When we learn to make connections between two phenomena, we can make better choices and have better reactions.
There’s a particular color the sky gets before a severe thunderstorm; a distinctive pale green that sort of hangs in the air.
It takes awhile to learn to recognize the color; but if you pay attention, certainly by your teens you learn to notice that color and what comes after.
It’s true for all sorts of phenomena that there are signs visible ahead of time, if you know where to look. Obvious ones, like rain preceding a rainbow; and subtle ones like whatever it is that some animals sense before an earthquake or tsunami.
My point is this: we need to learn to recognize those things, and we can’t learn to recognize them without experience. You didn’t recognize that green before your first thunderstorm), or even before your first ten; it took awhile to see the connection.
There are all kinds of subtle musical associations that we can learn to recognize and anticipate – how a melodic note will affect the voicing underneath it; how a particular chord will cause the second tenors to sing flat; how a certain acoustic needs to affect the tempos in a performance.
But without experience seeing those connections in action, it’s very hard to learn to recognize and act.
Learn to recognize the green before the storm, in whatever context you need to.