Band after the pandemic

The Covid-19 pandemic was bad for a lot of things, including school band programs.

I’m starting my programs up again this fall after an absence of more than two years. Restarting them is like getting a ship moving with a only paddle. The experienced students have either advanced to high school, moved to other cities, or just vanished from my radar screen. Sadly, the few who are still around haven’t played their instruments since March 2020 and have lost all momentum.

So, after spending two decades developing mature band programs at several schools, I am starting over. This year I’ll have just beginning bands. If things go well, I’ll add intermediate groups in the fall of 2023 and advanced ones in 2024. Three years are necessary to recruit and develop students and establish in them the knowledge and skills needed to perform complex music, the kind that a good bands play.

Seeing my students and their schools in a new light

The schools where I work closed on March 12, a date that seems to come from ancient history. I taught my last class on March 11, thinking with a naiveté that now appears laughable to me that we’d be back in the classroom in a couple of weeks.

Since then, rather than lead groups in rehearsals, I teach my students online in half hour lessons—as many as I can fit into a week. Live group rehearsals, because they require precise synchronization, just don’t work on Zoom. The only way to continue working with my students was in online private lessons. It’s been a very busy two months, with about 60 lessons per week, and by the time Friday evening arrives and I finish my last lesson at 5:30, my mind is exhausted, not able to form a coherent thought until Saturday morning.

Still, it’s been a great experience, one that has peeled away some of my innocent notions about schooling. Working with my students on Zoom, one at a time, me at the computer in my home office and they in the comfort of their own homes, I began to see my students and indeed school itself in a new light. I saw that what had seemed impossible or invisible in class was really not so.

(A darkly fascinating aside, more than half of my students’ parents went totally incommunicado during the pandemic and school closure, not responding to any communications from me. It saddens me to think that I wasn’t able to help these students and makes me wonder what happened to their families.)

In one-on-one lessons, I saw my heretofore struggling student who seemed to understand nothing that I taught in class, and who seemed more interested in poking his neighbor, suddenly make real progress as we worked together on Zoom. I saw my hyper talkative student whose mind always seemed to be elsewhere in band class come across as calm and collected at home. I saw a student who seemed embarrassed to play her instrument in school come out of her shell at home and put a lot of feeling into her playing. I saw a student who seemed so withdrawn and confused in class make astonishing progress from her kitchen.

I saw that the students are different at home than they are at school, far different. School changes kids’ behavior, and school itself may be be a barrier to learning.

I began each online lesson with a question that has nothing to do with music: “What do you miss most about school?” It was meant as a way to make small talk, but the answers were so revealing.

Here are my students’ leading responses, in fact, the only two that were statistically significant.

1. Seeing my friends

2. Recess

One student mentioned his art class, but he was the only one to vote for anything other than seeing friends and recess.. It seems the only thing students miss about school is the social life.

That can’t be a good sign.

The barriers to learning that afflict many students come exactly from that social environment. At school, students are focused on what their peers are doing, and we teachers fade into a Charlie Brown “wah, wah, wah.” It seems kind of naive to think that you can stuff a bunch of kids into a limited space for six hours a day and hope that they will focus on learning. Even adults would lose the thread.

Losing a student, losing an opportunity

If we band teachers are honest with ourselves, we suffer when we lose a student. Losing a student is like losing a friend. It hurts, and the pain lasts. I still vividly recall many of my quitters, even from years ago.

We may pretend that it’s not a big deal, that students come and go, but it’s not so. But why should it hurt so much?

First, I think it’s that we are sad to lose all the work we’ve put into the student. A tremendous and somewhat indescribable effort goes into teaching a young person how to play an instrument, a million details and constant reinforcement. We’ve spent years working with a student, rolling a heavy granite boulder up a hill, only to see it go cascading down the mountain again.

When I taught high school English I wasn’t bothered when one of my students left my class. Transferring from one English class to another, a student will continue to learn the subject and may in fact benefit from having a new perspective on the subject.

But because a school usually has only one band teacher, a student who leaves band is not leaving the class, but leaving the subject. Thus, in a spasm of adolescent desire for change, ends a student’s education in music at the ripe age of 12. As they leave, my quitters almost always assure me they’ll come back—maybe next year, maybe in high school— but in more than 20 years I’ve never had a quitter who returned. Once they pack their bags and check out, they don’t come back.

For years, I taught private lessons at a local music school and had many adult students, some who had played as children and quit and others who had never studied an instrument before meeting me. Those who never had lessons as children always seemed so amazingly eager to learn, despite the substantial obstacles they faced. They were happy just to have the opportunity that they missed as children, and II’d often hear from them something like, “I wish I’d had the chance to learn an instrument when I was a kid, but we didn’t have the money and there wasn’t any band program in my school.”

From the comeback students—those who had played as children and quit— I also saw the same eagerness, but there was something else too: regret. There were many variations in their stories, but all were wrapped in regret at having quit as children. I’ve heard this story of regret so often over the years that I could write a gospel of regret. To borrow from Paul Simon, there were 50 ways to leave your band program, but they all ended in regret. Of course, the regret , as it often does, takes years to catch up to us. I’ve heard all these variations on the theme:

—I quit playing the clarinet when I was 11. I’m not really sure why. Just seemed like the thing to do at the time and no one tried to stop me.

—I quit playing the flute in middle school because the teacher didn’t pay enough attention to me. At time I wanted to be the center of attention.

—I quit playing trumpet in high school because I thought football was more important and there wasn’t time for both.

—I convinced my parents that I didn’t like it, but the truth is I didn’t want to work hard at that age.

—I quit because my friends were quitting.

Whatever the reason, all my come-back adults told me the same sad refrain: I wish I hadn’t quit. I wish that someone had pushed me to stay with it, but no one did. We never take advice until it’s too late to use the advice.

Our children's frontal cortexes

I've been teaching young musicians for more than 20 years, and I can say with confidence that very few children will practice if not directed to do so by an adult. (If your child does, count your blessings.)

If a child is to make any headway in learning a musical instrument, a parent (or other executive figure) must be involved. We parents function as our children’s external frontal cortexes, the function of which is to project future consequences that result from current actions. (Interestingly, the frontal cortex doesn't reach full maturity until a person's late 20s, so our services will be in need for at least a few more years.) To learn a musical instrument (future consequences), you have to practice (current actions). That relation between the future and the present is an immutable law of musical progress. Parents supply the long-range vision that children lack—we connect the present to the future—and without us, there would be very few accomplished musicians on this planet.

To practice effectively, a young musician needs a place to work, a seat, a music stand, a working instrument, engaging music, appropriate goals, and, most of all, someone to help direct the practice.

Butterflies and fear on stage

What prevents musicians (and others who go on stage) from performing at their best? According to body-movement guru Barbara Conable, there are four kinds of problems that interfere with performance: butterflies, self-consciousness, inadequate preparation, and fear. They are usually lumped together under the heading of “performance anxiety,” but in fact not all are anxieties and not all are to be avoided. (Conable’s ideas can be explored in greater depth at www.bodymap.org.)

1. Butterflies is the common sensation of fluttering in the stomach (and possibly nausea) that immediately precedes a performance. However, rather than being something to be feared, it’s actually a positive bodily response that signals emotional involvement and goes away once the performance is underway. Even great performers feel butterflies, and a musician who lacks this response may also lack the vitality needed to be a great performer. In brief, don’t worry about butterflies.

2. Self-consciousness is “a morbid awareness of oneself as an object of attention,” according to a pithy definition that Conable cites. In this case a performer mistakenly believes that they—not the music—are the focus of attention. As Conable notes, the audience has come to hear a performance of music, not to look at a person on stage. The root of the problem lies outside the scope of music performance per se and should be addressed accordingly, but Conable suggests developing kinesthetic and emotional self awareness.

3. Inadequate preparation. I once asked the great saxophonist Ernie Watts whether he felt nervous while performing, and he replied, “Only when I’m not prepared.” If you haven’t done the work needed to be on stage, you simply shouldn’t be there. The remedy for this problem is simple: cancel or delay the performance and go back to the grindstone. Conable cautions musicians never to go on stage unprepared.

4. Fear. Sweating, shaking, rapid breathing, dry mouth, and disorientation are the hallmarks of fear, the most difficult performance anxiety to overcome. Fear can cause memory slips, missed and wrong notes, stopping and starting, and even an inability to read music. In other words, it can ruin a performance. The problem may seem intractable, but Conable notes optimistically that even this barrier can be surmounted with patience and diligence. She summarizes the remedy with the acronym FEAR: a) feel the fear, b) embody the fear, c) arrive, and d) relate.

   1. Most importantly, a performer who feels fear on stage must not try to ignore the feeling. This kind of psychological struggle only adds to the fear. The solution begins in acknowledging the fear as well as other emotions—anger, hope, compassion, anticipation, etc.— that occur in the moment. Fear only overwhelms, Conable notes, when experienced in isolation from other feelings, and fear is diminished when accompanied by other emotions.

   2. Conable encourages performers to feel all of the sensations in the moment of performance, which she refers to as embodying the fear. Being aware of the sensations occurring while on stage, including the feeling of your clothes, shoes, socks, skin, hunger, thirst, pleasure, the feet planted on the floor, etc. allows a performer to connect to the moment.

   3. Arrive in—or claim—the space you perform in. Metropolitan Opera Orchestra French horn player Eric Ralske tells a related anecdote about being backstage during a performance. He noticed a singer about to go onstage strutting like a dog and “marking” his territory by wiping his nasal mucous on the curtains. When he walked out on stage, the singer appeared to own the place, according to Ralske.

   4. Finally, Conable encourages performers to relate to the audience, not to see them as opponents or judges, but rather as people who want to enjoy music. The audience is on your side.

The active metronome (and other great ideas) from Eric Ralske

Erik Ralske plays the French horn. After 17 years in the New York Philharmonic, having reached the pinnacle of an orchestral musician’s career, he stepped back into the ring by auditioning for two other A-list groups: the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. Astoundingly, he won both auditions. For non-musicians, that’s like winning three championships in a row.

Ralske is not one to rest on his laurels, and what he has to say about practicing and performing is well worth listening to. (And by the way, he chose the Met over Los Angeles.)

Below are some his gems, as presented in Noa Kageyama’s wonderful blog at bulletproofmusician.com.

Practice at performance tempo. Many young musicians, myself included, were taught to learn a new piece by practicing very slowly at first and gradually speeding up until the performance tempo is reached. In this common-sense method, you start at a snail’s pace and accelerate bit by bit over a long stretch of time until reaching the performance tempo.

Ralske, however, suggests trying another way: start learning right away at performance tempo. This would be like a racecar driver taking a practice lap on a new course pedal to the metal, so it may seem crazy at first glance, but according to Ralske, it’s often a more efficient way to practice.

Let’s say that you are learning a running passage of sixteenth notes. Rather than going the old way of setting the metronome to a very slow tempo and gradually speeding up until reaching the performance tempo, you would just set the metronome to performance tempo right away. However, to do it correctly, you have to go one note at a time. At first, Ralske recommends, just practice the first two notes in the run at tempo with articulations, dynamics and so forth. When those can be played at tempo, then add the third, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth, etc. until the entire run has been mastered. This method may seem less efficient than the traditional method, but, as Ralke notes, when you get to, say, the tenth note in the run, you have already practiced the first nine many times at tempo. Practice guru Rob Knopper, who also learns new music this way, adds another positive effect: when you practice at tempo right away and learn the music one note at a time, you don’t have to relearn how to play it fast.

Subdivide. The essence of subdividing is to feel the pulse of a smaller note value underneath the larger note you are playing. For example, a quarter note can be felt as two eighth notes, or in a very slow tempo, four sixteenth notes. Ralske correctly notes that subdividing allows musicians to play together with precision, even at very slow tempos. For example, if I play four quarter notes of the melody before handing over the next four quarter notes to someone else, I can do so with greater precision by feeling an underlying pulse of eighth or sixteenth notes. Ralske likens it to completing a connect-the-dots drawing. Connecting the music through an underlying pulse allows the music to be seen more completely. He says that great orchestras learn how to play together even when the conductor’s beat is unclear. They do this by feeling a subdivided beat underneath the pulse of the music.

Predict the metronome. My favorite of Ralske’s ideas involves establishing a new relationship with your metronome, from being a follower to a predictor. Like most young musicians, I spent many agonizing years using a metronome, and how I wish I had heard about Ralske’s idea when I was sixteen. It’s a simple but very powerful idea. Instead of following the metronome and hoping that you will acquire an iron pulse—what he calls a passive use—you should learn to predict when the next click of the metronome will occur, what he calls active use. For example, you count “one” and “now” and “now” and “now” and so forth, so that the metronome merely verifies your prediction of when the next beat will occur. Rather than following, you are predicting and over time, your playing will become much more rhythmical. I’ve done this with students, and the results are stunning. More rhythmical playing occurs right away.

Is talent real?

“Talent is what you think other people have when you’re feeling insecure.”

—Rob Knopper, Metropolitan Opera percussionist

When I taught high school English back in the 1990s, my colleagues and I would often chat about our students over lunch. I’ve forgotten the conversations except for one that sticks in my memory for its striking opposition to what I believed at the time. A couple of English teachers and I were talking in the teacher’s lounge with the school’s choir director, whose groups regularly won prestigious awards. We were discussing talent among our students, referring to a few students whose talent for writing seemed to be far above that of their classmates, when the choir teacher interjected, “I don’t believe in talent. I don’t think it exists. It all boils down to hard work.”

I kept my mouth shut, but to myself I thought, “What the hell are you talking about? Of course talent exists. Some people have it, or at least more of it than others, and some don’t.” I had been around many dedicated musicians over the years, and it was clear to me that some simply had more talent than others. Some just played better and could do things that others only dreamed of doing.

Rob Knopper, whom I quoted above, is among those who believe that talent is overrated, unless by talent you mean hard work.

Knopper’s biography is compelling in this respect. In addition to his job at the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra (a top-level group in case you don’t keep up with orchestral reputations), he has become something of a internet guru on the subject of practicing for success. He uses his own career in music as an object lesson: In a word, his story goes like this: after many years of setbacks and disappointments, he has a realization about his weaknesses, rededicates himself and subsequently reaches the top of his profession.

The right steps. But to back up a bit, Knopper decided in junior high school that he wanted to become a professional drummer. Feeling certain, however, that he didn’t have the coolness to succeed as a rock musician, he decided that he would become an orchestral percussionist. Being a dedicated kind of guy, he took all the right steps to achieve his goal: countless hours of practice, attending prestigious summer music camps, attending Julliard, and auditioning for summer music festivals. Despite all these steps, he took many auditions but never broke through in the way that he had hoped he would. Rejections far outnumbered acceptances, something like seven minor successes out of more than 50 auditions.

Once, after failing to win another audition and feeling at the end of his rope, he decided he would figure out what he had to do, no matter what it took, to win an audition and commit himself totally to succeeding at the project. He did the most sensible thing. He went home to his parents home for the summer and practiced 10-12 hours a day to improve the weakest part of his playing: quiet snare drumming, which, in case you are not a drummer, is especially dicey if you have the slightest bit of nervous energy. Imagine your hands trembling as you try to perform the most delicate passages of soft playing on an instrument that seems built to be played loud.

After the marathon summer of practice at his parents’ home, he came back to New York with a new level of confidence. When soft snare drum playing was called for, he was confident that he could do it. He eventually won his current position at the Metroplitan Opera and began playing with percussionists who had been his heroes not so long before.

Intelligent practice. Knopper credits hard work, and hard work is essential, but it’s not the only thing needed. Knowing how to practice efficiently is equally important. In other words, you can practice for 12 hours a day, but if you’re not practicing in a way that produces results, if you are not practicing intelligently, you are not going to succeed. I’m guilty of that myself. In an effort to improve my trumpet playing when I was younger, I would often practice for 5 or 6 hours every day. But with the benefit of hindsight, I see that my practice was haphazard and lacked appropriate goals. By appropriate, I mean specific and achievable. As a result, my progress was uneven, and often I ended up feeling massively frustrated. I was working very hard, but not making the progress that others around me were making.

In retrospect, I see that my teachers were in part to blame. I actually never learned how to practice from any of them. The typical response to my playing at each week’s lesson from my teachers went something like this: “Sounds good, see you next week,” which is not a good game plan. A summary of my game plan for practice, which borrows form the work of Knopper and USC music professor Robert Cutietta, can be found on this website’s FAQ page. My plan now, since I don’t play the trumpet professionally any longer, is to impart this wisdom to my students.

Hiding out in the section

Psychologists have noticed that a person working in a group will do less work than he or she would do if working alone. This behavior, which goes by the name of the Ringelmann effect, has been verified in many studies. In one, the more people there were in a group of people who were asked to shout, the softer each individual person shouted even though everyone was always asked to shout as loudly as possible.

As a rule, the more people in a group, the less each work each individual does.

David McRaney writes about this behavior in his book You Are Not So Smart. “[W]hen you join the efforts of others toward a common goal, everyone has a tendency to loaf more than if each was working alone.” He calls this behavior “social loafing.” Employers are well aware of social loafing. That’s why they track each individual employee’s productivity. I worked for a large corporation many years ago, when it wasn’t so easy to track an employee’s productivity, and I can attest that there was no shortage of social loafing occurring in the hallways between the cubicles and offices.

I imagine that many band and orchestra teachers have noticed this social loafing behavior among their students, but we just call it “hiding out in the section.” It’s well known among band teachers that if there are eight flute players in the section and all are playing the same part, each student will play it less well in the group than he or she would individually. And some will take it to the extreme and hardly be able to play their part at all, probably hoping that no one will notice.

I met a woman a few years ago who told me that she played flute in her high school band but never did anything more than pretend to play. She would just blow and move her fingers randomly. Amazingly, her band teacher never noticed (or at least, being stretched to the limit, probably noticed but didn’t say anything). Being in a group takes the pressure off.

I’ve found myself feeling a bit annoyed by this phenomenon. When it comes to playing a challenging section of music, I ask my students to practice at home, but they often don’t. Why? I think it’s because they know that others are playing the same music, so their not being able to play the part individually won’t be so noticeable. They are trying to hide out in the section.

The antidote. The one thing that counteracts the Ringelmann effect is what McRaney calls “evaluation apprehension,” in other words, a test. If you know that you are going to be tested individually on the material, you will work harder so as not to sound bad in front of your peers. You can’t hide out in the section when you are the only one playing. That might explain why instruments that tend to play by themselves, such as the tuba and the piano, prepare their music thoroughly. There’s no section to hide in. Every note you play is heard.

Musical training, if done right, encourages each person to think of their part as essential to the overall character of the piece. Mature musicians learn to think of themselves as soloists, no matter what part they play, whether third trombone or first violin. When Michael Tilson Thomas took the job of conductor of the San Francisco Symphony, he is reported to have told the musicians in the orchestra to think of themselves as soloists. That doesn’t mean that the tuba should play so as to obstruct the sound of the first violins. It’s not willfully playing your part louder than others. It’s realizing that your part, even when part of the “hidden” inner harmony, deserves to be played at the highest possible level. Such playing takes maturity and humility, which may explain why not every musical ensemble plays at the highest level or why young musicians must learn how to do it.

To address my annoyance, I’m going to try to get around the Ringelmann effect by having my students perform the challenging sections of their music in front of the class in a short recital format. For example, if the alto saxophones have an especially challenging eight measures of music to play in a particular arrangement, each player will be asked to perform those eight measures as a recital in front of the class with the expectation that these “recitals” will improve the overall quality of the ensemble. We will see how it goes.

She has to want to do math for herself, not for me

Years ago, when I taught mathematics, one of my students dropped my class halfway through the school year. I asked her mother for an explanation, and she replied, “She isn’t committing time to do her math and it has been a cause of stress for her. I don’t want her to study math because I want her to, she has to want to do it for herself. This isn’t the case so it’s probably best for her not to continue.”

This unusual line of thought spun me off into a maze of thoughts about math education. Maybe my student’s mom was right. Should you compel your child to study mathematics? And especially when it can cause stress? Do children study math because they want to or because their parents want them to? Why do schools require math?

Outside of a few math aficionados, most young people study math because it’s part of the school curriculum. To be blunt, for many young people, math is a hoop that must be jumped through on the way to graduation. Most of us, if we don’t end up in science, accounting, or engineering-related professions, don’t actually use math beyond the level of arithmetic in our adult lives. Even then, our phones can now figure out the tip on a restaurant bill quicker than we can, so what were all those years of math for?

I began to see the logic in my student’s mom’s reply. We don’t really need math, so why are we forcing our children to take it? Sure, the aficionados should be taught math since they clearly have the talent for it, but what about the rest of us?

A little fiction. I have to admit that I made up that little anecdote, but it is based in reality. The truth is the only math I have taught was to my son, and in that case only arithmetic. But the fabrication was for a good reason: we usually cannot see clearly that which is right in front of us. We take things for granted. We study math, but do we really know why other than that it’s required by the school our child attends or that some experts have told us it’s necessary? We take it for granted that math is required but that other subjects, such as music are elective. In other words, you’ve got to take math whether you like it or not because someone in the past said so, but you only take music if you want to or, as some people say, if you’ve got the talent or inspiration for it. I often wonder how those priorities became fixed in our school curriculum.

The actual reply I got from my student’s mother—who was responding to me when I asked her why her daughter had dropped band class in the middle of the school year—went as follows: “She isn’t committing time to practice and it has been a cause of stress for her. I don’t want her to do it because I want her to, she has to want to do it for herself. This isn’t the case so it’s probably best for her not to continue.”

Notice the subtext and assumptions in that reply. Music is a subject that we believe should be limited to those who are inspired to study it. She was essentially saying that she didn’t want to compel her daughter to do something that required hard work. Music, like math and other challenging subjects, takes good old-fashion hard work.

Now do you see how much we assume about the essentialness of math, music, and other subjects that we study? We assume that math is life-and-death mandatory and that music is optional. What about the many subjects—accounting, behavioral economics, social psychology, auto repair, cognitive science, graphic design, marketing, to name just a few—that we could teach young people but do not? It might be time examine our assumptions by turning our attention to the received curriculum and asking why we teach subject A but not subject B.

A logistics problem? Could instrumental music’s status as an elective boil down to a logistics problem? To study math, you need a book, some paper, a pencil, a calculator, perhaps a few other lightweight objects. To have a school band or orchestra, you need an (often large and somewhat expensive) instrument, a method book, sheet music, music stands, and a large room to fit all those players. In other words, math is an easy logistics problem. Music, just like auto shop, is a complicated one. And that’s one of the reasons that music, the most human of arts, that which has accompanied us in celebration and in despair from the earliest of times, is an elective in our schools.

The other reason—one I’ve written about several times before—is that you don’t really need to play an instrument any longer to have music in your life. Our ancestors had to make their own music. Now, with a few swipes of a finger or thumb, you can listen to anything ever recorded, from Bach to Beyonce. After all, why struggle to learn a musical instrument, why devote so much time over so many years, when it’s so easy to just sit back and be entertained by whatever you desire to hear at the moment? That’s a tough question, but one worth thinking about deeply.

The iPhone vs. the saxophone

Tristan Harris used to work for Google. In 2012 he gave a company talk arguing that “we [have] a moral responsibility to create an attention economy that doesn’t weaken people’s relationships or distract people to death.” To that list, I would add a third responsibility: the attention economy should not prevent people from doing sustained focused work.

Harris’s bosses must have been impressed because he was soon appointed the company’s “design ethicist.” Yet the work of designing ethics wasn’t apparently as high a priority to Google as Harris had hoped, and he eventually left Google to start the non-profit Center for Humane Technology. The Center aims to bring the harmful effects of the internet economy to the public’s attention. It’s a David v. Goliath struggle.

I sense that many of us are aware of the harmful facets of the digital world we inhabit, especially those who came of age before it enveloped us so completely. In a presentation at a recent technology conference, Harris warned, “When your business model is extracting data and attention out of people,” the result is “a race to the bottom of the brain stem.” (Harris was first brought to my attention by Los Angeles Times business columnist Michael Hiltzik.)

There’s a war going on in our culture—not the “Culture Wars” between left and right. The war I refer to goes deeper, to the very core of what it means to be human regardless of where you may fall on the political spectrum. One the one hand, there are forces driving us to ever shortening attention spans and constant superficial stimulation. In opposition to these potent forces, however, are much older traditions of patience, perseverance, and deep knowledge. (To be fair, this war didn’t commence with the Internet age. I trace its origins to the rise of the original mass distractor, television.)

When history calls. You can’t help but feel sorry for the monks of Lindisfarne on the British Isles on June 7 in the year 793, carrying on their routines, unaware that their tranquil lives were about to be upended by Viking invaders on June 8. On that day, the past collided quickly and violently with the present as the Vikings descended on their monastery. In our case, the collision between past and present is much slower, so slow, perhaps that you may not have noticed it. Nevertheless, we stand at a juncture in history.

Virtually all of us now carry a potent little device in our back pockets that can entertain and distract us endlessly. This device gives us immediate access to a brave new world of immediate gratification and endless stimulation, and nothing is more than a few strokes of the thumbs away. To be sure, these devices have many purposes, many of them very useful, but, as Tristan Harris noted, we are foolish to ignore their malign side, especially as our children are growing up with these devices appended to their bodies.

By now you may be wondering what this has to do with music. Before I get to the answer, I am reminded of a joke: How long does it take to make an apple pie? [Dramatic pause] Billions of years. First, you have to create the universe, then the stars, then habitable planets, then soil, then apple trees. The joke illustrates the idea that even the most “trivial” of things has a unfathomably long pedigree. There are literally billions of years of cause and effect behind everything in our lives, from apple pies to the highest arts.

Fifteen years. Learning to play a musical instrument exemplifies and perhaps epitomizes the traditions of the past. To play a musical instrument, you spend years patiently working on a craft—scales, arpeggios, etudes, recitals, hours of practice—to achieve the goal of mastery. To get back to the joke about about creating an apple pie, how long does it take to play Frederic Chopin’s Nocturne Op. 9, No. 2 in E flat major? [Dramatic pause again] A minimum of 15 years. The piece’s duration is measured in minutes, but the preparation needed to get those minutes just right lasts for thousands of hours stretched over many years. Thousands of hours of knowledge, patience, perseverance, and struggle.

Or, to take another example, consider the music of Western music’s greatest composer, J.S. Bach. With great care and workmanlike attention over a span of many decades, he wrote some of the most majestic music human ears have ever heard. The quantity, leave alone the quality, of his work is staggering. Just copying one of his masterpieces by hand would take more time than most of us could imagine spending on a single task. And yet Bach—and many others who are less well known today—did it. They built cathedrals of music out of knowledge, patience, perseverance, and struggle. It doesn’t give me any pleasure to note that their towering achievements may never be repeated—or even approached if we go too far down the road of shortened attention.

Does being human mean that we have everything we want within easy reach? Want something? Touch a few buttons, or just speak to your smart speaker, and it can be delivered to your door almost immediately. Want to watch a Korean soap opera ore distract yourself with Candy Crush? Want to put some light jazz on in the background? All of this is available and so very easy to reach with a few finger or thumb motions.

By now, you should be able to tell which side of this struggle I am on. The other side in this war seems to be whispering that nothing need be hard anymore. Relax and let the machines do it. To me, that’s a problem in the way that I define what it means to be human. The meaning of life emerges from the struggle for survival, for mastery, for greatness. Make it too easy, allow the algorithms and devices to do all the hard stuff, and you lose the essence. The brain atrophies when we always allow the computer to navigate for us. The false paradise of instant gratification and ease may sound nice, but I just don’t think it’s a place where humans will thrive.

What worries me in particular is that short-term gratification and constant distraction are becoming the new traditions that we will bequeath to our heirs. Will our descendants be like the characters from the movie “Wall-E,” needing nothing but to be passive consumers of food and entertainment? I hope not, but I also know that the war will be a long and difficult one. The other side has massive advantages that my side cannot match. But I’m sticking with my saxophone.