Discipline & Music
I have started to notice a trend happening in many studios, among many students, of a lack of discipline. I don’t mean the kind of discipline your momma dishes out. I mean self-discipline. The ability to push through a task no matter how hard to accomplish a goal. Many great musicians have amazing self-discipline. That’s how they became great. Or take sports athletes. Do you think they were born already knowing how to throw a football? No. They had to learn.
To get to an advanced level of playing a student must learn self-discipline. I first noticed this lack of self-discipline when I would ask students to continue practicing a song for one or two weeks more and was met with utter shock and dismay. How dare I ask they practice another week just because the rhythms and notes were incorrect! “I practiced it, though! Why do I have to practice it again?!” Maybe I’m a mean teacher. Or maybe it’s because I want them to always strive to do better. If we always settle we aren’t actually progressing. Doing something just okay isn’t good enough. So what if you have to practice a song for 3 weeks. By the end of that 3 week period, that song will be amazing!
When I was studying music in college I was required to practice 3 hours everyday. Every. Day. Even weekends. It was hard to keep that up over a semester. Most people assume I would play multiple songs each week, then received all new songs the next week, but that’s not how it worked. For every semester I would focus on 3 masterworks. Just three. For an entire semester. Depending on the song I could master it before the end of the semester but a lot of the time I was working right up to the end.
That takes a lot of self-discipline to practice that long every day. I wasn’t perfect at it. There were days I would have rather spent hanging out with friends but instead I was in solitude in the practice room. A lot of days I just didn’t want to do it! But I made myself. I forced myself to do something I didn’t want to. That’s self-discipline. Fast forward to today, I certainly don’t practice 3 hours a day any more, but all those hours working towards one goal taught me a lot. I know what I’m capable of doing. I know whatever job I choose to have I can master it. Why? Because I know what it takes to accomplish a goal.
I fear our society as a whole is becoming less self-disciplined. We have way too many distractions in our lives. I know when I sit down to practice, my phone may start to buzz and I can’t help but look at it. And in that 1 second I’ve lost all concentration and have to start over. As a whole, we need to expect more of ourselves and our children. It’s like the old adage “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” Can you imagine the Romans saying “well, I placed a few bricks down, that should be good enough.” No! That’s crazy. Every song a young student plays is a building block to working on the masterworks or creating their own. If a teacher needs the student to repeat the song another week it’s for their own good. Then, hopefully, we will create self-disciplined adults.
