Creating Memories: A Cartography of Musical Learning

Abstract

When a newly written score comes to a musician there may be different learning strategies the performer must employ. With no recordings to influence, no performance tradition passed through generations of teachers to respect and draw on, the performer must rely on their experience and embodied knowledge at the time of learning, as I did in learning James Rushford’s solo work for viola Untitled (2012). This landmark work in Australian viola repertoire confronts the performer with extreme challenges rarely or never seen before in viola repertoire. I premiered this work in 2013 and have subsequently performed it three times and am now preparing the work for recording. This chapter presents the wrestle of the creative and analytical minds that occurs when becoming the conscious autoethnographer, and seeks to encourage the conversation that conscious autoethnography has in personal practice to create meaningful outcomes and its potential for further development and growth.