Exploring ambiguity
You can see anything in the fog — you just have to get closer to it.
When people study music, they are often taught to read notes at the same time as they are learning their instrument.
Thus, is possible to play zillions of musical pieces in this way without ever actually learning how music works. You just play what’s in front of you without ever having to think about it.
If you want to learn the hidden architecture of music, the easiest way to do it is to get rid of the printed sheet music and start learning songs by ear, beginning with songs that follow a very simple melodic or harmonic structure.
This challenges you to get inside the mind of the composer, recreating the song from its component parts. When you do this, you will begin to hear and see patterns that will allow you to decode ever more complex musical pieces.
To demonstrate this, we’re going to take a look at one of the great masterpieces of American music: “Memphis, Tennessee” by Chuck Berry. It’s deceptively simple, delivering an unexpected emotional wallop at a key moment. The story makes me cry every time, yet the harmony consists of only two chords.
A chord is basically just a group of notes. It gives color to the music. Whenever you switch to a different chord, you create a different color. We learn to identify these colors aurally through trial and error, and then we can play songs by ear.
Instead of playing the full chord, we’re going to just play one note. The root note of a chord, its lowest note, is so powerful that, especially when played in a low range, it can suggest the entire chord.
So you’ll need just two notes: Gb and Db. If you’re at the piano, you’ll put your left pinky on Gb (the leftmost note of the 3-black-key group) and your left thumb on Db (the leftmost note of the 2-black-key group). On the guitar, Gb is found on the lowest (6th) string at the second fret, and Db is on the 5th string, 4th fret. You could also pull up GarageBand on an iPad.
On the recording, there’s a lot going on. But all we have to worry about is our two notes. When the song begins, you’ll play Gb (by the way, the recording happens to not be perfectly in tune). When Chuck begins singing, you’ll switch to Db. Then, your job is to figure out where to switch back as the song moves forward.
In other words, you’re trying to hear (and feel) when the “color” changes. The relationship between these two chords is the backbone of Western music. The Gb chord represents the I (the “one,” also called the tonic), and the Db chord represents the V (the “five,” also called the dominant). From there, we build.
I could write up a whole chart to show you exactly when to switch chords. But that would just be a shortcut to playing this particular song. It wouldn’t help you to learn to see the underlying structure for yourself. Instead, I’ve given you a puzzle that has drastically reduced the variables. This means that whenever you get it wrong, you can quickly get it right. You’ve always got a fifty-fifty shot. You can find your way through that maze without a huge amount of frustration. Enjoying that sense of accomplishment, you’ll be ready for the next puzzle.
However, you can also play the song again and get better at it. You can play it enough times that you start to be able to predict when the chord changes come. Eventually, you’ll see the patterns and be able to make your own chart.
When we’re learning, a lot of us like to eliminate ambiguity and unpredictability. We like to get an A and move on, never repeating, rereading, revisiting, reviewing. But the opportunity for growth is often in the moments where we don’t have quite enough information to be certain about something. We have to hypothesize or even guess. We have to try stuff and get it wrong.
Like feeling our way through a dark room, we slowly gather the data to discern our surroundings and make inferences. This is a rich experience that gives us a lot more feedback than if we were painstakingly guided by someone else and prevented from bumping into anything.
It definitely helps to have a guide to help you choose appropriate challenges and structure the “puzzles” for you. But it’s best if your guide then lets you explore the terrain for yourself. You will learn faster, and you’ll be more confident in what you learn.
You can use the ideas in this post to learn how to play music by ear — but you can also use them to learn anything else. All you need is a willingness to deviate from the established map and into the unknown. Be sure to come back and tell us what you discovered.
