The Rewarding Journey of Becoming Musically Fluent

Imagine the first time you picked up a golf club, touched a bike, or tried your hand at a new language. Can you remember what the experience was like?

I remember the first time I saw a double bass and decided I would learn to play it. It was orientation day for 5th grade orchestra. I was standing with a group of 5th graders in a large room, and we had been instructed to “pick something that looked interesting”. We meandered about looking at instruments of all different shapes and sizes. I saw a large instrument standing in a corner and my 5th grade brain thought “biggest is best”. The journey began.

I didn’t know at the time that this journey would continue for another 25 years, but I know now it was a journey worth taking.

The journey of learning music is similar to the journey of learning many other things. When I began, everything was new, awkward, and sometimes painful. In my middle school orchestra practice, our first task was simply to make a sound with the instrument. Notice I did not say music. For our director’s purposes, any sound would do. As you may imagine, 40 kids making “sounds” resulted in something that was as painful to our ears as it was to our bodies. I remember waking up in the morning with sore fingers and arms that were the result of asking my body to perform the awkward movements associated with my new instrument.

Mercifully, after hours and hours of group practice, the pain to our ears and bodies subsided. Our orchestra began playing simple tunes that had a decent shot of being recognized by other students walking by the orchestra room. While “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and “Mary Had a Little Lamb” weren’t the most exciting things to play, or hear for that matter, they were a significant upgrade to the scratching we had been doing earlier in the semester.

This slow progression continued year after year. Each year we began with music that stretched our capabilities, and at the end of each year, we all were better musicians for it.

Learning music takes time, patience, good instruction, and above all, practice. There is no way to shortcut practice. The progression from sound, to note, to motif, to phrase, and finally to song is akin to the progression from sound, to vowel, to word, to sentence to speech. When you hear an excellent musician, you are listening to someone who is fluent in the language of music. Their accent is natural, they can convey emotion and feeling when they “speak”, and they are easily understood. Achieving this fluency, however, is a daunting task.

I began to achieve fluency in my own music after I had graduated from Hillsdale College and began studying music for a master’s degree at the University of Michigan. For those of you counting at home, this would be 12 years after my awkward first meeting with music in the 5th grade.

While up to that point I had achieved some level of proficiency with music, a different level of dedication was required to reach the next level of fluency with my instrument. The next two years were spent playing my bass for eight hours a day in a practice room. Just me, my bass, and a solitary room where endless hours of playing scales in nearly every variation of speed, articulation, and style imaginable happened.

I would play a note and make sure it was in tune. I would play the same note and make sure the sound of the note started correctly. I would play the note and make sure it was at the right volume. The same note could then be considered with regard to how it was sustained, how it was released, what quality of sound was produced, how much vibrato was used. Once I was satisfied, there was the next scale, passage, or sequence of notes to consider. In what is the closest thing I could categorize as full immersion, music became the only thing I lived and breathed for two years. The end of those two years resulted in me being comfortable playing, or ‘speaking’, in front of others.

When you hear a beautifully played piece of music, you are hearing that musician’s investment in the craft of music. Countless hours spent in a practice room all for one purpose: to be able to communicate to others through song.

What worth is this investment, however, when others don’t understand the language? Music finds value where both a performer and a listener are present. The impact of music is directly linked to the listener’s ability to receive it. In “The History of Classical Music” you will be able to experience and enjoy the mastery displayed by Hyperion Knight. A virtuoso who has himself spent countless hours mastering the language of music. Not only will you be able to hear his mastery of the piano, but you will also be given a rare explanation of why this music was written the way that it was written, why it is important, and what the great composers of the Classical Era were trying to communicate. It is our hope that through this course you will deepen your own understanding of the language of music, and through this understanding, become a better receiver of the wonderful achievement of western classical music.