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One of the reasons I took up the piano last year was the chance to learn something entirely new: I was feeling that work (ie. IT) knowledge, even something like a new programming language, computer system or approach is largely a refinement or improvement on things I already know. Reading a book on a subject is certainly educational, but I’m hardly going to become an evolutionary biologist myself from reading more Richard Dawkins.

That’s not to say I don’t enjoy such things, or that I know everything - quite the contrary! It’s just that these things don’t have the spine-tingling feeling of being a shiny and new concept, certainly compared to when I was at school and University when I first ‘got’ recursion, first grasped nuclear decay, and first used E=mc². Plus appreciating a subject is very different from using a subject in anger.

So because I’m starting from scratch with the piano, and music, the difficulty is finding somewhere to ‘hang’ new bits of information, so I feel that I properly understand it and have rationalised it. Music is exactly what I wanted, so very different from the IT, physics, mathematics or cooking I’ve an existing body of knowledge I can add to when something ‘new’ comes along. Compound time and swing quavers most recently in my experience have proven a bit difficult. Simply trying to understand what these things actually are, and how that differs from the concepts I’ve already learnt. Why, if it’s written like that does it sound like this? And why is this still sounding different from what my piano teacher expertly played? But therein lies the very joy of a new subject: the feelings of success and achievement are so much the better from being at the bottom and slowly working up.

From my points about swing quavers, perhaps anybody with a musical talent will be unsurprised to learn that my biggest difficulty (so far) is simply keeping consistent time. I doubt I’m alone amongst music students! But keeping consistent time across crotchets, quavers and so on, whilst reading the two clefs for both left and right hand is, to be blunt, a bit of a mindbender! More practice is (surprise!) the cure, but I’m also my own worst enemy for not always being diligent enough with keeping time in my head as I do so. Metronomes are relentlessly distracting…. Still not found the best way, or stuck at a method long enough to make it work.

I suppose on a related thought that the bland ‘musak’ and pop that infiltrates so much of our public spaces, and even the perpetual iTunes playlists of my 40Gb music library that I have playing whilst I’m working: I get music unbidden, or at the touch of a button. It’s produced in vast quantities, and is downloadable for free. It all seems to collude to make music a less valuable ‘commodity’.

With the piano, I may be struggling away in the foothills of this huge new mountain range of a subject that is ‘Music’, but my slow progress still helps create an improved appreciation for this age-old subject. It’s palpably helping me understand more about the music I do listen to and love, even before the raw feeling of delight I still occasionally feel as I ‘master’ (perhaps a little hesitantly) a new piece of music.

Music is certainly a lot more valuable, and a whole lot more enjoyable than it was a year ago. Learning entirely new things is never going to be entirely easy, and with most things, it’s the journey that matters, not the destination.