TeledyN

Surely I've done 10,000 hours practice? I achieved a standard necessary to play professionally at the top level. Over the years I've been diligent about my practice and assumed that I'd met 10,000 hours. However upon further investigation the reality proved to be a little different.

I did some calculations from memory on the practice and playing that I did between the ages of 11 (when I started playing) and 22 when I was playing at a professional level regularly - around a 10 year time span. I've estimated how many hours I spent practising, playing in groups, having lessons and other associated activities and learning over the given time period.

The Results

You'll notice that I've made a distinction between 'practice' and 'deliberate practice'. The 10,000 hour rule requires deliberate practice, the type that has aims, concentration and results. You'll notice as a beginner I did equal amounts of unproductive and productive practice. As I developed I did increasing amounts of deliberate practice.

It may not be obvious from the graph but my total amount of deliberate practice over the period was in fact only around 5,000 hours - half of what is required to become an 'expert'. Whilst I'm probably over the 10,000 hour mark now I was very surprised to find that I'd done so little.

That's not to say I did not do a lot of playing. If you add in other playing, rehearsals and the like the total becomes nearly 13,000 hours over the 10 year period. Some of these other activities undoubtedly contributed towards my development, despite not being deliberate practice.

Another factor which may not have been considered is the impact of directed learning - lessons. Over the same time period I received 2,500 hours of instrumental and musical tuition. I shall need to re-read the Ericsson study to see if it takes account of external factors such as lessons and group activities.

What does it mean?

So my total musical hours over the 10 years is around 15,500. To put that in some context; the majority of these were during college/university years. During these 6 years I was, on average, musically engaged for 5 hours every single day. 365 days a year for 6 years. This doesn't account for holidays, breaks, illness etc.

It makes you think doesn't it. To get to 10,000 hours is a huge commitment which you'll need to make over probably 15 or more years, day in day out. That's tough. It's also why most people don't make it

What brought this to mind was another item, a video posted by a net friend showing school kids dutifully holding up sound-bite phrases given to them by the marketeers of the New Image Of Childhood and what got me was the frightful resonance in the bite-card that claimed

By the time they graduate, the average child will have spent 10,000 hours playing video games

I kind of blew up at my kids the other day, directed at one more than the other but the other got drawn in, and while we do make a concerted effort to ensure that our kids will not be in the ranks of the 'professional-level' stupid-game players, what sparked my rant was one of them refusing to play a piece of music because ... because ... because it went one semi-tone above his comfort range. I lost it, but tried to be so absurd and animated as to be comic: in a video game you pilot a puppet, a dolly, a pre-school toy pushed around a maze, and oh look golly by gee aren't I amazing? ... I actually picked up a cup. Wow. What skill, what dexterity, what an evolutionary advance for the human species, I can make a doll pick up a cup, or a gun, or spit phlegm at another doll. Even the 'puzzles' in these essentially identical D&D style MUD-room games are not clever deductions, not even on par with second-guessing a 3rd rate mystery novel. They are baby toys and we are creating an entire generation with a professional level of experience not in building them, but in operating them. No species is going to gain the edge in the ecology for having a particularly well-developed thumb, Tom Robbins notwithstanding. To waste the learn-hungry capacity of the young brain on such tripe, however profitable it may be to the vendors, is essentially and practically criminal. We probably deserve extinction for that fact alone.

Which brings me to the above, to his observation that it was between the ages of 10 and 22, the 'school-age' years, where he gained the bulk of the experience that would later show as the competent musician. So far so good, but then he surmisses that there was a particular form of disciplined practice that was requisite so as to make the climb difficult and it was, he says, that very feature of the drudgery that eliminated the vast majority, the majority who apparently then slid into the much easier world of constant Skinner-Box reinforcement for dexterity at pushing phlegm-spitting dollys around a hamster-trail VR world.

I would challenge only one aspect of that: we are all experts at our native tongue, and yet we spent virtually none of our formative years in language engaged in 'deliberate practice'! Quite the opposite: we learned to speak by playing with others, by playing with experts, and playing with experts who were welcoming and forgiving of our baby talk, who even emulated our mistakes so as to draw us in and encourage us to keep at it, because they knew, and they knew we would come to know, that a proficiency in this thing we called langauge was something valuable to know. It has ecological validity, it gives you the edge in the ecosystem. Most parents will tell you that once you get the first concept of the power of the word into the young mind, once they start with mama or bottle or dada or whatever, the problem is not getting their children to learn new modes of expression, but getting them to stop.

And remarkably, using that natural method of acquiring the new language beyond grunts and cries, how long does it take baby to learn a proficiency? Precious little. And what is the difference?

The difference is in the reason, in that first word and the power it brings, in the self-realized recognition that this thing, this simple utterance, gets you where you want to go and from there, well, evolution has created this creature that, once it knows where it wants to go, has an astounding propensity and cleverness to get itself there. That cleverness is what draws it into the marketeer's snare of games and diversions of entertrainment.

Now imagine if we structured the music training in the same way, in a friendly welcoming environment where mistakes are irrelevant to the purpose, the purpose being the social reason for the music, what musicians call the groove, and what happens when the child learns that this 'groove' has direct effects, and they learn this early in the game, like when they learned that saying 'Mama' will get the whole room excited and attending.

So why do we start with notes and scales and fingering? Ok, the highly successful Suzuki method doesn't, but I think you know what I mean: Our goal as music educators should be to lead the young mind to recognize first and foremost the reason for playing, and bring them into the real conversation with real and competent conversationalists, and do this as soon as possible so as to get on the leading wave of that precious and fleeting 10-year span where they have both the capacity for voracious learning and the time available to devour it. Once they get in, once they are in the group of Those Who Can Speak This Language, what do you suppose will happen?

Well, we already know the answer. Or rather, we knew the answer. Those of you from third-world nations are already laughing at my gringo ignorance here because you probably grew up knowing the difference between the son and the rumba clave, tasked with playing it at every jump-up. In Great-Grandpa's day everybody had direct experience with the making of music, not consuming a packaged commodity, but having an active and direct participation, in playing inside the music, inside the social architecture of choirs, of bands, of orchestras however rag-tag and ill-equiped. It was the way we did things.

So where is it now? Well, it is there, but maybe you're not seeing it. It is there in the community choirs (no, you needn't join a church though it is still there too) it is in community theatres, and in the many municipal orchestras and city bands who hang on like raggamuffin monks, clinging to dwindling budgets and media indifference, knowing the societal value of what they hold, preserving that vital lifeline back to where we've been from, waiting for their surrounding society to wake up, ditch the dumb dolly games, and come back to life itself.

But that stat, that fact of sociology that says we are spawning an entire generation of pro-gamers, just as many of the other cultures we had disenfranchised fell into various drug/escape depressions only to rebound and reclaim their birthrights, so will we too wake up one day to realize there is no one here responsible other than ourselves, and that the solution is still there, our prince charming, waiting for us to awake.