Why does it matter? On stage, in the rehearsal room, and especially when practicing alone, every musician is their own teacher, their own guide. The inner voice that guides you as you practice is a direct result of how we and our teachers and other guides frame and have framed our experiences. And if that voice only points out mistakes, you’re working with only half the information your brain needs to transform itself.
This article discusses:
- The “Teaching from Resources” Approach of a Piano Professor at the Mozarteum University in Austria
- Errors and their role in the brain
- Why befriending mistakes changes not only how we learn, but also how we teach, and
- How design fluency helps us make mistakes—without romanticizing them—to define the experience, without cementing them in our memory
Two weeks ago, I attended the meeting of my pedagogy working group within the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Musikphysiologie und Musikermedizin, the German Association for Music Physiology and Musician’s Medicine.
A colleague from the group, a piano professor at Mozarteum University, presented her inspiring approach in a brief talk: “Teaching Based on Resources: Elements of Positive Psychology in the Piano Classroom and Their Effects.”
A year ago, she began bringing all his students together weekly. It’s not a concert; there’s nothing special to prepare: each person plays something they’re working on—something that isn’t quite “finished” yet. After playing, the rest of the group offers feedback, starting with three positive aspects of what they’ve just heard. Suggestions for improvement and ideas for moving forward come second.
At first, the teacher explains, it wasn’t easy: getting students excited about participating was a challenge, and coming up with three genuine compliments for each student who presented a project was an uphill battle. Even so, she continued to maintain this space because she believed it was necessary to institutionalize opportunities where students learn to navigate the learning process constructively—and where the habit of valuing resources at every step of the way is cultivated.
After a year, the change is starting to become apparent. His students come to individual lessons saying, “This week, after practicing, I found myself automatically thinking about two things that went well.” Before, that kind of thought didn’t exist. They used to scrutinize everything with a magnifying glass to find mistakes, to correct over correction. Their attention was entirely focused on fixing things, on hunting down what was wrong.
What the teacher did also was to explicitly and deliberately create an institutional space to improve students’ ability to handle mistakes as part of a learning process, as part of the brain’s transformation process.
Ten years ago, during a discussion on the topic, a colleague argued with me: “Gabriela, we can’t wrap our students in cotton wool—a career as a musician is tough.” In German: “in Watte packen.” To wrap in cotton wool.
At that moment, I responded by drawing on Carl Rogers’ humanistic psychology and the inherent human need for self-actualization—to form healthy connections with oneself in order to face the toughest challenges presented by music and life’s various contexts.
Today, after delving into studies of the musician’s brain, I’d like to add one more thing: the reasons go back even further—to biology, to the way our bodies function, our vestibular system, our nervous system, and our brain.
An error is information for the brain.
Babies are the best example: falling down and trying to stand up again is a daily task during months. Their tools for learning are play, recreation, exploration, and imitation. Their motivation isn’t to avoid mistakes—it’s to reach interesting places, imitate others, interact, and move through the world. And they’re efficient: in just one year, they master various skills—walking, eating with a spoon, understanding a language, and beginning to speak it.
An environment where criticism of mistakes predominates does not help a baby learn to walk sooner; rather, it holds the baby back.
Excessive criticism in music education does not improve musical precision either.
Cortisol isn’t always the villain
“Learning is, basically, finding your way through confusion.”
Kenneth R. Leopold, Professor Emeritus of Chemistry, University of Minnesota
Learning a new skill is a chaotic, imperfect, and complex process.
Giving a concert, on the other hand, is a process that requires a certain level of clarity, drawing on information, possibilities, and skills that have already been internalized.
These are two different situations that require different skills.
To learn something new, cortisol levels need to rise enough to help us navigate the challenge. Without that activation, there’s no curiosity to explore. That rise in cortisol is the driving force behind confusion—and even the slight stress, difficulty or exasperation we may experience when trying to learn something new.
But when criticism prevails, or when the skill we’re trying to learn is much more difficult than we can handle, cortisol levels rise higher than the brain needs—and our ability to analyze, remember, and learn is compromised.
In other words: indiscriminate criticism stifles critical thinking… Critics get loud and the critical thinker in ourselves – the one who asks good questions – is left out of the game.
In that state, old, automatic habits take over and the novelty wears off. That’s when the frustration of “not making progress” sets in.
This is also usually accompanied by constant self-monitoring, which erodes something fundamental: the trust that sustains the fluidity the brain needs to experience life in all its facets—both conscious and unconscious.
In most cases, Western musical training develops and hones a radar for detecting the next mistake to be corrected. Even in class—which isn’t the place to show off what we know, but rather to raise our awareness, explore, reaffirm, and expand possibilities.
During solo practice sessions, at concerts, or before and after concerts, we are guided in the same way that our surroundings accompanied and taught us: with similar words, similar goals, and a similar tone—whether distant or engaged, curious or weary, exasperated or calm, critical or asking good questions—what we experienced in the classroom becomes our inner voice.
The brain needs mistakes
The brain does not process the world from scratch at every moment: it makes predictions based on paths it has already taken and on past experiences. And it is with those predictions that it recreates music in real time, note by note, phrase by phrase.
The brain compares options and selects the one that makes the most sense based on the available data. If the prediction lacks sufficient information, the “technique”—which is more organic than technical—may fail. This failure adds an edge to that experience: it shows the brain where the limits lie.
That is the time to seek out the missing information—not to punish the mistake, but to enrich the experience with new insights.
For that prediction to work on stage, a variety of possibilities is needed. The brain needs to have explored several possible versions of that passage—several paths leading to the same goal. Several different versions are needed so that a technical aspect has enough information to flow seamlessly. This prepares us to handle under pressure to make corrections “on the go” and handle the unpredictable aspects during a performace.
If there is only one possibility—the “correct” version, repeated without variation—and that one possibility fails in that moment, there is nowhere else to turn. In a concert, this feels like walking along a ledge, staring into a sheer drop below.
Mapping Learning
Scientists Gerald Edelman and Joseph Gally described two principles by which biological systems, such as the brain, transform themselves:
- redundancy: where neural pathways are shared across different functions
- degeneration: where different paths lead to the same result
A musically skilled brain doesn’t build just one path to a goal—it builds several. And it also learns to use the same path to reach different goals. That diversity is the wisdom that later allows us to solve problems we’ve never practiced exactly like that.
Mistakes—which don’t yet help us move forward—should be seen as part of this process. The brain gradually builds a map—a map with more and more routes to the same destination, more connected cities, and more discovered shortcuts. The most-traveled paths become wide and smooth; those we stop using gradually narrow until they disappear. This is how old habits are replaced by new ones.
Repeating what goes well, refining it until there’s no visible margin for error—that’s not how the brain prefers to learn. What it prefers is to explore, to map out the experience to its very limits—including what doesn’t work, what falls apart, and what isn’t there yet—in order to build multiple paths toward the same goal, and to use those paths in contexts that aren’t entirely predictable.
Design Fluency for Singers
By always practicing “the right way”—when a mistake is repeated—we tend to cement that mistake in our long-term memory. The brain is malleable: it learns through repetition, both the good and the bad.
Design fluency —a term that comes from psychology and sports—is the ability to solve problems creatively. Instead of always repeating identical movement patterns—such as when creating navigation maps for high notes, for example—the brain prefers to seek out different ways to internalize the new task.
Explore, investigate, and make new mistakes.
The voice and music in general, as emerging phenomena, require a high degree of adaptability.
When our approach to solving a technical challenge is unique, or is based on a single aspect of execution rather than on the variety of factors that influence it, we lose our big-picture perspective, our focus narrows, our nervous system becomes rigid, and so do our movements.
Variety in practice fosters coordination, resilience, adaptability, the ability to make adjustments along the way, the ability to inhibit unwanted movements, and cognitive flexibility.
Design Fluency for High Notes
Continuing with the example of high notes, you can choose five variations, taking the time to observe arising sensations, noticing how they feel as you try each one.
Here are a few examples, from a sea of possibilities:
Explore the high notes: in ascending scales, in small or large intervals, in staccato, in piano, in forte, from forte to piano, and vice versa.
Play with your body while you sing: leaning against a wall, lifting one knee; squatting; with your arms outstretched at shoulder height; tracing a small line with the tip of your nose; lying face down with your forearms and hands on the floor, supporting your torso.
Play with your balance while singing: start with your feet shoulder-width apart and shift your weight rhythmically from one foot to the other. Then try lifting one foot completely off the floor as the weight moves to the other side — left, right, left, right — finding a steady, unhurried pace. Let the movement become almost like a slow walk in place.
Play with your gaze as you sing: focus it on a single point and gradually widen it toward the periphery.
Movement and cognition influence each other.
The variety of practices brings with it:
- information for troubleshooting,
- adaptability to situations that are difficult to predict,
- refining coordination without micromanaging,
- reduction in anxiety,
- mental flexibility and
- greater long-term resilience.
The goal is not a perfect sound, but one that is reasonably accurate—stable yet flexibly adaptable.
Mistakes are relevant information; they are a working tool; they are the raw material for defining and expanding our individual experience of the skills we seek to acquire.
The Mozarteum professor’s project serves as a reminder that the process—including mistakes and the results we discard—needs to be acknowledged and deserves a space as significant and valuable as the achievement itself.