I've been thinking over yesterday’s playing-without-dots breakthrough and wondering how it happens. It is partly – as I know from the three tunes I can play dot-less on a mandolin – a matter of waiting for a tune to get inside your head. But it needs to get inside your head in a special sort of way that doesn't vanish the moment you play a note. I've yet to understand why a tune can drive me up the wall all day at work but mysteriously disappear by the time I arrive home. Nor do I know why a tune I love refuses to stay in my head, but one I feel I'm barely familiar with will lurk around.
I have quite a good memory for the patterns that text makes on a page. If I'm looking for a passage in a book I’ll be quite clear where on the page layout it is, what sort of shape the paragraph is, and so on. I also find that I can picture sheet music. I can’t always see the exact dots, but I can see the general pattern. The fan says this isn't the right way of playing without dots, but I can’t not visualise something I've seen. (I have no idea why this works for text, for written and printed materials, but utterly fails as far as places are concerned. I'm famous for getting excited about somewhere I believe to be a new place only to be told that I've been there lots of times before).
But patterns. Now, of course I know in purely intellectual terms that folk music is repetitive, and I know that means whole bars repeating and recurring during a piece, but somehow when you really know a piece you really begin to feel those repetitions. The repetitions can also catch you out of course – is this the repetition followed by a note going up, or the one followed by a note going down? I can also get stuck in a loop where I get the first variation but then can’t remember how the repeat resolves itself in the second variation and ending up repeating the first variation ad nauseam. Yesterday, having played through as best I could, and then had a quick look at the dots to fill the gaps, I realised in a quite visceral way for the very first time the patterns and repetition that were involved – I really saw them - and I think that’s why I had my breakthrough.
Now all I need to do is look and listen really carefully so I can learn a few more tunes without dots.
No comments:
Post a Comment