‘Look at the order in which you do things’Īn excellent suggestion! If your practise sessions always follow the same pattern – warming up with scales and exercises, perhaps, before moving on to work on pieces – try mixing things up a bit. See them in a positive light – we can always learn from mistakes – and take action to ensure they do not reoccur. Never ignore mistakes: consider why they happened and how they can be resolved. So make each repetition count: listen, look, think, consider, so that each subsequent repetition has value.Īn obvious and useful aphorism.
But practising the same phrase or section over and over again, 20, 50, perhaps 100 times, can be dull and unsatisfying. Repetition is what trains the muscular memory (what psychologists call “procedural memory”, since in reality our muscles do not retain a memory of movement). So, we all know that repetitive practise is the activity which fixes music in head, hands, eyes and ears. These are my own responses to the cards, and are simply suggestions and perhaps an inspiration to others to try this approach. I have taken just a few Oblique Strategies and considered how they might be used in day-to-day practising, and also in preparation for performance. It is a fact universally acknowledged that if our practising becomes monotonous, unthinking, uncreative and boring, it will not be productive. It also struck me while listening to the radio programme that Oblique Strategies Cards could be used in practising to help enliven practising or shine a new light on an issue which may have been causing one problems, or just to help one think and act more creatively during practise. In the radio programme, Simon Armitage spoke to Carlos Alomar (guitarist on those Bowie albums) as well as music journalist Paul Morley and chef Ian Knauer who use these cards, and during the course of the interviews with various creative people, it became clear that these brief gnomic aphorisms, selected randomly, can bring new or unexpected ways of thinking to seemingly intractable problems and difficulties, not just those encountered during creative processes such as writing, composing or painting/making art, but also in every day life. The cards were most famously employed by Brian Eno during the recording of David Bowie’s Berlin triptych Low, “Heroes” and Lodger in the 1970s. (Source: Wikipedia)Įarlier this week I heard an interesting programme on BBC Radio 4 in which the poet Simon Armitage set out to discover more about the Oblique Strategies cards, their origins and how they are used. Each card offers an aphorism intended to help artists (particularly musicians) break creative blocks by encouraging lateral thinking. Oblique Strategies (subtitled Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas) is a deck of 7 by 9 centimetres (2.8 in × 3.5 in) printed cards in a black container box, created by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt and first published in 1975.
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