For most of my life I’ve played the piano

I started taking lessons in third grade. I continued through my senior year of high school. In college, I’d wander to the music building nearly every day and practice for an hour.

At the peak of my ability, I was probably a very good amateur. A lack of discipline and a very liberal interpretation of timing capped my potential.

At that time, I could sit for hours playing from memory. My repertoire was wide and deep including classical, jazz, blues, rock, show tunes, “oldies”, and top forty pop.

I could memorize any non-classic piece within a couple of days. I felt like I was able to open my head and pour the music straight in.

I still play. However, through the years, the time and attention that I’ve been able to devote to playing has decreased significantly.

In terms of ability, I’m now a competent novice. While I still understand music mechanically, I no longer have the patterns, styles, approaches or muscle memory from which to play. As a result, my ability to memorize, improvise, and embellish music has decreased sharply.

Today, I struggle to memorize even the simplest piece of music.

So, what changed?

Sheet music is a lot like today’s micro-learning.

It provides a short, focused, concise representation of a song. Like much of today’s micro-learning, it focuses on the specific information needed to get a task done. In the case of music, the task is playing a song. The information includes the timing, key, notes, and phrasing.

Yet, two people reading the same music may produce an entirely different result. Playing music is about much more than just applying the “facts” of a given song.

Some of the difference can be attributed to artistic interpretation. Other differences come from the musician synthesizing the song’s story with his or her own experience. I would argue that those two things are what bring the song alive. Yet, neither can be found in the music

Another differentiator, and the one that drove my ability to memorize so easily, is the musician’s understanding of music in general. That’s critical because to play the song, you first have to understand music. The sheet music might tell you that the song has 6/8 timing, but it doesn’t tell you what that means or what to do with that piece of information.

A good musician understands more than just the notes. He or she understands how music works – the structure of a scale, the chord progressions of a style of music, and the way that melody and harmony work together.

My ability to memorize had nothing to do with my ability to remember notes. I didn’t have to. I just had to remember they key that I was playing and the sound I was trying to create. Through both my musical memory and muscle memory, the next notes that I needed to play were obvious, with or without the music in front of me.

As I’ve grown older, my music library has grown. I have literally thousands of scores taking up my cabinets and now my iPad.

Yet, I can’t play them the way I used to. And, I certainly can’t memorize them anymore. Although I’ve accumulated more instructions about how to play specific songs, over time, I’ve lost the musical foundation onto which to apply that information.

Which brings me back to micro-learning. It seems that many companies are increasing their focus on pumping out (or sourcing) more “sheet music” at the expense of providing “musical understanding”.

For people who already have a strong foundational understanding of their discipline, this strategy seems very effective.

But I worry about the people who haven’t built up the contextual and “muscle” memory of their discipline. Do they understand the patterns and archetypes in their discipline? When they view a five-minute chuck of content are they able to think, “Oh, that’s just a type of X. Now I know how to make sense of it.”? Where does that come from? Where are they learning about the connections between these discrete pieces of content which they are receiving?

I’m not against micro-learning. Like any strategy, when applied in the right context, to the right problem it can be very effective. However, too often I hear people talking about it as “the” strategy rather than “a” strategy in their arsenal.

Understanding takes time. It takes focus. It requires taking apart and putting ideas back together in multiple contexts. Most importantly, it requires feedback. It seems hard to get all that in five minutes.

Brad Kolar is an executive consultant, speaker, and author with Avail Advisors. He can be reached at brad.kolar@availadvisors.com.