‘My experience is that it is perhaps boring and harder to practice technique alone. It is easier to use your musical desire to drive your technique — the more you want to express in music, the more you will be driven to conquer the technical limitations that stand in your way and the faster you will improve.’
From Strings by Mail, here.
Ms Yang has published two sets of songs, not a method, nor a set of technical exercises. She does include extensive notes, which include implications for learning:
- Music is prior to the technical capacity to express the music
- Minimize the cognitive burden of self-regulation by doing the thing you want to do, that is, express yourself through music
In the interpretive guidance she writes for each song, she makes clear that ‘express yourself’ is not a vague exhortation but rather a rigorous engagement with the composer’s intent and your own cognitive and emotional (and physical) responses.
Deepening musical understanding and self-understanding drives the development of technique. There’s a strong family resemblance to Thomas Viloteau’s ‘always play music’: skilled mechanical manipulation of the instrument is not the goal.
In an interview, Yang remarked that she always wants to know something about the culture from which a song emerged in order to interpret it. Yet another cross-domain association and as well another indicator of comprehensive requirement for understanding the music.
A last learning-related comment. In Yang’s commentary on the various songs she frequently makes synesthetic-type remarks (‘I’m… painting an Impressionist painting in music’ ‘as a singer’ ’imagining a beautiful countryside scene’). As well as eliciting feelings this kind of association is (perhaps) an additional retrieval path not mentioned by other writers. Most of the focus in the various authors has been on cognitive approaches, but we retrieve emotional content as well. Perhaps cross-mapping the musical content with culture, scenes, physical features (a stream, a waterfall), or other forms of art, all deepen emotional savings and provide routes to retrieval.
A summary: the challenge and pleasure of music drives technical development, and the emotional content of the music is central.
Learning music on guitar 