The Three Fates

There's something I wanted to mention briefly and it concerns the performer's awareness of musical time which is obviously different from that of the listener. I know - the performer is a listener too but the listener isn't a performer, at least not in the same way as I might be if I'm playing a concert to people.

It's this. When I'm playing a pre-composed piece that I've committed to memory or am reading from a score, say a classical study, or a piece I know by heart, my attention is on the present and the future, broadly speaking. I don't think much about what's just happened, unless I've made a complete horse's arse of a section but that requires the application of experience and diligence to ignore. If I'm improvising with little more than a few abstract ideas or even less, my attention will roam between past, present and future. I need to have in mind what I've just done to make some kind of musical sense (yes, I still believe in that) as I go forward through time. I also need to be aware of what I'm actually playing and I have to attention on what's to come. How this works is complex. Maybe it's something like what computers do when they're multithreading.