When I solve Matt Gaffney’s Weekly Crossword Contest, I’m always looking for the click. The moment when one small logical bridges the gap to the solution. I’m not alone, there. When his Crossword Meta Puzzles require too large of a logical leap to get to the answer, there is always much groaning in the discussion boards.
The same was true when I taught test prep – in reading sections of standardized tests, many questions ask you to draw inferences from the text, and wrong answers always included ones that went beyond the click – beyond what you can reasonably infer, whether accurate or not.
And there is always that moment in working on music, too. Whether composing or rehearsing a piece, you have to seek the click that you need in order to move on to the next step. It might be understanding the underlying rhythmic components, or finding the right architecture of the piece (as when I said to Mandy last week, “I still feel like this piece is missing a section.”). It might be learning to understand how a chord functions, or to anticipate and lean into a dissonance or a modulation. As a composer, it’s preparing those things ahead of time so they make sense. So that they click.
When the click happens, everything works seamlessly, because it makes logical sense.