ABSTRACT
Continuity in music performance may seem so obvious that it doesn’t bear discussion. A performance of a piece of music exists in time, and time is the container of the continuous. Chapter 7 brings together topics from the previous five chapters—foundation work, chunking, mental work, slow practice, variety in repetition—in the service of achieving unbroken continuity in performance. Mastery of these will contribute to the development of an inviolable sense of continuity. Pianist Frank Merrick thought that “there are few, if any, factors that do so much to ensure that the audience will be carried away by the music.”
But massed repetition, which is the preferred practice method for many, often creates fractures in the flow of a work. Even after mastering a passage, many artists have recognized that the passage must be carefully integrated into the larger whole.
George Kochevitsky suggests that when one can play a passage at tempo but is unable to play the sections in continuity, it is a problem of the mind; one is unable to think fast enough to “anticipate and prepare one’s playing apparatus for each situation without the slightest delay.”
Chapter 7 examines the attention placed upon the development of continuity by legendary artists.
