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The immediate tangible rewards populating the process of musical practice
Music practice brings an instant, tangible reward for properly smoothing out the creases that come up during our learning process.
It is an self-sufficient reward that, once gained, can fulfill itself endlessly, because you’ll be able to perform that particular piece whenever you desire.
Furthermore, if you push to become intimately familiar with it, all the nooks and crannies, you will have the capacity to play around with it, develop other variations, derivations, interpretations, inspirations from its solid fundaments (tried and true fundaments, as you learned that piece because it was emotionally satisfying and stimulating to perform).
Music is a gift that readily offers that intrinsic satisfaction. And it also represents an inexorably honest feedback-giving experience. Every time we test our mastery of a particular piece, passage, technique, etc. on our instrument, every single mistake will be all too noticeable. We cannot escape from it nor explain ourselves out of it.
This is just as true when we are playing jazz or other flexible kinds of music-making. While we can repurpose mistakes by framing them through musical manoeuvres that compatibly integrate them back into the bigger picture of the piece (reharmonisations, opening and closing a new motif, circling back to creative cadences, law of contrasts, and so on), every one of these efforts will expose its own mistakes if not performed with finesse. In any case, regardless of how deftly we executed our musical manoeuvre, the piece will continue and we will get to the end, even to a more or less satisfactory result, but the mistake can always be pinpointed and cannot be erased.
A pure analogy for the path of learning itself
Because music offers this perfect feedback-giving experience, when we practice it we are also experiencing a pure version of the act of learning itself.
First of all, if one actually enjoys music, the reward system that music practice offers is thoroughly satisfying: if we smooth out all the creases and understand them inside out, we will become masters of a small, low resource, self-contained vehicle of concentrated pleasure —i.e., a musical piece—. Second, as I stated before, each problem that we encounter is objectively a problem. We cannot get away without properly addressing it. Thus, how we choose to address these points of failure and what happens while we do so potentially becomes a generalised lesson for the learning process. If we properly digest how to address problems that arise in our learning process in a self-directed manner, we will be able to extrapolate this process to other instances of learning driven purely by self-initiated problem-solving.
Points of failures as anchors: an examination of a particular instance of musical learning.
For example, we can become more aware of the unexpected benefits contained within failure points. They can indeed be used as anchors for accelerating the process of mastering a piece.
Consider this: we can play most parts of a particular piece, except for a few points of failure where we always become more tense, and clumsily play through, making a few key mistakes along the way. So we choose to concentrate on one of those passages that presents a couple points of failure.
What we do is exert exclusive, deliberate concentration on these points of failure. We set our minds to pay attention only to them, sustaining in our heads what exactly is that we need to remember next time we test the passage, so that we do not trip over those failure points. Meanwhile, to alleviate our brain’s capacity, we allow the somewhat mastered parts —or the easier parts— to flow without much thought. We trust that we have integrated these enough, that our muscle memory and our thorough familiarity with them will take care of it.
What happens is that as we concentrate on fixing these failure points, we will also notice how portions of what we left to flow intuitively begin to unravel. We realise that we need to give them at least a bit more thought, as tiny cracks become apparent, signaling that we weren’t as thoroughly familiar with them as we thought.
What is all the more encouraging is that if we hadn’t struggled with these points of failure and thus needed to focus on them, we might not have identified these tiny cracks, because we would have been confident enough to play the piece without having to zoom into its nooks and crannies with such meticulousness. The implication is that these pesky failure points open a window for improving our musicianship, that is, our understanding and mastery of the structural foundations that make the piece work. We are indeed being forced to consciously analyse each detail as it emerges in our automatic playing of what we had thought were mastered passages.
Conclusion: organically choosing our focal points within small learning cycles
The great overarching lesson of this example is that we can deliberately master something organically. By organic, I simply mean that as we progress through our learning, we chiefly address problems as they arise from project to project. By analogy, the musical piece equates to that project: it represents a small learning cycle within the larger timeline of our journey to greater musicianship. This shorter-term goal of mastering this particular piece is what defines what problems we are going to address now — just like the particular problematic passage, they are problems organic to the piece itself, they might not provide us with musical knowledge that might be more relevant for our general musicianship, but they are essential for this particular piece.
In fact, with an organic learning process, we are aiming at various synergically connected destinations: we want to improve our musicianship but we also want to be able to perform something for others and obtain that rewarding satisfaction of doing so. It is a self-feeding mechanism between motivation and arduous improvement.
All the while, when we are confident that these tricky bumps have been flattened, every other part is improved. This is because, now facing the sight of a smooth road stretching to the horizon, all other passages will confidently, fearlessly dance towards their destination. We will find ourselves in that glorious zone of expressive freedom within the piece. Within these formal confines, as we perform the piece, we can decide how it will channel our emotional impulses in the most satisfying way.
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