The FALLacy of Study

Living in an age where there is an oppressively large amount of junk orbiting around the planet, it's natural for me to think of orbits when I think of musical study. Really, it's an observation of how counter-intuitive some actions can be.

When something is in orbit around the earth, it is actually just falling. As you can see in the above illustration, if a hypothetical cannon fired a ball at a high enough speed, the curve of the earth falls away at the same rate that the ball falls towards the earth's center of gravity and just keeps on falling, getting no closer.

When we experience weightlessness in orbit, it's not because there's no gravity above the earth's atmosphere. There is a little less gravitational pull our there but the weightlessness is experienced because the spacecraft and the astronauts are falling. This is how we can experience weightlessness on airplanes if they perform some special maneuvers.

 Now, say that a spacecraft in orbit is trying to catch up to another spacecraft ahead in the same orbit. One's first impulse would be to fire your rockets so that you go faster, and catch up to it. What happens is quite the opposite. By firing your rockets and propelling yourself forward, you would actually boost yourself into a higher orbit (it's not quite that simple, but we'll just say that it is). Your new higher orbit takes longer to go around the earth, so the pursued spacecraft will escape further and further.

Slow down to catch up?
What you say?!

So, naturally, you do the opposite of what seems natural and intuitive. You blast your rockets in the opposite direction to slow yourself down.

This puts you into a lower orbit which moves around the earth faster, allowing you to catch up to the pursued spacecraft.




What this shows us is that often systems are more complicated than they first appear, and that very often blasting straight towards a solution to a problem is not going to get you any closer to the solution. This is true in the study of music.

Sometimes the sound approach of isolating a problem and practicing it alone won't lead to mastery of that subject. Sometimes they can only be practiced indirectly, in the context of something else. One example is the practice of learning absolute pitch. I knew a conducting professor that worked on it by keeping a tuning fork in his pocket all hours of the day and periodically ringing it to see if his A was still on pitch. After years of this practice he was no-where closer to pitch discrimination; he just knew what his tuning fork would sound like if he rang it, much like you know how I am the Walrus will sound before you play it. He didn't listen to all the pitches in multiple timbres and registers and listen for the underlying feel of each sound and how those were different for each pitch.

So, what can we take from this? Just take it as a warning, that while it is usually sound advice to take things apart and practice the parts individually, sometimes your time is better served by keeping the elements in context and practicing them indirectly. As long as you keep this warning in mind, you will soon acquire the wisdom to know which is which.