On the Nature of Learning
Stanley Jordan is one of the finest musicians on the planet. His playing is nothing short of enthralling. Every time I see him my heart is squeezed, my mind is blown and my jaw gets effectively stapled to the floor. In 2012 I took a class with him geared towards musicians of any level in which he shared insights on becoming a better practicer and overall better musician. There was a 7 point system and plenty of other material that I don't want to plagiarize, but a single concept cut through the fold, and straight to the heart of one of the great insights of educational psychology.
Please see Stanley shredding
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzHSJSJ_ias
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ruEkWMtdM8
And sharing his secrets:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWwWnMdRNdw
The insight from the class begins with the understanding of an inverse relationship between the ease of a task and excellence at completing the task. That is to say, certain tasks are sufficiently easy that you would complete them with profound excellence. Other tasks are in the middle, meaning they are challenging but surmountable. Still others are difficult enough that you simply can't do them.
1. For the easy category let's use the example of brushing our teeth. We are usually in something of a brain-dead trance, conjuring only a few random musings of the ilk: "Shit, I totally forgot to ____ today." This task is so easy it's mind-numbing, and it takes a freak accident to mess it up.
2. For the middle-ground, you need to imagine a task that is challenging, but surmountable. Driving to a new place. Even with modern GPS it's sometimes easy to make a wrong turn. With a little focus we always get there, even if it includes a mistake. This task is surmountable but nearly guaranteed to include mistakes.
3. For most, a great example of the impossible is dunking a basketball. I just can't do it, it's too tall for me.
OK, so we have enumerated 3 different relationships between ease and success. Before I'm accused of donning the costume of Captain Obvious, allow me to prod your intuitions about the nature of 'good learning.'
Most people believe that good learning happens in category 2 - the middle ground. When tasks are challenging, you're making some mistakes but you succeed through struggles, and this is how you learn. Great learning is presumed to happen in category 3 - the monumental task. If a person takes on and overcomes a monumental challenge, they will have learned and grown in a profound way.
This may be true of categories 2 and 3, however, it is a massive oversight. Indeed, nothing could be further from the truth of modern educational psychology and how brains learn best. I will opine about the fabulously misunderstood field of Ed Psych in future blog posts, but this point can be driven home with good old common sense.
The best learning actually happens in category 1 - when the task is easy, and you are awesome at it. This is when the brain is firing on all cylinders, and highest degree of information retention is happening. And what is learning if not information retention?
This is an uncontroversial, and even obvious fact. Consider the common proclamations "That's easy!" and "wow, that's hard!" They are literally synonymous with "I totally get it" and "I don't get it yet." They are thus explicit statements of your understanding.
Let's take a moment to revisit our analogies and then map them directly onto musical endeavors. In reverse order, for catharsis' sake.
3. Dunking a basketball. If I wanted to be able to do this, it would obviously be inefficient to just keep trying. I might eventually get it, but it would take somewhere on the order of 10,000 tries. And therein lies the rub. We musicians keep getting caught up in the loop of repeating difficult passages over and over as if by the 100th time it is supposed to come out right. What we are in fact doing is getting exceptional at being sloppy and frustrated. If I wanted to dunk a basketball, I'd have to spend a lot of time losing weight, doing squats, and extending my jump height. Please take a moment to notice that accomplishing my goal requires a great deal of time that has nothing to do with a ball or a hoop.
Map this analogy to music and we are discussing a sonata or transcription that is way out of your league. You can't play this repertoire without knowing your scales and chords so practice those instead. Trying Beethoven's Pathetique Sonata? Learn your Eb scale, and primary chords in C minor first. If you don't know them, you're sunk anyway.
2. Driving to a new place. For this, you already have the necessary knowledge, but a little foresight goes a long way. Look at the map before you go and you'll not only make it without incident but get to avoid some traffic too.
Bringing it back to music, we're talking about a current song in your method book. It includes some new concepts and if you just rip into it, you'll have to stop frequently to fix small errors. Stumbling through the whole thing will not commit very much of it to memory, though. And yet all musicians are guilty of stumbling through whole pieces of music "just to get the idea." Sure you got the idea, but you also got lots of wrong ideas. Observe the map before you leave the driveway. Check key and time signatures, spell out chords, play once through difficult passages, or better yet simply resolve to learn the piece one phrase at a time. Or better yet, resolve to learn it one note at a time. This seems stupid and tedious but I challenge you to try it once. If you do it right, you'll only have to learn the piece once and it all happens a lot quicker than you'd imagine. Time it if you doubt me, and if you do, let me know how it goes!
1. Brushing your teeth. It'd take a mighty blunder to screw this one up. This task is so easy that it is handled subconsciously, and your mind is free to wonder about the rest of the day. It bears repeating: the task is so well-learned that it is committed to subconscious memory and your conscious mind is free to focus on higher-level tasks. This is the very definition of being "in-the-zone."
In music, this refers to an old song that we already know or a new one that we are quite capable of sight-reading. For those of us (myself the worst of all) who have complained about sight-reading over the years, this is why it is asked on auditions and adjudicated events. It is a genuine window into your musical fluency. No one cares if you can practice for hours and make it sound fine because everyone can do that, just like no one cares if you can finally understand a line of Shakespeare after reading it 50 times in a row. We ARE impressed if you can make us understand Shakespeare just by how you articulate it when you read it to us. Musicians ARE impressed when you can make a beautiful phrase out of a brand new line of music.
Conclusion and an anecdote:
Committing both the surface-level and deeper meanings of music to subconscious memory is the endeavor of music education. It must be so, or we haven't truly learned it, and we will never be able to perform it. If we want to bury this information in our minds this way, we need to practice so that the passage is easy and we kick it's ass. This is when the best learning happens. On new material, 99% of the time we just need to slow down or do less to make it easier. But we are all bad at this because of our inherited psychology. Thus the great majority of our practice should be spent playing old songs that we love. Enjoying our practice and making it ever more expressive is motivating and it is the most important part of the musical language to develop. Parents, please stop scolding your kids for playing that same old song, and teachers stop cramming rep that's too hard down their throats. Play your Arban book, but mostly just enjoy the hell out of playing Star Wars. You'll become more expressive, and you'll actually come back for another round of practice willingly.
You can't focus on playing expressively if you're too worried about the damn sharps and flats. As my teacher John Raschella often said, "Knowing the notes is the bare minimum requirement for being prepared for a lesson." I even got tossed out once or twice for being unprepared, and I am grateful for the hard-learned lesson.
Imagine, then, how well-prepared one must be for a performance. You must know the piece as well as you know how to beat your own heart. In a guarded corner of your mind it lies, untouchable and unmistakeable. You put it on autopilot and devote your conscious mind to drawing every last drop of blood out of Mozart's heart, which he so kindly penned for you to bear witness. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-m2haPvoHk
