Passionate Practice: The Musician's Guide to Learning, Memorizing, and Performing - Softcover

Elson, Margret

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1587900211 ISBN 13: 9781587900211

Publisher: Regent Pr, 2002

Synopsis

"Relax your shoulders." "Let go of tension." "Look at the music." "Don’t look at the music." Look at the keyboard." "Don’t look at the keyboard." "Listen to the music." "Don’t think, just play." Every music student has heard such suggestions, and they all hold some truth. But the challenge is: how? This book is a gentle, progressive guide in exactly how to relax, focus, listen, and feel the music and how to harness them to work together, automatically and simultaneously. Its innovative approach combines special relaxing and behavior modification exercises that foster concentration, focus, security and passion in performance.

The book, user-friendly, comprehensive, and filled with witty illustrations, can also be used as a key tool for psychotherapists working to help clients detoxify trauma, especially that associated with performing issues.

About this title

About the Author

Margret Elson s dual careers span 30 years of teaching and coaching pianists, vocalists and ensembles, and 25 years as artistic counselor to artists and performers. She is a licensed psychotherapist and was certified as a hypnotherapist. She has performed as a soloist and in ensemble, and in 1993 she and her piano partner Elizabeth Swarthout received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to produce the CD, Twentieth Century American 4-Hand Piano Music, issued on the Laurel Record label. Ms. Elson s musical background includes ten years as a piano scholarship student at Juilliard, Preparatory Division, and studies in the San Francisco Bay Area with Marjorie Petray and Alexander Libermann. In addition, she has masters degrees in Psychology, Journalism and Political Science. In 1983 she opened the Center of Artistic Counseling in Oakland, and has presented her innovative work at international conferences such as The Biology of Music-Making (Denver), and The First International Conference on Mind, Body and the Performing Arts (NYC), and in Oslo, Norway and London. Throughout her work, she seeks to maintain her sense of humor.

Edition details

• Publisher: Regent Pr
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1587900211
• ISBN 13: 9781587900211
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 108