I’ve been learning the piano for about 3 months now. When I first picked it up again I was very skeptical because I have a history of learning things at short intense bursts, before burning out. Also having observed myself for 4ish decades I don’t seem like a music or musical instrument kind of person. There is this subconscious belief that we have natural inclinations and yearnings towards things. I had actually learnt a few musical instruments as a child: the organ, the er-hu (chinese violin), the chinese flute. I thought if I like playing music it would have caught on by now.
Upon some deeper contemplation perhaps these days I like playing the piano not particularly because I like playing music, but rather the sense of progress of a very unfamiliar spectrum of skills. For most of my life I had always been living in my mind, as though my body didn’t exist. I loved the computer because it allowed me to express and exercise my mind with very minimal physical skills unless you count using the mouse. I liked activities like reading and writing, which also didn’t involve much use of the body. Hence when I deeply struggled when I was chronically sick, because I didn’t know what to do with myself when I couldn’t use my mind. It is as though my entire existence consists only of thoughts and words (and in my opinion this is a recipe for depression, at least for me).
Then I picked up running and strength-training, which had the opposite effect. They allowed me to stop using my mind so much. I developed a relationship with my body for the first time, and discovered so belatedly that the health of my mind actually relies so much on the health of my body.
Learning the piano is an exceptionally different experience for me because it requires both the mind and the body, as well as the marriage between the two. I guess we could almost say the same of drawing, except drawing didn’t require me to have strong flexible fingers. Unlike drawing (at least for the sort of rudimentary drawing I could do), it also requires me to develop:
- focus
- memory
- pattern recognition
- multi-tasking: playing while looking ahead at the score
- brain-eye-hand co-ordination
- interpretation skills: to look at a note and know what it means
- stronger fingers and flexibility: being able to repeatedly pound weighted keys while stretching them across at maximum
Currently I am on method 4e of Piano Marvel. It has gotten both progressively harder and also somewhat easier. Easier because my sight-reading has improved and I can spend less time recognising notes when I play a piece for the first time. Harder because it requires more technique.
These days I would start a new piece, try playing it and then think that it seems impossible for me to learn it. I would make so many mistakes, play so many wrong notes, my right hand can barely play the melody, much less play with the left. The tempo also feels insane: I can barely play it slowly, how am I supposed to play it at speed?
But somehow, as long as I am willing to play it very very terribly, somehow it would improve. Perhaps it would be only 3% right, but maybe the next attempt it would be 4% and so on. Sometimes there are sudden huge leaps in progression, which makes me marvel at how quickly the brain and body can learn. Then, slowly but surely, I would be able to play the song.
I think there are two major related factors at play for my progress. The most important factor is setting the intention to learn how to sight-read no matter what, no matter how stupid and slow it makes me feel. I once learnt somewhere that the difference between a polyglot and the average person is that the polyglot is willing to endure feeling stupid and embarrassed. The reality is learning a language for most people is always difficult at the beginning even for polyglots, but they put up with it as they know it is just part of the process. Then they actively practice it with other people even though it makes them sound terrible. Most people give up because they think learning languages is a natural talent, and even if they do learn it they can’t make themselves practice it. I mean, imagine constant stuttering and mistakes when conversing with a native speaker, and having to put up with a sense of frustration for both sides.
(People don’t realise how much emotional regulation influences learning progress. If there is any “in-born” talent at anything I feel emotional regulation would be it, in the sense that a lot of how we develop regulation skills is determined during early childhood and it is mostly taken out of our hands. We need emotional regulation skills to endure frustration etc.)
Because I wanted to learn how to sight-read, I picked Piano Marvel as an app to use. Its unique proposition is its focus on sight-reading. What I think it excels in, is the scaffolding. It really starts at the very beginning teaching us to recognise and play just one note. Then it adds one more, and so on. So we make small baby steps. What this gifts is a sense of progress that is actually attainable. It can contribute accumulatively to burnout if progress is too difficult to attain.
(Of course most people would recommend having an actual teacher but I have that type of personality that doesn’t do well with being taught. I do feel like there are people similar to me that will do better with an app instead of a human. I just *really* don’t enjoy being paced by other people. It is not like I want to become a professional musician or take a graded exam – I just want to play casually.)
Earlier on in my journey I tried to learn a song that was beyond my level. I did learn it eventually, but I played hundreds of attempts until both my wrists and fingers were sore, and I had pretty bad brain fog the next day. Only upon hindsight much later I realised it would have taken me 20% of the time and effort to learn the same song if I had waited till I was at the right level, because I would have already acquired the sight-reading ability, hand-coordination and finger flexibility required. I could have skipped all the brute-forcing and rote memorisation. Hence I stopped trying to skip steps or make dramatic jumps, and I went back to taking baby steps.
I think the concept of scaffolding is really demonstrated to me very clearly by Piano Marvel and it makes me think about learning in general. I think being a quick learner in some scenarios sabotaged me in others. Like I tend to have an inner-expectation of attaining some level of skill within a short-time so I never developed the skills or patience needed to learn something slowly in baby steps. Now, I am reminded again and again that scaffolding that supports sustainable attainable progress makes a dramatic difference.
I think living itself is a giant inter-connected learning experience. We not only learn skills, but we learn to be human, and we learn to become. Through learning something we are learning about the skill of learning itself. learning how to play the piano is changing how I think about myself. I was never a committed learner, in the sense I had traditionally found it difficult to put in the grunt work of learning. Something either made sense to me intuitively or not. This is probably the first time I am learning something so slowly and truly from scratch. It is humbling and yet inspiring. It makes me wonder what other experiences are now open to me, now that I have learnt to learn? That instead of desiring unrealistic giant leaps I possess the embodied experience of what it is like to experience attainable progress through baby steps. What other baby steps I can make?
