Over the years, there have been a handful of times when I've thought to myself "Wow, there's no way I'll ever learn something more complex than this." It happens not just in music, but in a variety of disciplines. I distinctly remember having that feeling while taking Calculus in high school. Oh sure, you can always learn another trick for integrating functions, but at the conceptual level, I couldn't imagine any math that would be more involved than Calculus -- until I took Differential Equations and Real Analysis, by which point integration seemed childishly easy.
The other clear memory I have of this sort is when I started learning about unusual time signatures. I was blown away when I first heard a piece of music written in 5/4 time, and blown even further away when I tried to learn "The Test That Stumped Them All" by Dream Theater and "Dedication" by Pain of Salvation, both of which I gave up on due to their frequent meter changes which seemed impossible to comprehend. This, of course, was years ago, and by now I've grown so comfortable with odd times and shifting meters that they appear in almost all of my songs.
It is only after this happened a few times that I was able to recognize the pattern and append "This is the most challenging concept I will ever encounter" with "...but I've said that before and I was wrong, so I'm probably wrong now." However, recognition of a pattern is not nearly as exciting as the ability to make use of it. Instead of gradually drifting towards the next level of complexity as I've always done, I now find myself wanting to dive right into it, and over the past week I've done exactly that.
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A few months ago, I started making an effort to expand my understanding of rhythm to include quintuplets by learning Dream Theater's "Erotomania" and writing my own rhythmic labyrinth called "Broken Hourglass". As I grew more and more comfortable with quintuplets, I caught myself thinking those usual thoughts of "Well, this must surely be the most abstract rhythmic idea I will ever learn."
More recently, however, I saw that this was the perfect opportunity to charge headfirst into the realms of complexity. Instead of piecing together an arsenal of unusual subdivisions over weeks and months, I'm now trying to train myself to be able to accurately divide a beat into any number of subdivisions on command. The vast majority of last week's practice hours were spent listening to a metronome, rapidly switching between various numbers of subdivisions to try to wrap my head around this abstract concept. I even wrote a program on my calculator to produce random sets of integers just to keep myself guessing.
The eventual goal is to become as comfortable with arbitrary subdivisions as I already am with arbitrary time signatures. Assuming I can do that, the next goal will be to master two-way polyrhythms with arbitrary numbers, rather than just using the various combinations of 3, 4, 5, and 6 that I've come to love. From there, I will work towards mastering arbitrary polyrhythms with any number of voices, each using any number of subdivisions. After having realized how often we fool ourselves into thinking we've reached our limits, I am confident that I will eventually be able to conquer any rhythmic concept I can dream up. Only time will tell if this confidence has been misplaced.
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Week 27 total: 20 hours
Grand total: 633 hours
Required pace: 519 hours (+114)
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