Practicing our instruments

“You have to practice or it’s a waste of my time and your money”.

“If you want to improve, you have to put in the work”.

“I only take on students who commit to playing every day”.

“I can tell you haven’t been practicing, it shows in your playing”.

Nope. Nope. Nope.

Oh! How heartbreaking to think that in the hearts of most instrument teachers of the past, and some (many?) still today, improving is the ultimate goal of instrument lessons.

This is the kind of narrative that leads music students to give up playing their flute, after 5 years of lessons, because they’re no longer “getting better”. So what’s the point?

It prevents parents from finding piano lessons for their child because they know, hands down, they won’t put in the practice. So what’s the point?

Representative of a system that pedestals children who do music exams because their value as a musician can be documented, over the children who play by ear, or by imagination. Dare I say it, the ones who “play instruments but aren’t real musicians”.

Can. We. Settle. Down. Please.

Music is an experience. That’s it! A healthy, brainy, nervous systemy, emotional experience. It does not require commodification to be valuable. Every single moment we experience music, we are having a significant moment.

Every time we experience music by hearing it, thinking about it or even making it, more of our brain becomes simultaneously active, than when we experience any other thing.

The moment of music experiencing IS the outcome. The getting better is a by product. And it’s okay to desire to master your skill - it’s a beautiful, loving thing to desire to master your skill.

But if we. could magically put instrument playing on a set of justice scales, with the ‘aiming to improve student’ on one side and the ‘playing for the fun of it human’ on the other side, one would sink and one would fly.

And we all know which is which.

We inherently know. Such is the depth of the deep conditioning that tells us instrument lessons have a purpose. And for what? For external validation.

Honestly. It’s a really, truly sad thing that we have done to music. Tried to trap her in a box of This Is How We Do It.

She is a mist, an air, a spiritual being. The box can’t trap her. Music is everywhere, all around us, but we keep looking for her in the box. And when we hear her in there, we celebrate her! Completely oblivious to the enormity of the symphony that plays all around us, all the time. We celebrate the boxed bit.

We pedestal it for following the rules and improving in technique.

Yet the musical mist smiles because she isn’t trapped at all. She’s just waiting for us all to calm the fuck down. And just BE musical. Without the incessant need to prove our value.

She is a goddess. She is a teacher. She is an elder.

May music melt the strict hearts of the strict teachers and let us just play the chords without practicing the scales.