So how long does it take to become a skilled musician? 10,000 hours, according to the latest research in cognitive neuroscience.

Daniel J. Levitin, in his book, This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, writes that studies in musical expertise – and expertise in general – reveal that approximately three hours a day over a period of ten years is what it takes to achieve basic mastery in a particular domain of activity, whether this be musicianship, a sport, writing, playing chess, etc. (An intriguing question I’d like to pursue later on is expertise in spiritual training.) “Learning requires the assimilation and consolidation of information in neural tissue.” Through repetition and incremental advance – which is another way of saying “practice” – we kneed our neural tissue in ways that create strength of memory so as to permit the coordination of skills-specific activities with the (apparently spontaneous) fluidity that marks higher levels of proficiency. But importantly, rote activity will not suffice. “Memory strength is also a function of how much we care about the experience. Neurochemical tags associated with memories mark them for importance, and we tend to code as important things that carry with them a lot of emotion, whether positive or negative.”

The point is not only that positive emotion incentivizes us to practice something that might otherwise be a mechanical exercise, merely a chore. But the care, attention and genuine excitement associated with its practice increases dopamine, which assists in the encoding of memory traces in neural tissues. In other words, the greater the love, the more indelible the memory. And the more indelible the memory, the more proficient the execution of the skill.

Mastery, in Levitin’s use of the term, cannot be equated with mere technical execution, however. “Many of our greatest musical minds weren’t considered experts in a technical sense. Irving Berlin, one of the most successful composers of the twentieth century, was a lousy instrumentalist and could barely play the piano.” This could hardly be more applicable to rock.

While we sometimes celebrate technical virtuosity in rock music, and while there is a substantial list of “musicians’ musicians,” more often we marvel at the depth of a musician’s range and intensity of emotional expression, or a musician’s irrepressible style. It’s the reason we can marvel at the guitar work of The Edge as much as Jeff Beck. Or appreciate the distinctive drumming fingerprint of Ringo Starr or Charlie Watts as much as Neil Peart or Terry Bozzio. Or why Bob Dylan’s voice can elicit as much affection as Freddie Mercury’s.

In fact, large swathes of rock music explicitly repudiate any emphasis on technical skill as part of its characteristic sound.  “Three chords and the truth” is one kind of rock philosophy. One can think of punk music’s imperative to pare music down to essentials, to unearth – in the name of protest against all establishment – rock’s primordiality. But even here there is a very high degree of skill involved. Even if Tommy Ramone could express loathing over another interminable Hendrix solo, and call for “some pure, stripped down, no bullshit rock ‘n’ roll,” make no mistake about it: the power of punk music, and its effective communication in performance, is hardly a matter of accident; it requires significant skill and experimentation to discover and communicate the musical spirit that makes punk music so very “punk.” A garage may not seem an obvious place for high-level musical training, yet countless hours of sweat-soaked practice, with the smell of gasoline, paint thinner, beer, and smoke in the air, are essential for even those most “primitive” of rock creations.

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