Learning by making mistakes; nobody’s perfect!

“Careful the things you say, children will listen.”

Into the Woods by Stephen Sondheim

A couple of months ago my husband, a professor of Early Childhood Studies at SAC, asked me to watch a video he uses in his Creativity Class.  It was an old video by Bev Bos who had a  preschool  where creativity in all areas was explored: art, music, dramatic play, outdoor play, literature and writing.  Perhaps the most striking thing in the school were the different pieces of equipment that were in unlikely places.  There was a swing in the library, a zip line on the playground to  name a couple of surprising ones.   In the video Ms. Bos was asked why she had this equipment in her environment. (I was thinking that was  they would be forbidden now with our safety regulations.)  Her reply was that children need to learn to take risks because being an artist requires one to be fearless.  

This was a concept I had never really considered when working with students in music, but I immediately saw how it applied.  The fact that most people won’t play or sing for anyone is a good example of how fearful most of us are about expressing music.  Some students in class and private lessons will just launch into a new song without hesitation and my job is to help them down the path to a happy ending of beautiful, skillfully sung or played music.  But what about those students who hesitate, who no matter how many different approaches I try, never seem to be able to let go and just play, or just sing?

This got me thinking about  a student I have had for many years.  He started at 6 years old and is now in college.  He has always been an enigma to me.  When he learns a song, he plays better than anyone:  beautiful tone, expressive, flawless, but in his lessons he is timid, hands hovering over the keys.  New songs take months and months to learn.  I had tried everything, and then one day I talked about mistakes, and taking risks.  He admitted that he was afraid to make mistakes.  I explained that mistakes are a necessity in music.  You can’t learn to walk without falling down and you can’t learn to play music if you are not willing to make a mistake.  We also talked about how we use our intellect to learn music, figuring out notes, fingerings, rhythm, but when you actually play, it’s a leap off the cliff — you can’t think.

The next week he expressed how much that discussion helped him.  He then made a very interesting comment.  He said that at home when he played, if he made a mistake his mother always yelled from another room that it was wrong. He realized that it made him really afraid to play.  When he told his mother this, his mother was obviously upset that she had caused that effect.  That next week he came back a much more daring and successful player.  It really made a difference.

I thought of other students who would say that they didn’t want to practice when their parents could hear and I thought of my own parents who only said positive things to me.  I practiced at 6AM every morning when I woke up.  That was what I wanted to do first thing in the morning.  One memory of that time is my dad waking up and telling me how my Balalaika Serenade was one of his favorite pieces that I played.  Another memory is of my niece (she was 2 years younger than me) and I learning to play the  Rainbow Song duet (from John Thompson piano series) in every key.  I know it wasn’t pretty for weeks, but we hung in there until my niece could play all of the scales and I could play all of the cadences.  No one ever complained or told us our notes were wrong or sounded bad.  We worked until we figured it out.

My conclusion is that we all need to think about what we say to our budding musicians.  Mistakes are a necessity and our commenting and correcting is not a short cut to mistake-free playing; it might rather be a short cut to our children not making mistakes by not playing at all.