The bakers urge you: don’t slice into the warm bread. (The baking teacher at Zingerman’s has strong words for you.) But who can resist that warm, rich, bready deliciousness?
(Well, I learned to – and I learned to bake my bread when no one else is around, so it gets a fair shot to cool first, most of the time.)
There are so many things that, like bread, benefit from waiting a little longer than you want to to dig in.
And I think it’s really true of music, so often – we want to perform it literally the minute we’ve got it learned. (Or, vice versa, we want to memorize it literally a minute before the performance.)
The music will develop more character, more flavor, if we can just let it develop a little longer. Like bread, we need to give it time to cool down after it’s finished baking.
What can you do to build in that rest time between learning music and performing it?