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Musicians, Ninjas, and Neuroplasticity
Ninjas and musicians don’t seem to have much in common, although they both spend a lot of time practicing. But I began to think about the differences in performance in the two disciplines after I was introduced to the sport by my 12-year-old niece, Eva Fornwalt, who has been practicing ninja for the past couple…
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Stress, sleep, and performance
Any musician who performs has been in the position of having to play a concert with too little sleep. We may be traveling and don’t sleep well in hotels. Or perhaps a performing opportunity has popped up unexpectedly and the only way to have the music learned and memorized is to work well into the night. Students are…
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What you see is what you hear: mirror neurons and music, part VI
Robert Schumann wrote in a review of a Franz Liszt concert in Dresden in 1840: “It is unlikely that any other artist, excepting only Paganini, has the power to lift, carry and deposit an audience in such high degree. . . In a matter of seconds we have been exposed to tenderness, daring, fragrance and…
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Why Am I Doing This?
My favorite photography collection is Contemporary Musicians in Photographs by Louis Ouzer. This 1979 Dover publication contains 119 photos of some of the world’s most famous musicians, from Rubinstein to Ellington, taken at the Eastman School of Music between 1940 and 1979. Ouzer, whose studio was a few doors down the street from Eastman, was a…