Thursday, June 8th - 10:00 pm
Kevin Eisensmith, Donald Robertson - Scratch Pads and Pop-ups: A Cognitive
Neville Young, reporter
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ITG Secretary Kevin Eisensmith
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Kevin Eisensmith, trumpet professor from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, was joined for this lecture by his colleague and co-presenter Donald Robertson. Robertson is not only a professor of psychology at IUP but also a trumpet student of Eisensmith's so they made the perfect pair for a lecture on this interesting, nay worrying, topic.
To start their lively talk the presenters played a duet while over the loudspeakers we heard their “thoughts.” Eisensmith seemed to be pretty cool, as befits a pro, but I felt for poor Robertson as his taped voice enumerated, with rising levels of frequency, volume and anxiety, all the things that were worrying him in this performance. As well as being entertaining this little act was a good demonstration of the kind of thing that many of us, apparently, have going on while we are trying to play: being privy to Robertson's private thoughts made you wonder how he'd managed to get through the duet at all and it is this, of course, that the talk aimed to address. It's beyond the scope of this report to give you the full story on every nuance in this extensive lecture but perhaps an overview will whet your appetite to research the area further.
The talk explained - with a lot of useful and interesting background - the idea that we only have a certain amount of space to process instructions: this working
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Donald Robertson
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memory, the “Scratch Pad” of the title, is where the current set of instructions reside. This applies to playing the trumpet as much as for other activities. When anxiety strikes it has a nasty habit of getting its own agenda onto the scratch pad - it “pops up” there and can get into conflict with the stuff you ought to be dealing with, or even push it right out of the way. And because anxiety works as a positive feedback system it doesn't self-limit but just gets worse and worse: since our nervous system is set up to deal with caveman-style fight-or-flight stuff it doesn't understand why we are still standing there trying to play the trumpet when its own logic says we should by now have run away or hit someone with a club. Eisensmith and Robertson went on to discuss how anxiety affects us and what we can do to limit its effects, talking about methods for increasing the attention paid to the things we need to worry about, and minimizing the effects of the pesky stuff that causes us grief. If we work towards developing a “Teflon Mind” we can try to make sure that the irrelevant concerns just slide off without causing harm. We were even given a brief introduction to a meditation technique which not only made me feel distinctly more relaxed but also provided the unusual spectacle of a whole room full of trumpet players being perfectly quiet for a couple of minutes.
This talk was fascinating, well organized, and informative. I am putting its ideas into practice immediately; if you get the opportunity to see Robertson and Eisensmith in action please go along to this talk and see and hear for yourself.
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