How to Succeed

As musical artists, we are always practicing to improve our ability to express ourselves through the music we play. We must improve our technique so that we can play those tricky or fast passages clearly and with ease. We must strengthen our memory of each part of a piece. We study theory and the structure of music to improve our playing and our composing abilities.

We spend hours preparing for, learning and polishing a piece before we share it with other people. The great artists we look up to have spent even MORE hours working on their music. 

Yet so often we hear the comment, "She is talented," as if that is the explanation for why she can play so well.

Dr. Suzuki said, "Knowledge is not skill. Knowledge plus 10,000 times is skill."

The way to succeed at anything is to repeat what you know how to do over and over again, and also add to your knowledge as you go.

This is the reason that we work on review pieces instead of just "going on" to the next thing. This is the reason we celebrate with book recitals which require us to work on many pieces for more than a year.

Through review and continued study, we reach new levels of ability and expression in a piece. We get a little closer each day to the way we want to sound.

This video, featuring the statements of Ira Glass, a writer, describes this idea about how to close the gap between what we want to be or do, and what we currently can do.


THE GAP by Ira Glass from frohlocke on Vimeo.