Improve your talent: Non-judgmental mistake awareness

Improve your talent: Non-judgmental mistake awareness

In Developing a technique to improve your talent, I laid out 6 things that I have been using actively in my teaching to improve my students’ talent. This post will investigate the fourth of these, Non-judgmental mistake awareness.

Often, when I ask students to think out loud while practicing in a lesson, many of them speak in terms like this:

• “well, that was bad”
• “crappy intonation”
• “my sound was not good”

This is perfectly logical: we are trained from a very early age to differentiate between good and bad, to try to only do good things, and feel terrible about doing bad things. Unfortunately, the simple act of calling your own playing good or bad can easily obscure the truth of what is actually happening. In other words: don’t judge, just notice. At the beginning of my professional career, I listened to several performances of the Chiara Quartet in the quest to find music to put on a demo CD. To my surprise, I had made the same mistake in 4 of them at a moment I distinctly remembered thinking “that’s just a fluke” in my practicing. As it turns out, I so desperately wanted to be “good,” I was unconsciously shielding myself from the pain of recognizing my own mistakes as even existing. This moment was a wake-up call. Since then, I have developed three techniques for releasing the fears and anxieties surrounding self-judgment.

Turn “nots” into positives

One of the teaching techniques employed most often in music is to tell students what not to do. “Don’t tense up!” “Don’t bend your wrist when you shift!” “Don’t play so close to the tip!” “Don’t play so loud here.”

If you have been taught this way, and we all have, you may find that these voices of admonition are loud and clear in your head. I will occasionally even see the annoyed face of the teacher as they say the negative phrase to me! To turn negatives into non-judgmental mistake awareness, you will need to re-phrase these “nots” into a positive. Here are some examples of “nots” and their corresponding positive description:

nots:

1. don’t play so loudly
2. don’t play so quietly
3. stop tensing up your bow hand
4. don’t play so sharp on that note
5. don’t play slow here
6. don’t mess up!

positives:

1. play with an intimate character
2. give more energy and drive to the musical line
3. be sure your palm can breathe, let there be some cushion between your bow hand and the bow
4. that note is the third of a chord, listen to how it matches the root and it should be a little lower than melodic intonation
5. Feel the music in a larger meter, try feeling it in one beat per bar instead of in four beats per bar
6. play wonderfully!

As you can see, it often takes a fair amount of creativity to turn a “not” statement into a positive re-phrasing. The effort to transform a “not” into a positive will go a long way along the path to non-judgmental mistake awareness.

Turn quick judgments into neutral descriptive statements

If you are like the vast majority of serious music students, you want nothing more than to arrive at the promised land: to be effortlessly great at playing your instrument, and expressing the music. Perhaps you feel the weight of the accumulated history of the greatness lavished upon the piece or composer you are working on, or the responsibility to keep classical music “alive,” or the desire to impress your teacher or parent or friends. Or to make your mark upon music history.

It is hard to argue that any of these things are not worthwhile endeavors, but they just aren’t helpful if you’re trying to learn anything.

As a result of the desires and fears that accompany not yet “being there,” you may find yourself actually hearing an English commentary inside your head while you are playing. “That was too slow, oops forgot the accent, drop your shoulder, is my left hand too flat? Vibrate everything! That was not good pitch, #$%^@# missed the $*&%*$#%& shift again!! Oops, bow crunch, ‘massage the frog’ but not too much…”

Sounds familiar? All right, let’s deal with this.

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First of all, if you really want to improve, you need to borrow a page from Buddhism. The truth of the matter is that if you are hearing self-judgmental voices while you are playing, the root of this problem is in fact your desire to be great. To begin the arduous task of converting that self-criticism into useful reactions to the practicing, it will be necessary to release the future goal. Take these steps in your practice session:

1. Sit down facing a blank wall on the front of your chair, hands gently resting on your knees
2. focus on a point on the wall
3. breathe in and out fully 3 times (using things you have already learned from Breath awareness and control)
4. Notice the anxiety you probably feel because you are not yet doing anything
5. tell yourself “I am here.” Notice your reaction to saying this (absurd, right?)
6. listen to the sounds of the room, the buzzing of lights, air handling, traffic, anything that you had not noticed before that is there with you
7. when you feel ready, take out your instrument, play a single note continuously without purpose, simply seeking to hear the resonance of the instrument and of the room’s reaction to it. Open G string will do.
8. Notice the voices in your head criticizing the sound or posture and instead direct your attention to the soles of your feet. If you had already been paying attention to the soles of your feet, direct it to the armpits, or to the backs of the knees, or some other location you had never noticed before.
9. When a voice tells you that you are doing something wrong, intentionally re-phrase the words out loud. “I’m tense in the shoulder” becomes “I’m using my shoulder muscle.” “That’s out of tune” becomes “I played A, B 1/16 tone flat”

Intentional mistake repetition

One of the most powerful things you can do to release the fear of making a mistake is to recognize that the very idea of making mistakes is not a useful concept. There is only what you intend to do, and what actually happens. To illustrate this, a story is in order. I had a student who was working really, really hard on improving his sound quality. His attention to contact point was incredible and he quickly developed a rich sound. Then, one day, I assigned the Debussy Sonata. The student came in with the third movement, and at the point Debussy calls for sul ponticello (a technique where the bow is placed very close to the bridge to bring out edgy high overtones), the student simply could not bring himself to place the bow outside of the “good” contact point. He had so thoroughly trained himself to think of a rich sound as “good” and anything else as “bad,” he was unable to vary the technique when a composer actually called for it!

When you realize that a composer may call upon you to do anything, the entire concept of “mistake” blows up: they cease to exist.

The same is true of intonation: some day, you will play a piece where a composer asks you to hit that microtone you just hit by accident when you shifted. Might as well learn how to do it intentionally. When I am practicing a difficult shift, if I find myself consistently missing the shift, instead of repeating and incessantly trying to shift to the “right” note, I try to notice the exact pitch I actually shifted to. I actually say to myself “interesting, I just shifted to C quarter tone flat” or something like that. The natural instinct is to think to oneself “I just shifted to the wrong note, it was too flat.” See the difference there? By simply naming what I actually shifted to, I have removed judgment and instead have noticed more precisely what I have done.

Then, I carefully measure the angles one needs to measure for the target note (elbow, armpit to side, upper arm to chest), and repeat the shift and try to land on the “wrong” note I just shifted to by accident, turning accident into intention. Once I have done this, I move the hand and notice the difference in feeling/angle between C quarter tone flat and C natural. After doing this, I will attempt to shift to a C natural again. Repeat with each attempt until you begin to hit the note.

I have taught this technique to 4 students, all of whom played in a manner that any objective observer would call egregiously out of tune. Without exception, every single one of them was shifting to the note he or she wanted to shift to with close to 100% accuracy within 10 iterations in the first lesson. As soon as you remove the emotional baggage of being right or wrong, it is possible to truly excel.

Conclusion

Without the ability to separate your emotional judgment of what you are doing from the process of learning, you will get stuck in a loop much like the character in the xkcd comic at the start of the entry. I can’t stress how important this work will be for your playing and for your general happiness as a musician!

Your assignment for this week is to practice something ridiculously hard, such as a 3 octave shift, and see if you can train yourself to learn the shift using the technique of intentional mistake repetition. Report back in the comments below.

Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed this post. See you next week with the fifth post, total mental visualization!