Thomas J. West Music

Over the three years that my website has been publishing articles, I have written many special topics on music learning and how modern neurology is providing powerful information on the way we master a musical instrument. I have also done more than one article on mental rehearsal, when one visualizes the motions of performing a piece of music on an instrument in the mind's eye.

Just a few days ago, the very excellent iSchoolBand Blog published a guest article by Michael D Griffin entitled How to Learn Music Properly. In his article, Griffin draws many of the same conclusions that I have discovered in my own personal research of modern neurology and how it affects music learning. I agree that most performing music programs never teach their students how to practice or how to think meta-cognitively.

As science begins to understand how the brain functions with new scanning technologies, we as music educators need to pay attention and apply those findings.

I highly recommend this article. Be sure to give it your attention.

This article (c) 2010 Thomas J. West. All content on ThomasJWestMusic dot com is licensed under a Creative Contributions Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Please contact the author before republishing on or offline.