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I held my breath and drew the bow across the strings. I was rewarded with some sweet notes, sprinkled with a few thin, random ones I wasn’t aiming for at all. Meanwhile, the tip of my bow had drifted off course toward the violin’s neck. Sigh.
My teacher, Chris, stared at my right hand. He handed me a pencil. “Try holding this like you would the bow,” he said, and my heart sank. Not the pencil again.
Learning to play the violin as an adult is an exercise in humility.
Not only is there the frustration of doing something over and over and still not getting it right, but there is the mathematical reality that no matter how hard you practice, it really is too late to truly master an instrument beyond playing — like a language learned later in life — with a pronounced accent.
Even if I work really hard, which is not a given, I can probably only hope to achieve OK, or not bad. And that is not likely to be any time soon. I do have a day job.
Does that bother me? Well I enjoy plenty of activities without being an expert, so not really. Or maybe just a little when I see the sponge-like progress of some of the kids learning violin at the same time as me. That’s where the humility comes in. “Yeah, you show that to kids and they get it right away,” said my teacher once while watching me struggle to get my arm, hands and fingers in the right positions. Children’s brains, especially before the age of 10, are designed to soak up as much information as possible, that’s why they learn languages — and instruments — more easily than adults.
I played the piano and guitar when I was younger. I even had a brief stint as a teenaged folk singer. I can read music. Still, nothing prepared me for the heavy lifting and frequent stumbling that comes with learning to play the violin.
It is not surprising the question I get asked most often is “Why?”
I have come up with different answers since I made my first squeaky attempts nearly five years ago. “I just want to be able to play music with other people,” I would say at first. I come from a family in which the concept of learning the violin as an adult is not foreign and in which Christmas violin duets are a tradition I can now join.
So why keep going? What am I hoping to achieve?
That is a more difficult question and one I am still working out. But I am beginning to think the answer is nothing. Achievement is maybe not the point of learning to play an instrument as an adult. It is not like a race you can win or beat your best time. Or a mountain you can climb and check off your bucket list. The point might just be in the doing — the routine of practice and lessons and trying again and again to get things right, of making space in your life for it.
That, I have almost accomplished. I will never love regular practicing, but I am learning to live with it, especially now that I have been convinced to take a violin exam early this summer. The more I practice, the more comfortable it feels, although I fear consistency could be a problem. But there is some pretty good compensation, including actual changes in your brain that come with learning to play an instrument.
Oh, and when everything comes together, it is fun. Addictive, even, at times.
What I may never achieve is getting over the frustration of learning something that looks so effortless but is so hard.
The bow, for example, is an instrument of torture. When I pick it up, my baby finger often locks at a weird angle and the bow feels like it is about to fall from my hands. How can manoeuvring something so light be so hard?
Several years into my mid-life career as a novice violinist, the bow continues to feel like my worst enemy. When I read this on an online forum about playing the violin, it all made sense: “In my experience, as a player and teacher, smooth, accurate bowing takes thousands of hours to develop.”
So it’s not just me.
Thousands of hours. And that is just to develop “smooth, accurate bowing,” not to become really good.
It is hard to get around the stark reality of math when you pick up the violin as an adult.
Most people are familiar with the 10,000 hour rule. Author Malcolm Gladwell popularized it in his book Outliers. Based on research by Swedish psychologist Anders Ericcson, the theory maintains that it takes 10,000 hours to become a world-class expert at something. He uses the Beatles, who played eight-hour shifts, seven days a week at Hamburg strip clubs before hitting it big, and Bill Gates as examples. Gates, he notes, had access to a computer early, something almost unheard of at the time, and logged thousands of hours on it.
I like my violin — its warm amber gloss worn in places that hold secrets of the strangers who played it, and maybe cursed over it, before me — but not that much. Sometimes when I am practicing scales grudgingly, my mind begins to do the calculations. Say I practice for half an hour every day, or so. That is about 180 hours a year. At that rate, it would take me more than 55 years to meet the 10,000 hour threshold. Not going to happen.
Or, let’s say I wasn’t trying to become a world expert, just a decent violinist, how many hours would that take — 5,000, 2,000, 1,000, a few hundred?
To get to 2,000 hours would take 11 years, unless I upped my game and practiced for one hour a day. Is that enough to learn how to make the bow stay straight? Or play really quickly? And is it likely to happen?
The 10,000 hour rule has lately been discredited by researchers who found that practice is important, but it takes more than that to become a world class expert, like extraordinary talent and motivation. Still, it can’t happen without lots of elbow grease.
Maybe it is better to forget the math.
Dr. Daniel Levitan, a former professional musician-turned-neuroscientist, McGill University professor and author, has good news on that front. You can see progress with even small amounts of practice, if done regularly, he says.
“If you practice just a little bit each day, say five minutes a day, 35 minutes a week, you are going to get a lot farther than if you practice one and a half hours once a week on a Sunday. It is the same reason that if you are a student cramming for an exam is not a good idea. It is because the brain takes time to assimilate information.”
Levitan, who is the author of This is Your Brain on Music, as well as The World in Six Songs and his latest, The Organized Mind, notes that most adults don’t have 45 minutes a day (or more) to devote to practicing, when they have so many other commitments like work and family. “There just are not that many 45 minutes in a day, but 10 or 15 minutes will get you a lot farther than you would imagine.”
Even more encouraging, is that learning and practicing an instrument, as with learning any new skill, will change your brain – in a good way.
“You don’t need 10,000 hours to see notable changes in your brain. You can see it after several hundred hours, even a few dozen hours.”
Learning to play the violin, he said, works your brain in numerous ways and, as it does, it builds new connections.
“Every time you learn to do something new, what is happening in the brain is you are making connections that weren’t there before, or you are strengthening connections that were weak and so the brain changes in response to learning. In fact, to a neuroscientist, the terms are synonymous. Learning is a brain change, the terms are not distinguishable.”
Plus, violin playing is complicated, which probably ups the neuro-benefits.
“When you learn to play the violin as an adult, you have to learn to control your fingers in very precise ways, to hold your left hand at an angle that is unusual for you, then you have to control the arm movements in the right hand and to synchronize with what the left hand is doing,” says Levitan. Because each hand is controlled by the opposite side of the brain, those two hemispheres have to talk to each other in ways they haven’t before.
“Some parts of your brain may actually expand in size,” he says.
Scientists have found links between musical training and improved executive functions in brains, although this is most pronounced in those who begin before the age of seven.
Still, there is plenty of good news about the benefits of playing an instrument as you age, even if you will never catch up to the pint-sized virtuosos. Musicians are less prone to developing Alzheimers in the later stages of their lives, according to a 2011 study by Dr. Robert Friedland. Other researchers have found a strong correlation between playing a musical instrument and happiness.
Levitan says playing an instrument is among the challenging activities that might help stave off early cognitive decline. But the biggest habit to prevent cognitive decline in aging, he adds, is maintaining active social relationships.
Right now, I pick up my violin most evenings after returning home from a day in the newspaper trenches and work my way through the scales and pieces I will be tested on in June. Some days it sounds OK. Other days it sounds pretty rough, but I can usually hear progress.
My musical training tends to drive my family out of the room — except the faithful dog, who lies on the floor and howls along. I punctuate my practice by telling her to keep it down so I can hear myself play.
Once in awhile, my husband pokes his head in to say that I am “really coming along.”
It can be bit lonely playing for the dog, although she is an appreciative, if loud, audience.
So I am thinking of a next step — joining an amateur group of musicians willing to make room for those still learning. Music and social relationships in one place, it should be a winning cognitive combination. It might even be fun.
I just have a few hundred hours of work to do first.
epayne@ottawacitizen.com
查看原文...
My teacher, Chris, stared at my right hand. He handed me a pencil. “Try holding this like you would the bow,” he said, and my heart sank. Not the pencil again.
Learning to play the violin as an adult is an exercise in humility.
Not only is there the frustration of doing something over and over and still not getting it right, but there is the mathematical reality that no matter how hard you practice, it really is too late to truly master an instrument beyond playing — like a language learned later in life — with a pronounced accent.
Even if I work really hard, which is not a given, I can probably only hope to achieve OK, or not bad. And that is not likely to be any time soon. I do have a day job.
Does that bother me? Well I enjoy plenty of activities without being an expert, so not really. Or maybe just a little when I see the sponge-like progress of some of the kids learning violin at the same time as me. That’s where the humility comes in. “Yeah, you show that to kids and they get it right away,” said my teacher once while watching me struggle to get my arm, hands and fingers in the right positions. Children’s brains, especially before the age of 10, are designed to soak up as much information as possible, that’s why they learn languages — and instruments — more easily than adults.
I played the piano and guitar when I was younger. I even had a brief stint as a teenaged folk singer. I can read music. Still, nothing prepared me for the heavy lifting and frequent stumbling that comes with learning to play the violin.
It is not surprising the question I get asked most often is “Why?”
I have come up with different answers since I made my first squeaky attempts nearly five years ago. “I just want to be able to play music with other people,” I would say at first. I come from a family in which the concept of learning the violin as an adult is not foreign and in which Christmas violin duets are a tradition I can now join.
So why keep going? What am I hoping to achieve?
That is a more difficult question and one I am still working out. But I am beginning to think the answer is nothing. Achievement is maybe not the point of learning to play an instrument as an adult. It is not like a race you can win or beat your best time. Or a mountain you can climb and check off your bucket list. The point might just be in the doing — the routine of practice and lessons and trying again and again to get things right, of making space in your life for it.
That, I have almost accomplished. I will never love regular practicing, but I am learning to live with it, especially now that I have been convinced to take a violin exam early this summer. The more I practice, the more comfortable it feels, although I fear consistency could be a problem. But there is some pretty good compensation, including actual changes in your brain that come with learning to play an instrument.
Oh, and when everything comes together, it is fun. Addictive, even, at times.
What I may never achieve is getting over the frustration of learning something that looks so effortless but is so hard.
The bow, for example, is an instrument of torture. When I pick it up, my baby finger often locks at a weird angle and the bow feels like it is about to fall from my hands. How can manoeuvring something so light be so hard?
Several years into my mid-life career as a novice violinist, the bow continues to feel like my worst enemy. When I read this on an online forum about playing the violin, it all made sense: “In my experience, as a player and teacher, smooth, accurate bowing takes thousands of hours to develop.”
So it’s not just me.
Thousands of hours. And that is just to develop “smooth, accurate bowing,” not to become really good.
It is hard to get around the stark reality of math when you pick up the violin as an adult.
Most people are familiar with the 10,000 hour rule. Author Malcolm Gladwell popularized it in his book Outliers. Based on research by Swedish psychologist Anders Ericcson, the theory maintains that it takes 10,000 hours to become a world-class expert at something. He uses the Beatles, who played eight-hour shifts, seven days a week at Hamburg strip clubs before hitting it big, and Bill Gates as examples. Gates, he notes, had access to a computer early, something almost unheard of at the time, and logged thousands of hours on it.
I like my violin — its warm amber gloss worn in places that hold secrets of the strangers who played it, and maybe cursed over it, before me — but not that much. Sometimes when I am practicing scales grudgingly, my mind begins to do the calculations. Say I practice for half an hour every day, or so. That is about 180 hours a year. At that rate, it would take me more than 55 years to meet the 10,000 hour threshold. Not going to happen.
Or, let’s say I wasn’t trying to become a world expert, just a decent violinist, how many hours would that take — 5,000, 2,000, 1,000, a few hundred?
To get to 2,000 hours would take 11 years, unless I upped my game and practiced for one hour a day. Is that enough to learn how to make the bow stay straight? Or play really quickly? And is it likely to happen?
The 10,000 hour rule has lately been discredited by researchers who found that practice is important, but it takes more than that to become a world class expert, like extraordinary talent and motivation. Still, it can’t happen without lots of elbow grease.
Maybe it is better to forget the math.
Dr. Daniel Levitan, a former professional musician-turned-neuroscientist, McGill University professor and author, has good news on that front. You can see progress with even small amounts of practice, if done regularly, he says.
“If you practice just a little bit each day, say five minutes a day, 35 minutes a week, you are going to get a lot farther than if you practice one and a half hours once a week on a Sunday. It is the same reason that if you are a student cramming for an exam is not a good idea. It is because the brain takes time to assimilate information.”
Levitan, who is the author of This is Your Brain on Music, as well as The World in Six Songs and his latest, The Organized Mind, notes that most adults don’t have 45 minutes a day (or more) to devote to practicing, when they have so many other commitments like work and family. “There just are not that many 45 minutes in a day, but 10 or 15 minutes will get you a lot farther than you would imagine.”
Even more encouraging, is that learning and practicing an instrument, as with learning any new skill, will change your brain – in a good way.
“You don’t need 10,000 hours to see notable changes in your brain. You can see it after several hundred hours, even a few dozen hours.”
Learning to play the violin, he said, works your brain in numerous ways and, as it does, it builds new connections.
“Every time you learn to do something new, what is happening in the brain is you are making connections that weren’t there before, or you are strengthening connections that were weak and so the brain changes in response to learning. In fact, to a neuroscientist, the terms are synonymous. Learning is a brain change, the terms are not distinguishable.”
Plus, violin playing is complicated, which probably ups the neuro-benefits.
“When you learn to play the violin as an adult, you have to learn to control your fingers in very precise ways, to hold your left hand at an angle that is unusual for you, then you have to control the arm movements in the right hand and to synchronize with what the left hand is doing,” says Levitan. Because each hand is controlled by the opposite side of the brain, those two hemispheres have to talk to each other in ways they haven’t before.
“Some parts of your brain may actually expand in size,” he says.
Scientists have found links between musical training and improved executive functions in brains, although this is most pronounced in those who begin before the age of seven.
Still, there is plenty of good news about the benefits of playing an instrument as you age, even if you will never catch up to the pint-sized virtuosos. Musicians are less prone to developing Alzheimers in the later stages of their lives, according to a 2011 study by Dr. Robert Friedland. Other researchers have found a strong correlation between playing a musical instrument and happiness.
Levitan says playing an instrument is among the challenging activities that might help stave off early cognitive decline. But the biggest habit to prevent cognitive decline in aging, he adds, is maintaining active social relationships.
Right now, I pick up my violin most evenings after returning home from a day in the newspaper trenches and work my way through the scales and pieces I will be tested on in June. Some days it sounds OK. Other days it sounds pretty rough, but I can usually hear progress.
My musical training tends to drive my family out of the room — except the faithful dog, who lies on the floor and howls along. I punctuate my practice by telling her to keep it down so I can hear myself play.
Once in awhile, my husband pokes his head in to say that I am “really coming along.”
It can be bit lonely playing for the dog, although she is an appreciative, if loud, audience.
So I am thinking of a next step — joining an amateur group of musicians willing to make room for those still learning. Music and social relationships in one place, it should be a winning cognitive combination. It might even be fun.
I just have a few hundred hours of work to do first.
epayne@ottawacitizen.com
查看原文...
