Here is a story of the first changes I ever made to my practising which started it all for me. (Nothing to do with Molly).
I was a 3rd year violin student; had worked on the same piece for a month without moving forward. One day in disgust I turned my back on the music stand, and worked on "string changes", where you move the bow from one string to another. I looked for etudes with string changes and borrowed bits: made my own exercises - found the best way to change strings. That's all I did the whole week because I wanted nothing more to do with that piece. The difficulties, however, had been largely due to string changes. At my next lessons, I had to play the piece that I had not touched for an entire week - had not practised. When I played, it was vastly improved: teacher was astonished.
That is the first time I had ever practised that way: not literally working on the assigned piece. Major improvements in the piece I had not worked on.
The next occasion was a piece where I constantly got stuck on "measure X" - and I mean literally stuck: my fingers wouldn't lift. Every week in lessons we'd get up to m. X, try to get me to play it properly, go back to the beginning and get stuck again on m. x (anyone who knows about good practising will know what's wrong with that picture. š). One day I "went radical" - worked only on that one measure to find out note for note why my hand was getting stuck, how to unstick them, the optimal way of moving for those 8 notes. Once I had that motion, played the easy earlier notes, continue into m. X, and a bit past. ..... Then I made extra copies of the music; circled every passage that was similar (say transposed) - then the next difficult passage, etc. I worked on my coloured circles one by one. These chopped up small bits that barely seemed to be music, and felt guilty about the sacrilege. Except that this is what musicians who get somewhere do, and some teachers teach. Again, after going in circles for weeks, I got somewhere fast in a short time.
Those were my beginnings. Two incidents of working in an entirely different way, and getting improvements and successes that were greater, and over a shorter period of time. That's when I started seeking this out.
To me the "Molly story" is not necessarily about following everything that MG says. If anyone is in the rut of ways of working that are ineffective, then the idea of doings things differently is an idea beyond the specifics that she teaches. One might come up with something entirely different. For me it was the two incidents that I related, which happened out of sheer despair. "Hey, I did something radically different - didn't do what I believed I was supposed to do - and wow, that's interesting." It's a bit like Alice in the Looking Glass meeting the Queen of whatsit, and learning that she must walk away from the house in order to get to the house. (I was 8 when I read the book. That and the grin without a cat always got to my imagination.)
). One day I "went radical" - worked only on that one measure to find out note for note why my hand was getting stuck, how to unstick them, the optimal way of moving for those 8 notes. Once I had that motion, played the easy earlier notes, continue into m. X, and a bit past. ..... Then I made extra copies of the music; circled every passage that was similar (say transposed) - then the next difficult passage, etc. I worked on my coloured circles one by one. These chopped up small bits that barely seemed to be music, and felt guilty about the sacrilege. Except that this is what musicians who get somewhere do, and some teachers teach. Again, after going in circles for weeks, I got somewhere fast in a short time.
