Learning Analogy

My sometimes quiet, smart, and very musical ten-year-old recorder student always inspires me to figure out ways of explaining things. Today's challenge (for me) came from trying to understand why she remembered how to play pieces she practiced a while ago, but hadn't seen for a long time.

I suggested that how something goes in your brain makes a difference. And I went on to suggest that learning a piece of music carefully is kind of like folding clothes and putting them away in a drawer. When it comes time for you to wear a particular item of clothing again you strive to remember which drawer it is in, are happy to have found it, and then proceed to put it on.

With a piece of music or a difficult passage in a piece, I have found that the condition it was put into my brain is pretty much the same condition I find it in when I play it again. So a passage that I have notched carefully with the metronome so that I could play it in tune and in rhythm can surprise me by being far easier to play well when I remove it from its figurative drawer.

But a piece I basically sightread every time I play it still seems to hold its "wrinkles" no matter how many times I unearth it from the figurative pile on the floor. If I can even find it.

Things are different once I put the time and care into to "ironing" (practicing) those "wrinkles" out.