Repertoire Strategies for learning Music From 'Carl E. Seashore - The Psychology of Music' 10. Review in cycles. Certain types of knowledge, skill, facility, and efficiency need to be reviewed systematically. This is well recognized in the organization of teaching of arithmetic in the grades. A certain process is repeated at higher levels at larger and larger intervals by the practice of recall or performance. In such review, the essentials should stand out progressively more clearly. In any account of learning, we acquire a lot of incidental accretions in matters of no consequence. One condition of memory is the power to forget the nonessential or irrelevant. The cycle of review should tend to eliminate these and let the permanently valuable stand out in higher relief. 11. Build each new acquisition into a habit. As we grow we acquire more and more power to do things automatically. No one acts musically until the techniques have been shoved back into the subconscious where they take care of themselves as habits. No one can read music or play or sing until the fundamental facts and skills have been converted into habits which function without fail in progressively larger integrations Only then can a singer sing with feeling and abandon; only then can the pianist pick up a complicated score and play it at sight; only then can the conductor inspire unified effort in the artistic playing of the ensemble. Historically, there have been two schools of teachers: those who cultivate conscious attention on a specific element or process in on a specific element or process involved at a given stage in musical training, and those who take the opposite view and say, for example, "Sing naturally and with feel-ing and pay no attention to how the tone is produced." The psychological theory combines these two and says, "At the learning stage, be intensely conscious of the element involved in the par-ticular that is to be learned, then relegate these elements to habit and in musical performance give yourself up to the situation as a whole, guided largely by a feelingful intelligence." 12. Learn at your own level. Great difficulty is involved in class instruction in music owing to the diversity of talent in a group. While this is a problem of the teacher, it is ultimately your problem to see to it that your learning effort is concentrated upon the acquisition, not of what you would have, but what is within your power of acquisition at the time. Refuse to learn what you already know, refuse to drill on what you already can perform with skill, insist upon the privilege of working at your own natural level so that the task that you undertake is neither too easy nor too hard. Perhaps most frequently this will mean insistence on going back and acquiring that which was passed over too lightly in order that you may have the background for the making of further progress. These are excerpts from Chapter 13 of 'Carl E. Seashore - The Psychology of Music'. The second half of that chapter has related advice for teachers, and I unreservedly recommend the book as a resource for the musician who is curious about his own art.
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