and so on. At this point fingerings may need to be revised or parts of the music ‘dropped out’ or edited for playability. (In a tonebase commentary subsequent to publication of his book he recommends determining fingerings at tempo, prior to slow practice, since fingerings that work at half-speed may not work at tempo.)
Doing this, the question will arise, how much is a particular note/inversion/stretch worth for the music? For the specific song? Is it an example of a generally useful capability? More practice or simply editing it out? Is it a skill issue, or capacity? Parkening’s transcriptions, for example, often have long LH reaches; no amount of skill practice changes the physical size of an individual guitarist’s hands. How much of the flow of the song is affected? Damaged or diminished? This is my riffing, not Viloteau’s, yet another reminder that for each of us, the music and the performance are inseparable, and that continual self-assessment is a central practice skill.
‘It also seems that to play fast, we have to practice fast. I mean that practicing slowly does not make the muscles in our hands more agile. In other words: to play fast, we have to… play fast.’ All of the writers, including Viloteau, tell us to slow down in order to learn. The context for the quoted remark is a discussion of extended scale passages, more popular in flamenco than classical, but this, along with Viloteau’s notion that we haven’t mastered a song until we can play if perfectly at 20 bpm above tempo, is one of the few ‘practice fast’ comments in any of the methods/books. Even with this, Viloteau says the way to go fast is to move slowly. More on this below, regarding ‘anticipation.’
Approach:
- Understand the score (similar to Mathews ‘eliminate confusion’), mark it up without the guitar, that is, understand the composer’s intent and add your ideas about interpretation and expression; in the term used in these reviews, form a clear and detailed musical intention
- Sight read, as a test of the musical ideas written in the prior step (Viloteau writes for the advanced guitarist, and assumes the ability to sight-read, which because of the ambiguity of note placement is difficult on the guitar; multiple ‘how to sight-read on the guitar’ books are available.)
- Figure out the fingerings for both hands. Often scores edited by guitarists have fingerings marked out where there’s ambiguity, but they’re suggestions, not requirements. (Bradford Werner mentions looking at multiple arrangements of the same song to see different ideas of fingering and note placement.) The song is played with the exact same fingerings every time, for both hands.
- Decompose the song into very small sections. Use the `sliding window’ to meld the tiny sections. And…
- Repeat, e.g., 10x very very slow, ‘should be able to control every little movement,’ 10x slow, &c, counting and playing with full attention. (Echoes Kappel’s ‘repetition’ section, and his quote of the ‘rotating attention’ idea.) Each repetition to be played perfectly, e.g., if there’s an error on rep 9, go back to 1.
- Concentration and focus: ‘The information developing into long-term memory will always be more ingrained if it has been genuinely understood and analyzed. …Repetition only cannot guarantee this. What is better is staying alert at all times when practicing, which is most vital to your progress. If you feel tired or not focused, you might as well stop or take a break.’
This last point echoes Landkowski. Note how it contradicts the naive ‘more practice is better’ default that is easy to fall into. If we accept that learning requires mental sweat, Viloteau is saying, stop at the right time. Doing it a lot without concentration might result in some learning, but not of correct technique, or even more important correct (for you) musical intention. Viloteau, with assent from the other authors, is pointing out that practicing music is always also practicing practicing: there is no point in practicing where self-monitoring and self-assessment are not required.
A few more notes, consistent with the above:
- Never leave a problem unsolved—which I interpret as understanding what it is and what needs to be done, not necessarily having mastered the solution (but this may be a mistaken interpretation!)
- Become your own teacher, using recording, video, practicing in front of a mirror, slow-motion video, and playing for small audiences.
This is self-regulation and feedback: understand exactly where you are (recording, mirror, video) and practice self-directed diagnosis and prescription. Be for yourself exactly as a good teacher would be. Viloteau is pointing to learning/improving of self-assessment and self-regulation, and as well continuous improvement in judgments of learning.
Viloteau advocates anticipation, that is, is anticipating and preparing for the next move while playing the current. It ties in with ‘going slowly to go fast,’ making continuous minimum movements between both LH and RH positions and actions. Viloteau believes anticipation is under-taught. (I was never taught anything like it.) Consciously doing this seems to reduce physical tension while playing, and (in my limited experience) enhances rather than dilutes the musical experience while playing, as physical anticipation interweaves with musical anticipation.
In the section on ‘what are we talking about’ examples were given of how music engages the whole mind/whole brain. Integrating physical anticipation with musical intention is likely to deepen both savings and retrieval by consciously integrating these very different things.
Viloteau describes finger ‘preparation’ as necessary, enabling maximum ‘slowness’ in finger movement. He describes preparation as knowing where each of the fingers is going next and having them be ready to make the necessary movement in the shortest, easiest way. There’s a deep musical aspect to this, once again reinforcing the impossibility of separating music and performance, that as musicians we’re creating a pattern of sound through time, and here, we’re creating a pattern of movement through time on the fingerboard and the strings. Viloteau here is recommending learning what to intend. The gist, I think, of Viloteau, on learning:
- Break it down into sections small enough to fit entirely in current awareness (working memory)
- Practice these perfectly, with full concentration, at multiple tempos
- No matter how small the section always hear the music in the mind’s ear
It’s easy to see a commonality with Mathews, even if their approaches to decomposition are different:
- Understand what you want for the entirety of the piece, whether through score analysis (Viloteau) or standing, singing, and clapping (Mathews)
- Break the score down to subsections much smaller than most of us practice
- Do it right, a lot, with full concentration…
- …without ever losing sight of the larger musical intention
Both assume this will result in high-savings, high-retrieval learning. That is likely true in young learners, but it’s not clear that it generalizes to all ages. Is there any reason this would not be sex-neutral? If the finding about spatial navigation mentioned earlier applies to learning music (men’s characteristic mental models, women’s routes), then Viloteau’s requirement for score analysis would correspond to map analysis prior to arriving at the territory, with a less strong (but more specifically musical) companion in Mathews’ insistence on performing the entire song as rhythm and movement, a bit more like a route.
I’m exaggerating differences here: playing video games is a far stronger predictor of spatial reasoning skill, including navigation, than sex. Mathews starts by discussing eliminating confusion about the meaning of the score, and in different words Viloteau starts the same way, and I doubt Viloteau would object to Mathews’ and Kappel’s notion that understanding the rhythm is foundational.
Viloteau’s ‘always play music,’ like Mathews’ ‘make beautiful sound’ and Kappel’s ‘sound is central,’ is I think a fundamental insight: engage every musical element, cognitive, emotional, physical, whenever practicing or playing. Learning as letting the roots of the music grow into every fertile part of oneself.
Learning music on guitar 