1957  Building Mastery

Date: Tue, 4 Nov 2003 11:26:06 -0600
From: Stephen Brown <Stephen.P.Brown@DAL.FRB.ORG>
Subject: Building Mastery

Yesterday when I was playing A Media Luz and several other pieces of music
that I haven't really mastered on my guitar, I realized that if I put too
much effort into the mechanics of my playing it took away from the feeling
of my playing, but if I didn't put enough effort into the mechanics of my
playing, the music deteriorated from a lack of execution. What I
recognized for myself is that mastery comes from developing a big
difference between too much attention to mechanics and too little
attention to mechanics, so that I am not sitting on the knife edge between
two different types of failure. In playing the guitar, mastery comes from
practicing enough that one develops what pianists often call "touch." I
think this idea of developing touch carries over to improving our tango
dance skills. If we use practice to refine our mechanics, we can build
our dance skills to the point where there is a big difference between too
little and too much attention to the mechanics.

--Steve