What Music Teaches That Sports Can’t — and Vice Versa

Parents often feel as though music and sports are competing for the same limited resources.

There are only so many afternoons in a week. Only so much money for lessons, equipment, teams, and activities. And only so many hours a child can devote to becoming genuinely good at something.

So it is natural to ask:

What does my child get from studying music that he or she wouldn’t get from playing a sport?

It’s a good question.

But many of the usual answers don’t hold up very well.

Music and sports actually teach many of the same things.

We sometimes say that sports teach children to perform under pressure.

But musicians do that too.

A musician walks onto a stage and encounters unfamiliar acoustics, a different piano, an unexpected tempo from a conductor, or simply the realization that today’s performance doesn’t feel as comfortable as yesterday’s rehearsal.

The performance starts anyway.

We say that sports teach children to recover from mistakes.

Musicians learn exactly the same thing.

Miss a note during a concert and you cannot stop.

Lose your place in a chamber music performance and you have to find your way back.

A mature performer learns that the mistake matters far less than what happens next.

We say music teaches patience and delayed gratification.

But ask a serious gymnast how many hours it takes to perfect a skill.

Ask a basketball player how many shots she has taken.

Ask a runner how many miles he has run to shave seconds from a race.

Excellence in both music and athletics is built through thousands of small repetitions whose rewards may not become visible for months or years.

And both demand technique.

The violinist cannot simply “try harder” and produce a beautiful sound any more than the tennis player can simply try harder and produce a great serve.

The body must be trained.

Movements must become efficient.

Bad habits have consequences.

Tiny technical adjustments can produce enormous results.

Even teamwork isn’t unique to sports.

Private music lessons are individual. But music itself doesn’t have to be.

Put a child in a string quartet and suddenly everything changes.

You have to listen to other people.

You have to adjust.

Sometimes your musical idea isn’t the one the group chooses.

Sometimes another musician makes a mistake and you have to accommodate it.

Sometimes you make the mistake and everyone else has to accommodate you.

An orchestra takes this even further.

Dozens of people must subordinate some degree of individual freedom to create something none of them could create alone.

That isn’t identical to being on a soccer or basketball team.

But the underlying human lessons—cooperation, humility, responsibility, leadership, trust, and contributing to something larger than yourself—are remarkably similar.

So perhaps we’ve been asking the wrong question.

The difference between music and sports isn’t that one teaches discipline while the other teaches teamwork.

Both can teach discipline.

Both can teach teamwork.

Both can teach resilience, patience, courage, concentration, delayed gratification, quick recovery, careful self-examination, and the pursuit of excellence.

The more seriously a child pursues either discipline, the more obvious these similarities become.

So what is different?

There are places where music and sports finally begin to diverge.

And those differences matter.

Sports develop physical capacities in ways music cannot.

Music is physical, of course. Anyone who has seriously studied an instrument knows that.

But it is not a substitute for vigorous physical activity.

Sports develop cardiovascular fitness, strength, speed, agility, balance, spatial awareness, and large-scale coordination in ways that most musical study simply does not.

They teach children what their bodies can do.

There is also something distinctive about physical competition.

Run faster.

Jump higher.

Defend an opponent.

Push through fatigue.

Coordinate your movements with teammates while bodies and objects are moving rapidly through space.

Music cannot fully reproduce that experience.

And it shouldn’t pretend to.

But the reverse is also true.

Music develops the ear in ways sports cannot.

Learning to listen deeply is one of the most underestimated aspects of a musical education.

A young musician gradually learns to perceive differences that were previously invisible—or rather, inaudible.

Is that note slightly sharp?

Did the phrase actually reach its destination?

Is my sound blending with the person next to me?

Is the accompaniment overpowering the melody?

Did that note begin exactly with everyone else’s?

What changed when I moved my bow slightly closer to the bridge?

To an untrained listener, two performances may sound virtually identical.

To a developed musician, they may be worlds apart.

The child has learned something larger than pitch and rhythm.

Attention changes perception.

The more carefully we learn to attend to something, the more of it we discover.

Music also asks children to inhabit someone else’s emotional world.

This may be one of its most distinctive gifts.

Suppose a child plays a piece filled with grief.

The child may not be grieving.

Yet the music asks her to understand something about grief—to recognize its shape, its weight, its tension and release—and somehow communicate it.

Another piece might require tenderness.

Another exuberance.

Another restraint.

Another humor.

Another longing.

And the composer may have lived hundreds of years ago, in another country, speaking another language, inhabiting a world radically different from the child’s own.

Yet somehow the child is asked:

What was this human being trying to say?

And then:

How can I make another person feel it?

That is an extraordinary exercise in perspective-taking.

It is one reason I believe musical education can contribute to emotional intelligence and empathy in a way that is difficult to reproduce elsewhere.

Music gives children access to an interior world.

Sports primarily unfold through action.

Music can unfold through contemplation.

A child can sit alone at a piano and enter a world that requires no opponent, no team, no audience and no external reward.

Just sound.

Memory.

Imagination.

Emotion.

Structure.

Beauty.

That interiority matters.

Children today live in a world constantly competing for their attention.

Screens flash.

Notifications arrive.

Entertainment changes every few seconds.

Music asks something radically different:

Stay here. Listen to this. Notice what is happening.

Not because you’re going to win.

Not because anyone is keeping score.

Because there is something here worth discovering.

And music gives children a lifelong language for beauty.

This, to me, may be the deepest distinction.

Beauty is not merely decoration.

Human beings have made music for thousands of years because there are experiences that ordinary language cannot adequately express.

Celebration.

Grief.

Prayer.

Love.

Longing.

Wonder.

Awe.

A child who studies music seriously isn’t merely learning where to put his fingers.

He is being introduced to one of humanity’s great ways of making meaning.

And unlike many childhood activities, that relationship can continue throughout an entire life.

The eight-year-old struggling through her first pieces may someday become the seventy-eight-year-old sitting at the piano playing them for her grandchildren.

She doesn’t have to become a professional musician for those years of study to have mattered.

So music or sports?

Whenever possible, perhaps the answer shouldn’t be framed as a competition.

Both can build extraordinary human beings.

Both can teach discipline.

Both can teach resilience.

Both can teach children how to fail, recover, practice, improve, collaborate, perform under pressure, and pursue something difficult over a long period of time.

But they are not interchangeable.

Sports give children an extraordinary education in the possibilities of the body.

Music gives children an extraordinary education in the possibilities of human expression.

One asks, among other things:

What can my body learn to do?

The other asks:

What can I learn to hear, feel, understand, and express?

Children deserve opportunities to discover both.

And when parents wonder whether years spent learning an instrument are worthwhile simply because their child probably won’t become a professional musician, I think we should ask a different question.

We don’t ask whether years of playing soccer were wasted because a child didn’t become a professional soccer player.

Why should music be any different?

The purpose of a great childhood education isn’t simply to produce professionals.

It is to enlarge the human being.

Sports can do that.

Music can do that.

And each can take a child somewhere the other cannot.