On Patterns and Chunks in Music

Sunday morning thoughts on music stuff (since this is the hour when I'd have violin lessons for over a decade)

Something I only really learned / realised in recent years, particularly after watching someone very skilled at sightreading demonstrate their skills [1], which maybe would've been better to know earlier:

Patterns, patterns, patterns.

While many of us of driven mad to the point of curling up in a crumpled mess a few bars in then barely holding on, what higher level performers do here is they are able to quickly deconstruct what they see into the building-block patterns the composer used.

What do I mean?

Scales + Arpeggios.

Ultimately, many composers are relatively "lazy" in that they will use runs of scales + arpeggios to "fill out space / make noise", acting as "connective tissue" between stretches of melody. This is especially true the more "showy" and "virtuostic" the piece is supposed to be...  [2]

This sort of ties into an interesting Ted talk from Benjamin Zander years ago where he talks about the progression of musical skill (i.e. The "one buttock playing" one - IYKYK). The central thesis here is that, what distinguishes beginners from more advanced players is the progression of skill away from trying to tackle things on a note by note basis (i.e. equivalent to kids learning to read having to spell out words letter by letter, stringing those together, then trying to make sense of them), they are instead looking more broadly at larger chunks, eventually focussing a phrase-level progressions.

Yes. These are pretty much the same same kind of fundamental insight as:

"What makes a piece of music memorable / easy for people to understand? Repetition. People need to hear ideas several times, and especially in different ways, for them to start picking up on them, and before recognising and/or even eventually liking them. It's not *boring* that something needs to be repeated several times - as long as you do it to establish a pattern that you then subvert to create some minor novelty / interest... That is just what needs to happen. To satisfy our stupid lizard brains."   [3]

Hopefully this helps unlock something for some music student out there sometime... 

 

Footnotes: 

[1] Yes, for those wondering, yes, that was one of the old Tiffany Poon videos, where she went over this.  (It seems these old vlogs are no longer online anymore though either... so I can't give you a link to this anymore)

[2] Perhaps the framing of these exercises when introducing them to students should be done differently. At least from what I've seen, it seems that people who understand this point seem to understand this point.

[3] Not quite paraphrasing, but more of the general gist of something a music teacher once told me during High School