Muscle Memory

Muscle memory in memorizing music: A musician "feels" the music through his fingers. She feels the music, physically and emotionally. Our personal feeling comes through. Each musician has her own unique personal "touch", so, because of this, we can recognize the player when we hear someone playing a tune even before we see them or hear the name. We can identify their personality, their touch, their own musical fingerprint in the music they play. When I listened to the radio, sometimes I could identify who was playing a new tune by the "touch" of the musician. That can happen with any instrument: piano, fiddle, whistle, bagpipes, flute. Like my violin teacher said, what we "feel" also besides our emotions coming thru in the music we play, is how it "feels" to our hands and fingers. When it's right it feels right. Muscle memory makes our fingers remember the shapes and space measurements between fingers. Our brain and finger muscles have been trained. When I play a concert at the Artsgarden, sometimes, I get "in the zone" and my hands seem to move independently from me. I look down at my hands playing keyboard and it looks like anyway I'd place them would be right, like, it doesn't matter where I place them. It was surreal! I was like floating above the keyboard looking down at what was going on!