Playing Music Has Destroyed My Appreciation of Music?

I recently decided to pick up the guitar again. I played for a while in high school, but pretty much dropped it about 30 years ago. So my Christmas present to myself this year was an electric guitar and I’m diligently trying to relearn the instrument. One thing that I’m doing differently this time is that I’m paying attention to what others have to say about playing (yep, when you’re 16, you know everything - it’s only later that you find out that you don’t know squat or are at least you’re willing to admit it). I came across a thread in the forums at ultimate-guitar.com where the poster was complaining about how learning to play had destroyed his appreciation of music.

This is not the first time that I have heard this. One of my girlfriends (yes, we had girlfriends back in the dark ages) was a bassoonist who went on to study music in college. As I recall, she had finished two or three semesters of her music studies before she changed her major to business. I think the question that came to me at the time was something along the lines of “how can understanding music ruin your appreciation of it?” After all, I had been listening to music for as far back as I could remember, had learned several instruments, starting with piano in something like the 3rd grade, and my appreciation of music hadn’t changed. In fact, the only noticable change was that my taste in music had become more eclectic. I kind of shrugged off the question as one of those “mysteries of the universe” or “things that man was not meant to know” and went on with my life. Now that I have a few more years and a bit more experience under my belt, I think that I understand her point.

I think that most people who pick up an instrument, especially one like the guitar, start with the idea that they want to be able to play like so-and-so (Hendrix, Page, Santana, Van Halen, Billy Gibbons, Slash, etc. - obviously my brain has been fried by too much exposure to rock/R&B as I can’t think of any other styles of guitarist by name). Or perhaps they want to learn how to play certain songs or styles of music. But the common thread running through all of these is “how”. How does he/she do that?

So they set out to learn how to do that. Some find a teacher; others pick up any of a number of “how-to” books. Some do it the old-fashioned way: they listen to records (sorry - CDs) over and over again and then try to mimic on their own instrument. Those with the talent or sheer persistence eventually learn how to do that. Those without the talent or determination get frustrated and move on to other things. In my case, it was lack of determination more than anything else. My modicum of talent was enough to let me get started, but talent alone won’t do it for more than a handful of people and I wasn’t in that handful by any long stretch of the imagination.

At any rate, once the student has learned the “how” of a particular instrument, song or style, the problem comes. In many ways it is like a magician’s trick. Once you know how they trick is done and can do it yourself, the trick loses a lot of its wonder. The “wow” factor just isn’t there anymore. And I think that this is the point where people hit the crisis point. Now that they know what they set out to learn, what comes next?

Many musicians never hit this crisis point. They continue doing what they have been doing and are quite satisfied to play what they know. They may even put down their instruments and only occasionally pick it up again. This last group are the folks who rush home to pick up their acoustic instruments when there is a power failure at the local watering hole and stage an impromptu sing-along.

I think the potentially great musicians change their question, however. Now that they know how it was done, they want to know why it was done that way and why it wasn’t done some other way. And those questions lead them into the theory and structure of music rather than just the performance of someone else’s music.

This entry was posted on Sunday, 17 December 2006 at 13:15 and is filed under Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.