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Six
Strings
and a
Dream
Interview with Gary Marcus, author of Guitar Zero
If you don’t start playing an instrument as a child, can you become good at it
later in life? Or is there, as is commonly believed, a “critical period” after which
the learning window closes? A professor of psychology and director of the NYU
Center for Language and Music, Gary Marcus decided to be his own guinea pig
as he explored this idea. Dr. Marcus set out to practice guitar for 10,000 hours—
testing another popular belief that this is the amount of time needed to achieve
expertise, in anything—to see if he could become fluent on an instrument.
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by Melissa Hartman
In graduate school, I tried to learn again with something
called the Miracle Piano, which you hooked up to your computer, and was basically a typing tutor for piano. I made it
through the first few lessons fine; I learned where all the notes
were and in what order I was supposed to play them. But I
really didn’t have a sense of rhythm and timing, and after about
five lessons, I gave up on it. There were no miracles with the
Miracle Piano.
Did you attempt to learn an
instrument when you were younger?
How did you find your way to the guitar?
My early experiences were dreadful. The first
one I remember is trying to learn to play the
recorder in fourth grade. I’d dug up a recorder
at home somewhere, and I asked if I could take
lessons. My mom bought me the lessons, but
the teacher discerned when I couldn’t play
“Mary Had A Little Lamb” that recorder was
probably not for me. I wasn’t trying to be a great
musician; I was just trying to play at all. I think
she was looking for the next great thing, and I
obviously was not that.
As the title of the book suggests, I made my most serious
efforts at learning music after making a little progress in the
video game Guitar Hero, which I initially thought would
be impossible. But when I started, I wasn’t 100 percent
certain whether I wanted to try piano or guitar. Ultimately
I chose the guitar because I just liked the sounds it made. I
liked the physicality of it. And because I make my living as
a researcher and a writer at a computer keyboard, I didn’t
really want to spend a couple of hours a day at another kind
of keyboard. Of course, there are other possibilities, but I
thought that instruments that require very fine control of
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your mouth—such
as trumpet and saxophone—were just going to be
too hard. I thought violin would be too
hard because it’s fretless. So I decided guitar
might be a good place to start.
How did you learn to play?
I started by learning on my own. This was
before the explosion of YouTube videos, so I
read a lot of books, some of which came with
a CD I could listen to. And I just spent a lot of
time with the guitar trying to understand what
it could do.
So I was pretty much self-taught for about six months,
thinking after my fourth-grade experience with the recorder
that no teacher would want to see me. But it turns out that
there are different kinds of teachers out there, including those
who are happy to work with adults who are not trying to be
professionals, but just want to understand music better.
Eventually I found teachers to work with me, but by then
I was better than I ever thought I could get to be by virtue of
sheer persistence.
If you were to design a music instruction
course based on your experience,
what features would it include?
I wouldn’t start with a lot of time on a guitar. I would have
students work on rhythm, doing things like just dancing in
place, in time, to learn where the beat is. For most people
that’s easy, but for people like me, who have a clinical problem
with rhythm, it’s not. I would probably use a drum machine
to teach that.
I would also use a ukulele rather than a guitar. The tuning
on a guitar is a bit complicated. There are six strings and one of
them is not like the other five, which makes it confusing. The
ukulele doesn’t have the prestige or the same tone range as the
guitar, but you’d learn all the basics.
I would teach things like the A minor pentatonic scale,
which empowers you to make up your own music. A huge,
exciting thing that kept me going was the realization that if
I knew sets of notes that went together, I could put them in
different, almost random orders and they would still sound
good. The ability to improvise was very motivating to me, and
I would want students to feel that, too, and feel it early on.
What do you think of the
notion that with 10,000
hours of practice, anyone
can become an expert?
The best studies are on chess. The average is about 10,000 hours to become
a grandmaster. But the variation is
enormous. Some people get to that
level of mastery of chess in 5,000
hours, or even 3,000 hours. Some
people get there in 25,000 hours, and
some people even after 25,000 hours
aren’t there yet. Ten thousand hours is
kind of the rule of thumb, but it doesn’t show that there’s no
such thing as talent. In fact, talent is the variation around
that number.
One of the most rewarding experiences you
describe in the book happens at a summer
camp, when you experience “flow” for the first
time. Why was flow so important to you?
The psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi defines flow as
this pleasurable state when you get so engaged in something
that you lose track of time. You get completely absorbed in
it. Mountain climbers can experience flow. So can writers and
jugglers. Musicians can experience it. Something that came as
a surprise to me was that even relatively novice musicians can
reach that state.
The first time I ever experienced flow in music was in a
summer camp where I was jamming with 11-year-olds. We
were told to play notes just from this one chord, each on our
own instrument. It was exciting. It was real music, and we were
just making it up, in the moment, and it was amazing.
I’ve been in that state occasionally in writing and in juggling,
but now, music is the most reliable way for me to get there.
A huge, exciting
thing that kept
me going was
the realization
that if I knew
sets of notes that
went together, I
could put them
in different,
almost random
orders and
they would still
sound good.
What’s next for you musically?
This book gave me opportunities to play with really good
musicians, including Vernon Reid, the guitarist of Living
Colour. As part of the book tour I got to play way above my
level because of the weird fact that I’m a scientist who wrote
a successful book on music. That was really fun, but at the
end of it, I was glad to just play for myself again and not have
people watching me. Being able to play for myself was all I
ever really wanted to do.
Read more about Gary Marcus and his books at www.garymarcus.com.
www.cty.jhu.edu/imagine
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