WORKS / PAPERS
Music • Brain • Performance
These works combine more than three decades of professional artistic experience with ongoing independent research in music cognition, memorization, performance psychology, mental practice, irregular meters and artistic creativity.
This essay argues that true mastery of asymmetric meters (understanding, feeling and navigating) — 7/8, 9/8, 11/8, and their polyphonic extensions — cannot be achieved through notation-based analysis alone.
It requires four interdependent, biologically grounded pillars: (A) active listening immersion, (B) percussion/rhythmic instrument training, (C) rhythmic solfège with simultaneous multi-limb execution, and (D) embodied movement synchronized to the pulse. Each pillar corresponds to a well-documented neural mechanism.
Contemporary cognitive neuroscience confirms what many world music traditions have long understood: rhythm is a whole-body affair, encoded not merely in auditory cortex but across a distributed sensorimotor network spanning premotor cortex, supplementary motor area, basal ganglia, and cerebellum.
The three moments are specific practices I have discovered over time that helped me stay open and creative during practice. I’ve also heard from other players—some quite famous—that they had similar experiences in their practicing time, when new melodies and ideas came to them unexpectedly.
The difference is: most musicians let these moments pass unnoticed.
I learned to recognize them, capture them, and systematically cultivate them.
Music is like an ocean with endless ideas. The ocean is always offering gifts. But if we’re too closed, too focused only on our technical agenda, we swim past these gifts without even seeing them.
We need to dive in, be present – be open. Let me show you how to stay open.
For over thirty years, I’ve maintained what many might consider an unusual practice routine for a bass player: alongside my physical practice with the instrument, I’ve dedicated some time to mental rehearsal, focused meditation, and visualization techniques.
When I began this approach in the early 1990s as a young music student, I had no scientific validation—only the empirical observation that it dramatically improved my learning speed, performance confidence, and creative output.
Today, neuroscience research has caught up with what dedicated practitioners have known for centuries: the brain doesn’t distinguish between vividly imagined practice and physical practice when it comes to building neural pathways.