Progress Over Perfection

 

I recently saw someone wearing a t-shirt with this phrase, and thought it perfectly expressed my philosophy about learning to play the piano.

In my almost four decades of teaching piano, I have had many students, ranging from total beginner to intermediate to advanced. I would say that in almost 100% of students, the goal of playing "all the right notes" is their highest priority, at least when they start lessons with me. But over time, hopefully, I enable them to see that having this as your top priority (sometimes even their only priority), will be detrimental to both short and long term progress.

Some students who have come to me having had some lessons previously or having tried to teach themselves, focus so exclusively on "the notes" that the rhythm is totally ignored. Somehow they think they will "add the rhythm later." This is preposterous; the rhythm and the notes are inextricably enmeshed to make the particular music what it is. You cannot just take out the rhythm and try to add it back later. In focusing only on the notes, they ignore phrasing and dynamics and all the other nuances which make music beautiful. Again, they think they can add these later, but by the time they have "learned the notes," their habit of playing without these nuances is deeply entrenched and is almost impossible to change.

Students who come to me from other teachers and/or self-taught also tell me that they spent many months learning one piece, with great difficulty and a fair amount of drudgery. Then, I assume, they enjoyed playing it for a while, but if they stopped playing it for a short period, they could no longer play it. Then they would start the next piece and go through that process again. In the end, they really had almost no music they could just sit down and play, despite all the hours and months of work. This is because they learned notes but not skills. The learning was at a superficial level, so with lack of reinforcement (playing every day), it just disappeared. In focusing solely on the notes, they didn't work on developing their physical skills (technique) except for the minimum required by that piece. Nor did they develop their ear. So with the next new piece, which may require some different aspects of technique, they are starting from square one. If it takes you many months to learn a piece, you will only have exposure to very few pieces in the course of, say, a year, and you will not be able to acquire a broad range of technical skills. I might also add that most people who approach it in this way are trying to play pieces far too advanced for their skill level, so they don't have even the foundation of technique to be able to play that piece.

I always tell my students I am teaching skills, not pieces. The pieces are vehicles for learning skills. That doesn't mean that they are to play their pieces as exercises -- in fact the exact opposite. Playing musically, that is, with phrasing, dynamics, nuances of timing and so on -- is part of the skill set they need to acquire. They need to play pieces at the appropriate level of difficulty (which any good teacher must be able to assess), so that they aren't struggling too much, but yet are somewhat challenged. 

Perhaps the most important aspect of this approach is that you must give up on the idea of 100% correct notes 100% of the time. If this is your only metric of progress, you will do just about anything that you think will help you hit the right notes. These include, stopping and "fixing," looking at your hands, writing the note names in the music, listening to the piece on YouTube and trying to imitate, and a host of other things. These will actually take you backwards in your progress. They hamper your sight-reading, your kinesthetic awareness, your ear development, and your confidence. If you do these "cheater" approaches, thinking that one day you will magically play it all correctly, you will be sadly disappointed, to the point where you probably will consider giving up the piano.

In the course of learning to play the piano, or any other instrument, you will play many wrong notes. Get over it! It is part of the learning process. I often think of Olympic ice skaters who do those incredible jumps and leaps without falling. Do you think they never fell when they were learning to do these? Of course not; they fell all the time. If they hadn't been willing to fall, they never could have learned those techniques. It is the same with piano. Not only do you need to accept wrong notes, you need to embrace them. If you have a good teacher and also try to employ a great deal of self-awareness, you will start to see WHY you have the wrong notes. It is almost never random. Only if you know the reason for them can you take steps and practice in such a way to gradually reduce and/or eliminate them. But again, eliminating wrong notes is not the goal in itself. The goal is to have solid technique. If you are making progress in the areas of technique, ear-training, and musical expression, you will probably be quite happy and enjoy the process. 

I often think of this story: the student of a spiritual practice goes to see the Master and says: "Master, how do I keep from making so many mistakes?" The master replies: "Ahh...Experience." The student then asks: "But how do I get experience??" The master replies: "By making mistakes."

I hope you will keep this in mind in your piano practice. Experience, rather than avoiding mistakes, is the goal. Progress over perfection.