sdawkcab gnicitcarp (practicing backwards)

Molly Gebrian, a terrific violist and a superb teacher (of subjects musical as well as subjects neuroscientific) talks about the way the brain processes patterns after doing an activity. After playing a series of pitches, for example, the brain will play that series back many times, and at a super-high speed. If you make an intentional pause for ten seconds or so in your practice, it gives the unconscious mind a chance to work through the pattern. This time of inactivity is apparantly where the actual learning takes place. It is as if the mind gets a chance to separate itself from the body in order to work out the most efficient way of executing the pattern at hand.

The brain plays the pattern in a backwards direction as well. Molly says that nobody knows why. So I have been trying to think of reasons why the brain would do such a thing.

My friend and teacher Danny Morganstern taught me to practice passages both forwards and backwards on the viola and the violin, and I find that doing so really helps me "hear" with my left hand, which helps make my intonation more secure. I do it with my students too, and it works wonders.

Today, after considering that nifty Haydn Minuet from the 26th Piano Sonata, I posted about the other day, I gave practicing backwards on the piano a try. I combined it with Molly's ten-second pause, so my backwards playing would "play" forwards in my brain while I was resting between repetitions. (I did it with a different piece, since the A Major Minuet makes complete musical sense both ways.)

It is quite challenging to do with two voices, particularly because flipping the rhythms so that the beginnings of notes sound together complicates the task. Anyway, when I played passages forwards after playing them backwards, I found that it was much easier to play accurately than before I did my two-handed backwards practice.

I wonder if our brains are "wired" to backtrack when we make a journey so that we can find our way home. I have, particularly while walking in the woods, found myself recognizing landmarks on a return trip that I didn't particularly notice on the forward trip. Isn't a musical journey through passages of pitches similar to a journey through physical space?

Also, when we build or assemble things like houses, clothes, or machines, we sometimes need to take them apart in order to clean them, repair them, or simply figure out how they work. We sometimes have to reverse our steps when we are trying to locate a lost object, and it is often not as difficult to do as we might have anticipated.