The intuition of experience is remarkable.
I can look at a new score and find the spots that won’t work with good success. I’ll play through a section and say, “That won’t work.” I can go back and think about why, but the answer comes before I consciously know the reason.
This is a variation on the ideas that Malcolm Gladwell popularized in his book Blink. The idea is that the years of work I’ve done on my craft allows me to cut through to the heart more quickly.
The bad news for early teachers is that this only comes through time and work. In my case, it involves programming – and writing – a lot of music that didn’t work for my ensemble, till I learned to recognize it.
The good news is that it does come, in time. It can feel like a superpower, to just know things in a flash. It’s not a superpower. It’s just time and work.
As a writer, it also means that I can avoid many mistakes in my writing process, mistakes that I used to have to put in front of an ensemble to discover. Now I can skip past these as I write, which opens me up to trying other things, to making new and different mistakes!