level up

I’m increasingly finding music to be like a role-playing video game.  We choose specializations that we have to level up, say clarinet, conducting, piano, and sight singing.  Then, there’s an overall “musician” rating that is a combination of all of your subsets of skills. Only by working on all of them can you become a better musician.  Better still, the more you work on one sub-skill, the more it helps with the other subskills. More skillful sight singing makes me a better musician, which also makes me a better clarinetist, for instance.  It’s sometimes helpful to take a different perspective, to be a musician who happens to do x. With Music in mind, we might make different choices, which might be better ones. ​