Nobody taught me anything, and it wasn't their fault

While writing the article on my memorization method a sentence slipped out that at the time seemed like mere context: nobody ever really taught me how to memorize. Not at the conservatory, not afterwards, and some of the people I studied with were leading figures in European music.

Rereading it, I realized that sentence is the actual argument, and I had treated it as an anecdote.

Because it is not about memorizing. It is about the fact that almost nobody, in almost any field, teaches procedures. They show you what to do, they correct you when you do it badly, they give you examples. But the sequence of steps by which you get to the result on your own — that, almost never. And if you ask for it, very often what comes back is a description of the result, not of the path.

For years I assumed this was a form of reticence, or laziness, or that Italian mixture of jealousy and "this is how it has always been done". Now I think it is something entirely different, and much more interesting.

I had already described the mechanism elsewhere

In the first of these articles I described what happens when you play from memory: a motor sequence that is already available gets triggered and unfolds by itself, and you are not retrieving information. The proof is that the precise instant you ask yourself how does the next bit go, you jam. You have not forgotten: you have put a slow, conscious process in the place of a fast, automatic one.

That phenomenon is not confined to playing the piano. It applies to anything anyone can do well.

When a competence matures, the steps that made it up stop being steps. They get packed into one single large gesture that contains them all and fires as a block. That is exactly what makes the expert an expert — the speed comes from there, because nobody could do in real time what they did as a beginner by breaking it apart.

And here is the conclusion that, to me, explains everything:

The procedure is not hidden, it has been compiled. And compiled code cannot be read.

Asking a master for the sequence of steps is like asking me, while I am playing, what note comes three bars from now. It is not that he does not want to say. It is that the information, in that form, no longer exists inside him. It has been rewritten into a format that works beautifully for doing and terribly for telling.

What gets taught is the residue

If that is true, something unpleasant follows.

What manages to pass through teaching is the part that stayed verbal, which is the part nobody ever automated. Harmony rules get taught because they stayed as words: chord names, prohibitions, inversions. How to memorize forty pages and still find them after the summer does not get taught, because in whoever can do it, it has become gesture.

Put bluntly: we do not teach what matters most, we teach what survived in sayable form. And there is an uncomfortable correlation between the two, because what stayed verbal often stayed that way precisely because it is used so little.

From which comes the paradox in the title of this piece. The better a master is, the more they have automated. The more they have automated, the less access they have to what they know. The distinguished master is, structurally, the one with the least to tell you about how. They have a great deal to give in other forms — a model, a standard, an eye — but not the procedure.

It was not their fault. It was their competence that prevented it.

Why this is not a musical question

I tested the idea against the other trades I practise, to see whether it held outside the piano.

Writing software, I spent years wondering how certain people could see the right structure of a system straight away. The answer they gave, when you asked, was always unusable: "you just see it". And they were right — they really did see it, because they had met that case three hundred times and recognized it rather than deriving it.

In composing it is identical. I have never been able to explain properly why a passage has to be cut. I feel it, and if I try to justify it I produce a plausible reason which is not the one that decided: it is a reconstruction after the fact. I have distrusted my own explanations for years, for this reason.

Everywhere I looked I found the same thing: experts know how to do and do not know how to say. And the fact that it is so universal convinced me it is not a defect of certain people, but a property of competence itself.

Which opens the real question, and it is the subject of the next pieces: if expert knowledge has this form, what exactly is it? And if it does not travel by explanation, what does a teacher actually do — and how is it that, despite everything, it sometimes works.