Discrete Skills

We work in interlocking skills in performing ensembles. What about discrete skills?

Performing a piece requires to simultaneously focus on vowel, tone, pitch, balance, diction, phrasing, drama, and about a dozen other things. All of them. At once. These are interlocking skills if we want to be successful.

But skills are best learned as separate components before we put them together. We’d do well to focus on discrete skills, as we do in academic classes, including academic music classes. First you learn to add one digit numbers, and practice just that. Then you learn to subtract, then multiply, then add two-digit numbers, then ……

When we’ve built all the separate skills, it’s a whole lot easier to put them together in performance.