I don’t know, but I suspect that everybody experiences this thing I’m about to describe.
When I started learning flute, just 3½ years ago, I worked on a very few tunes – things like The Galway Rambler and The London Lasses – some nice flute fundamentals. I worked them up until I thought I was pretty good at them. But, being a beginner, they were probably pretty rubbish.
I’ve moved on to all sorts of other tunes since, but I do get the ‘old’ tunes out and dust them off every now and then. What I find is that I’m making mistakes that I recognise as the sort of thing I did when I was first learning those tunes, but don’t otherwise do now in other tunes (there are other horrors which I perpetrate now ). I find it really hard to get over those mistakes – but only for tunes learned when I was more generally prone to such mistakes – things like errors in timing, flubbed fingers, poor rolls, you name it.
I find it strange that I seem to have retained a sort of memory of these errors attached just to particular tunes.
The good news is that, although it takes some effort, I can eradicate those errors even from these ‘beginner’ tunes.
What is this about? I find it puzzling. I suppose somebody is going to tell me it’s ‘muscle memory’, but I’m not sure I believe in that*. If you think it is, could you convince me of its existence? If it’s something else, what is it?
*One of the reasons I would discount ‘muscle memory’ in this particular case is that I can play tunes on flute that I haven’t played on flute before, just because I know them on fiddle. So I think I play from knowing where the notes are rather than by rote discipline of my fingers. But I could be wrong …
You can’t play a tune properly until you’ve made every mistake that you possibly can.
Just as when you were young you got sick often- you were building up your resistance.
I’m missing something here. Proprioception is not to do with memory, is it? It’s the sense of knowing where the bits of you are. (I know about that, because I lost it and had to learn how to walk again following a bad leg injury a couple of years ago.)
I look at it like any repetitive task. The more you do it a certain way, the more you’ll keep doing it that way because you get to the point where you 're not thinking about it. The computer punch-card is already punched in your brain for that tune. And it has a hanging chad.
I noticed this particular phenomenon long ago. The tunes that actually got me interested in playing flute, and I therefore began with learning, I no longer even play because those same old mistakes and general immature playing style sets in every time. Kind of sad, actually, that I specifically shy away from playing those old tunes that originally inspired me to pick up the flute in the first place.
I’m not sure about mistakes, but sometimes I find it harder to make variations on a tune I’ve learned long ago. It’s like if my mind doesn’t want my fingers to “explore” the tunes in a different way from what they used to.
See, that’s strange. Because that ought to apply to my fiddle playing. But the opposite is the case. The tunes I learnt when I was a teenager go off all by themselves in all sorts of wild, imaginative directions. New tunes are kind of as I’ve just learned them. And then the wild thoughts start coming in anyway …
). I find it really hard to get over those mistakes – but only for tunes learned when I was more generally prone to such mistakes – things like errors in timing, flubbed fingers, poor rolls, you name it.