Date of Award

Spring 2019

Document Type

Open Access Thesis

Department

Art

First Advisor

Scott Price

Abstract

Mental practice has been discussed among piano pedagogues from the nineteenth century until the present. Over time, many terms have been used to describe different kinds of mental practice. This variety can make it challenging for the independent teacher to consolidate the information and effectively apply mental practice to the private lesson. For this reason, a codification of the terms associated with mental practice is presented in this thesis. Terms are classified into four groups: Visualization (kinesthetic imagery and musical imagery), Aural (aural imagery and audiation), Psychological (mental wellness and guided imagery), and Hybrid (practice away from the piano and score study) techniques. These codified terms are then used to understand and organize mental practice studies and techniques occurring in other career fields, such as psychology, engineering, rehabilitation, medicine, business, sports, design, dance, and conducting. This resource provides direct applications from the findings of other fields to piano pedagogy, and will help inform further research so that studies can be conducted in more specialized and focused ways, leading to more piano-specific, transferable, and empirical conclusions.

Rights

© 2019, Anna Beth Rucker

Included in

Music Commons

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