Piano Fail

I was thumbing through a magazine while waiting for an appointment and came across some wisdom on reversing painful assumptions from Martha Beck. She had asked her client, who was getting divorced, to give her 3 reasons her marriage didn’t fail.

“But it did!”, Dorothy muffled a sob.

“Well, was any part of it good?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Did you learn from it?”

“I learned so much,” said Dorothy.

“And is every learning experience that comes to an end a failure?”, I asked…

I really wished I had had this in my arsenal during a recent conversation with one of my students about her piece for our fast approaching area recital, which went something like this:

“This piece just isn’t getting better. I can’t remember it. No matter what I do, it won’t go faster.”

“It’s a big piece. Concentrate on playing no faster than you can play it beautifully and fluidly and use the score. Give up on total memory for now.”

“But then I will have failed!”

We discussed that fact that the musical message was way more important that whether she used the score or not. We also fine tuned her technique and fixed a place where her concept of the rhythm was out of whack.

At her next lesson, the piece was much better. It had a nice arch and was gelling well. The recital was in 3 weeks, one of which was spring break.

“Keep doing what you’re doing”, I said. “It’s working!”

“But”, she wailed, “it’s not fast enough!”

The elephant in the room was, “I’m failing.” All the students had completed an assignment for studio class in which they presented 4-5 performances of their piece via CD, YouTube, or iTunes. So, she knew very well that there is a range of performance tempos out there and the piece is not always played at top speed. She couldn’t get past the preconceived picture she had of what her performance would be like.

“Do you ever watch What Not To Wear?”, I asked.

“Yes!”

“Remember how Stacy and Clinton always tell their clients to dress the body they have right now?”

A knowing nod.

“Well, you have to play this as the person you are right now not the person you will be in 6 months, or 4 years, or even 10 years from now.”

We talked about great artists and how their performances & recordings of a work vary considerably over the years. Concert artists have lived and played a piece for many years before they record it or play it in Carnegie Hall. Students often perform pieces in studio or area recitals which they have studied for a little as 6 months. To compare yourself to a concert artist and say you failed is like saying you failed at basketball because you can’t play like Kobe Bryant.

“You have to be you with your life and its’ experiences—right now. You can’t try to be someone else.”

I could have said, “In the words of Tim Gunn, ‘Make it work people’.” Because that is what we musicians do. We make it work now with what we’ve got. We can’t buy more time or make excuses. If we do our best, and make it work, and learn something in the process then there is no failure.