ABSTRACT
Great artists and teachers of the past wrote a lot about slow practice—it’s mentioned in just about every book that has high-level study as its object—and what they wrote aligns with the results of more modern research. Slow practice allows one to attend to minute details of technique, fingering, and interpretive nuance. Slow practice also allows one to check memory because it temporarily “erases” muscle memory and is a great aid to making memory more secure.
There’s another important reason for looking at slow practice in depth: Theodor Leschetizky, Tilly Fleischmann, and George Kochevitsky taught or wrote about slow practice in a way that may have anticipated the work of Francis Matthias Alexander or Nobel Laureate Charles Sherrington.
Slow practice presents the opportunity not to do something so we can do something better. It provides time for musicians to resolve the conflict between what Tilly Fleischmann saw as between the subconscious and conscious and what F. M. Alexander saw as between contaminated kinesthetic awareness. Slow practice helps us inhibit the use of a contaminated habit and replace it with something better.
Alexander wrote about “inhibition” in 1910, and Sherrington was a pioneer in the field of motor control. His work had to do with “inhibition as an active coordinative mechanism.”
