6 Is It Good to Be a Good Student?

Cleaning out the garage one day, I came across a dusty carton of my college notebooks from many years before. One of them was labeled Advanced Calculus, a course in which I had managed to get an A, not just once, but for two semesters. But as I paged through, I had the odd experience of gazing at notations that made absolutely no sense to me, although they were clearly in my own handwriting. In fact I had no memory at all of having written all those symbols, graphs, and equations. The truth is I had never understood a single thing about calculus then, and I certainly don’t now. But one thing I had understood quite well was how to play the education game, how to be a “good student.” (I introduce that term in quotes because I’m referring to someone who knows how to get an A, not someone who genuinely knows how to learn.)

Calculus was a required course, and as a music major I had no interest in learning anything from it. All I wanted was the grade. So I did what so many good students do: observe the teacher closely, figure out what he wanted, memorize some formulas and surface operations (without questioning the reasons behind them), learn to recognize which situations called for which procedures, and plug those in at the right moment.

I did get the desired grade, but I also paid a hidden price, which I only came to realize later. Those grades of A didn’t give me much satisfaction, only a sense of relief that I’d gotten away with it and hadn’t been unmasked as the impostor I knew myself to be. The trouble is, it doesn’t feel comfortable to be an impostor; it leads to cynicism about the system (how could they have fallen for it?) and guilt. And in my case, pretending about math had become such a habit that a glum belief set in: the lifelong certainty that I had no ability to understand higher mathematics.

Now, whenever I hear myself state, “Oh, I’m no good at math,” I wonder—is that really so, or is it just something I’ve come to believe? As a music teacher, would I accept it at face value if somebody said, “I’m no good at music”? Probably not. I’d probably think that person just hadn’t had the right musical experiences.

It does give me a bit of consolation to know that even the elite math students at MIT didn’t always “get it” either. They had mastered plenty of techniques and stored lots of information, but their inner grasp was only partial. According to physicist Richard Feynman:

I often liked to play tricks on people when I was at MIT.

One time, in mechanical drawing class, some joker picked up a French curve (a piece of plastic for drawing smooth curves—a curly, funny-looking thing) and said, “I wonder if the curves on this thing have some special formula?”

I thought for a moment and said, “Sure they do. The curves are very special curves. Lemme show ya,” and I picked up my French curve and began to turn it slowly. “The French curve is made so that at the lowest point on each curve, no matter how you turn it, the tangent is horizontal.”

All the guys in the class were holding their French curve up at different angles, holding their pencil up to it at the lowest point and laying it along, and discovering that, sure enough, the tangent is horizontal. They were all excited by this “discovery”—even though they had already gone through a certain amount of calculus and had already “learned” that the derivative (tangent) of the minimum (lowest point) of any curve is zero (horizontal).

They didn’t put two and two together. They didn’t even know what they “knew.”

I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding; they learn by some other way—by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!1

Music learning can be fragile too. Music and mathematics are alike in that students haven’t totally digested a new concept until a visualization, or a palpable sense of spatial relationships, clicks into place. Then we have the classic “Aha!” moment. The surface operations have no relevance without this felt sense, this bodily experience of rightness. And it takes a bit of extra time to allow for that feeling to happen; it won’t come from quick, memorized answers, which tend to be shallow responses.

The surface operations have no
relevance without this bodily
experience of rightness.

Feynman’s description of true learning mirrors that of actor Alec Guinness (chapter 5): it isn’t so much about surface techniques, rather it is “some inner mystery” which is nonetheless experienced in a tangible way. I would guess that everyone longs for true learning, but external situations—especially educational settings—can lead us astray by rewarding us for pleasing others, for playing the good-student game.

The good-student syndrome

Good-student knowledge is fragile because it’s incomplete. It depends on external validation. It emphasizes quickness and cleverness. Most importantly, good students are focused not on their own inner questions but on the teacher and the teacher’s specific expectations. They defer to authority. In educational circles this has been termed “system dependence,” the belief that if you do exactly what you are supposed to do, the system will always reward you. But educational systems don’t reflect the richness—or the unpredictability—of real life.

Here again, the film The Karate Kid dramatizes a compelling educational point. Daniel, the young student, has now embarked on karate lessons with Mr. Miyagi. and the goal is clearly defined: to win the upcoming karate tournament against some high-school bullies who have been beating Daniel up on a regular basis. The bullies have agreed to leave him alone if he can win the tournament—something they consider highly unlikely, since they have aggressive training in karate and Daniel has none. Handyman Mr. Miyagi, although not a certified karate teacher, agrees to help Daniel prepare. He uses his ramshackle front yard as a teaching studio, so the lessons have an unconventional, almost subversive, feel about them from the start.

Daniel is willing to work hard—which stands to reason, since he’s in danger of being beaten up in the match—and wants to be told exactly what to do. He needs fast results because of the stringent deadline: the date of the tournament. Lesson after lesson goes by, but Miyagi won’t answer Daniel’s pressing questions about how to kick or how to punch, much to Daniel’s (and the movie audience’s) puzzlement. Good-student quick learning is apparently being dismantled by the screenwriter, and we wonder what will take its place.

Instead, Miyagi seems to ignore karate altogether, and makes Daniel wax cars for hours on end, but with a particularly focused, circular arm movement. Day after day, all Daniel hears is “Wax on, wax off!” He is also instructed to breathe in a vigorous, conscious pattern in coordination with the waxing gestures. After waxing the cars, he must whitewash a fence (up and down, whole arm, flexible wrist), paint a house (side-to-side), and sand a deck (large circles). All these simple motions, natural to the body and thus intrinsically powerful, are not really new, but they are being activated and brought into consciousness. Since an action like sanding a floor calls for no real accuracy, it frees a person to enjoy the vigorous motion and to integrate that motion with healthy breathing as well.

But Daniel, understandably, smolders with resentment. Despite his hard work he thinks he has learned nothing, has nothing to show for his efforts. So he confronts Miyagi angrily, to which Miyagi replies with a sudden flurry of fierce karate blows from every direction (while shouting “Wax on!” or “Paint house!”). Daniel discovers to his astonishment that the waxing and painting motions are in fact perfect blocking moves. Without having tried consciously to perfect their accuracy and without being subjected to teacherly critiques on a weekly basis, he has absorbed the moves so thoroughly that they are now swift, sure, and precise. They adjust themselves instinctively to each new situation, as if Daniel had been refining these skills for years.

So he learns not only skill, but trust in his body’s wisdom and in his new-found ability to improvise. This is the turning point of the movie. In the final tournament scene, Daniel’s satisfying come-from-behind victory derives not from physical power or conventional strategy but from his balance, centeredness, and self-trust. He finds fresh creativity under pressure, and he and Miyagi are equally surprised at the high level of originality and skill he demonstrates in the moment of truth.

This story brings to light one of the most misleading notions about learning: that progress should always be visible and steady. We tend to expect the straight-line steady climb, especially from someone who is known to be a good student, whereas a more true-to-life pattern has plateaus and breakthroughs.

Steady climb

Plateaus and breakthroughs

It’s natural to experience the alternation of plateaus with unforeseen bursts of progress. Clearly, such a pattern is not only unpredictable but will vary drastically from person to person. Progress is often invisible and hard to gauge. It takes great trust in individuals and in the learning process to accept this pattern and to resist the temptation to engineer shallow (but demonstrable) “progress.”

 

Part of the problem has to do with self-image. Once formed, the idea of oneself as a good student is a strongly appealing one—constantly reinforced by society and difficult to let go of, even when it directly hampers a person’s growth. I base this observation on many students I have known and also on my own history as a musician. Once we’re identified as good students we have a lot to lose by experimenting with new approaches. Outside approval can thus turn out to be a form of dependency and a hindrance.

Outside approval can
thus turn out to be a
form of dependency.

My own pathway to music was complicated by this factor. Until I was seventeen, the one career possibility I had categorically rejected was that of concert pianist. This seems odd to me now, since music and piano-playing had come easily to me, I loved them both, and I also loved to perform. But school-learning had come easily too, largely because I was almost too good at the student game, alert to teachers and able to sense exactly what they wanted. The payoff at school was warm and substantial: the report card, the reputation, beaming parent-teacher conferences, and a constant message from the environment that high grades signified real self-worth. What this meant, of course, was that I had much to lose.

I would often say at the time that concert performing didn’t interest me—I’d claim it was too boring, too elitist, or whatever. What I really meant was that it scared me, although I wouldn’t have admitted that to myself. I was used to ease, not struggle and perseverance. What if I struggled and didn’t succeed? I wasn’t at all sure I could handle the inescapable accountability at the core of concert performing.

What changed this attitude was the intervention of some of my music professors in college. What they did, in essence, was call my bluff. They perceived that in pianistic terms I was a smooth faker who had avoided real challenges, and they simply told me so (in kindly words). They were surprisingly neutral, not recommending what I ought to do or not do from that point on; their helpful role in my life was simply to hold up a mirror so that I could see myself realistically. This caused me to think much harder about what I actually wanted. I proceeded to find a good teacher, the late Leopold Mittman, with whom I could begin to study the instrument “for real.”

Mittman encouraged me to feel and enjoy every move at the piano. He discouraged over-intellectualizing. I learned that quick learning was irrelevant, that it takes time to gain refinement and control with any piece of music. He introduced me to the importance of physical commitment to the keyboard as a whole and to every note, having correctly assessed my general situation with the words, “You have natural facility, but no technique.” He helped me find the courage to expose my weaknesses. I began tackling big pieces for the first time, using my whole body, taking new chances, enjoying the adventure of it. “Here’s a virtuoso piece,” he would say, slapping me on the back encouragingly, “just throw yourself at it—you’ll figure it out in your own way!”

I was also learning to be honest about mistakes—letting them stand without any concealment—and learning how to process them wholesomely, without retreating from this healthy new-found exuberance of playing. Practicing became intriguing and fun for the first time. I learned to be realistic and to take my time. The mind-set in Mittman’s studio was: roll up your sleeves, plunge in—who knows what you’ll find today?

I remember thinking of this new approach as “practicing stupidly,” since it was the exact opposite of the surface cleverness and quick results that had long been my habit. Now, even after playing a passage quite correctly, I would stop and wonder, Do I really get it? Often the answer was no. Such inner honesty was brand new, and I found it refreshing. Mittman explained, rightly, that I wouldn’t need to practice long hours, since this “stupid” way was in fact a highly efficient way to penetrate to the bone, to what I really needed to know.

The good student in the music studio

Many an academic whiz has encountered humbling frustration in the study of music performance. Among the most common problems are shaky memory, technical limitations caused by body tension, and overcautious interpretations. Baffled and discouraged, some quit their lessons. It’s difficult to accept that one’s diligent efforts, so predictably crowned with laurels in school, would have such unpredictable outcomes in the musical sphere. It would help tremendously if book-smart people thought of music more as a sport and less as an intellectual activity, but this is often not the case. And for the academic perfectionist, the public nature of music-performance failures can be particularly humiliating.

But many others don’t give up, and continue to seek musical wholeness—sensing that its challenges and benefits are unique and profound. Artistic self-expression is a rich reward, to be sure. But also, music mastery means self-mastery, both physical and psychological. In music, the good student comes to understand the difference between cleverness and true understanding, and learns to choose accordingly. Some people have the facile gift of quickness and thus have shortcuts available to them which other people might not have, but music performance, a great equalizer, will expose the shallowness of those shortcuts in the moment of truth. This gives clever students a precious opportunity to grow in self-knowledge through music.

ROBERTA

“Roberta,” in her early thirties when I worked with her many years ago, was intelligent, level-headed, and interested in redefining her basic relationship with the piano. This took emotional fortitude, since it’s not easy to confront long-established patterns that have served a self-protective purpose, even though they may in fact have been self-defeating in another way.

As a child, Roberta had always found sight-reading a breeze, and—as usually happens—she was much praised for this remarkable trait. She had a natural intellectual ability to learn complicated music quite quickly, in a rather intellectual way, and she enjoyed tackling such projects. Soon she became her teacher’s prize pupil.

Unfortunately, her physical knack for playing was not precocious, so it lagged behind her mental brilliance. But the teacher wasn’ t troubled by this and didn’t perceive that a fundamental dislocation was being set in place. On the contrary, the teacher was delighted to have such an unusually bright, responsive, and reliable student.

By the time I met her, Roberta played with clumsy but determined fingers. She gravitated to long pieces of great complexity. As she played, the music sounded impersonal and her face was locked in a fixed, pleasant smile. That smile bore no relation to the ever-changing, passionate emotions in the music. Her industrious hands seemed bizarrely disconnected from Roberta’s feelings and the rest of her body. This would be evident at the end of an emphatic phrase, for example, which she could never release with a direct, convincing gesture that would signify, There!—that’s just what I meant to say. Instead, she seemed to be going through mechanical motions.

To put it bluntly, her playing elicited no response from anyone, including Roberta herself. How did this disconnection come about?

As she eventually related it to me, her childhood pattern was that she would do anything necessary to make the pieces work, to seem to have enough technique to play complex music. But this often meant forcing things, contorting her young fingers: she had to “drag the technique along, battle it all the time.” In lessons she would do her best to conceal this struggle. In time she developed an adversarial feeling toward her own hands (“contempt” was her word) and toward the keyboard. It is hardly surprising that she forced things, since her technical limitations might cut off the pipeline of praise and acceptance that she’d come to rely on.

Self-contempt in any form is toxic. In this tainted atmosphere Roberta’s honest musical soul did not feel safe emerging. What did feel safe was to continue playing ever-harder pieces in a detached way. Their obvious difficulty worked well to keep criticism (including self-criticism) at bay. But deep down, said Roberta, “I always knew what I was lacking.” She received compliments with cynical disdain, and felt “two-faced.” Uncomfortable with such inner conflicts, she wondered if she would simply have to quit the piano for good.

After a break of several years, however, she took up the instrument again, as an older-than-usual college student. Something within her demanded resolution of the conflict and perceived its importance. As her teacher I sensed that the last thing she needed at this point was more detailed advice, and neither of us wanted her to feel dependent on my approval. What she did need was some way to remove her pervasive sense of shame, stemming from her old habit of faking everything. We needed to find a way to “reunite” her with her own hands and therefore with her spontaneous expressivity. And the final step would be to extend that expressivity to an audience without fear.

We approached this experimentally, with lots of activity away from the piano, such as body-movement games and dramatic improvisations (as playful as possible). We also tried isolating moments at the keyboard to an almost ridiculous extent: for example, holding one chord for a long time, sinking into it luxuriantly while exploring the question “How does this feel?” until a convincing answer came forth, a full registering of the experience of the moment, a physical sense of “Aha!” That may sound mystical, but it isn’t really. The difference between shallow and full knowing at the keyboard is quite unmistakable, and one can literally see the change in students when they make this important mind-body connection.

After a while Roberta was able to reclaim the most basic technical skill of all: awareness, and enjoyment, of how things actually feel. As she put it, such a renaissance depends on restoring a basic belief, the “belief that it can be yours.”

I admire Roberta’s tenacity, honesty, and insight. Our dialogue went beyond music too; a divorced single parent, she was working with a psychotherapist during the time she studied with me. One focus of her therapy was to let herself be authentic, without self-judgment or blame, at all times—as opposed to presenting the smiling, controlled façade of the person she guessed others wanted her to be. Many a time during our sessions she would throw back her head with a hearty laugh, because what we were doing was “exactly like therapy.” Indeed, not only did piano study often mirror psychotherapy (or the other way around), but I believed the two pursuits were intertwined. Piano-playing and psychotherapy enriched each other through shared insights and through the practical, physical, and expressive application (at the piano) of the issues at hand.

HELGA

Sometimes good students admire a teacher too much. At the time I heard “Helga” give a guest solo piano recital at my university, she was in her mid-forties and a professional artist-teacher at a major European conservatory. Expecting to enjoy the recital. I was nonplused to hear instead an unpoetic hour of thudding, flat, ugly sounds, and I knew it wasn’t the piano’s fault, since this was a sweet-toned instrument from which I had heard many others elicit beautiful tones. What made it odder was that Helga consistently made unusual, deliberate-looking playing gestures, most notably a peculiar, studied way of flinging her upper arms heavily at the keyboard. Every time she did this, a particularly jarring sound resulted. What was going on—couldn’t she hear what was happening?

Intrigued, I sought her out at the reception and struck up a conversation. Whenever I asked questions about her own life and career, she would deflect them and eagerly change the subject to her teacher, a world-famous pianist. Helga apparently felt that she owed everything to this man; she worshipped him and often followed him on his tours from continent to continent, reflecting in his glory and taking lessons whenever he had some free time. As she gushed on, I had a flash of recognition. Helga’s odd, counterproductive arm movements had seemed vaguely familiar to me, as if I’d seen someone play like that before. Now I remembered; her famous teacher used exactly the same technique. But with one great difference: when he did it, it worked beautifully.

Some key discoveries have to be made for ourselves and cannot be passed along from teacher to student. Many techniques are neither good nor bad; their effectiveness depends entirely on who is using them, with what level of understanding, and whether the techniques happen to suit that person’s body. It seemed to me that Helga’s deferential “handmaiden” role with the great maestro had done nothing but arrest her own artistic growth, technical fluency, and ability to even hear her own playing.

MING

The story of “Ming” illustrates how good students can get stuck musically, and how they might become unstuck. Ming, a graduate piano student, was playing his Bach suite for the class. He had absorbed years of strict conservatory training in Asia: respect the teacher, never question, the music must be thus-and-so, get it exactly right, anything wrong will be ridiculed. Any suggestion by the teacher, even a casual remark, becomes a commandment of sorts, an instant rule to be memorized and followed; the student must absorb the teacher’s thought faithfully.

Even though interpretation of Western music is meant to be an opportunity for personal creativity, Ming was fixated on doing it correctly, according to the teacher’s idea of correctness. As he played for the class, his listeners didn’t feel much response . His playing, rather tight and hasty, did have some temperament, but only of a generic kind. We made suggestions to change this or that interpretive nuance, but every time he started the piece we sensed the same decisive mind-set, even before the first note; his playing was virtually the same each time.

What to do? I remembered a psychological technique I’d seen in a workshop. “Imagine that this is the International Bach Contest,” I offered. “Everyone in the contest must play this very piece. The rendition we just heard was that of Contestant No. 14. We don’t have any idea what the judges thought of it. Now we will hear someone from another part of the world play the piece-Contestant No. 38. This guy has quite different ideas—and maybe he’s not so good!” Ming looked embarrassed and started again; not much different than before. I tried once more: “Contestant No. 22 is way off base—he takes the piece at much too slow a tempo.” He risked this, playing the Bach “too” slowly.

We were all riveted. The counterpoint was absorbing, and his sound sprang to warm, human life. I tried to hide my grin of pleasure, because pleasing me was not the point. “Contestant No. 6 has the strange idea that this is a humorous piece,” I threw out. He played with even more zest and communicative energy as he demonstrated this “silly” idea. Soon he didn’t need our suggestions but continued to invent interesting versions which Ming would never do.

All the “wrong” interpretations had twice the musical vitality of Ming’s customary dutiful-student approach. Which is best? At the moment, the question seemed unimportant. But who is Ming? That is more interesting. As long as he calls himself that name and takes the usual serious responsibility for his work, he seems the most predictable and uncreative of players. But as soon as he pretends to be someone else—a Hungarian or Brazilian or someone with questionable taste—he has freedom, imagination, and magnetism.

It wasn’t going to be easy for Ming to know how to handle all these possibilities in the future as he prepared to perform and be evaluated. He’d have to redefine what it means to be a good student. He may feel tempted to revert to the safe old path—settling on one interpretation, anointing it as correct, and polishing it relentlessly while scorning all others. Or he may relax his hold, trust his momentary instincts, and dwell outside the “Ming” persona for a while. Either way, he had demonstrated to himself and his classmates that he can indeed be a creative artist, capable of a multitude of fertile musical responses.

MELISSA

It is startling to see how easily a specific skill can be lost (or misplaced) the moment a person is cast in the student role. I am thinking in particular of the ability to count music correctly, to grasp and absorb rhythmic structure. Sixteen-year-old “Melissa” informs me dejectedly that she has always had a poor sense of rhythm. Every music teacher has told her so, and the assessment certainly seems borne out by the faulty counting she exhibits in my studio. Melissa’s problem is by no means unique; many teenage students seem to share it. And difficulties with rhythm can be especially discouraging from the teacher’s point of view, since a sense of rhythm is so fundamental, such an internal connection, so difficult for one person to correct in another.

Yet when I come across Melissa away from the music school. she appears to have no problem at all. Hanging out with a group of her friends and singing their favorite popular tunes together, songs which they have learned from the radio or recordings, she executes the most sophisticated, complex rhythms in perfect unison with the others. Rests, syncopations, quirky variations from one verse to the next, all are rendered flawlessly by every teenager. Of course their motivation for mastering music in this context is entirely different from that of the music lesson; this is the teens’ own culture, it has nothing to do with a teacher, the music plays a role in the all-important social acceptance they hunger for, and in most cases—since they have never seen any written notation for the songs—they’ve learned them totally (and quite quickly) by ear.

Once again, vital musical abilities have gone into hiding in the studio. As with Helga and Ming, some sort of studentlike passivity seems to be the cause.

Perfectionism

Books on music pedagogy abound with reminders to maintain perfection at all points during the learning process. Many a piano teacher’s studio wall is festooned with prim sayings extolling perfectionism, like the one I saw on a framed sampler recently: “Practice doesn’t make perfect; perfect practice makes perfect.” Whew! And yet if we widen our scope to include thinking from outside the studio, the value of perfectionism is called seriously into question. In Gestalt Therapy Verbatim, Perls states that if you are “cursed with perfectionism, you are absolutely sunk,” and terms it the “beloved game of the neurotic, the self-torture game.”2

Certainly this clash of views about perfectionism can be quite confusing, since there appears to be some truth on both sides of the issue. Depending on the context, perfectionism can apparently be a good trait or a destructive trait. For many young, high-achieving music students, the confusion can be intensified by family expectations and pressures. Once, after I had given a lecture to music educators entitled “Tension Problems of the Gifted Student,” an audience member came up to me and said that I hadn’t gone nearly far enough in describing the psychological stakes of musical perfectionism. When she was a child, she said, if she didn’t play Mozart on the piano flawlessly, she sensed that her mother simply didn’t love her.

Parental expectations, so crucial to a child’s psyche, can create perplexity for virtually any music student. The parents of toddlers greet their children’s bumbling attempts at learning to walk with cheerful acceptance, support, smiles, and hugs. But take that same child and same parent, roll the imaginary tape forward several years, and picture the child practicing for a piano lesson in the den while the parent is busy in the kitchen. Child hits an obvious wrong note: an F-sharp that should have been an F. Parent calls out, “I heard that—be more careful! Your lesson is tomorrow, and we’re paying good money for those lessons!” The parental view of imperfections seems to have reversed itself, yet the child no more meant to play a wrong note than he had meant to lose his balance as a toddler.

Perfectionistic expectations lead to detachment from one’s body and a tendency to apologize preemptively for one’s efforts, knowing from experience that there’s sure to be something wrong with them. I make this statement because of a recurring exchange I’ve had with several students. The conversation is illogical—like a dialogue from Alice in Wonderland—which is why I have committed it to memory:

TEACHER (after student plays awkward passage): How did that feel to you?

 

STUDENT (glumly): I know that’s not how it’s supposed to sound.

Well, I wasn’t talking about sound at all, or how it was “supposed to sound”! I was just asking how it felt physically. (And how did the phrase “supposed to” get into this discussion anyway?) Perfectionism can really get in the way of communication and perception, to say nothing of enjoyment and ultimate mastery.

Sight-reading and its dangers

Some people are born with a specific knack: to play music at sight with ease and with impressive results. Many good students, quick-witted and visually oriented, fall into this category. Not only can good sight-reading be a useful, marketable skill, it is further glorified by the chorus of praise (and envy) from those who find sight-reading a struggle. But good sight-readers often find themselves beset with troubles caused directly by their inappropriate use of this seemingly positive talent. They can develop physical tension—even injuries—and feel shaky in performance.

Why are they at risk? Because everything about sight-reading is technically unwholesome, according to the principles outlined in this book. If healthy playing is characterized by full awareness, relinquishing of control, and thorough physical commitment, sight-reading encourages the exact opposite. In fact, the very skill that makes sight-reading work is the narrowing of awareness, selectivity about what to be conscious of and what to ignore. Skillful sight-reading depends on more self-supervising, more self-consciousness, not less. And one can never play with physical thoroughness while sight-reading, because it is based on shrewd approximating—or, to put it more bluntly, faking. This is why, if you’re planning to learn a particular piece of music, you shouldn’t sight-read it very much or introduce sight-reading into your practicing. It simply confuses the body.

Deciding in an instant what to leave out (no one will notice), what to cleverly guess at, how to generalize and keep going, how to play by ear and camouflage the inevitable mistakes—these are the hallmarks of crafty sight-reading. Sight-readers have no choice but to be fixated on results—just finding the notes; never mind how it feels to get those results. They take every shortcut possible. Playing one measure while scanning the next one is a great technique for sight-reading, but disastrous for the holistic ideal of “experiencing the moment” because the sight-reader is experiencing two moments: the present and the future.

Sight-readers pretend to know, by playing in a pseudo-polished way, notes which their muscles don’t in fact know at all, since there has been no chance to program the requisite motions with the patience that is so essential. In this respect, sight-reading is a lie. Physically, it is terribly inefficient as well; the same muscles and nerves which should be used for well-integrated actions are now used instead for reactions—hunting quickly and shallowly for the notes as quickly as the eye spots them, and playing tentatively just in case the eye happened to be mistaken. As a result, energy that should flow from the body-center out through the extremities now backs up, from clever fingers inward. This lack of good energy flow leads to muscle tension, incomplete playing, and a colorless tone quality.

The body simply doesn’t like
to lie or be lied to.

Sight-reading distorts our perceptions about the music at hand. Quite frequently a passage that looks hard and is difficult to read turns out to be surprisingly easy to play; the two functions are not related. But if sight-reading is used as the initial point of departure, an inexperienced player can easily form the false notion that a particular passage is something to be feared. Such notions sink in and are difficult to change later.

In all these ways, the mind-body system is put so out of whack by sight-reading—especially when the material is complex—that it’s practically impossible to prevent the buildup of harmful tension, even if one tries to think good thoughts about healthy posture, breathing, and relaxation while playing. The body simply doesn’t like to lie or be lied to. This source of pervasive tension helps explain the distressingly high percentage of gifted, professional orchestral players who suffer from debilitating pain or injury caused by playing. Many say nothing about the problem for fear of losing their jobs. Many of these same players are prodigious sight-readers of the most demanding scores, and proud of that ability; in fact this is their stock in trade. There is certainly a direct link, although it has been very little discussed, between high-level sight-reading and performance injuries.

The ability to sight-read well can be enjoyable, and a major musical asset, and it makes sense to develop this skill. But to safeguard our health, we must do it for only brief periods of time and—most important—treat it as a separate musical activity entirely, not to be mingled with the technical learning of a piece.

The sight-reading dilemma dramatizes how crucial it is for the good student to cultivate inner honesty above all else. Or to look at it another way, solving this dilemma helps us to find out what inner honesty really means. When the good student chooses the honest path, free of perfectionism and faking, music study becomes something refreshingly new: a calm oasis of self-acceptance for those who are so used to driving themselves and trying to please others.