3 Juicy Mistakes

I’ve alluded many times to the traditional concept of practicing and lessons, so I should clarify what I mean by that characterization. The traditional view has evolved since the nineteenth century and encompasses a range of assumptions about how to reach musical goals and how to teach. I am most concerned, though, with the management of mistakes, or perhaps I should say those unexpected events we usually label as “mistakes.”

As a reference for this aspect of traditionalism I’ve used The Pianist’s Problems by William Newman, but many other sources say virtually the same thing. While you read these statements, ask yourself whether they seem correct to you:

These words do contain a lot of truth, but they can mislead us too. That’s what makes this analysis so tricky. Many of us have subscribed to the traditional approach and considered ourselves in agreement with its logic, only to discover later through direct experience that the traditional approach doesn’t always work and may in fact create problems. This can be quite confusing and can cause us to blame ourselves needlessly. More clarity, then, is called for, and I hope to be able to provide a bit of that in the course of this chapter.

Newman’s viewpoint is quite typical. He disparages what he calls the “mistake habit” and describes the “viciousness” of a natural system that automatically makes every wrong note into a new program, a permanent memory tape that will come back to haunt us. “Mistakes become learned and stick just as correct procedures do.” As a corrective, he recommends a policy of “hesitate rather than err,” claiming that “you can catch yourself before you make the mistake, just as you would if you found yourself about to walk off a cliff or run down a pedestrian.” Forbidding images such as these contribute to an atmosphere of guilt right from the start, the implication that any musical mistake you make is your own fault, a disaster you should never have allowed to happen.

Interestingly, though, Newman casually pinpoints a central weakness of his own argument when he concedes that “anticipating the mistake in advance can be very difficult.”1 Yes indeed! Perhaps a mistake that’s become a bad habit, something one has often done before, can be anticipated in the mind, but anticipating an honest, pure mistake is not only difficult, it’s clearly impossible. And to hesitate in situation after situation is to set up an ongoing inner conflict. One feels “My body wants to do things but I mustn’t let it,” and this creates tension and impedes the flow of energy. Putting it simply, it’s not much fun to hesitate and be careful all the time—and frankly it’s hard to believe that hesitation could possibly be an effective pathway to virtuosity or freedom.

But let’s put all that aside for the moment. Let’s proceed in our imaginations to what happens next: at a lesson, after a week of practice in the mistake-free traditional mode.

The scenario: I’m a high school student who’s been assigned three new pages of a Mozart sonata for my lesson next Tuesday. I’ve heard the elegant sonata before and am eager to get my hands on it. “Bring in the first three pages next week,” says Madame X, my illustrious teacher. For the first couple of days I enjoy exploring, taking the music apart, trying to figure out the new material and get the feel of it.

But then next Tuesday begins to loom. What if I’m not ready on time? What if it’s not perfect? It’ll look like I haven’t practiced enough, and what would Madame think of me then? I’d hate to let her down. She’s always saying, “Remember the most important principles: always play musically, and be sure everything is 100 percent accurate from the very beginning!”–and I’ve got to have those three pages done. So I make myself find some way of getting through all of it even though in a sense I’m still sight-reading, and it’s taking all my fiercest concentration to manage the new fingerings, dynamics, and rhythms all at the same time and try to be “expressive” as well! (But if I neglect any of the expressive markings, I know Madame is likely to pounce and call it to my attention with ”Have you forgotten what crescendo means?”) All I know to do is to keep repeating the piece over and over with care, in hopes that gradually my playing will become more confident. I focus some on the “hard parts,” playing them slowly and meticulously, even working on each hand separately, but the results are less than inspiring. Well, at least I’ve carried out my assignment, dutiful student that I am. But I’m beginning to wonder whether I still like the piece, or if I’ll ever be able to play it.

Off I go to Tuesday’s lesson. Madame settles herself in her chair and opens her beloved volume of Mozart so she can follow my rendition measure by measure. I nervously clear my throat and proceed to labor through the three pages the best I can, thinking and concentrating as hard as I know how. Mustn’t sully the sublime legacy of Mozart! The trouble is, after only one week every bar is somewhat shaky, hesitant, and unmusical, but it’s as close to perfect as I seem to be able to make it. My clenched shoulders, wrists, and jaw bespeak the intensity of my concentration. I remember to observe all the interpretive markings. But I stumble badly in several places, much to my shame, frustration, and chagrin. I’m not used to hearing mistakes in practice, and I’m mortified to hear them now. “It went much better at home,” I mumble quite truthfully, hating the apologetic helplessness of those words. But since there isn’t a comfortable, enjoyable, or satisfying measure for me anywhere in the piece yet, all I have to cling to is the fact that I at least tried to do it all.

And what can Madame possibly say? Clearly I haven’t yet given her much to work with; my rhythm is unsteady, my physical movements are self-conscious, my tone is colorless, I’m exuding general insecurity and not much musical personality. Madame sighs (am I wasting her time after all?), smiles thinly, but seems vaguely displeased and bored, and of course I’m somewhat embarrassed too (maybe I have no business being here, pretending I have real talent!).

Hoping to spur me on, she gives me her best critique, describes—or perhaps illustrates—majestic musical results that can be attained: how much more beautiful and singing the melody could be, how accurate and fleet the technique should be, how my body should flow, what dramatic contrasts one can achieve. She sends me home with unconvincing words about how I just needed to “work harder for next time” but had nonetheless made a “good start.”

But have I made a good start? What exactly have I learned this week?

I learned to fear some great music that I really wanted to play. I learned to feel bad about my shaky and sluggish abilities, my slow progress. Deep down, I am beginning to feel inept and unmusical. I learned that my fingers could betray me, at just the worst moment. And I learned to blame myself for all of it. (Probably in years to come I’ll say “Oh, I was lucky to get into the studio of a very fine teacher with European training, she played beautifully, had a lot to offer—but I just didn’t have enough talent.”) All the negativity I’ve learned will stick with me and be hard to overcome later, because that’s how impressionable and programmable the mind-body system is.

Whew! Sounds pretty grim. In fact, though, weekly lessons often do far more harm than good, even when the teacher is absolutely well-meaning. Sometimes the very fact that there is a weekly lesson can be counterproductive. Why should it be assumed that the student’s efforts will be ready for aesthetic critique after only seven days? Why should accuracy and control be expected right at the start, rather than at the end of the process? Many students, including me, have noticed that whenever the teacher went out of town for three weeks we made more progress than usual. Our learning process could unfold naturally over the three weeks, without the disruption of those premature attempts to perform every week.

Weekly lessons often do
more harm than good.

Luckily, I received clues along the way that other philosophies were possible and could work better. The first clue came early; I was about seven years old when I got my first inkling that “mistakes” weren’t always as negative as they seemed. It happened like this:

At the piano lesson I was playing a melodious little piece (simplified Chopin, as I remember) that I liked and had learned quite easily. I was enjoying showing it off for my teacher—Mr. Kleiman—with lots of expression. Suddenly I hit an obvious clinker in my right hand. It sounded stupid, and it made me feel stupid. That wrong note had never happened before. Embarrassed and annoyed, I started to play the phrase over again immediately so that I could really “fix” that note, erase the mistake. After all, I was my teacher’s prize pupil, and I had a reputation to uphold!

To my surprise, Mr. Kleiman cut me off and said, “Hey, don’t fix it; if you’re going to make a mistake, why not make a nice, big, fat juicy one?”

Hmmm—say what? This caught me off guard and sounded ridiculous, but somehow it felt like great advice, even though I was too young to comprehend much about it. I sensed that he was telling me the right thing. And I’d certainly never heard a teacher say anything like that before. (It’s always memorable when teachers do something unexpected.)

It worked too. As soon as he said it, I laughed. My shoulders relaxed. His words gave me permission to keep my energy flowing, to play with honesty. He was obviously asking me to experience that particular mistake fully, without scorning it (if the mistake was “juicy,” how could it be bad?). If he hadn’t interrupted me and had allowed me to make the impatient correction, I would have felt like a different person altogether—tense, disappointed with myself, grasping at control, desperate for approval.

If the mistake was “juicy,”
how could it be bad?

By contrast, his advice (although it contradicted what most piano-pedagogy books say) told me “You’re OK, you don’t have to prove yourself to me—but what’s that fascinating piece of evidence out there? What would happen if you didn’t reject it, but embraced it instead?” When I tried the passage a few more times with this new attitude, my muscles, nerves, and mind didn’t recoil or disrupt the natural sorting-out process, and somehow my note-problem solved itself very quickly. Undoubtedly there was a logical, legitimate reason why I had missed the note in the first place. My body figured it out in its own straightforward way, and the learning was secure and permanent. This differs sharply from the more typical “good-student” response: feeling shame, and then manipulating the note to be right, using subtle tension and willpower—just to make sure we look good to someone else.

To put it simply, Mr. Kleiman was encouraging me to:

This was nothing new; in fact, it was exactly how I’d learned to walk and talk as a baby. All I had needed was this gentle reminder of how human learning works. But Ivan Kleiman had also given me something juicy to think about: the concept of honest mistakes.

Later, in my early teens, the same life-lesson reappeared. Like many musical kids, I was often casually prevailed upon at family gatherings to entertain after dinner with a solo or two. My aunt and uncle lived in the same city, and I saw them several times a year. These were friendly people I’d known all my life. So in these social settings I let myself be coaxed into playing, even though I hadn’t really been preparing to perform that day. Playing a popular song by ear was always easy for me on these occasions (no pressure), but the more exacting classical pieces were quite another matter. As informal as the setting was, I typically found—to my surprise—that my Chopin waltz, normally easy to rattle off, was now a struggle. I felt tension and uncertainty jumping from chord to chord in my left hand, my right hand struck peculiar wrong notes, and even my memory was surprisingly shaky. It took a lot of willpower to hold the piece together, because my playing just didn’t feel quite normal. Doing my best to disguise the struggle, I would smile and accept the warm applause, but my inner feeling of dismay was not eased. What made it even more puzzling was that I hadn’t really been nervous about playing. Finally, to add to the puzzlement, when I would go to practice the waltz the next day, I would find no problem at all!

What could this mean? Perhaps these experiences were simply telling me a sobering truth: I wasn’t cut out for performance. Just didn’t have the right nerves for it. Look at the evidence—how I fell apart in front of people, lapsing into mistakes I’d never made before in pieces I obviously “knew” so well!

Or the evidence might point to something quite different: that I was perfectly OK intrinsically, but there was an external problem—purely operational—that needed some attention. Maybe what I called practicing wasn’t really practicing at all. Maybe what I really did every day was kid myself, skim the surface, amuse myself in the practice room, but not really process the information that I needed to feel secure in front of any sort of audience. Maybe I needed to learn how to dig for deeper truth in practicing, and quit wasting time trying to impress myself.

Maybe what I called practicing
wasn’t really practicing at all.

Could I learn to listen to my body in a whole new way? Apparently so, and this is what I started to do. I often think, though, that the only reasons I didn’t blame myself and slink away from performing in my teens were simply that I loved music so much and had received plenty of reinforcement throughout my childhood of the notion that I was indeed a natural musician. It was a delicate decision to make—whether to quit or go on—and so I can easily understand why people give up on performing after similarly baffling disappointments.

 

One way to dig deeper in practice is to exaggerate, play with big energy, so that whatever you do (right or wrong) feels concrete enough that your body will remember it later. After all, the hands can’t hear, can’t think, and can’t tell a right note from a wrong one—nor do they care which notes they play. They’re simply waiting to be trained, just like an eager puppy or a young child. But for this they need lots of physical clarity. Just think how overtly, how emphatically, you would explain something to a five-year-old child, or to a puppy, for that matter; that’s the kind of explicit communication the body likes.

For example, do you ever have this experience? You’ve become so frustrated with something you’re trying to master—controlling some pianissimo chords, for example—that finally you just get out-and-out angry. Cursing a blue streak, you bang your way through the chords, thinking giddily, I just don’t care any more! A minute later, when you calm down, you realize sheepishly, Hey, those chords felt pretty good. They were accurate too—I guess I just actually learned them! And now the chords are so comfortable, so much a part of you, that when you do try for the pianissimo, there’s no tension, and the dynamic control is effortless.

Releasing all that untrammeled energy caused the learning to really “take.” Of course, as we shall see, it’s certainly not necessary to get mad in order to get in touch with that productive level of energy.

 

I continued to ponder the meaning of mistakes years later as I pursued graduate degrees in performance and pedagogy. I would sit in the university library, reading passages like this one by Andor Foldes and squirming uneasily: “[We must avoid] the possibility of memorizing mistakes, which are more likely to creep in during fast practice than when we see to it that everything is exactly right.”2 I would squirm because the words pulled me in two directions; my mind accepted the familiar logic, which did sound convincing, but I also knew that it was somehow wrong—and futile—to try to “see to it” that those nasty mistakes didn’t ever “creep in.” It certainly wasn’ t how I myself practiced, and I was thankfully free of strain and starting to win a few competitions, so (I told myself) maybe I was beginning to have the right to question the age-old pronouncements, which tended to sound so sweeping and unequivocal.

I also read, with considerable skepticism, this statement by famous pianist Walter Gieseking in the widely respected book that he wrote with Karl Leimer, which bears the confident title Piano Technique: The Shortest Way to Pianistic Perfection: “[Faults] acquired through incorrect practicing, can be eradicated only by great effort. For a pupil, therefore, who wishes to make quick progress, it is of the greatest importance to avoid mistakes, from the very beginning.” 3 A stern admonition indeed; one can easily visualize the teacherly finger wagging. It is only now, decades later, that I see clearly where such pronouncements run into trouble. In fact, this one divides neatly in half—the first half is solid, the second half questionable:

Faults acquired through incorrect practicing, can be eradicated only by great effort. [True—we are strongly programmed by the actions we perform.]

 

For a pupil, therefore, who wishes to make quick progress, it is of the greatest importance to avoid mistakes, from the very beginning. [False—shaky conclusion that doesn’t follow from the first sentence, although it may seem to.]

A passage like this one captures quite well the pedagogical problem, the core misunderstanding, the little logical misstep that has caused so much trouble over the generations. Actually, authors Gieseking and Leimer could have corrected the meaning neatly with the addition of one modifying word: careless. Then we’d read: Faults acquired through incorrect practicing can be eradicated only by great effort. For a pupil, therefore, who wishes to make quick progress, it is of the greatest importance to avoid careless mistakes, from the very beginning.

Now the passage is correct. The point is that mistakes are not all alike; some are honest (pure mistakes), some are merely careless, and not all should be avoided. So are mistakes healthy, or are they unhealthy, or does it all depend on how we think of them? In the words of Shakespeare (Hamlet), “There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” Let’s explore two basic categories of mistakes as I’ve labeled them: honest and careless.

Honest mistakes

Rarely, if ever, are honest mistakes mentioned in pedagogical books—it’s as if they didn’t exist in the music studio. Yet the golden pathway to learning, not just in music but in anything in life, is through one’s own, individual, honest mistakes. We all learn uniquely, so there is a unique pattern to the mistakes that each of us needs to make. These mistakes form the quickest way, the healthiest way, to learning that is authentic and solid. Best of all, the process of working through honest mistakes has vital, positive energy because it grows out of an attitude of healthy self-acceptance. Why waste energy feeling guilty for no good reason?

Before delving further, let’s consider the word mistake. It may not be the ideal word, but it’s hard to think of a substitute that’s any better, so I continue to use it. Words, though, can be deceptive because of the perpetual problem that (as the famous saying has it) “the map is not the territory.” Words are not the same as experience, and words often reduce experience simplistically, or interpret experience with a clumsy hand.

Mistake tends to imply something regrettable, something that shouldn’t have happened. But if you meant to play an F and your finger struck a G instead, was that a mistake? You could just as easily call it something else: an unanticipated outcome or a surprising piece of new evidence or an intriguing event. All we know for sure is that at the moment you struck the G, you meant to do one thing and something different happened.

How can you tell if the mistake was an honest or a careless one? If you weren’t paying attention at the time, and you didn’t take the mistake seriously and deal with it immediately, it was careless, a mistake that will cause you trouble later on, just as we’ve always been told. But if you were paying attention and the mistake happened anyway, it’s probably honest. Honest mistakes aren’t caused by inattention; they’re simply what happens when the body is allowed to express itself without restriction. If you take time immediately to process that mistake (which we will examine in the next chapter), your learning will be pure and lasting.

Each honest mistake wants to be allowed to process itself into correctness. It’s frustrating not to do so. Oftentimes music teachers, in a sincere attempt to loosen up a tense or timid student, will cry out, “Just play any notes! Don’t worry if you make mistakes!” But this doesn’t tend to work well, because it is genuinely distressing for the student. How can it be freeing to play a lot of ugly wrong notes, if you just let them stand and don’t let them convert themselves into rightness? After all, it does matter which notes we eventually play.

Among the most efficient uses of practice time is to produce as many honest mistakes as possible-intentionally This gives us lots of excellent data. The method of producing them is simple: focus your intention, relax, execute the chosen segment with gusto, and pay close attention to the result. Repeat as needed. Don’t take any of it personally. Trust the process and don’t try to control it. Enjoy all the sensations.

Honest mistakes are not only natural, they are immensely useful. Truthful and pure, full of specific information, they show us with immediate, elegant clarity where we are right now and what we need to do next. This is why a particular wrong note can indeed be thought of as perfect. Honest mistakes save a lot of time. As I will illustrate, they often have a sophisticated knack for revealing the underlying, specific reason for a particular glitch—a reason the conscious mind may not have considered. Honest mistakes demonstrate that the body is smart in a different way from the intentional mind. Sometimes we have to experience fully what’s wrong in order to understand and integrate what’s right, and honest mistakes are the only way to do that. They give texture to the act of learning.

Honest mistakes give texture
to the act of learning.

The honest-mistake approach isn’t so easy to accept for most adults, or for older children; we’re driven too much by our emotional need to control events and avoid embarrassment. But luckily we can all share the same source of inspiration, one that’s always available to us: we can think back to how we learned things at the very beginning, at the age of one or two. During those eventful early years we were expert practitioners—ardent devotees—of the honest mistake; therefore, no approach could be more natural to us.

Observing my own children as toddlers, I was in awe of the adventurousness and efficiency of their learning. At the same time, I began to better understand the flaw in traditional music pedagogy. Like all kids, mine made every gross “mistake” imaginable—falling down clumsily, crashing into tables, bringing the spoon to their noses, garbling their words. But their attitude was admirable indeed: focused, persistent, enthusiastic, and undeterred. They never felt a shred of guilt or self-consciousness when they missed the mark; instead they were innocently surprised, bemused, and endlessly fascinated by the results of their attempts. (Luckily for them, they had never read stern dictates by the likes of Mr. Gieseking.) Like any parent, I was all smiles and encouragement—“Ha ha! You broke the floor!”—not that they seemed to need much encouragement. Neither did they need any instruction; that was obvious.

Did they then program themselves into a lifelong tendency to crash into furniture and drop their food on the floor, having “permitted” so many mistakes to get programmed in? Clearly not. Every mistake was completely and efficiently processed (“So that’s what it feels like to mash oatmeal into your nose!”), and a few weeks later I would be amazed at how much they had mastered, and how elegantly. The process may appear messy, depending on your point of view, but one thing is clear: their honest mistakes left absolutely no residue. And they couldn’t have had all those breakthroughs without them.

Careless mistakes

In my view, the identifying trait of the careless mistake is inattentiveness, both in how the mistake is made and in how we respond to it. Of course, there can be many causes for such inattentiveness. But if our initial intention in playing something is generalized and ill-focused (“Well, I’ll just play through this new piece a few times and hope for the best”), followed by a generalized assessment of results (“That wasn’t too bad, for something I just started two weeks ago”), we really have laid the groundwork for a future mess. Because of our casual intentions, we won’t even notice some of the mistakes that happen. Others will just lie there, unprocessed, yielding no information at all. Having not been given a chance to correct themselves, they will indeed become unfortunate habits later on.

The careless mistake is one that gets rationalized, explained away. It’s awfully tempting to explain away inadvertent mishaps in the practice room, but explaining events away is in itself a form of mental carelessness. Newman warns us not to casually “chalk up” mistakes to “human error,” and I agree with him totally. This is a habit everyone should break. Here are a few examples of the rationalizing thoughts we’re all so good at:

  • e9781574673890_img_9670.gif That never happened before; I just wasn’t concentrating.
  • e9781574673890_img_9670.gif Well, nobody’s perfect; even Babe Ruth struck out a lot.
  • e9781574673890_img_9670.gif I got distracted.
  • e9781574673890_img_9670.gif Sounds pretty good on the whole.
  • e9781574673890_img_9670.gif I know this perfectly well—I don’t know why I got so nervous!

Notice how narcissistic these thoughts are; they are all about me and how I want to look good and justify myself, while ignoring the useful, objective evidence at hand. Yet many books on practicing, including those that propound the integrated functioning of body and mind, actually encourage us to be mentally careless in this way and to explain away our wrong notes. These texts often place an exaggerated reliance on one holistic principle as the answer to everything. That wrong note wouldn’t have happened, they might say, if you had only heard the note better in your imagination before playing it, or visualized it more exactly, or sensed the impulse more in your solar plexus, or connected to your inner sense of rhythm. So again the underlying message is: start feeling guilty, because it’s all your fault!

Mistakes as teachers

Fortunately, babies and toddlers aren’t the only ones who are in touch with the importance of realistic, juicy mistakes. In many areas of endeavor, we seem to share a common-sense understanding that risk-taking is absolutely essential for success. For example:

  • e9781574673890_img_9670.gif Ice skating—if you want to master a double axel, be willing to fall on the ice a lot.
  • e9781574673890_img_9670.gif Succeeding in business—be willing to fail a few times.
  • e9781574673890_img_9670.gif Speaking a foreign language—plunge right in and say it the best you can; if you don’t speak up because you might be wrong, you’ll never learn.
  • e9781574673890_img_9670.gif Mastery of cooking—make a few “creative” stews you’ll have to feed to the dog.
  • e9781574673890_img_9670.gif Learning to drive a stick-shift car—lurch forward, stall out, make a public spectacle of yourself (the instructor’s frantic exhortations to “let out the clutch and give it some gas” mean nothing to you in your moment of panic). In a few days you’ll be shifting smoothly like a pro.
  • e9781574673890_img_9670.gif Riding a two-wheeler bicycle—first you decide that you’re tired of being the only kid on the block who can’t ride a two-wheeler, so you open yourself to risk, thinking, “I don’t care what happens, if I embarrass myself or skin my knee, I’m going to try it!” Someone runs alongside, holding the seat, and you find your balance, going faster and faster. This is fun! Now you quickly turn the wheel—and crash to the ground.
e9781574673890_i0002.jpg
e9781574673890_i0003.jpg

There’s a sophisticated relationship between rate of speed and the ability to control a turn, and the body understands it beautifully as soon as the “mistake” is made. In fact, there’s no other way to teach or learn this relationship—no lecture or explanation could ever come close. Everyone knows how this process works from experience; we don’t even question it. Of course, even when it comes to bicycle riding we have personal choices: if we have an unusually high need to be in control we could just leave the training wheels on permanently and never figure it out.

And there are plenty of music students who have never removed the metaphoric training wheels from their performing. But in music, just as in mastering a stick-shift car, we must have permission to make our own mistakes (what I think of as each person’s sovereign mistakes); we must be permitted to do it badly before we can do it smoothly and well.

Aristotle said, “The best way for a student to get out of difficulty is to go through it.” It’s easy to see the applicability of Aristotle’s thought to any process that invites meaningful learning and growth—psychotherapy, for example. When we stop avoiding a problem or lying about it to ourselves, and start to experience how it feels (“go through it”), only then can changes begin and a solution be found.

In fact, many young people these days seem to have a remarkably good sense of how important it is to embrace honest mistakes, and this may explain why they can become disenchanted with traditional music study. Adventurous recreations like snowboarding clearly show the value of honest mistakes. It takes three days to learn to snowboard, I’ve been told: one day of falling down constantly (and painfully), another day to figure it out better, and by the third day you’re snowboarding with style. Young people also love computers, mastering the systems quickly—almost intuitively—and yet never reading a manual. We older folks envy their fearless acceptance of computer mistakes; we sense that they’ve got the right idea about quick learning.

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Cultural factors can also determine whether a person decides to embrace mistakes. A Korean woman was complimented on the precision and articulate fluency of her English, a language she learned as an adult. She attributed her success to the fact that she was female:

Oh, it is much more easy for a Korean woman to learn than for a Korean man. She can afford to make mistakes. When a man makes a mistake, it is an affront to his masculine pride, to his great Koreanness. He is programmed to feel shame. So he learns six sentences, six grammatical forms, and sticks to them. He’s safe inside this little language; his pride is not wounded. But when a woman makes mistakes, everybody laughs. She’s “just a girl”—she’s being “cute.” So she can dare things that a man wouldn’t begin to try for fear of making a fool of himself.

I could make a fool of myself, so it was easy for me to learn English.4

Suppression and denial

Whenever we play inattentively and ignore or explain away mistakes, we suppress the learning process. This can happen in various ways. There are some mistakes that never take place in practice but actually should have; they’ve been suppressed, which is what the traditional approach explicitly encourages. Another example of suppression is correcting a flaw so instantly and hastily that we are barely aware it ever happened; this is a form of denial—not allowing ourselves to accept reality.

A suppressed mistake.
is unfinished business.

However we suppress a mistake, we deny the truth of the moment. A suppressed mistake is unfinished business. It’s not gone; it’s been swept under the rug, and it will very likely reappear at the most inopportune time—still demanding completion.

Think of suppressed emotion—as in the smiling, amiable person who is actually carrying a chronic, hidden anger. That suppressed anger is certainly not gone; in fact, it may lash out inappropriately under stress. It may also turn inward and make the person chronically ill. To suppress an emotion takes energy; it is a major internal conflict and isn’t healthy.

If we make surprising mistakes onstage, it’s often because we’re in an altered state there—more open and vulnerable—and truth will emerge. This openness has a wonderfully positive side, when we discover unexpected spontaneity, communication and artistry in front of an audience. But a more unsettling effect can be that the customary, superficial controls we exerted in the practice room no longer seem to work. Being onstage signifies real accountability (which is why we get nervous); the chickens come home to roost, and suppressed mistakes will surface.

 

There have been times onstage when I’ve watched in disbelief while my finger blithely played a wrong note I was sure I’d fixed months ago. But was it fixed?

Memory can be selective and unreliable. Perhaps my run-throughs weren’t nearly as perfect as I thought they were—it’s awfully easy to discredit seemingly minor errors, consider them unimportant when they happen, and correct them impatiently as we go, saying to ourselves, “There!—that’s what I meant to play—I I just wasn’t paying attention.” This split-second correction is forgotten immediately. After a while we don’t perceive that such mini-corrections ever took place; the ego discounted them, but the trouble is that the body still remembers the wrong note and the right note as equally valid bits of information, still waiting to be sorted out. The body honestly doesn’t know which is which.

For example, I may have programmed myself like this: first, play a wrong note; second, say “Oops!” (or whatever colorful one-syllable word may pop out); and third, deliberately play the right note. All in rapid succession. This same sequence happens repeatedly when that note is particularly tricky.

Is anything being corrected? Not really. What happens is that the computerlike body faithfully remembers the entire sequence (including the “Oops!”), doesn’t make any judgments about it, and proudly repeats the whole thing back the next time. The body thinks that this is exactly how the piece of music goes (play a G, say “Oops,” play a G-sharp).

So the mistake maddeningly reappears. Why shouldn’t it? It was suppressed, not processed. “Aha!” I hear some readers exclaiming, “that’s what we’ve been saying all along. The solution is simple—don’t permit the mistake in the first place, and you’ll never have to worry!” What’s wrong with that idea?

This is an important question, and the answer is a physical one. To understand the flaw in the traditional reasoning we simply have to notice how it feels to avoid the mistake, what it costs us to insist on 100 percent accuracy in the practice room. Simply put, supervising our own movements so much feels unnatural. To be sure, we can always keep the music immaculate by playing ver-rrrryyyy slllowwwlllly, but that yields a limited result; we won’t be able to handle a fast tempo, which will feel frighteningly out of control. Or we can choose a moderate tempo and steer each finger carefully to all the correct destinations, but this feels stiff and tiring, because it’s asking the same muscles and nerves to do two jobs at once, namely, find the note and play the note. That won’t prepare for a fast tempo either; things will probably fall apart if we try to “loosen up and be spontaneous” (as we’re often exhorted to do). There will be too many notes to find, and physical tension will accumulate while accuracy breaks down. Another flaw in such overcontrolled playing is that the mind plays too central a role; we’re largely relying on our thought processes to find each note. If concentration is disrupted for any reason, the notes fall apart. Playing that is held together more by willpower than real technique is fragile playing indeed.

Playing that is held together
more by willpower
than real technique
is fragile playing indeed.

The natural way, the ideal we aspire to, is just to trust ourselves and play, with a free flow of energy. No need to concentrate so hard on finding each note. The body itself will find the notes, because it has had an ample chance to integrate their specific locations and spatial relationships in its own physical way. But for this method to work we must first admit that the body has its own logic, its own way of sorting through things.

For example, when you learned to feed yourself as a baby, you brought the mashed peas enthusiastically to your nose or your chin as a way of mastering the location of your mouth; now you trust that mastery totally, and no concentration is required. (You might want to try it right now: pantomime the spoon-to-mouth process in the enthusiastic hit-or-miss way all babies do it, then try it as if you aren’t sure where your mouth is, but imagine you’ve been admonished never to make a mistake. Compare the degree of tension in your forearm.)

Refined motor skills can become reliable, accurate, and effortless. All that’s really needed is a down-to-earth understanding of programming and processing. By integrating honest mistakes, we also integrate comfort and physical freedom into the control we eventually achieve. It becomes a new sort of control altogether.

Chaos

In the pristine world of classical music, the apparent chaos of mistakes is an unsettling notion. Uneasiness about chaos has unquestionably muddled our thinking on the subject of wrong notes. We certainly aren’t surprised by the chaos of mistakes in gymnastics, skiing, or our other “down-to-earth” examples. The beginning skier expects gross mishaps, knows they serve a purpose, and understands that they’re temporary. But in classical music we cringe from the ugliness of wrong notes, hate the idea of desecrating the purity of Mozart, and—most of all—we dread public embarrassment.

But don’t mistakes encourage chaos? I’ve often heard teachers and students ask this question, implying that chaos is something to avoid.

Interestingly, thinking in the arts can be quite conservative when compared with the sciences. Modern science has embraced chaos theory as a potent, positive, exciting interdisciplinary insight into how things work. What this theory says is that patterns which appear to be chaotic and random (such as the frequency of tornadoes or the turbulence of a mountain stream) are really evidence of an unseen “higher” system of organization.

In business training, chaos theory implies that managers should relax their ideas about controlling everything, and expect plenty of unpredictability in a company’s internal and external environments en route to their long-term goals. This is considered a standard, modern outlook.

Chaos theory is an open-systems theory. Thus it takes the view that various processes in life are not self-contained but in fact affect each other in a dynamic, moment-to-moment way. Our physical well-being, for example, is an open system responding in an ongoing way to other systems (emotions, barometric pressure, external events, what we’ve eaten, and the like). Open-systems theories embrace the complexity, dynamism, and wholeness of life, and give up the idea that the world is predictable or that we are in control. Since open-systems views are not reductionist, they are rarely neat and clean.

Chaos theories were little accepted until fairly recent times. Aristotle, Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Newton, and others exalted logic, rationality, order, the mechanical “watchmaker’s view” of nature, and believed that in time all events would become predictable. They believed in direct cause-and-effect, in a way that is now generally considered rather simplistic.5

Nature, as an open system, operates on “feedback loops”—momentary information from one system that immediately affects another system, such as the interdependence of predatory animals and prey. Other examples of feedback loops: the checks and balances within democracy, economic supply and demand, a thermostat and furnace, a conversation between two people. Feedback processes are not regular and steady; rather they have moments of stillness followed by bursts of activity, in a pattern that at first glance may appear to be random.

Mastering musical performance skills is not a totally controllable or rational enterprise; it is a dynamic, natural, open-systems process. There is a mind system (my thoughts), a body system (what my muscles and nerves are experiencing), and an emotional system (my feelings), just to name a few.

The various systems are in constant flux and interact differently from one moment to the next. This is reality. When we “process a mistake” we open ourselves to information about this vital dynamic. The violinist’s left hand may say, “So what if my octave leap was correct yesterday in measure 63; that may have been a fluke, and right now I’m not totally sure how large an octave feels in that spot. Can you give me a chance to master that interval better?” How does the left hand say this? In the only way it knows how—by landing on a specific wrong note. That mistake produces a valuable piece of information in a feedback loop.

Mistakes form
a dynamic language
of inner communication.

Thus the body system, which is a sort of parallel system with its own logic, seeks a way to communicate with the mind-system about solving a specific problem. Mistakes, from this viewpoint, are never random. In fact, mistakes form a dynamic language of inner communication.

 

The open-system way of practicing is fascinating and absorbing. You never know what’s going to happen next. The key is to relax, focus, and see what the systems have to tell you in any particular moment.

But in the traditional approach to practicing we shut systems down. We take a far more dreary cause-and-effect approach; we demand consistency and insist on steady, demonstrable progress. Therapist Anne Wilson Schaef sees this as a wider societal problem: “In a system that demands perfectionism, mistakes are unacceptable. We cannot learn from our mistakes, because we must pretend that we never make any. We must hide them or cover them up.”6

It’s intriguing to explore mistakes as pure evidence. In the world of science, as Briggs and Pear have put it, “Systems theory is not as gray or mechanical an idea as it sounds. In fact it can be quite lively . . . nonlinear feedback can turn the simplest activity into the complex efflorescence of a fireworks display.”

The universal characteristics of systems are strikingly relevant to music practice in many ways. Mastering music is autonomous learning that involves many facets of a person. Scientists have found that the greater an organism’s autonomy, the more feedback loops it needs both within itself and in its relationship to its environment. Thus, the feedback phenomenon is an essential part of true autonomy. Secondly, in a complex system, cause doesn’t immediately lead to effect; there may be some delay. Think of the time it takes to integrate the technique involved in a really challenging piece of music. Consequently, students who don’t trust the natural learning process just won’t give it enough time to work, and they’ll never discover their own capacity to play difficult, virtuosic music. And finally, systems often follow a pattern of “worse before better.” Therefore changes that produce better results immediately should usually be suspect: if you “fix” the mistake the first time you repeat the passage, you may be interfering with valid feedback and short-circuiting a deeper learning process7

Our training, and our schooling in general, has exalted the quick, right answer, and the sharp line between right and wrong. But the systems world to which I am alluding is a world of patterns, a nonverbal realm in which (for musicians) the body truth is the central truth. After all, music is made using the vocal mechanism, the breath or the hands—not the brain cells alone. In this wordless realm of experience, labels such as “right,” “wrong,” “mistake,” and “correct” can be misleading. For example, say you had to jump to a B-flat, but you keep landing on an A-flat instead. That A-flat could be understood as a wrong note or as a “right-note-in-the-making,” depending on your view of process.

Look back at “negative” events in your personal life: a relationship that ended badly, a job you left, a loss you felt, a struggle. After some time has gone by, do you still see these as random misfortunes that you wish had never happened, or do you see them as indispensable components of your unique journey of growth and learning? They may seem like parts of a meaningful pattern that is just now beginning to emerge. So perhaps these experiences weren’t negative at all, if we take the systems view. Neither are honest mistakes.

Sometimes patterns can be truthful in a way that literal (reductionist) words cannot be. All the arts, including music, create patterns imbued with a special sort of meaning; as Isadora Duncan reportedly said, “If I could say it, I wouldn’t have to dance it.” Patterns are often more complex and sophisticated than our minds can grasp. H. G. Wells considered the mind a “clumsy forceps” that “crushes the truth a little when grasping it.”8

Mindfulness

To perceive the shifting patterns of reality, to practice well in an open-systems way, is quite simple; all that’s required are clear intentions, self-acceptance, and that detached, ongoing awareness of the truth of the moment that the Buddhists call mindfulness.

In selfless, mindful awareness, there is a serene sense of wholeness. Opposites such as good-bad, pleasure-pain, win-lose, right-wrong, are no longer seen as opposites at all, but as essential, interrelated components of the turning wheel of life.

Learning to swim, read, ski, whatever—the real grasp of it, the breakthrough, comes from a shift within the learner. It is a shift to mindfulness and acceptance. Something lets go (the illusion of control), the person becomes more relaxed and at the same time more observant, the process begins to be trusted, some kind of inner connection is made. This connection can’t be pinned down precisely in words, and really can’t be taught. This is the genuine “Aha!” To sense such authentic learning taking place within us is one of life’s great fulfillments.

With a shift to mindfulness, the music practice-room—instead of teaching us boredom and defeat—can provide us with breakthrough moments of discovery, of pure process, of the wholeness of experience and the “juiciness” of learning.