Music Lessons

Patience is not passive; on the contrary, it is active; it is concentrated strength."

~ Edward G Bulwer

Awhile back, a music professor that I admire greatly was sitting across my desk visiting with me before his next meeting. I asked him about his program, and about his students. Since I am also an Academic Advisor, I know that music majors have a particularly rigorous schedule and I had made the assumption that by the time these students were seniors, they must be very dedicated and polished academics. To survive that long in the program, it seemed to me that it made sense that some of our brightest students would be found in our most challenging programs.

To my surprise, he shook his head and said that wasn't the case. In fact, he was quite worried because many of his students wanted to become music teachers. In the mind of this professor, pursuing a performance degree was quite different from making a decision to teach. He felt a responsibility not just to his current students, but to the next generation of musicians his students would be mentoring. He talked about how frightened many of his students were during conducting class, and how they were afraid to give him honest questions and answers. He assumed that his students were worried that he would tell them they were "wrong" or that he might be disgusted by their personal musical tastes. He chuckled to himself as he told me about the kind of music he enjoyed. I can not remember exactly the words he used but it was something to the effect of, "It might not be a musical masterpiece, but I sure do love cranking it up in the car!"

As our conversation went on he began to discuss his own experience as a music student. He talked about sight reading when trying to conduct a choir and how that had been challenging for him. I told him I imagined that it would be very difficult to have to read so many lines at once. I had studied the piano on and off for many years and I had enough trouble getting my eyes to focus on two lines. I couldn't imagine simultaneously reading five, and being aware enough of musical dynamics to know who to cue and when.

I felt a bit silly comparing my limited musical experience to his quite accomplished one, but to my surprise he perked right up. "You know," he said, "I didn't get better at reading music until way after graduate school."

I thought I might throw out a possibility to him that I had been considering. "I wonder", I said, "I wonder if there are just developmental leaps that just happen in their own time."

I shared with him about my experience as a kindergarten teacher before I came back to work in higher education. In my experience working to teach children to read, I had observed that I could go through word practice activity after activity with no seeming improvement or growth from the student. Then it seemed they would just walk in one day, and "get it". They weren't ready until they were ready and then it seemed like their brains just opened up all of a sudden and they grasped the topic completely.

The music professor leaned forward and his face lit up.

"It's exactly like that." he said. "It's like there is this spike of understanding just in this one particular area, and then it takes years for everything else to catch up and even it out." He talked about how one area would suddenly move to an entirely new level of performance and ability, and then it would take quite a bit of time for the other areas of musicianship to get up to speed and match the outstanding one.

If this was true for him in the area of music, then the same sort of leaping and jumping was most likely happening in many other areas at the same time. Not only that, but as my friend suggested, it took years for the rest of him to meet the part that had jumped ahead. It only seemed to make sense that with more practice, more discipline and more work, there would be another "spike" or "leap" as we can refer to it here and the cycle of catching up, expanding and growing would continue.

The discipline it takes to work towards a goal could be seen then as active patience. My friend continues to teach and modify his techniques to meet the needs of his struggling students. Those students continue to practice their instruments and do their homework despite the fact that perhaps only limited improvements are happening. If the teacher was to give up, or the student decided to switch their major or drop out altogether, the possibility of a "leap" becomes far fetched and improbable. If however, there is a readiness level or developmental opening that must happen naturally, then all that time and all that practice is not in vain.

Changing the way we practice also takes patience and discipline. Another music professor that I also enjoy very much came to my congregation when I was a teenager to give a music workshop to church musicians. He talked about practice. He talked about the right way and the wrong way to practice. Until that moment, I felt like if I was putting in my 30 minutes a day to work on a piece, I should be able to call it quits after that and feel okay about what I had done. What he said that day changed the way I viewed practice and altered the way I approached the piano...and my personal life.

When I practiced, I would go through the music and stumble through the tough parts. When I had played the piece from beginning to end, I would go back to a passage that was more difficult, maybe play the right hand and left hand separately, bring them together and try again. I would play the piece again, and again, and again, making almost the same mistakes at the same point every time.

Jack the crazy musician that visited my church pointed out that all I was doing was practicing my mistakes over and over and over. The way I practiced was teaching me to repeat the mistakes. The key he said, was to stop when I had made a mistake, fix it, and not make it again. This simple technique actually took me years to internalize and I still find that it takes a tremendous amount of patience on my part. Patience, I learned comes with the discipline that it takes to recover from frustration and reevaluate a plan of action.

I am no longer a piano student. I am grateful though for the lessons of discipline, practice and patience that the piano brought to me. All those nights sitting at the piano with tears of complete and total frustration running down my face produced more than an improved musical performance from me. These were my earliest lessons is real patience.

**Photo by "Theogeo" at flickr.com