Mental Study

All music study is Mental Study. Research comparing brain scans of musicians both playing music and just imagining music reveals that the action in the brain is similar in both cases. This means that when you “imagine” the piece, the same parts of your brain and nervous system are activated as when you actually play it.
Musicians in the past, especially before recorded music, were used to using mental study as an ordinary part of daily practice. Copying scores, thinking of music on long journeys or during walks in nature, memorising scores…
For instance, Frans Liszt told his pupils to “…think the phrase ten times and play it once.” (You can also read how Mozart composed entirely away from the instrument at the bottom of the page.*)

We all do mental study already: when we think the thought that coordinates our fingers, readies our embrasure, inspires our breath to come for a new phrase, it is the interaction between our brain, nervous system and musculoskeletal structure that is making it all possible. All this is sparked by the musical impulse. However, the musical-neurological impulse is often dampened by rote learning and trying to hard to play before the message of the music is clear in our minds.

When we stop to think through a phrase, however, powerful things can happen. We can meet the phrase first, without practicing in old habits that might get in the way of expression. We can tap the essences of the piece, sparking the nervous system with a pure, clear musical impulse. This impulse will fire and tune the action of our coordination and release sound through our instrument.

Everyone is different, and there are also many ways to do mental study. Here are some flashcards to get you started:

Mental Study options:
Alternating Silence with Sound
Reading the Score
Music Walk
Slow Writing

*Read this example from Mozart:

“When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say, travelling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep; it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence and how they come, I know not; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me remain in memory, and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this or that morsel [little phrase] to account, so as to make a good dish [piece] of it, that is to say, agreeably to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of the various instruments, etc.
All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised and defined, and the whole thing, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it, like a fine picture or beautiful statue, at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively [one after the other], but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell. All this inventing takes place in a pleasing, lively dream. What has been thus produced I do not easily forget, and this is perhaps the best gift I have my Divine Maker [God] to thank for.
When I proceed to write down my ideas, I take out of the bag of my memory… what has been previously collected into it in the way I have mentioned. For this reason the committing to paper [writing it down] is done quickly enough, for everything is…already finished; and it rarely differs on paper from what it was in my imagination…
But why my productions [music]…[have] that particular…style that makes them Mozartish, and different from the works of other composers, is probably owing to the same cause which renders [makes] my nose so large or so aquiline [pointy], or, in short, makes [my nose] Mozart’s, and different from those of other people. For I really do not study [try] at any originality.” W.A. Mozart