How Should We Go About Learning Music?

I’ve had a number of conversations recently with people about different approaches to learning music. You won’t be surprised to hear that it’s a question that has multiple right answers, though the different approaches confer different advantages and so may prove more or less useful in different circumstances, and I’ve been finding it useful to reflect on these differences, both for my own benefit, and for the various other musicians I find myself supporting.

Start at the beginning

This is a classic approach for a reason. Learning the music in the same order that an audience will listen to it has an intuitive logic because your learning experience follows the same narrative journey that you will eventually be sharing with others. It is easier to make sense of the music when you encounter each musical event in its proper temporal sequence, and it is easier to internalise (and memorise if that’s your genre expectation) if you have this sequential structure in place from the get-go.

Start at the end and work backwards

The opposite way round is also a great approach, especially where the music has a strong sense of forward motion or narrative trajectory. If the first bit you learn is actually the last bit you’ll perform, you always know where you’re headed, and this give s a great sense of momentum to a performance. And since you’ll have known the later stages of the piece for longer than the earlier, you’ll perform them more fluently, so this approach avoids the problem of getting bogged down as you go along through difficulties with either technical or cognitive stamina.

Learn the tricky bits first

Many pieces of music have one or two specific technical or musical challenges, and it can be a useful strategy to target these from the get-go of your learning. This is partly psychological. It gives you much more confidence in learning the rest of it to know you’ve got the challenging bits sorted, and avoids the dispiriting experience of having a piece almost learned except for a couple of stubborn bits that keep it from being performance-ready. From a practical perspective it means you get more practice time on the bits that need the most practice.

Learn the easy bits first

This is a strategy that is particularly useful for relative novices. If you don’t have very much experience just yet, developing your skills with simpler material allows you to get a handle on the physical processes of producing and controlling sound and means you’ll be encountering the more challenging bits with more experience under your belt and thus both more confidence and more cognitive capacity to tackle them when you’re not having to focus so much on the nuts and bolts of operating your instrument (whether that instrument is a separate bit of kit, or your own body).

Learn the whole piece at once

When dealing with shorter pieces of music (relative to the norms of your genre and experience) that are technically and musically well within your grasp, it makes sense to work on the whole piece from the get-go. There will inevitably be bits that need more attention than others, but you’ll identify these sooner with a whole-piece approach, and your concept of the overall structure and emotional shape will be stronger for having engaged with the whole from the start.

Learn it a section at a time

Longer and/or more demanding music needs breaking down into smaller chunks to give your brain space to absorb each bit without getting overwhelmed. Trying to cover too much at once is a good way to practice in mistakes and/or inadequate technique, which then takes an annoying amount of work to undo later.

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These approaches apply both to individual practice and the rehearsal strategies of ensembles. Obviously if you are in an ensemble, the approach the group as a whole takes will shape your overall experience, though you might also choose to take a consciously different strategy when by yourself if you feel it matches your particular needs at the time.

And of course the important bit is that you do spend time learning music between rehearsals. The problem with relying on the rehearsal time for all your learning is not just that you find yourself holding back other people who have done individual work, it’s that rehearsals are usually spaced at intervals just long enough to forget most of what you did between them, As my friend Drew Osterhout put it: a lot of the point of individual practice time is to interrupt the process of forgetting.