Embracing Mistakes

There are many different theories about the role mistakes play in live music performance. In my opinion music educators spend far too much time teaching students how to avoid mistakes and far too little time helping students know what to do when they make them.

When I first started playing piano, mistakes were an enemy that could not be vanquished. Through proper practice and effective technique I was able to reduce the number of mistakes I made, but eradicating them entirely seemed like an absolute impossibility. They would always resurface at the most inconvenient times -- usually when I was performing for a live audience. I used my practice sessions to develop muscle memory as well as I possibly could, and I tried to select pieces that were appropriate for my skill level. But still mistakes would show up exactly when I least wanted them to, and the harder I tried to eliminate them the worse I played. After a large number of public failures I decided that a new approach was in order and I began to embrace my mistakes.

Embracing rather than erasing mistakes might seem counterintuitive, but it significantly improved the way I practice and play. Music is a language, and when you know a language well enough there is usually, if not always, a way to redeem yourself when you make a mistake in a conversation. For example, I might be having a conversation with a friend in which I want to say, "Don't forget to call your mother." But if I start by saying some filler words like, "I think ... " then I can still successfully convey my thought by finishing the sentence with "... that you should definitely remember to call your mother." Music, like language, has syntactical logic and conveys emotion and meaning. Like language, it has a set of rules. But also like language we understand that some rules were made to be broken (if you've ever been privy to a text conversation between two teenagers, you are probably well-versed in the flexible nature of language). Music has a certain flexibility as well, although the degree to which it can be bent to your will depends upon the audience, the style of music being played and the song itself. But if, for example, I am on stage performing an arrangement and meant to play an A note, but instead I played a G, that is certainly a mistake, However, if I now move -- in a rhythmic way -- to the A note, it might have the unexpected effect of actually ENHANCING the original tune. This is because music ultimately is an aural experience. The notes written on a page may be the notes the composer intended, and they may sound absolutely amazing when played perfectly and expressively. But the notes on the page are not the only possible notes that could be used. Some variations--purposeful or otherwise--can be made without the audience even noticing, and some may even sound better than the composer or performer intended or expected. Even rhythm, as important as it is, allows a certain amount of flexibility. A slightly faster tempo at the beginning of a measure followed by a slightly slower tempo--purposeful or otherwise--can be used as an effective expressive device, and again it can enhance the original tune.

If you are in a piano competition where judges are looking for performers to robotically duplicate what is on a printed page, then the techniques I'm describing in this blog entry are definitely not for you. But in most settings they can be quite effective, and they can keep performers from making one of the biggest mistakes that performers so often make: focusing on mistakes so much when they happen that it draws the audience's attention to them (and tormenting themselves after every imperfect performance). In my case, the more I focused on my mistakes the more I made them. As soon as I started learning how to gracefully recover from a mistake my playing improved dramatically. Now instead of playing a passage over and over until I can play it perfectly, I work towards perfection while playing "around" the tune, learning how to avoid the worst mistakes and how to recover from the others. Then if I make one of those not-great-but-not-horrible mistakes while performing, I know exactly how to make it sound "right."

Jazz improvisers understand that there are no mistakes in improvisation--only unexpected turns. When I am teaching students how to improvise, this is the first thing that I tell them. Many of my students confuse improvisation with composing and first. While the two endeavors are definitely related, improvisation is composing in real time without pausing--whereas composition is, by definition, a stop-and-go process. In order to improvise well, a student must be able to lose her inhibitions and allow some less-than-ideal notes to pass by, more frequently at first and then less frequently as the practical application of music theory becomes more natural. If the student sees every unexpected turn as a mistake, improvisation will feel like continual failure and inhibitions will increase instead of decrease.

I once heard a cocktail pianist say that when he makes a mistake he sometimes repeats that mistake in subsequent phrases to make it sound like he did it on purpose the first time. This may not be the right approach for your preferred style of music (and some mistakes are so jarring that they really shouldn't be repeated in ANY style of music), but there are times when it can work quite well. This strategy can apply to both note and rhythm errors. For example, if you are playing a song that begins with four quarter notes and accidentally begin the song by holding the first note longer than the second, why not continue that pattern and apply a sort of "swing" effect to the whole song, or at least to that section?

Human beings tend to gravitate towards whatever they are focusing on. If you are crossing a narrow bridge and someone behind you says, "Don't look down," that's usually the first thing you will do. If we as musicians find ourselves focusing too intently on our mistakes: worrying about them before we perform, thinking "This is the place where I always mess up" as we begin playing a difficult section, and dwelling on our mistakes for days or weeks after we make them, then mistakes will continue to play a prominent role in our music. But if we prepare as well as we can before a performance, if we teach ourselves not just how to avoid mistakes but also how to respond when they happen, and if we let them slide by without acknowledging them any more than absolutely necessary--occasionally even welcoming them as friends and making them part of the music we are playing--then our audiences will likely never even notice them and we can begin to focus on our ever-expanding repertoire of success. Perhaps there is even a life lesson buried somewhere in this advice about music.