10 Adventurous Amateurs

What do Sherlock Holmes and Albert Einstein have in common?

Both were extraordinary thinkers, one a fictional genius, the other a real genius—curious, original, and brilliant. And both were amateur violinists. The link between these aspects is significant: when either man got really stuck in his problem solving, he would turn to the same remedy: playing the violin.

A typical scene in the detective novel finds Dr. Watson, the loyal assistant, trudging up the stairs-knowing, from the wild violin sounds he heard, that the great Sherlock Holmes’s powers of logical deduction were being sorely tested by the case at hand. In one story Watson observed, “Sometimes the chords were sonorous and melancholy. Occasionally they were fantastic and cheerful. Clearly they reflected the thoughts which possessed him, but whether the music aided those thoughts . . . was more than I could determine. ”1

Holmes apparently trusted the process of logical deduction, but he trusted another process too—the physical, absorbing act of music making. The two processes interacted somehow, one enhancing the other in a way that the author hints at but doesn’t attempt to define.

Einstein also found a way to facilitate his thinking through violin playing. He may not have been an especially skilled violinist, but that is clearly not relevant. As one biographer relates:

He had his music. But this, as he would explain on occasions, was in some ways an extension of his thinking processes, a method of allowing the subconscious to solve particularly tricky problems. “Whenever he felt that he had come to the end of the road or into a difficult situation in his work,” his elder son has said, “he would take refuge in music, and that would usually resolve all his difficulties.”2

Musical forms, struggles, beauty, and physical patterns took both these legendary minds beyond the conventional—into an advanced type of metaphoric thought. In both cases their result-fixated minds eased up somehow, “allowing the subconscious” to lead the way—and musical performance provided this fruitful link between conscious and subconscious.

In short, they solved real-world problems by losing themselves in music, specifically in the physicality of the violin. I would guess that Einstein was not a timid or cautious player, either. He attributed his scientific creativity directly to this quality of childlike inquisitiveness, a plunge-right-in approach to his environment that I call physical intuition. And Einstein often said that his most famous theory was also inspired by music, its forms and relationships.

It seems that certain physical actions fire the brain, create connections, and accelerate thought. We have all had the experience of being literally unable to sit still when we are on the verge of resolving something in our minds. We pace up and down or jiggle a leg, almost as if such involuntary motions were needed to propel our thoughts forward. Sometimes the mind-body dynamic works a bit differently: while taking a long walk or rowing the boat across the lake, just letting our thoughts drift, we suddenly receive from the unconscious—with effortless ease—the solution to a conundrum that had been vexing us for weeks. I can testify that playing the piano has this effect; maybe it has something to do with both sides of the brain being stimulated by the independent articulations of both hands, and at the same time both sides communicating and integrating with each other. In any event, I have to keep a notepad handy while practicing, because I tend to get all kinds of unbidden information ranging from the trivial (where I left the car keys) to the momentous (my life goal for the next decade).

Certain physical actions fire
the brain, create connections,
and accelerate thought.

This fertile mind-body unity is only one of the riches to be found in making music—at any level—as an adult. Ironically, far too many adults, even if they do take the initiative to start or return to music study, are so modest in their expectations that these rewards turn out to be only a fraction of what they might have been.

An essay in The New York Times Magazine illustrated this point. Entitled “A Joyful Noise—How to Practice Without Hope of Perfection,“ it chronicled the feelings of an adult writer taking piano lessons for the first time at an urban music conservatory.

And so it began—an excruciating half-hour of mistakes, confusion, and deep, deep frustration. I’ve never been more relieved to exit a room in my life. As I turned to sprint down the stairs and back across the street to safety, the door of the practice room across from mine opened and a small boy came out—a small boy with a stack of complicated sonatas and concertos as thick as a phone book. The humiliation was complete.

The weeks staggered by. I dreaded going to lessons when I hadn’t made any progress . . . . I practiced dutifully at the conservatory every night for an hour, though the only thing I could hear clearly was poor Bach rolling in his grave.3

Apparently, judging by the next week’s letters to the editor, these charmingly candid confessions struck home with other readers. I believe the writer spoke for many as she expressed her awe of young talent, her resigned acceptance of slow and doubtful progress, and her guilt at mangling sublime music like that of Bach.

The paradox is that adult music learners, while they often have the lowest expectations, are in a uniquely excellent position to succeed. Many come to this endeavor with fervent desire, love of music, enchantment with the idea of making music with their own bodies and emotions, and leisure time and disposable income to support the lessons. Even more important, they bring maturity and intelligence to the project. But how much can adults learn if they are constantly comparing themselves negatively to others (children, no less) and feeling guilty about every unmusical wrong note? Add to this the pervasive notion of practice as tedious discipline, adherence to the traditional “no-mistakes” philosophy, and uncertainty that they have any real talent for music, and they soon find themselves in a state of semi-paralysis of body and mind.

Let’s contrast music study with golf, another favorite self-improvement undertaking of mature individuals. Golf is challenging and unpredictable, just like music performance. Happily, though, golf isn’t generally played by precocious kids; therefore, no need for self-deprecating comparisons to little prodigies. A botched golf swing is silent and (if no one happens to be looking) unobserved by anyone. An obvious musical clinker, though, resonates embarrassingly through the house; even the neighbors are often subjected to it. And while golf may be a beautiful game, it has no equivalent of a Bach or a Mozart whose divine legacy we run the risk of desecrating; therefore, no aesthetic guilt.

Golf is also widely valued as a personal journey, an absorbing, enriching, ongoing challenge of self-mastery in which struggle is expected, even embraced. Accuracy and control are rare, and if they do happen occasionally the golfer feels triumphant. Golfers, in other words, are philosophical.

But adults at the piano, or any other instrument, are often disconcerted by how much they feel like children; the situation itself seems to evoke this reaction. Wayne Booth, a professor emeritus of English at the University of Chicago who took up the cello as an adult, puzzled about his shamed bumbling whenever a chamber music colleague made a polite suggestion that he turn a particular phrase more musically:

I try it—but my embarrassment makes me play it even worse . . . . It would no doubt shock her if she discovered how the little boy in me cringes over those failures. It shocks me. So I usually try to conceal how much feeling of a nonmusical kind has gone into my unimpressive phrasings: anxiety, tension, a sense of inadequacy.4

Even the word amateur has built-in conflicts of meaning, and I’ve wrestled with that in the writing of this book. While it literally means “lover,” it can also carry the connotation of dabbler, dilettante, a person who is somehow preordained never to be very good. To describe someone’s work as amateurish usually is not a compliment, and the expression “rank amateur” is less than inspiring. But amateur status can be joyous—denoting free choice, pure love of the doing, and open-ended possibilities for discovery.

Advantages of maturity

I teach at a university, and whenever I talk with colleagues, no matter what their subject area happens to be, we invariably agree: it’s uniquely stimulating to work with the so-called nontraditional student. This is the official institutional term for the older person, the fifty-year-old in the class with all the twenty-year-olds.

Why is it stimulating? Older students have made their own choice to be there, so they want their learning to be meaningful. They are excited by the chance to master new things. They ask penetrating questions. They instigate and respond to conversations in which the teacher can also learn a lot, often making interesting connections, on a mature level, between new material or concepts and the knowledge they already have. Such connections expand everyone’s understanding.

And adults can draw on their full personal histories. Professionals have arrived at a sense of mastery in a certain field and have usually become autonomous learners in the process; a lawyer or schoolteacher may say, “School was OK as far as it went, but the actual learning started when I got out in the real world.” Whatever adults’ experience has consisted of—work, child rearing, relationships—they’ve known the rich texture of life-learning. They’ve learned to take risks, be flexible, gain insight from their own ”sovereign“ mistakes, be curious, and—through all such experiences—reach a deeper level of self-acceptance. They’ve got some common sense and know how to focus.

Adults have common sense
and know how to focus.

In other words, the down-to-earth approach I recommend throughout this book fits beautifully with the profile of adult learners. Is their motor learning somewhat slower than that of a child? Certainly. But this is far outweighed by all the learning benefits just mentioned. I think that success for adult learners boils down to just one key factor: adventurousness.

Another adult cello-beginner who wrote about the experience (and who met with greater musical success than he ever expected to) was John Holt; his wise, straightforward musical memoir is titled Never Too Late. Interestingly, the Los Angeles Times called the book “delightfully subversive.” Holt became famous as a courageous and visionary educational reformer, and his books about the school system (including How Children Fail and How Children Learn) became widely influential. Holt personifies the adventurous adult amateur.

Holt’s musical development was strongly influenced by his own passionate ideas about education. For example, he thought that what many saw as a learning disability in schoolchildren was in fact just fear and tension, that problem readers didn’t have “word blindness” as much as “fear blindness.”5 Think of how the brains of many of us become paralyzed whenever we’re presented with one of those dreaded “word problems” in math—that’s the feeling. Holt felt that many children were simply “too scared to learn or think.” The same phrase could often be applied to the music lesson experience. Holt certainly had to battle his own fears about performing music; describing a flute solo he once attempted, he says:

I didn’t make very many mistakes, but at every one I was flooded with embarrassment and shame. I grew more and more tense, my face felt hot, my hands sweated so much I feared I would drop the flute, there was a kind of buzzing in my ears, I could hardly hear the piano. In a way, feeling great fear is like feeling great pain; it is like being inside a little box of one-way glass; others can see and hear you, but for you the world almost disappears.6

Holt was so innately curious about such phenomena that he was able to see them objectively and thus move beyond the trap of fear. In fact, his flute study had belonged to an earlier period of his adult life when he wasn’t quite ready to blossom as he did later with the cello. He attributed his early lack of success to several factors, including, first, that he was only thinking of music as a hobby and not expecting much improvement; second, that he wasn’t “psychologically or emotionally ready to play a musical instrument” because of excessive fear and shame about mistakes; third, that he wasn’t physically exuberant enough in his playing; and fourth, that he wasn’t resourceful enough as a practicer, but just did as he was told, even when the results were disappointing. He had yet to become an adult in the music studio or make full use of what adults are good at: taking an “intelligent, critical, and imaginative” leading role in their own processes, including musical ones. As Holt put it, “I was not yet ready to be at the center of my own learning.”7

Grown-up practicing

I learned to respect the power of grown-up practicing from “Larry,” a student I taught years ago, during my graduate student days. Larry, in his mid-thirties, was a postal worker, an amiable, beefy fellow with thick fingers that could occasionally get stuck between the black keys on the piano. He had discovered that he was a songwriter, meaning that original songs kept popping into his head in full-fledged form, and he needed a way to play them. So he was seeking instrumental skills for quite a practical purpose.

He was so open, motivated, and willing to try whatever I proposed that I was really able to put my ideas to the test. Having never studied the piano before, he presented a clean slate, with no inner conflicts, no prior piano lesson traumas to unravel. Add to this his calm and stable temperament—his “maturity”—and I knew I was in luck; I sensed that the conditions were perfect for an experiment in adult learning.

So we embarked on a program of mastering the foundations of piano technique. The goals may have been a bit more ambitious than he had originally bargained for, but Larry never complained. He practiced steadily, compared himself to no one, and his expectations were relaxed. His instrumental capabilities seemed about average (although such assessments are not always fair to make). Whenever something worked he was satisfied; whenever it didn’t he was patient. I threw him a lot of technical challenges but never mentioned that those skills were supposed to be hard. He was so generally pleased to be doing this that he dealt with all obstacles with honesty and equanimity as they arose. He took things apart intelligently (something adults can do well) and never took shortcuts. He combined a naturally relaxed state of mind with a rigorous approach to problem solving, and the results were solid.

To my amazement, after about a year he was playing a Beethoven sonata with fluent, secure technique and solid musicality. People rarely play at their full capacity, but that’s exactly what he seemed to be doing—sometimes I secretly thought he was even playing a bit beyond his capacity! Typically, Larry treated his accomplishments with equanimity too.

Unknown to Larry, he gave me a priceless, enduring gift: a greater trust in my own instincts about learning. I suspected then, and it has since turned out to be the case, that such an untainted opportunity to find out what an adult student can do is extraordinarily rare. But accomplishments like Larry’s needn’t be rare; what made it work for him was simply his attitude: sane, honest, unafraid.

Adults often do have an easier time than younger students adapting to practice approaches that are thoughtful, efficient, and perhaps a bit philosophical. For example, the concept of deliberately relinquishing physical control in order to receive honest information about technique is a sophisticated one, even though it’s simple to do once a person catches on to it. Adults are intrigued by such ideas. Similarly, the mental transition process into a practice-ready state is more readily understood by an adult. It appeals to adult intelligence to understand practice sessions as bold experimentation and detective work rather than dutiful repetition.

John Holt quotes the words he heard from cellist Janos Starker that changed his life, resonating as they did with Holt’s own fervent belief in the vast educational possibilities we have as adults:

“Well, it’s extremely difficult for someone of our age to learn to play this instrument well, because we have to develop a whole new set of muscles, and a whole new set of coordinations.” He paused an instant to let that sink in. “On the other hand,” he said, “we have an advantage.” “What’s that?” I asked. He said, “We can think up problems, and find solutions.”8

Other musical pleasures

Adult amateurs who have written about their musical involvements often mention, and puzzle over, the tears that spring to their eyes when there is a moment of piercing beauty, when things come together and the music seems to live on its own. Whatever those tears may mean, they explain—in a way that can never be verbalized—the closeness of music to our very souls. In radio journalist Noah Adams’s chronicle of studying music as an adult beginner entitled Piano Lessons: Music, Love, and True Adventures, a seasoned teacher is asked why music affects our emotions so directly, especially when we’re playing. She says, “Music can create these beautiful moments out of nothing. We can be sitting here and play a phrase and suddenly there’s beauty.” Having such glimpses of another realm she considers a “privilege.”9

Often the sense of beauty seems most immediate when we make music with others, whether it’s a chamber trio, a duet, a drumming circle, or a barbershop quartet. Then we have the perfect combination, in a way—we are participating actively at the same time that the shared expression transcends our own egos. The delights of this can be felt at any level of musical advancement.

In addition to instrumental study, there are other musical satisfactions for adults, activities that don’t involve systematic practicing. Classes in Dalcroze Eurhythmics, for example, offer adults the same rhythmic fun and integrated learning through body movement that preschoolers receive. There are also grass-roots associations devoted to freely expressive improvisation, requiring no training or experience; the most notable of these is called Music for People. Voice and simple percussion instruments are the primary media for their improvisation sessions. Among the points in this organization’s “A Bill of Musical Rights” are:

Researchers are just beginning to investigate the health benefits of music participation, but the findings seem convincing and heartening. A recent study analyzed the saliva of volunteer members of a community chorale in California, measuring the amounts of certain antibodies made up of disease-fighting proteins. They were tested before, during, and after rehearsals, and at a performance. Not only did the level of immunoglobin A rise 150 percent after the rehearsals; it spiked 240 percent after the performance. This surprised the researchers, who had theorized that the performance might be stressful and thus lower the level. But apparently performing proved to be a peak experience of a positive kind. They also concluded from the data that the more passionately the choristers sang, the more their antibody level rose.11

Primarily, though, it is the personal stories that impress. Michigan State music professor Midori Koga writes of her grandfather in Tokyo picking up the violin again at the age of eighty and performing his first solo recital at his own eighty-eighth birthday celebration. He found a good teacher, practiced diligently, played some chamber music which inspired him even more, and awoke each day in his eighties “happy to know that I have so much to learn today.” According to Koga, he “played as a child plays, wholeheartedly, joyfully and with pure abandon.”12

Clearly, adults need to choose a teacher thoughtfully. Amateurs who have written about their musical journeys have been candid about the destructiveness of some teachers and the skillful helpfulness of others. Pre-lesson interviews are essential. Good teachers for adults understand the paralyzing dangers of misplaced perfectionism, and know how to encourage grown-up problem-solving autonomy. Again I defer to the firsthand account of adventurous amateur John Holt:

The teacher I need must accept that he or she is my partner and helper and not my boss, that in this journey of musical exploration and adventure, I am the captain.

Expert guides and pilots I can use, no doubt about it. But it is my expedition; I gain the most if it succeeds and lose the most if it fails, and I must remain in charge.13