What's the secret of every great musician? Repetition.
Repetition is the fastest, most efficient way to internalize music, both mentally and physically. For beginners, repetition builds muscle memory. Muscle memory is writing your name, eating with a fork, typing an email and, yes, playing the violin. For more advanced students, repetition of small chunks of music leads to mastery of large works, often many pages long. And repetition remains the number one way to teach our muscles new tricks or, rather, "technique".
I see the power of repetition each day in my three-year-old son. He recently acquired his dad's childhood lego sets- the NASA models with hundreds of pieces. He is obsessed with putting them together (correctly, using the instruction manual). Of course, he can't do it by himself (in case you're wondering what I've been doing for the past month). He enlists a grown-up to read the manual and instruct him where to connect each piece, which he does do himself. Two hours later, the space shuttle Endeavor is complete and then.... he takes it apart. And we begin again. But here's the crazy thing: after assembling the whole thing four or five times, my three-year-old child is actually MEMORIZING the instruction manual. Yesterday, he completed the last twelve pages of steps without the book or me to help him. Today, he corrected several mistakes I misread between pages 20 and 22. He's three. The lego project is designed for ages 8 and up.
For professional musicians, repetition is truly the way to teach old dogs new tricks. My formal training as a violinist was in classical music, but I make half my living playing jazz, of which I have absolutely no formal training. I gig regularly with a guitarist named Dave. Dave is the band leader, which means he brings the book and calls the tunes. He puts the tunes in a certain order at the beginning of the season and we pretty much play them that way for the next six months. At first, I found this amusing like an endearing personality quirk. "Hey!" he says with enthusiasm at the start of every event, "Why don't we start with 'tis Wonderful'?". Like this is a new idea, like that tune was just randomly appeared at the start of the book. After that it's 'Autumn Leaves' (swing with a rubato intro for kicks), then 'Lucky Southern'. It's pretty much the same set every week. But here's the funny thing: after repeating these tunes each week for the past several months, we're starting to sound like a real band, not just some thrown-together trio sight reading through tunes for the benefit of inebriated wedding guests who really aren't aware that the background music is being produced by real live human beings. AND I'm starting to play those tunes like I know what I'm doing. So, on top of getting paid, I'm actually becoming a better musician. Go figure. This is great because, as I manifesto-ed in blog #1, I hate to practice. So did the late great Stephane Grappelli. But he gigged every single day, probably with someone like Dave.
