Before the music
A passage from Debussy's La cathédrale engloutie, highlighting the multiple layers that have to come together when playing this piece.
© Debussy, *La cathédrale engloutie,* Henle Urtext edition (1986), public domain (EU), via IMSLP.
For most of my life I played music semi-professionally. When the children arrived, and with them the particular kind of time pressure that academic life and a young family produce in combination, that stopped. A few years ago I started playing the piano again – an instrument I had set aside even earlier, the demands of student accommodation being what they are. The gap was somewhere in the region of twenty years.
Re-learning has been instructive, and not only in the obvious sense.
Music is complicated. There are the notes, which is where most people's attention goes. But there is also dynamics – loud and quiet, and all the gradations between. There is phrasing – the difference between a passage played legato and one played with a crisp staccato, the way a melody breathes or does not. None of these things is decorative. They are, collectively, the music. But here is the problem: you cannot attend to all of them simultaneously until the foundational layer – where the fingers go – has become automatic. Until that point, everything else has to wait.
When I was younger, that first stage passed quickly. The real work began once I no longer had to think about it. Now it takes considerably longer, which makes the stages more visible and the lesson more acute.
The lesson for teaching
What struck me, practising at the piano with the concentration of someone who has forgotten rather more than they expected, is how directly this maps onto what we ask of students – and how rarely we acknowledge it.
University education has accelerated considerably since I was a student. The curriculum is denser, the assessments more complex, and the assumption throughout seems to be that students can attend to everything at once: the content, the structure, the critical thinking, the academic conventions, the argument. We present all of these layers simultaneously and then express surprise when not all of them land.
When I went through university, there was more time, and there was repetition – the kind that students and academics alike found mildly irritating. The Lambert-Beer law, for instance, appeared in the physics course. Then it reappeared in microbiology, in the context of measuring culture turbidity. Then again in molecular genetics, when optical density came up. Nobody particularly enjoyed encountering it a third time. But something important was happening: each repetition placed the same concept in a new context, showing where it applied and why it mattered. The muscle memory, so to speak, was being built. The fingers were learning where to go.
That kind of structured repetition has largely disappeared, and with it something valuable that was easy to dismiss at the time precisely because it worked quietly and without drama.
The fingers first
The students arriving at university now are not less capable than previous generations. They are being asked to play music before they have learned the notes – and then assessed on their phrasing.
This is not a sustainable approach, and the arrival of AI into the learning environment is accelerating the pressure rather than relieving it. There is a strong case for slowing down, for building in repetition that feels unnecessary until it suddenly is not, for allowing one layer to become secure before adding the next.
We would do well, occasionally, to sit down at the piano ourselves and remember what it felt like not to know where the fingers go.
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