Thomas J. West Music

One of the many things I took away from my time as a member of The Cadets drum and bugle corps was a stronger work ethic. I packed so much more learning and skill development into those two years than any other time in my life, quite simply because it was the only thing on my plate. Olympic athletes operate similarly. There is little else in their focus. They can devote hours each day to the development of the skills associated with that activity, and they are insulated from the rest of the world by trainers, coaches, staffers, and others.

It was when my time with Cadets ended and I returned to the "real world" that I found I was not as focused and effective as I was when there was a 30-member instructional staff pushing me. My level of tolerance for "hard work" had increased, but it had been diffused over all of the other things in my life that were competing for my attention.

Some Simple Math

The 10,000 hour principle states that a person must invest 10,000 hours of study to a set of skills in order to become proficient and then to obtain mastery of them. I have found this concept to be a pretty good measuring stick for learning a musical instrument, among other things. Those 10,000 hours can be done all at once (like an Olympic athlete) or can be diffused over time and mixed with time spent on other activities. If an average person who lives a busy life filled with many types of activities wants to work to the level of mastery by this principal, a period of 10 years is a good increment to consider.

Even with 10 years as a target, the amount of time devoted is still demanding. 10,000 hours over 10 years is equal to approximately 2.75 hours of work a day, 7 days a week. Don't want to work on the weekends? Bump that up to just under 4 hours a day. What, you want time off for holidays, too? I thought you said you were committed!

Joking aside, it is easy to see that mastering any complex skill such as music performance takes a long-term commitment and a passion for the activity. The variable in the equation, of course, is the individual's aptitude level. Strong audiation and rhythmic perception, strong kinesthetic and proprioception skills, and a tenacious attitude significantly reduce the amount of repetitions necessary to become a master. I know a professional jazz pianist who professes to be rather weak as a natural musician, but who devoted 11 hours a day to the piano to learn his craft. Fabled be bop saxophonist Charlie Parker was also known to practice up to 12 hours a day to master every scale, mode, arpeggio, and invent some hybrid patterns while he was at it.

Mastery vs. Proficiency

For the majority of school music students, mastery of the instrument (including the voice) is really not what they are interested in. They want to be able to play well. As a teacher, I want them to develop proficiency on their instrument, which is loosely defined as being able to perform with characteristic tone quality in all registers, perform the full common range of the instrument, perform all major and natural minor scales and tonic triad arpeggios, and be able to sight-read music of a grade 3 level. These performance goals are achievable by the majority of students, no matter what their aptitude level or background in music is. Players who progress to this level are what I consider to be on the upper end of the "intermediate" spectrum, with "advanced" work reserved for students who attend honors ensemble festivals and are considering music performance or music education as a career.

As I explain to my students, they obtain this level of proficiency by working over the course of 6 to 10 years from their first beginner sounds to high school graduation and beyond. They reach this goal of proficiency, however, by mastering many pieces of music along the way. I define mastery as the performance of a task or series of tasks to the point of sub-conscious or unconscious recall. When you have repeated the performance enough times to do it accurately without conscious attention, you have obtained mastery. Most of us, for example, have mastered sitting up and walking - both skills that we had to learn as infants.

It is by mastering many smaller tasks that the student becomes a proficient musician. 10,000 hours is not required for most people to reach this level of performance, but it certainly does take a long-term commitment of about a decade to reach this level.

This article (c) 2011 Thomas J. West. All content on ThomasJWestMusic dot com is licensed under a Creative Contributions Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Please contact the author before publishing on or off-line.

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