Yesterday I had a most fascinating conversation with Dr. Jim Holt, as pictured below. He is a otolaryngologist (ears, nose, throat specialist) who has taken up the study of organ and music theory in his retirement.

This was the starting point of our discussion, when he wrote in an email:

There are two related topics that I am interested in learning more about.  First, how to better learn a piece.  Second, how to become more adept in reading the score and processing the score into the actual playing — especially for pieces with a quick tempo.  

I began by answering that there are several factors to my being able to learn a new piece. First, I consider my sightreading skills excellent, as I have been sightreading my entire life! Yes, that means for years and years of piano AND organ lessons, I never practiced — I just sightread the music for the first time in front of my teacher! (And neither of my teachers ever suspected!) Having perfect pitch certainly helped — part of this is the ability to hear the music in your head without playing it first. However, I also think that the ability to sight read easily is being a good guesser; being able to predict what’s coming next. Of course contemporary music is harder to second-guess as compared to classical styles. Even Bach, though, puts in deceptive cadences—unusual harmonic progressions.

Secondly, as I have written in this blog before, I listen to recordings of the piece ad infinitum so that the music becomes thoroughly entrenched in my brain. I once said that at a minimum, I try to listen to a recording at least 100 times in the learning process. For the CPE Bach piece which I played in the September First Mondays concert, I listened to recordings on my daily hourly walk for at least four weeks in a row, well over 100 performances. You could call this total immersion in the music. By doing this, you unconsciously memorize it— when you play a certain passage, you know what is coming next!

Unconsciously, my eyes don’t dwell on only a single note or chord, but they look far down the end of the line, to the end of the music phrase. I’m also able to quickly scan and process music vertically, which means that organ music is written on three separate staves, one treble clef and two bass clefs. However, this means that my eyes are always ahead of my fingers, which often causes my tendency to “rush,” and needlessly accelerate the tempo.

This notion of listening to recordings was validated when I opened up my email this morning and found Dr. Noa Kageyama’s latest blog post, “Evidence that Listening to a Recording that could Accelerate the Learning Process.” Yes! that means that my listening to recordings over and over is not a crazy idea!

In hearing Dr. Holt talk about his struggles to sightread hymns, and even after intense study to finger and pedal every single note, this morning I came up with the realization that what he was after was “musical fluency,” which I can certainly relate to in my study of Spanish. What he wants to be able to achieve is a fluidity to his playing, just as I am trying to accomplish in speaking Spanish.

I found an excellent article on musical fluency called “Fluency and Music,” a part of which I would like to share: (P.S. I highly recommend that you read the entire article)

Music performance, at its best, must be fluent.  Listeners expect to hear uninterrupted lines that include clear communicative information.  Listeners desire accuracy and true competency from performers. From the simplest tunes to the most virtuosic concerti, the test of a fine performance is demonstrated fluency.

Fluency is the ability to read a text accurately, quickly, and with expression. Fluency provides a bridge between word recognition and comprehension. When fluent readers read silently, they recognize words automatically. They group words quickly to help them gain meaning from what they read. Fluent readers read aloud effortlessly and with expression. Their reading sounds natural, as if they are speaking. Readers who have not yet developed fluency read slowly, word by word. Their oral reading is choppy. Fluent readers demonstrate accuracy, expression, pace punctuation, and comprehension.

So, in music it is very similar. Fluency in music would be explained as the ability to read and perform a score accurately, quickly and with expression. I often tell my students that there is a difference between  “comprehension level” music learning and “performance level” music learning. A fluent musician would demonstrate accuracy, expression, pace, punctuation, phrasing and comprehension within the context of the performance.

Fluency involves a true understanding of all aspects of the vocabulary. In other words, one must know how to identify individual letters of words, define each word in a sentence, put the sentence together, and say and read it with inflection. That requires a great deal of skill! It is the same with music. The fluent musician must understand each individual note, its rhythm, its place in the musical phrase, how to read and perform that phrase accurately, and how to inflect that phrase accurately and fluently. So many students have spent all of their time working on simply notes and rhythms or just imitating their teacher or recordings. 

So, how do we achieve musical fluency? There are any number of books out there, but I don’t have the first hand knowledge of any of them. All I can say is that it’s probably the same as that old joke about getting to Carnegie Hall, “practice, practice, practice!”

P.S. Dr. Holt has been coming to visit Hawaii several times a year because several family members live on Oahu. I look forward to meeting his Chinese wife, Catherine, another Cathy!