2023-12-25

• So I’m still doing these flashcards to learn musical chords on the keyboard. Elena saw me doing these and asked me “do you think these will make you a better player?” It gave me pause. The truth is that yes, I think these cards make me a better player (as I have noted in previous writings). But the mechanism of “how does this make me better” is a little obscure to me. I find myself reaching for a building metaphor in this case. The cards are kind of like developing a solid recipe for concrete. Playing the keyboard is like building a house. Obviously, the best/most straightforward way to get better at building houses is by building more houses. Just keep building houses. On the other hand, developing an understanding of concrete and ensuring you have a way to really strong recipe will, a few steps down the line, be quite useful for building things more quickly and for enabling the building of certain structures that require a particular type/quality of concrete. Of course, during the actual building of most structures, you don’t wanna spend a ton of time thinking about the details of the concrete you are using. It’s a base level abstraction that needs to be solid/second nature, but it isn’t something that receives a large percentage of attention on the job site. I don’t know if that is really how buildings get made, but that was the metaphor my mind reached for when thinking about “where do these cards fit into my musical journey/practice?” They are foundational. But ideally the knowledge contained in them fades into the background of the actual work when it’s happening.

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