10,000 Hours

Surprising as it may seem, simply owning a fine AGO organ console does not a good organist make, all claims by the manufacturers aside. No matter how many beautiful stop keys, switches, and pistons, little musical sound will spontaneously erupt without some human intervention (MIDI recordings aside). To be fair, this is not a fact that organ manufacturers usually hide, but neither do they go out of their way to advertise it.

I do admit that I feel like a better organist seated at a better organ. And I enjoy practicing longer when there are inspiring stop sounds to select. Different registrations can make the same piece of music sound ghastly or sublime. My recent favorite is the Burea Church extended AGO sample set which I use with the free Grand Orgue software. But just having this organ setup sitting in my living room does nothing to improve my playing, especially if I am traveling and away from said living room as I was recently. My last organ lesson clearly demonstrated that.

Tempting as it is to spend my free time tweaking virtual organ configurations or converting analog organs to MIDI, the only thing I would have to show for that time would be a mechanical tool, an instrument capable of producing music, but only by someone who knew how to play it. Time spent practicing gives me something that cannot be taken away, something less susceptible to obsolescence and decay. The gift of music.

Malcom Gladwell in his best selling book "Outliers" describes some of the ingredients which produce truly exceptionally competent people. Be they musicians, airline pilots, or physicians, he asserts that an investment of at least 10,000 hours is necessary to truly excel at anything. And thinking about it, this number seems about right. That's about 3 hours a day for 9 years. A doctor does not graduate from university and start practicing immediately. A tennis star does not pick up a racket and win at Wimbledon the first year. The Beatles didn't start a band and instantly rise to stardom by performing to stadiums full of adoring fans. No, they spent years playing in small clubs in Berlin honing their skills before they were 'discovered'. I'm not sure they would have called their club playing 'practicing'. If you had asked, they probably would have told you 'trying to survive'.

But I thought it would be interesting to estimate how many hours I've spent practicing the organ, omitting past musical interests like piano, band, and choir participation. I started playing the organ about as soon as my feet could reach the pedals. I didn't care so much for the piano. Maybe it was just the loud piano we had a home, but I did not like sound of hammers banging on strings. It was a Baldwin Acrosonic. It probably should have been called a 'forte' rather than piano. Assuming that organ lessons started around age 13 and stopped when I graduated from high school at age 18, that's about 6 years. Assuming I practiced about 45 minutes every school day each of those years, by a very rough estimate I have put in about 832 hours of organ practice. That does not seem like very much, but it might even be a slightly high estimate. Of course it omits any time spent playing in church on the weekend, but that could probably be considered a negligible rounding error due to the fact that the majority of time in church services was spent with other people talking or simple hymn playing, not performing serious organ music. I was a bit surprised at how little cumulative time I had invested.

But the good news here is that there is hope! Maybe all that is needed is more practice time, as Bach said something to the effect that organ playing is easy if you work as hard at it as he did! If I can play as well as I can now with that little practice, just think what could happen if I spent 3 hours a day for 9 years? In fact, using Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 number, I only have an estimated 9168 hours to go, less whatever practice time I already put in over the last year and a half since purchasing this organ. That's just a bit over 8 years more to go!

I am reminded of something Nadia Boulanger once wistfully wrote regarding her failure to learn Russian: "Would it have really killed me to learn one word a day?"

Time for me to get serious about practicing! Maybe you too!