The Power of Repetition. First Principle of All Learning.

Nothing like doing something over and over to get good at it. But there has to be a bit of stretch each time—even if, simply doing it today is the stretch. To master something, you’ll have to experiment, just as the Wright Brothers did, time and again, before getting that first flight.

It’s the repetition that finally settles your mind, isn’t it? To get good at something, you have to be curious and patient enough to persist.

The power of repetition is immeasurable. The art of virtuosity is as much about repetition as anything else. But you have to practice in a different way than you would—for example—if your objective were to memorize a play or poetry. Your habits of performance will then take over and ensure that the memory appears almost without effort. It’s a fascinating phenomenon: the more you do something, the easier it becomes. Why?

It’s because of what can be called the primaeval urge to master. This urge is what drives a bird to repeat its movements or a fish swimming in long straight lines as it migrates. This impulse is also behind a computer program that keeps on doing, over and over again—the way programs in our brains become increasingly well designed the longer we use them. And it is the starting point, too, for learning how to improvise in music by force of repetition.

Much of our intelligence—as with computers—is based on obsessive repetition. The human brain has an enormous memory capacity, as we can see in our ability to hold up to 250 names and faces. But this same brain is also remarkably able to store information and then uses it repeatedly.

This capacity is what gives us a lifetime of experience under the roof of the skull, or so it seems. When faced with new situations that demand a flexible response—like making a new friend—our brains can store rules, habits and reactions with which to respond automatically, without thinking much about it; in this sense, we have become “second nature.

To begin to learn a new piece, you must first become familiar with it. Let’s say you’re trying to play a certain passage from the Beethoven Concerto. To learn it, you must first play it over and over until it feels as if second nature. While this may take a few attempts or even many more, the point is not to get the passage perfect but to master its techniques. You will then find that once the correct notion has taken hold of your fingers, it will come much more readily and effortlessly than otherwise.

You have to make the passage a part of yourself. It’s a physical activity and therefore must become one of your habits. You can then move on to the next level, of speech, and repeat it until you can speak along with the music. This is called “orchestrating”: you will hear everything in your head as if you were playing in an orchestra with all its instruments.

To make things more challenging, you must also practise speed. This is what distinguishes a virtuoso from a mere amateur. After mastering this, you will be ready to move on to the next level: electronic improvisation. Here you can play an entire piece without even knowing the score or notes and without having heard it played by anyone else—yet it will come flowing out of your fingers as if magically created by your spirit.

All this can be done without coming across as a show-off. It’s simply the result of a very particular and very deep-rooted habit. But you do need to have a certain amount of natural talent to be able to play all this without too much effort, even though it will have become so intuitive that you won’t even think about it.

You can compare virtuosity with mastery of an instrument in the same way that you would compare performance with mere training (practising). Mastery is different from performance because it happens at the level of your spirit, which is where the source of the virtuoso resides.

In the final stage, you will perform the piece in your head as well.

There are three stages to memorization: first, learn it until it feels effortless; then orchestrate it; then perform it by memory, even if only silently and mentally.