As I mentioned yesterday, I seem to be learning music much faster than I remember being able to before, even when I was in Conservatory. In fact, when I was a Senior in college I remember my teacher assigning me a book of Bartok pieces which were easier and shorter than my usual repertoire to help me to speed up the rate at which I was learning music. He asked me to learn, polish, memorize and perform one piece from the book for him each week.

It was an interesting idea, but I’m not sure the exercise had much effect, and now I know why. What was slowing me down wasn’t anything to do with my piano technique, or my approach to learning new music, or any lack of feeling urgency or pressure from my teacher. In fact, as I see it now, the pressure was part of the problem.

What was getting in my way was my own self-judging and self-talk around music. I spent so much time worrying about whether I was learning fast enough or not that I couldn’t concentrate well on just learning the darn music. I was so hung up on looking for approval from “serious” teachers and performers that not only did I lose touch with my love of music, but the worrying itself was preventing me from doing the very thing that I was worried about: learning my music well enough and quickly enough to satisfy my teachers or myself for that matter. The fretting, judging, and self-pitying voice in my head was distracting me from the very work that I wanted to be doing.

Even though I haven’t regularly practiced the piano for over ten years, and I haven’t practiced seriously for many more years than that, I’m now learning music faster and more securely than I ever did. I make far fewer mistakes either due to sloppy technique or memory slips than ever before and I attribute it all to increased concentration due to decreased self-judging.

I’ve written before about how I was able to break my habit of putting myself down and what a wonderful change that’s made in my life. As I have practiced not judging myself, an unexpected benefit was that I was finally able to take the steps I needed in order to heal my relationship with music. Likewise, an unexpected benefit of teaching myself jazz is that I’ve been able to heal my relationship with the piano.

When I began teaching myself jazz, I fully understood that I was very much a beginner. This was all new to me and I would need to be patient, take my time, and not expect anything too soon. Sure enough, some of the concepts have been slow going, but I’m having fun and I already have one tune memorized and ready to perform anytime. Because I had no expectations for how well I was going to do learning jazz, I didn’t judge myself along the way, either. I didn’t put any value judgement on whether things were going well or not. I knew that the ebb and flow of my progress was natural and I just went with it.

When I moved on to learning the Schubert “Impromptu” which I mentioned yesterday, I realized that the attitude I had taken while studying jazz had run over into my learning of the Schubert as well. When I struggled, I saw it as only a struggle, nothing more. The fact that I was struggling didn’t mean I was stupid or untalented or that I would never learn the piece or anything else other than that I was struggling. When a passage went well, it didn’t mean I was brilliant or talented or that I really should consider becoming a concert pianist or anything else other than that the passage went well. Again, I knew that the ebb and flow of my progress was natural and I just rode with it.

As a result, I found my mind is now much clearer when I practice piano than I remember it being when I practiced in the past. I find it much easier to endure what used to be mind-numbingly repetitive practice of particularly recalcitrant measures and I am able to be much more honest and strict with myself when something in my technique doesn’t feel quite right.

It’s difficult to describe how exciting it is for me to return to the piano and discover just how much more capable a pianist I am than I thought I was. I try not to think about how my years and years of toil at the keyboard could have been so much more fun and fruitful had I learned to quell my judging voice back then, but as I’ve said more than once before, I don’t believe in “do-overs.” I’m just happy to have now found joy in making music in a way that I was never able to before.

I truly feel that I’ve been given a second chance at being a musician and to experience what it means to allow myself to be in service to Music, rather than to try to use Music to serve my ego. I am grateful for this second chance and am excited to discover where Music takes me next!