For as long as I remember thinking about it at all, I have been interested in comparing music to language. For me, they are competing areas, though I realize that for most people they go together easily: people sing words to music and feel that the music adds to the words and vice versa. I find that when I am deeply involved with words, which is most of the time, as I'm a translator, music suffers. I hear music while I work. It plays in the background. But I don't pay it proper attention. Mea culpa.
Learning a second language was particularly deleterious to my musical progress. In high school, when I started to study French, I was enthralled by the language and put great effort into learning it well, because it was important to me - importance that I can't entirely explain to myself, and playing clarinet became less important to me. A moment comes when you're acquiring a new language when you begin to be fluent in it, when you stop translating from it into your native language, when you can read it with increasing ease, and when you can speak it without getting tangled up in it. That moment doesn't mean that you've mastered the language, but that you're dealing with it in new terms: fluency. You can be fluent in a language and speak it badly, with a poor accent, making a lot of grammatical errors, but at least you're able to use the language.
Learning to play a musical instrument is very similar. For a long time you're learning the fingering and other aspects of technique, and suddenly you can simply play the instrument without thinking about how you're doing it. For a long time I have been at that stage in the instruments I first studied, clarinet and saxophone, but flute wasn't easy for me, probably because I started playing it late in life. Now, and I'm not sure exactly when it happened, I play flute with fluency similar to my sax playing (I don't play clarinet often), which also means that it's more fun to play, less stumbling, less groping.
Playing fluently doesn't necessarily mean playing well, certainly not playing perfectly, but it's a necessary step toward those higher goals. Of course, when I am learning a new piece, I always come upon passages that are difficult for me, and I have to slow down and work on them. This also happens to me when I'm translating. Sometimes I run into a passage with difficult syntax or unfamiliar vocabulary, and I have to move through it slowly and attentively. But the basic fluency is there, the connection between what I hear in my mind and what I play. Working on a difficult passage teaches me how to hear it.
For most music teachers playing fluently is second nature and probably not in their minds as they work with pupils. That's regrettable. I've never taught music and wouldn't be comfortable doing it, but, were I a music teacher, I would work on fluency, so that playing one's instrument is like speaking one's native language.
