Making the complex seem simple
Cows in Norway, not even trying that hard. (Image by Arne Nyaas)
Glance at these letters for a moment.
IXW ZDA RSN TRV NCL
How much can you immediately recall? Ugh, my brain hurts just thinking about it.
Now try the same thing with this set of letters:
JFK USA FBI CIA NYC
This time, you can probably recite the whole sequence painlessly after just a glance. Why? Instead of being just random letters, there is a meaning you can assign to each set of three. Instead of fifteen ugly letters, you have five familiar concepts.
Below is an excerpt from Grieg's Op. 17, No. 22 for piano, "So lokka me over den myra." If my Norweigan serves me, it's a folk song about a Scandinavian cowboy. If you do not read music well, it might look a little scary.
I counted thirty-five notes. Yikes! For years, I had to decode each one of those notes individually to be able to play a piece like this.
Luckily, in the summer after my sophomore year of high school, I had the opportunity to attend the annual Summer Youth Music School at the University of New Hampshire. There, in a stuffy dorm lounge on an afternoon in late July, Lisa Lemay taught me all about chords. Several classmates slumped over half asleep but I was rapt, taking detailed notes and hanging on every word. This was the secret to reading music! Finally.
After that, the Grieg looked like this to me:
In other words, it wasn't thirty-five notes anymore. It was two or three musical concepts that had meaning to me, just like JFK or USA.
In the blue boxes above, everything except the circled note is either G, B, or D. That is somewhat helpful in itself, but together, those three notes are the G major chord, which is like a musical word. D7 is another chord, composed of four different notes. The smaller orange box contains two D's which are shared by both the G chord and the D7 chord.
Even better, there is a relationship between G and D7 - each of these "words" has a meaning in the larger context of the musical piece. Since we're in the key of G, I would expect to see both of those chords, which means that the whole excerpt can, itself, be thought of as one concept. Together, the chords create a common chord progression (pattern) known as I - V7 - I. This is similar to the way words combine in expected ways to convey a concept (“It’s raining outside, and I forgot my umbrella.”)
Whether you read music or not, I hope I've illustrated that all this music theory is not so much "theory" as distinctly practical knowledge that immediately helps you to play music. And what seems complex is actually layers of relatively simple concepts.
When someone sits down at the piano and fluently reads a piece of music, it’s not magic, talent, or unusual intelligence. The musician is processing musical patterns and concepts, not rapidly decoding endless notes. It’s more like the mundane task of reading a book: We read without conscious awareness of the phonemes that make up the words we’re seeing.
When you understand that no special gifts are required, it opens the doors to learning and mastering all kinds of things that seem out of reach if you’ve never tried them. Processes that seem impossibly complex, from athletic feats to artistic endeavors to virtuosic pastry-making, begin to reveal the legible and learnable layers of skill and knowledge that underlie them. And these layers build on each other in a way that human brains are designed for, making the whole process much faster and more efficient than it seems if you’ve never done it.
It helps to have a guide along the way, but the most important ingredient is the conviction that you can do it. When you see that you have everything it takes, you can begin learning the first layer, trusting that you will get to the deeper ones in due course. It’s not going to be like memorizing a meaningless sequence of letters; you’re going to build concepts you can then build upon.
What you create will seem like magic to someone else, but you’ll know the secret. Once you do, share it!
Speaking of sharing knowledge and skills, I’m leading a free online guitar class next Thursday, April 23, at 7 PM EDT. The guitar class is designed for people who have learned a few chords but got stuck somewhere along the way and are looking for the next step. Click the button below if you’d like to join us.