Why Music Feels Harder the Better You Get
1. Awareness
For some people, learning an instrument can lure you into a false sense of progression. At the start, it can feel like you are moving fast. You learn how to count, how to read notes, how to play some chords, and it might feel like music isn’t so tough to grasp. There are several reasons for this.
There is a famous chart that represents this very well called “The 4 Stages of Competence”. It begins with the stage of “unconscious incompetence”, where you don’t know what you aren’t yet able to do. In this stage, music can feel logical and make sense, and it can seem like it will just require a little bit of practice. Then there is “conscious incompetence”, which is the hardest stage to get through. This is because at this stage you know what you need to learn and you are aware that you can’t yet do it. After that, there is “conscious competence”, where you are having to work hard but you are starting to be able to do it. Finally, we have “unconscious competence”, where you no longer need to think and you are on autopilot.
This means that what feels like getting worse is actually usually just you noticing more.
Interestingly, for the piano, the step between unconscious incompetence and conscious incompetence happens quite quickly. This is because your exposure to difficult music is far greater at an earlier level, and also because our expectations of ourselves are changed by experiences of other piano players. If you see someone playing a piano piece, often the perception of how long it took them to achieve that level of playing is underestimated.
Having said this, it’s important to be aware that awareness is just a sign of musical maturity, and you do eventually come out the other side of it.
2. Decisions
When we see better players, it’s easy to assume that they are just doing more of what you are doing. Maybe they are able to read more notes at the same time, or their hands are able to play with more advanced technique. However, this is far from the truth. Better players aren’t just playing more notes with quicker brain processing power; they are approaching and thinking about music entirely differently.
Let’s take reading, for example. Many earlier players try to read individual notes and believe that good sight-reading requires being able to read more notes, quicker. Whereas for a more advanced player, they typically aren’t able to read individual notes much faster at all. They are able to group notes in their mind and therefore have to read much less.
Similarly, for an earlier player, in order to play a fast scale, they may believe that to play fast notes they have to get their fingers to move faster and work harder. Whereas for a more advanced player, they think in scales and think of one fluid motion for sections of notes.
The reality is that the perception of difficulty as you start to get better at the piano comes from what you think learning the piano is, and often doesn’t reflect the change in approach that comes with more knowledge and more experience. So as you get better at the piano, it can sometimes feel much harder because of skewed expectations based on what it took to get where you are now. As the saying goes, “what got you where you are won’t get you where you want to be”.
3. What To Do
The goal is not to remove difficulty from your playing; it’s difficulty that helps you adapt and improve. The goal is to be aware of what is making playing difficult and adapt. Any illusion of what it will take to become better is exactly that, an illusion, because it’s impossible to know what it will take without having got through to the other side. So the focus can only be on what you need to solve right now.
As you get better, you will find that your playing will change rather than your playing simply getting better. Your way of reading music or your way of moving your hands will be completely different, as more difficult pieces require different things.
Music does feel harder as you get better at the piano as you work your way through the conscious incompetence phase and become aware of your gaps in knowledge, but filling those gaps will look very different to what you thought.
Matt
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