The 3 Worst Habits of Musicians--And What to Do Instead
When you discover that you've been a miserable musician, you might be doing one of these three things.
Mental health among musicians is in the toilet. And it shouldn’t be.
Music is one of the best things about life, and anyone who is fortunate enough to have had the time to learn to play an instrument well should be ecstatic about their abilities.
And yet, musicians are some of the most miserable people I’ve ever met in my life.
Why is this?
The Pareto principle1 states that 80% of consequences are from 20% of the causes. So if we can determine what these 20% of causes for misery are, eliminating them would get rid of 80% of the problem.
Sounds like a pretty good deal to me.
The purpose of this substack in general is to help bring light to all the reasons why musicians are miserable, but for now, we’re going to focus on these 20% of causes. In other words, the WORST of the WORST of the WORST habits that make musician are so miserable.
Compliments of yours truly.
(sips tea)
Let’s get started.
#1 Repetition and Conditioning as Practice
This is an NPC.
Usually, this meme is meant to make fun of one side of the political spectrum or the other, but I’m going to argue that this meme is just as applicable to musicians who believe that repetition and conditioning are effective ways to practice your instrument.
Here we go.
I’ve already debunked repetition here. Exhaustively.
So the relevant question is…
Can you condition yourself into playing well?
Let me answer that question with a question:
Are you a dog?
Classical conditioning is a term that psychologists made up to explain the process of learning through association.
As the alleged story goes, it was discovered by Ivan Pavlov (who was, eh-hem, not the nicest person you’ve ever met, let’s just say) after a series of alleged “experiments” on some doggies.2
Allegedly, he noticed that these dogs started salivating when he put on his white coat even when food wasn’t around—the story usually (allegedly) says something about how they started salivating at the tinkle of a bell, but that’s, I guess, inaccurate? Idk, the story doesn’t really matter that much—. He concluded from this that since the dogs had allegedly learned to associate his white coat (or a bell?) with the presence of food, animals can learn to associate what were once distinct events with each other.
This is the…G rated version of the story. If you’re content to just stay with the G rated version, don’t click that footnote up there.
Similarly (allegedly), humans also learn things by “conditioning.” For instance, if you give someone a cookie every time they clean their room, they will learn to clean their room more often. Or something.
Allegedly.
So what, Emma? Sounds like musicians are trying to use psychology to help themselves practice. What’s wrong with that? And what’s your beef with psychology?
I will address the first two of those three questions. The third question will be answered later. Maybe. If I feel like it.
The problem with musicians relying on conditioning to practice is two-fold.
One:
Musicians aren’t really using this idea correctly.
What exactly are you associating with what? Are you associating the playing of your instrument with being a little psycho ball of stress in the practice room? ‘Cause that’s probably exactly what’s happening.
If you are doing this, isn’t that counterproductive? Shouldn’t you be trying to condition yourself into not being a little psycho ball of stress?
This is a misapplication of this whole idea of classical conditioning (which I will admit, albeit begrudgingly, has some merit…). To have conditioning, you have to associate something with another activity, and it doesn’t really seem like there’s much of that going on.
Two:
Since musicians aren’t using this idea correctly, they’re using it basically as a form of learning by repetition but with more steps.
“If I play this enough in the practice room, I’ll condition myself to play this piece without having to think about it!”
Do you really think that the best musicians have their brains turned off during their performances? ‘Cause that’s what your so-called conditioning is aiming to accomplish.
Also, brains don’t turn off…so if you’re not thinking about the music you’re playing while you’re performing, you’re probably thinking about
What your audience is thinking (which is probably making you act like a little psycho ball of stress. Good thing you practiced that so much earlier.).
How you’d rather be doing something else (which your audience can definitely see in your body language and they’re going to hate you for it).
If you’re being honest with yourself, you probably are going to realize that any time you perform you have to think at least partially about the music you’re playing. You can’t play it when you’re asleep, can you?
Musicians like to claim conditioning as a “scientific” way to practice, but their efforts to employ this science fails because they’re not doing it correctly.
Maybe if they actually tried to apply real classical conditioning it might work.
Maybe.
Allegedly.
Either way, though, relying on “conditioning” variants is the equivalent of becoming a musical NPC and expecting that to expedite your success. Spoiler alert: it won’t.
Instead,
Experiment.
To experiment, you need a few things.
A falsifiable hypothesis.
An independent variable.
A dependent variable.
Musicians tend to ignore all three of these things and just figuratively (or literally) bang their heads against the wall until something works, but believe it or not, this is actually counterproductive.
Here are some example experiments for elucidation and entertainment:
Bad:
This whole thing just needs to be better.
There is no falsifiable hypothesis, independent variable, or dependent variable.
My teacher said to work on this for some reason.
There is no falsifiable hypothesis or dependent variable.
Better:
My fingers are too slow right here.
The independent variable is too vague. Which finger(s)?
What am I trying to express in my playing at this part?
The hypothesis isn’t falsifiable.
Best:
My third finger is too slow right here because I’m not moving it fast enough in an earlier passage.
Specific, falsifiable, measurable.
What emotional impact am I aiming for in my performance? How does my expression in this passage achieve that?
Specific, falsifiable, measurable.
Good experiments basically come down to “I need to play this (the independent variable) in this way (dependent variable) in order to accomplish this (falsifiable hypothesis).
But enough about that. Just stop trying to learn by repetition, okay? It doesn’t work.
On to the next one…
#2 Hero worshiping
Beethoven once said of his famous Moonlight Sonata “Everybody is always talking about the C-sharp minor sonata. Surely I’ve written better things.”
Leo Tolstoy expressed disdain for, arguably, his most famous novel War and Peace by saying “People love me for the trifles—War and Peace and so on—that they think are so important.”
Historians™ dismiss these artists’ critiques of their own work by saying that they probably had low self-esteem or some other mental pathology that led them to dismiss their own work.
But!
Have you ever considered that maybe these artists might be…right?
“BUT EMMA, I LOVE THE MOONLIGHT SONATA!”
“WAR AND PEACE IS MY FAVORITE BOOK!”
Blah blah blah.
By all means bite my head off about this. I might even deserve it.
But also…Beethoven and Tolstoy are on my side.
So…
Stick that in your pipe.
I bring up these examples to illustrate the fact that not everything someone renowned does is great or good or even important. Not every musical piece is equally as good as another even if it was written by Beethoven himself.
So why are we musicians constantly pedestalizing these people as if they’re infallible?
Well, it’s because of “talent” again. Beethoven has been determined to be Talented™ by the Historians™, and Talented™ individuals are blessed with endowments of knowledge that cannot be known or understood save it be by Musical Priestly Class™ who will then dispense this esoteric knowledge to you if you jump through enough hoops and kiss enough butts.
Look, I’m not saying that War and Peace and Moonlight Sonata aren’t good. I’ve enjoyed them both. But that doesn’t mean they’re worthy of idolization.
Historians are the ones who get to decide which pieces and composers go down in history as the “best” or “most influential,” but you’ve gotta remember that historians are influenced a lot in their choices by politicking and chasing that sweet, sweet grant money from daddy government.
So the next time you hear your local classical music station playing an obscure piece by a well-known composer, don’t unthinkingly accept it as a masterpiece.
Instead,
Become an effective critic.
No, I don’t mean become cynical, curmudgeonly, highfalutin, supercilious or any other negative thing critics are usually known for.
I mean:
Become a student of what makes musical pieces good.
Become an astute observer of all musical pieces you listen to.
Identify specific things you like and things you don’t about every piece you listen to.
Prioritize nuance in your assessments.
Consider that you might be wrong. Also consider that everyone else could be wrong.
Keep your opinions to yourself if you can’t voice them with tact.
Pick your favorite pieces by listening intelligently.
After all, what makes your favorite musicians so good? Is that something that’s unique to them? That you couldn’t possibly attain?
Unless your favorite musician is a pianist with 6 fingers and you only have 5, the answer to this is probably not.
This same principle holds true for your teachers too. You must determine whether or not their advice is useful. Not anyone else. You can’t just default to believing their advice is useful merely because they have Ph.D, get invited to play gigs around town, have a private teaching studio, or any other reason.
WARNING:
Music teachers commonly try to manipulate their students by obfuscating basic concepts as if that were the hallmark of erudition.
This leads many students to think “Oh, my teacher is saying something really complicated that I can’t understand. This must be because he/she is so smart.”
This is not the case.
If someone actually knows better than you do about a certain topic, they should easily be able to explain to you what you’re doing wrong and how to fix it. They shouldn’t need to cover it up with dazzling pedagogical pyrotechnics.
END OF WARNING
Hero worship leads many to over rely on other people for their confidence, musicianship, and self-esteem. This is codependent behavior. If you need someone else to behave in a certain way for your own sanity, then you’re more likely to manipulate that person, and manipulating someone is never a successful game.
Side-Tangent. Sorry, Just Had to Get This Out of My System.
Speaking of manipulative people, you might be wondering why manipulative people are so miserable all the time.
I will tell you why.
It’s because manipulative people believe that they need other people to behave in certain ways in order for their lives to be okay.
The truth is that you can’t control other people’s behavior.
It’s impossible. It can’t be done.
If it were able to be done, governments and other control freaks would have figured out a way to do this a long time ago. Instead, they resort to psyops and propaganda as a “soft” form of mind control.
Though when individuals engage in this behavior, they tend to call it “psychology,” or “dark psychology.”
Personally, I think “witchcraft” is the best term for this behavior.
“But Emma!1!!!11 Psychology™!!!!1”
Sigh, alright. Let me illustrate why this thinking is irrational.
If I perform action A to get someone else to perform action B, I am pretending that people do not have free will. And yet, I have the ability to initiate this whole sequence of events by performing action A. So in other words, I have free will, but somehow my free will supersedes the free will of others.
This is a blatant contradiction.
And also is really just a logically fallacious and thinly veiled attempt to justify feeling superior to other people.
And it smells like narcissism.
So there.
Sure, sometimes manipulation is successful. It can even be successful a lot of the time! But ultimately, controlling people is not possible. And when all these individuals’ efforts yield inconsistent results, they get frustrated and are miserable.
What actually needs to happen for these people to regain control of their lives, is to realize that controlling people is impossible, and they should really be spending their effort on controlling their own actions, and upholding their own boundaries.
Whew. Alright.
Just don’t worship anyone as a hero, okay? Nobody’s any better than you are.
On to the next one…
#3 Comparison Driven Behavior
Many musicians and people and lizard people like to believe that “music” as a term is specific enough to suit all situations. They throw around this term “music” as if it means something specific, and then claim that people who are good at “music” are “geniuses.”
News flash: being good at Music™ doesn’t make you a Genius™. To say otherwise is musical quackery.
The reality of the situation is that every musician specializes at certain subtypes of music. The skill that they’ve developed over years of deliberate, intentional practice is only applicable to one (or a handful) of specific musical niches.
Not all pianists play classical and jazz.
Not all composers compose rock music and folk music.
Not all Lea Salonga’s can drop everything and become Ariana Grande’s.
The true artists among musicians will, of course, expend a great deal of effort to fill gaps in their expertise. But anyone who has hung around with musicians long enough knows that most musicians have a certain genre where they’re most comfortable creating and their best work comes when they make the music they’re good at in their own unique style.
In other words, their skill, when broken down, isn’t mystical “Genius™” at all, but is just that. A skill.
So!
What does this have to do with comparing yourself to other people?
Well, if every musician has interests that are completely different from your own…
How could comparing yourself to other people possibly be helpful?
The answer to that is that it couldn’t be, and doing it anyway is going to turn you into a Little Psycho Ball of Stress™.
Instead,
Develop your personal music philosophy.
Why do you believe in music?
Why do you play the instrument that you do?
Which musicians really speak to you?
What about them inspires you?
Ultimately, you’ll discover that this philosophy is pretty unique (and if it isn’t, you need to ask yourself more questions). It probably encompasses things that aren’t strictly musical in nature too.
Every part of who you are as a musician came from a unique set of inspirations that you’ve drawn from. And even if your inspirations aren’t unique, you’re most likely applying them in ways that haven’t been tried before.
Because the most unique thing about people is what they believe.
Alright, I feel like I’ve made fun of psychology enough in this article that someone is going to be mad at me if I don’t give them enough credit, so here is a quote from the Preeminent Psychologist™ (I’m kidding, I’m kidding…) Carl Jung.
Do not compare, do not measure. No other way is like yours. All other ways deceive and tempt you. You must fulfill the way that is in you.
So stop comparing yourself to other people, okay? Nobody has any better idea of where you should be than ayou.
Final Thoughts
I’ll finish up with a poem that seems apropos to all that I’ve said here.
The Laughing Heart, Charles Bukowski
your life is your life
don't let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can't beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.
‘Til next time, my friends.
P.S. To answer that third question from earlier, my beef with psychology is that I just really like to make fun of it. That’s all.
P.P.S. I really do actually like Carl Jung, for the record.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/24/drool