Confidence

I have long held this bit of wisdom from Stevens Hewitt, "Competence is enough. Competence is all there is," close to my heart, but I'm starting to believe that competence needs to be combined with confidence in order to make the statement really ring true.

As I make my daily way towards competence on the piano (as well as competence on the violin and the viola), I find myself rewarded by the fact that I can now, in many instances where I previously had trouble, get from one note to the next or one passage to the next with a real sense of intention. It was something that I longed to be able to achieve during decades and decades of dedicated practice, but until relatively recently thought was impossible.

I always thought my problem was due to some kind of hard-wired musical handicap, like not having absolute pitch (in my household absolute pitch or near-absolute pitch was the norm). It was particularly problematic when I played the flute. I would record myself and hate the fact that what I heard lacked the sense of direction I wanted. Playing with a metronome helped, but it only gave the illusion of phrase direction because of the regularity of the beat. Playing with the metronome on off-beats helped, but the "swing" that resulted seemed to vanish when I turned the metronome off.

It was not as much of a problem when playing violin or viola because configurations of up-bows, down-bows, and slurs could temper the problem. But as I became more competent as a player, my musical standards went up, and I really wanted to correct this inability to make phrases go the way I wanted them to go.

Then, after doing a lot of therapeutic work on myself and learning how to understand things about my childhood that were too painful to fully acknowledge while I was going through adulthood and early middle age, I began to develop a sense of confidence about who I was as a person. I spent my youth dwelling on the things that I wasn't or didn't have, and have had the great fortune to consider my younger years from a distance.  And eventually (and remarkably) the barriers that made it so difficult for me to make phrases that could go the way I wanted them to go were no longer there.

Technically it probably has something to do with having the clarity to pay attention to the direction, speed, and feel of my bow during the note I am moving from to the note I am going towards. These developments started to make physical sense to me around the time I wrote this post about musical doorways on 2023.

And now I am able to control the motion between pitches while playing the recorder, which means I have officially moved beyond whatever it was that was holding me back. 

I attribute this giant step in music making to overcoming a profound lack of confidence that began in early childhood. I must have masked it well because nobody seemed to notice it, and nobody (no teachers or parents) ever talked with me about it. Most of them just contributed to the problem by, I guess, ignoring it.

I think all human beings love watching confident people at work. I love watching artists, gymnasts, and craftspeople work. I feel a sense of physical comfort when I listen to and watch a confident musician. And if that musician is playing or singing virtuoso music, I feel a mixture of satisfaction and excitement. If I hear a person speak with confidence, I feel confident myself, unless that confident person is saying something that angers me. If, for whatever reason, I hear someone I admire lose confidence because they trip over their words, I feel their lack of confidence personally.

I know I am not alone. People experience lack of confidence in different ways. Some people, for whatever reasons, seek reassurance from others in order to believe that their work is adequate. Some people (like me) prefer to judge the work we do ourselves, being well aware of our shortcomings, and knowing that we do the best we can do, always considering the habitually perceived handicaps we carry around with us and try to eviscerate with everything we create.

I believe we can instill confidence in our students. We can do it by really listening to them and commenting in a way that reinforces the things that we observed them doing correctly. It is also important to acknowledge the things that students struggle with and show them ways to address the difficulties. Most of all we need to make it clear that the inability to do one thing or another is not an inborn deficiency. I also think that giving students permission to fail relieves the blow to their confidence if they (gasp!) make a mistake. 

This doesn't mean that we should give them a free pass if they habitually forget to count or habitually forget to look at the key signature or listen for intonation.

By helping students to gain confidence in lessons, and by encouraging students to instill confidence in themselves between lessons (always a struggle), I believe that we offer them far more than the ability to play an instrument or the enjoyment of being able to express themselves musically and communicate musically with others. 

We are giving them tools to organize the world in terms of things that they can do and will be able to do if they apply themselves. And if we are lucky they might even spend a part of their formative years being kind to themselves and, in turn, being kind to others.

One thing that gives me confidence is that I have not passed this "trait" onto our children. They are highly competent and confident adults, great parents, and great teachers.