#196: What to Do When Your Music is Boring You
They say that familiarity breeds contempt. Unfortunately, familiarity also breeds secure and confident music. We want to play our music well, and so we need to know it inside and out. That takes time.
Learning music also takes time. And the longer we take to learn our music, the harder it can be to stay interested in it. No matter how much we love a piece of music, it is possible to get bored with it.
Also, there are times when we are required to learn a piece that we don’t really like, perhaps for a performance or an exam. Practicing a piece we don’t like can feel like torture.
I believe there is no upside to playing or practicing a piece you are bored with. If you’re trying to learn it, your practice won’t be focused; your heart won’t be in it. If you’re performing it, your lack of interest in the piece will communicate itself to the listener. It might be a flawless performance but it won’t have you - your personality, your energy - in it, and those are the things that bring a performance to life. This is true not only for concert performances; this is true for every performance, whether it’s a video for Facebook or playing in church or playing for friends. If you are bored with the piece you’re playing, you are, in effect, cheating your listeners.
So I want to start by saying right now that you can choose to stop playing any piece that bores you. You have the power to choose; you could even say you have the obligation to choose. You owe it to yourself not to spend your time on something that doesn’t interest you, and you owe it to a potential listener not to present something that you don’t care about.
But maybe you don’t want to just put the piece aside, or maybe you can’t. That’s a situation worth investigating. When is it worth persisting with a piece that you don’t like or has become boring to you? When should you just put it away? And if you decide to persist, what can you do to make the piece interesting to you or to at least to help you endure practicing it? I have some valuable ideas to share with you today. Even if you haven’t run across a piece that bores you - and maybe we should say “haven’t yet” - you can use these ideas to keep that musical love light burning.
Links to things I think you might be interested in that were mentioned in the podcast episode:
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