Frustration! Some perspective for the beginning musician from down the road

Illustration by Jacob Chalkley

A Strings Community member recently wrote:

Its been a good six months now since I started the violin. It feels, at this point, like buying a new car: you know how everything works, but you don't know how to drive, and when you do its scary. On some roads you feel like you’re comfortable but end up going too fast or too slow, and you can never drive perfectly no matter how long you spend practicing on that one piece. It this normal? I really do love the violin, but it feels so distant especially when I hear my teacher and others play it.
—Ricky

Oh, it really is like that, isn't it? Yes, this is completely normal. Realizing that you’re not “terminally unique” might be the first step toward putting things into perspective for the frustrated beginner.

The next step might be to adjust your timeline. In our fast-paced world, six months is an eternity: your new iPod is already obsolete. But in music time, six months is no time at all. To continue the automobile analogy, I once worked with my dad to put a new engine in my old Volvo. It took us 2 1/2 days including buying the engine and getting it home. To Dad—not a musician—this seemed like an eternity to spend on one project. To me, it seemed like miraculously little time to trade for a lasting solution to the problem of reliable transportation. I could easily work that amount of time on a challenging new piece and just be getting to the point of being able to make it through start to finish. Never mind polished and reliable enough for performance.

For a little more perspective, remember that when you're learning to play—I'm assuming you're new to music—you're learning many things at once. Your ears are learning to hear and understand music in a different way. The difference between just listening to music and being able to reproduce it is like the difference between seeing something and trying to draw it.

Your ears are establishing a whole new relationship with your fingers, elbows, and bow hand. Your hands are learning to respond to the information your ear is sending to make very precise changes in distance, pressure, duration. (Yes, the initial feedback is painful!!)

You are also learning a new language—music is language and it’s not “universal,” at least from the standpoint of the musician trying to reproduce it. There are many families of languages, and most languages have local dialects, too!

Then, if you are learning from written music, you're trying to do all of this while you learn to read in a new alphabet. At first it’s like a math problem every time: how many lines and spaces correspond to how many fingers? Or, if you’re learning by ear, you have to hear whether the next note goes up or down, how far, and, compared to the previous one, how long to play it!

So, have patience with yourself while you learn all these tasks at once. Everyone learns at a different rate. Your teacher is not just trying to be nice. Age can slow the learning process a bit. I noticed that learning to play instruments I picked up after 30 took longer than I was used to (vexing!). But maturity might bring a more organized mind to the game. There’s no accounting for aptitude—everyone has more or less aptitude for everything we try to learn. But attitude is under our control.

As a teacher, I find that when a student gets discouraged, I can always point out something that they struggled with a month or a week ago that’s so easy now they don’t even notice they’re doing it. That "Aha!" moment usually puts things in perspective. See? Music is a journey and half the time we don’t even recognize when we’ve reached our destination! It's easy to look too far down the road and get discouraged rather than inspired.

There are no shortcuts. I remember my teacher stopping by my practice room one day, frantic that I learn a great deal in a short time. His frenzy made me unable to even understand what he saying to me. I looked at him and said, “Mr. Binkley, there's no ‘there’ to get to. I enjoy the journey.” He looked stunned, then broke into a big grin. He had a different perspective: his days were numbered and he wanted to pass everything on to his students. But even he remembered that there's no shortcut on this trip.