The one thing that I keep saying to L, every time I find a new level of depth in the piano repertoire I’m studying, is “If I were in college, they would have made me stop playing this by now — and I would never have learned this [thing I just learned about the music].”

If you’ve ever studied an instrument, you know how it goes:

Between the ages of 5 and 15 (or so), you get a new piece every week. You are told to practice the music five times every day, for at least five days out of the upcoming seven — and when you return to your next lesson, you automatically advance to the next piece in the lesson book regardless of whether you really-truly learned the previous one.

Most piano lesson books are designed to handle this, in the sense that they publish a series of short pieces that all deal with the same basic problem (picking up the hands and moving them to another part of the keyboard, for example) with the idea that if you string enough pieces together and assign them weekly, the student will learn how to solve the problem by the end of the last piece in the series.

If you’re still playing the piano as a high school student, you get three new pieces every quarter. This repertoire is longer, combining lesson book material with classic masterworks like Debussy’s Clair de Lune or Mozart’s Rondo alla Turca, and is often structured to hit the following benchmarks:

• Fall recital

• Christmas concert and/or church performances

• Spring music contest (and spring recital)

• Summer — well, if you’re actively taking lessons during the summer, you may end up playing “fun music.” Like Broadway stuff, or jazz, or whatever the kids are into these days. The point of summer lessons are to keep you practicing, in any capacity, during a season in which you may have competing interests and demands on your time.

By the time you’re in college, you get two or three major works every semester. In this case, you’re working towards the end-of-semester juries and the senior recital, in which you play the best of your accumulated repertoire.

The point of my telling you all of this — which you probably already know — is that in nearly all cases, the music is taken away from you after a certain period.

Regardless of how well you’ve learned it.

Which means that all external and internal evaluations derive from where you are when time runs out, not where you could be if you kept working.

This applies to many types of formal curricula, of course — math students are automatically progressed from Algebra 1 to Algebra 2 regardless of whether they mastered the material in the first course, and you can think of half-a-dozen additional examples on your own. Whether you want to call this “teaching to the test” or “social promotion” or “there aren’t enough resources to teach every student individually so we have to teach them all the same,” the basic problem is clear:

OUR CHILDREN

ARE BEING TAUGHT

TO STOP BEFORE WIN.

If you STOP BEFORE WIN, you never learn HOW TO WIN.

You never learn that YOU CAN WIN.

You also never learn that WIN = INTEGRATION.

I wrote about this months ago, in a short story that was going to become the first section of a novel, without understanding precisely what I was writing.

Annilee had long understood that execution was a binary, not a continuum. Pass/fail, not AABC. It was zero, or it was one — and she wrote that down in her practice notebook to tell Elliott, when she was ready to tell him.

Magic is one.

That was actually an important part of it, though Annilee wouldn’t realize what she had discovered until much later (she knows it now, of course, but at this point only you do, which gives you the advantage). Instead, she continued to practice and think about the difference between an execution that was magical and an execution that was merely competent.

I’m writing about it again, now, in the Larger Project that I keep hinting at. I know the work is good — or at least it has the potential to be good — because I’m waking up early, without trying, to get to it before I get to the rest of the day.

Someday I want to teach it.

Because I think that teaching people that mastery is possible, that integration is possible, that magic is in fact possible —

may in fact be the most important thing. ❤️