Chess and Music Proficiency: Growing the Imagination with Pleasure and Effort

This article focuses on the acquisition of proficiency in chess and music as skilled art forms, drawing on personal experience, historical and scholarly sources. It emphasizes the need to develop a code for understanding both art forms, and provides a visual method for connecting the efforts of the imagination in music and chess. It provides a critique of the modernist myths of innate talent and specialization as factors that prevent the development of both skills simultaneously, and focuses on the correlation between effort and pleasure. Finally, it proposes the notions of epistemological growth and creative-critical reflexive analyses as means for continuously expanding perception and learning in skilled art forms.