PALINDROMIC KEYBOARD
To avoid straining up for high notes, and pushing down into low notes, create a palindromic keyboard.
Imagine all the notes of the universe laid out horizontally in front of you, on one keyboard spread out to your right, and a mirror image keyboard spread out to your left. As you learn a song, play it with both hands mirroring each other on the 2 keyboards. Lower notes are close in. Higher notes are farther out, which corresponds to the arms and rib cage spreading to make more room for the higher notes.
This also helps to get pitch references of how to get from the end of one phrase to the beginning of the next. For example, the palindromic keyboard might help you realize that the note you ended a phrase on, is the same note that the next phrase begins on.
You don’t have to know anything about music theory or reading music to utilize the palindromic keyboard to quickly and easily learn a melody.
POLYCHOTIC LISTENING
from percussionist David Pleasants
Listening to more than one element at a time. Like percussionists in a West African drum ensemble, playing their own rhythm, while being part of the over arching rhythm.
For singers,
1) listening to your own voice’s melody, rhythm, words, timbre…
2) listening to how your voice blends in unison with other singers on your part
3) listening across the circle to singers on other parts
4) listening to the Whole – how it all fits together
Like a Braid – hearing separate voices (hairs), groups (strands), whole (braid).
MAGIC MOMENT * EL MOMENTO MAGICO * LE MOMENT MAGIQUE
Before we begin singing, we can already hear the music in the air. As you breathe in to begin a song, listen for the resonance of the music already vibrating.
When a song is finished, allow it to continue to vibrate and resonate in your body and the air around you, letting it settle, before talking or clapping or moving on to whatever is next.
SLEEP ON IT
During our waking hours, our brains are busy with Beta waves zipping and zinging along. When we sleep, the busy Beta waves take a rest, and the information we take in, has a chance to sink deeper into the Alpha and Gamma waves. Thus when we wake up, information we took in the previous day is more firmly lodged in our memory and knowledge.
It is why we encourage students, instead of cramming for test, study well the night before, and then get a good night’s rest. And it is why we seem to miraculously know a song a million times better the day after we learn it, after a good night’s rest.
THE GOLDEN THREAD ATTACHED TO THE UNIVERSE
from t’ai chi
Imagine a golden thread connected from the crown of your head up into the sky. The thread is connected to the pearls of your spine. Between the pearls there are cushions of air. As the thread connects to the universe, the body elongates and relaxes becoming ever more spacious and fluid.
BUBBLING WELL (K-1 POINT)
from t’ai chi
On the bottom of your feet, just below the ball, is an acupressure point where all the meridians come together. From that point, you can open down into the earth, feeling the energy flowing down the body and into the earth, and coming up from the earth into the body.
LAOGUNG – PALM OF YOUR HAND
from t’ai chi
The palms of the hands have powerful energy, as in “the laying on of hands.”
Rubbing the palms together creates powerful energy, and you can move energy through the body via the laogung (palms).