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RP Post 7

Fortes, Fumbles, and Failure: How the modern day musician copes with failure

Can Musicians Overthink Their Practice and Performance? Robert H. Woody, PhD This article first explains that musicians acquire skills through three stages: cognitive, associative, and autonomous. As skills are perfected and proceed to the autonomous stage through the “cognitively intensive” process of practicing, more cognitive power can be allotted to performance skills such as expressiveness. When a musician fumbles, it is not because they are thinking too much about their performance, but because the basic skills have not yet become autonomous. Woody insists that musicians should strive to have all the technical skills in the autonomous phase by the performance so that the expressiveness and other purely performance related skills can be managed in the cognitive phase. This way, playing the music will require “virtually no cognitive attention.” Whereas Gladwell is convinced that overthinking is a very valid and human mistake to make, Woody maintains that overthinking is simply not what happens. What a musician believes to be an fumble from overthinking is probably just a lack of preparation and the inability to be “spontaneously expressive.” Although all the claims this article made were valid, I personally cannot accept Woody’s overall conclusion that musicians do not overthink performances. Gladwell’s evidence supporting the idea of “panicking” overwhelms Woody’s speculation about the psychology of a performing musician.

Woody, Robert H., PhD. "Can Musicians Overthink Their Practice and Performance?" //Psychology Today//. N.p., 27 Mar. 2014. Web. 27 May 2014. .