I’m eight years old. I pull on the gold handle of the heavy, white door of the sanctuary. I see rows of empty pews, except for one near the back. Two people, my piano teacher and the director of the music school that shared space with the church, sit quietly and greet me.
I move toward the altar and sit at the shiny, black piano—the really good one, the Steinway we only played for recitals. The empty pews feel strange. I’m used to my adrenaline spiking in the presence of 100 people. My body is scared, but my brain’s jury is out—this isn’t a recital; it’s an exam to move up a level in the curriculum, and it’s my first one ever.
My teacher invites me to start whenever I’m ready. I’ll play a handful of scales, a Cornelius Gurlitt etude, and then a Bach minuet. Seven minutes of music, at most.
The scales are easy. The Gurlitt etude is little trouble. I’m three-quarters of the way through the Bach minuet when everything goes blank.
* * *
I was six when I had my first piano lesson. For the first several months, my teacher was a hip, younger man who made me feel comfortable about learning the fundamentals. After it was clear enough I had some potential, I was assigned to a new teacher—a woman about my parents’ age. She was kind and respectful, but more serious, and she was really, really good at playing piano. For the next five or six years, she would set the agenda: Technique. Precision. Dynamics. The right notes. The right rhythm. The right phrasing. The right fingering. Practicing eventually became a chore, and my weekly lessons felt burdened with the shame of being unprepared.
Some of the worst moments of my childhood were when my parents tried to get me to practice. They loved me then, as they do now, unconditionally and consistently. They also didn’t know, as most parents probably didn’t then (and many, perhaps, still don’t), how to induce their child to choose an activity (in this case, practicing) that requires facing one’s fears—possibly, their worst fears about failing or being good enough.
So, they did their best. They reminded me to practice, overruled my objections with reasoning, appealed to the virtues of hard work, eventually gave me the room to take initiative myself, and when I didn’t, they spoke frankly about how piano lessons were becoming a waste of money. They even gave me an out: I didn’t have to do this anymore if I didn’t want to, and they wouldn’t have held it over my head.
Paradoxically, that threw me into a feedback loop despite their reassurance—in my mind, I’d be a quitter. I’d be quitting something I could be good at, and that’s what hurt the most. Both my parents love music and raised me to do the same. Quitting piano would have been a betrayal.
Eventually, the lessons came to an end in ninth grade when my dad told me quietly, and without scolding, that he’d canceled my lessons because I simply wasn’t practicing. But over those years I would practice just enough to perform, mostly mistake-free, at the winter and spring recitals. And every time, I felt like a rickety Conestoga wagon traversing a Rocky Mountain pass with its wheels about to fall off. Or, as was the case in my exam, about to tumble right over the edge.
* * *
The exam requires me to play everything by heart. Panic building, I try to go back a few measures of the Bach minuet, but no dice. After my teacher gently suggests that I start the piece over, I get to the same spot and conk out again.
The fear peaks when she comes up the aisle with the sheet music. I’d always been so impatient to memorize the music, to get it into my hands, into my muscle memory, that my sightreading skills were weak. It was as if she was throwing me a life vest that I couldn’t inflate. Mercifully, she and the director end the exam and ask me to wait outside. What was likely a few minutes' wait feels like a solid half-hour with my self-worth on the line.
Finally, my teacher opens the door. “Despite the mishap,” she says, they decided to promote me to the next level. I remember feeling grateful, but also like it was a hollow victory. Or a baseball statistic with an asterisk. And in the days and weeks that follow, there really isn’t much debrief. There isn’t much after recitals, either. We just move on.
* * *
Today, that asterisk denotes not a personal failure of mine, but a sequence of missed opportunities to get to the heart of why I was taking piano lessons at all. While the importance of technique in music performance is undeniable, that was the only focus I remember. I don’t remember anyone asking me questions about the experience:
What do you feel when you play this?
What is this music about for you? Do you notice any images or pictures in your mind?
Do you like this song? This genre of music?
What do you feel, or think, when you play a wrong note? What do you think that’s about?
Questions like these (and there are, of course, many more) allow a teacher to help a student truly connect themselves to the music, which makes it easier to keep an important question in sight: Why do we play music at all? This is a question that a teacher can help students answer themselves. And if they own that answer, they can own their performance—and then develop other critical things like autonomy, self-esteem, and, perhaps most importantly, self-empathy.
Mistakes are not only okay; they’re crucial. Necessary. Not optional. A student must be encouraged to integrate their mistakes into every aspect of their playing, whether that’s rehearsal or performance. By integrate, I mean to make it a part of one’s playing—rather than the enemy. Embracing one’s mistakes means not to repeat them or excuse them, but to use them. Even make friends with them. They’re helpful, not hurtful.
I don’t blame my teacher or my parents for the missed opportunities to ask questions like the ones above. It was the Eighties—I don’t think those were questions they would have naturally reached for.
So as I pick up a new instrument (trumpet!) in my late forties, and rekindle my relationship with the piano from time to time, I’m fighting a narrative—but not one put there by my parents, nor by my teacher. It was one I’d synthesized based on my experiences: Mistakes are unacceptable and reflect failure—as a piano player, and maybe even as a person. And it’s neither a useful nor sustainable narrative.
I’m not unique in this way. For most of us, this is our automatic, default position; our first thought. Playing music enough to enjoy it means that I have to get to my second thought: I give myself permission to make mistakes, to sound bad, to make cringey noises. And I give myself that permission because it’s the only way I’ll get better—but more importantly, the only way I’ll have fun. And that’s why I play music at all… because it’s fun. It feels good.
Speaking of the Eighties, not too long ago I stumbled on an old video of a young Phil Collins. He was performing “Against All Odds” in front of a giant crowd at Wembley Stadium for Live Aid, just him and the piano. About a minute in, he hits an obvious wrong note, grimaces, smiles, and continues. In the moment that I saw it, over 30 years later, I was instantly redeemed. Even Phil Collins messes up! It’s okay! I wrapped my arms around my inner child and gave him a huge hug.