I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine

by Daniel J. Levitin

If an expert musician sees on a sheet of music that they have to make a rapid stepwise passage down two octaves, they’ll look at the first note and the last note and use their knowledge of scales to get from the top note to the bottom—they don’t need to read, or even think about, each individual note. Similarly, they encode chord sequences as chunks rather than individual chords, akin to textual or numeric chunking, allowing for a relatively sparse schematic representation of each song. A musician knows that a blues song will have a dominant I chord, IV chord, and V chord (in the key of A: A7, D7, E7)*—they don’t need to remember any more than the sequence and with experience, they can feel when it’s time to change the chord. Performance expectations for classical musicians, particularly soloists, are different than those for popular music performers, and classical musicians are indeed expected to play the music as written. But this still does not require that they necessarily memorize each individual note—they employ the same strategies mentioned above.