ABSTRACT
Chapter 1, “Introduction,” lays the groundwork for what the book’s main questions are and why they are important: Can there be a general pedagogy of music practice, and upon what would it be based?
Most writings about music practice are instrument-specific and are rarely supported by research, yet within the last several decades there has been an increase in research that focuses on how expert skill is best developed. The work of psychologists K. Anders Ericsson, Robert Bjork, Ellen J. Langer, Carol S. Dweck, and others has informed recent books on the development of high-level skill in athletes by Daniel Coyle, Geoffrey Colvin, Matthew Syed, Peter Brown, and Zach Schonbrun.
Up to a century before this modern research, however, high-level musicians who wrote about how they worked articulated ideas that presaged this research. Leopold Auer, Carl Flesch, Ivan Galamian, Theodor Leschetizky, Mark Hambourg, and Claudio Arrau are among those who described ways of studying and practicing that would be corroborated decades later by psychologists and neurologists.
Chapter 1 opens by exploring several “intuitive” ways of working that are condemned by historic musicians and modern researchers. The chapter proceed to give a broad overview of the tenets of practice explored subsequent chapters.
