With constant email notifications, text message alerts, and infinite scrolling, modern technology has slowly reprogrammed many of our minds to get used to frequent distractions. In the culture of smart phones, the ability to focus for prolonged periods of time has gradually diminished and got worse than ever during the COVID-19 pandemic as many had transferred to remote work. Coming out of the worldwide lock-downs, the culture of remote work continued to thrive, but unfortunately, not without overwhelm and anxieties that the tech culture brings. The amount of great content online has increased dramatically and it makes people want to take advantage and absorb as much of it as possible. But the human brain isn’t a computer. There is a limit to how much we can learn in a given period of time. So what does this have to do with memorizing music?

Continue reading “Fragmented Attention Culture & its Impact on the Ability to Memorize Repertoire”

Sometimes orchestra rehearsals and concerts are not held in the most ideal spaces. Have you ever sat in a section with so little room that you had to contort your body and hold your instrument in the weirdest and most uncomfortable ways to make room for your bow and the musicians around you? Now imagine playing in a 3-hour rehearsal like this. To make things worse, the chairs are terrible and don’t allow both sit bones to distribute your weight evenly to align the back properly. Oh yea, and you also have to make sure that you can see your music and the conductor reliably.

 

Continue reading “Self-Maintenance and Recovery After Orchestra Rehearsals”