I am not a music school graduate. The music learning journals are paywalled, and I didn’t pay the (ridiculous) prices. Nor am I a trained cognitive/experimental psychologist. I am seriously unqualified. I wrote this because I couldn’t find anything like it.
The next few paragraphs illuminate (some of) my cluelessness by considering further what ‘learning music’ entails. Skip them if that’s not your interest.
I’m writing about learning and memory for music as though it’s three things, learning what to musically intend, learning to perform it, and learning and practicing self-management. Taking only musical intention, there are (at least) cognitive, emotional, and physical components. (‘Physical’ here referring to how the music feels in the body, the pulse of it, how it correlates with breath and heartbeat, and so on, considered apart from motor performance.)
Memory is not a simple thing. The names for tools and the names for animals are centered in different regions in the brain. A visual image of a score is different than a visual image of good right hand placement is different than an auditory memory for a melody or harmony. Sticking to musical intention, multiple things must be learned concurrently, and however many ‘things’ that may be, all must be continually integrated with all of the others. Even something like rhythm and melody, that we like to speak of as distinct, are inextricably bound: changing the rhythm of a melody to quarter-speed or triple-speed can make it a different melody, or syncopating the melody, or perhaps swapping the quarter and half-note durations. Rhythm and melody, like music itself, are verbs. With only the highest level categories, melody, rhythm, harmony, dynamics, right hand, and left hand, we have 30 distinct pairwise relationships, each of which influences the others. In any actual section, even decomposed to a measure or less, there are many more, and all must be continually integrated. Brief pause for taking that in: in an absurdly simplified model of learning music on the guitar, there are thirty things being learned at once at any given moment. In reality, there are far more.
Then, there’s context and content. Context might be lifetime familiarity with the tempered (Western) scale and common patterns in tonal music (assuming it’s a Western song). By loose analogy, it’s a story in a language you already speak, spoken at a pace and with intonations that makes sense for the meaning of the plot. Content is in two parts (I think), repetition of the rhythm and melody and harmony, and then instrumentation. Is Clair de Lune the same song on a guitar as on a piano? Is it the same song in the transcriptions of Edwards and Sabuncouglu and Matthews and Ribeiro and Ensert? Yes, of course, and also, of course, no.
We use representations, like scores and theory, to aid retrieval of the music, which is not a (conscious) representation. Music theory is descriptive, not prescriptive. We like whatever we like. So understanding the music as music, independent of any other representation, is the core. But theory can be helpful in memory retrieval—this is a II – V – I with a suspended dominant substituted for the II—ah, OK, got it. Or, just looking at the score while playing. One of the authors reviewed puts his heaviest emphasis on visualization (which includes ‘mind’s ear’ as well as eye). But then, I think of (say) David Bruce—is what he hears in a melody the same as what I hear? Superficially, yes, and in substance, no. So two kinds of meaning: the actual music and abstractions into representations (like scores, theory-based analysis, &c.) And by ‘two,’ I mean more than two: the actual music has physical, emotional, and intellectual force, any of which can vary widely depending on performer and one’s own state of mind and body and attention and associations like what was happening when you first heard it. In live performance, it can vary with the non-musical accident of how close or far from the performer one is. And how well you trust the performer to physically and emotionally release into his or her playing, and what you had to eat before coming, and who’s sitting next to you, and that thing that happened at work this morning, and how warm the room is, and…
Summary: I don’t know what I’m talking about.
Addendum to summary: I’m being very generous in self-assessment.
Learning music on guitar 