When we hear a musician perform, we hardly ever think of the number of hours it has taken to prepare the pieces performed or to attain a given general level of performance. We could ask the same of other experts. How many meaningful chess configurations does a chess master know and how long does it take to learn those? Simon and Gilmartin (1973; as cited in Ericsson & Smith, 1991) estimated that between 10,000 and 100,000 meaningful configurations (chunks) were necessary and that it would take up to 30,000 hours to become an chess master! Because learning takes time, and even more so when a skill comprises a motor component, the amount of practice time is very important.
A seminal study in this area is the one by Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch-Römer (1993), in which the authors assessed practice times of musicians and related them to attained levels of performance. In their first study, 30 violin stu-dents from the Berlin (Germany) Music Academy were compared with regard to the amount of time they had spent practicing over their life spans. The stu-dents were rated by their teachers as being among either the “best” or the “good”
students (10 each, matched for age and sex), whereas the last group of 10 students consisted of aspiring music teachers. The mean age of the young violinists Practice 71
was 23.1 years. To ascertain whether the “best” students were comparable with current professionals in regard to practice times, 10 members of professional or-chestras in Berlin were also surveyed. During an interview, participants reported on current durations of practice and on their musical biographies (e.g., first teacher, start of lesson, changes of teacher). Also, they estimated retrospec-tively how long and how many days per week they had practiced in a given year since the start of their training. Those estimates were later summed to a total duration of accumulated practice by multiplying daily estimates by the number of days of practice and the resulting weekly estimates by number of weeks per year and then adding all the yearly estimates. When comparing the lifetime ac-cumulated durations among groups, the authors found that the superior experts (“best” students) had practiced more than the others (see figure 4.1 top). At age 18, when all the students entered the Academy, the best students had already practiced for roughly 7,400 hours; the next group, 5,300 hours; and the last group, 3,400.
In a second study involving amateurs and professionals, Ericsson et al.
(1993) interviewed pianists regarding their practice times and asked them to perform several motor performance tasks (tapping and coordination, music per-formance; see also Krampe & Ericsson, 1996). In brief, the findings showed that practice times were again related to motor performance (simple tapping tasks and complex movement coordination): More practice resulted in shorter between-keystroke times (faster movements) and more consistency in expres-sive performance. Many more detailed results are reported in those studies, but for our present purpose it is important to remember that duration of practice is systematically related to attained level of performance.
A later study by Sloboda et al. (1996) confirmed the results of Ericsson et al.’s (1993) study for younger music students. A large sample of music students at five different levels of achievement was surveyed with a method similar to that of Ericsson et al. (1993; see Williamon & Valentine, 2000, pp. 355–357, for a good comparison of both studies). Students were divided in groups, ranging from those with the highest level of achievement (Group One in figure 4.1 bot-tom) to students who had abandoned playing altogether (reported as Group Five in the figure). The better students had practiced more, even in the beginning stages of learning, whereas the least industrious ones were also the ones most likely to drop out of lessons. More important, the best students needed as many hours to progress from one level to the next as did the less proficient students.
Sloboda et al.’s (1996) data show that there is no “fast track” to achievement;
a minimum number of hours is simply necessary to reach a certain level of pro-ficiency. The better students in the study spent more time tinkering with their instruments, suggesting that they enjoyed playing them. Similar findings relat-ing amount of relevant practice to performance also come from other domains outside of music (see Ericsson & Lehmann, 1997; Ericsson, 2004, for a review).
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Assessing deliberate practice is usually done by interviewing the participants and obtaining retrospective estimates of practice for every year since the start of practice. Critics have suggested that these estimates may be unreliable and that time spent practicing alone may not be a good indicator of deliberate prac-tice. Ericsson et al. (1993) included a diary study in their project to compare estimates of current practice times with week-long diary entries. It became ap-parent that all students had slightly overestimated their practice. Therefore, the Practice 73
Figure 4.1. Relation between accumulated lifetime deliberate/formal practice and at-tainment of instrumental music performance (top panel for experts; bottom panel for novices). See text for details.
overall pattern of results remains: Practicing more leads to better performance in the long run, but the absolute magnitude of amounts indicated by the respon-dents may have been slightly inflated. The precise amount of (individual) prac-tice is not as interesting because it varies substantially among instruments—with string and keyboard players practicing most, followed by wind players, and ending with vocalists (Jørgensen, 1997). This difference is not due to the lazi-ness of some instrumentalists (or singers) but, rather, likely reflects physiologi-cal limitations and teaching traditions.
Although practice times are quite telling in the long run, researchers have rightfully claimed that they are not as indicative of performance in the short run—for example, when learning a single piece of music (Williamon & Valen-tine, 2000). The authors asked pianists at different levels to practice a piece of music and to record their practice using a tape recorder. Although the amount of practice was not related to final quality of performance, the length of practice segments in the middle stage of learning the piece was (see also the section on phases of practice, later in this chapter). Possibly some students acquired the piece faster and had fewer problems with its specifics. After all, someone with little experience playing Bach may face problems that an experienced Baroque player does not. This would be consistent with another study that found that a musician’s personally estimated difficulty of a piece, along with its objective amount of content—or the number of notes to play—did predict the amount of time a musician needed to learn this music for performance (Lehmann & Erics-son, 1998b). In brief, the mere duration of practice cannot be used indepen-dently from a more detailed analysis of the quality of practice when it comes to short-term practice efforts.
If practice times are more important in the long run, could one not simply increase the number of practice hours every day? This is, alas, not possible, largely because mental effort is needed to practice effectively, and human at-tention capacity is limited, as everybody knows. Ericsson et al. (1993) estimate that approximately 4 hours’ worth of concentrated daily mental effort is possi-ble without long-term physiological or psychological burnout. Beginners in a domain and children can probably concentrate for shorter amounts of time (also Williamon & Valentine, 2000). This fact leads to varying amounts of practice over a lifetime, starting with shorter stretches and leading up to (overly) long hours of practice prior to the start of the career (or before college exams). Up to this point musicians are still building skills.
Later the focus may shift to maintaining existing skills, which is likely to re-quire less practice. Moreover, competing activities, such as managing one’s life, career, and family or teaching obligations, force performers to practice less. To our knowledge, allegations of little or even no practice by performers must be misinterpretations of ambiguous remarks. When musicians claim not to need to practice, it may be that concertizing, or other activities which they may not view as practicing, suffice to keep their skills up.
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Very much later in life, performers ought to practice more because they have to counteract the adverse effects of aging. Incidentally, research shows that mu-sicians who keep practicing can actually delay those negative effects (Krampe &
Ericsson, 1996). The finding that their musical cognitive-motor skills decay comparably less than their nonmusical cognitive skills do offers a hopeful per-spective for all active musicians. Age effects can also be met with compensa-tory strategies, such as choosing technically less demanding pieces or playing more slowly.
What we learn from all these studies is that the amount of optimized practice is related to the attained performance. The expertise view does not rule out pos-sible individual differences in innate aptitude; it merely focuses our view on those aspects of skill acquisition that we can influence as educators. As educa-tors, we know that it is not the quantity of practice alone that is so important but also the quality, a subject to which we now turn.