Notes from the Teacher's Notebook: On Life, Bach, and Mistakes

Notes from the Teacher's Notebook: On Life, Bach, and Mistakes

I play Bach before my students come. I want to learn the fifteen Two Voice Inventions, which are kind of easy, but I never did the complete thing and I think they are little masterpieces of thought. The playing sparks ideas that I write in a notebook of blank pages, fat with a black cover,  that I always have close by. Some times I write on bits of papers, when I forget the notebook in some remote place, or I write in a small gray notebook that I call the travel journal, because it's more portable.

These notes have to do with Bach, life, and mistakes.

I am playing the A minor invention, number thirteen in my edition, which is pretty fast. I cannot play it without mistakes yet. I always play the wrong note somewhere. And they are stupid mistakes, the result of my lack of concentration, but mistakes after all, hard to eradicate. I have a very intense relationship with mistakes. I always thought of myself as a "dirty" pianist, I mean, I don't play clean, crystal clear, with all the little notes sharply enunciated. No, I am a bit sloppy, muddy, that's why I don't play much Mozart. I can't. Beethoven is more my type, messy, complicated, and murky. Bach helps me to keep my mental health in check, puts order in my head. Since last year, I don't play any other than Bach, of the classics, because my head has needed his assistance, and Bach helps a lot.

But it bothers me that I can't eliminate the mistakes, although, I think my problem is in my relationship with the mistake, not with the mistake per se. Then, I ask myself: what is a mistake for me?

To answer this question I will take a detour by the monastery of the Buddhists monks that I visited last month. Because, there is something else that the monks taught me that, when I wrote the note, RE: My visit to the Monastery, I didn't mention. They also taught me that there is no destination, that one never arrives, that there is no goal, that it's a lie. That we never get to a point where we can say, That's it! I arrived, now I can relax and watch. That there are no saints. The saints are also humans that keep making mistakes, like the humans they are, they also have to learn every day to listen to themselves, each day a new challenge, because if there were no challenges, life would be death, not life. They know that they will never be perfect, that they always will have "bad" thoughts, that they will always desire. Maybe they have more tools to resist temptation, to lead themselves not into temptation but deliver themselves from evil, but they are as sensitive to sin as the rest of the mortals. There are no perfect mortals. We all die, and that common flaw makes us humans and imperfect, no matter what we do with our lives, we'll never get over the fact that if we are not alert, life goes away and it doesn't come back. The clock never stops until it stops. And if we are not alert, we are going to fall again.

But, I keep asking myself: what does it means to make a mistake for you? Do you have a theory about mistakes? You, that have a theory for everything and brags of being a wise woman?

Well, I don't have a theory on mistakes, no, but in one of those little notes that I scribble while I play, I wrote that sometimes I feel that I live my life as if I was playing Bach, and that if I make a mistake in one note, boom! That's it, I ruined it, now it cannot be perfect anymore, and so I loose track, because I get stuck on that damn mistake, and indeed, I keep making mistakes because now instead of thinking ahead, I am thinking backwards. And that's how I think of life too, as if I had a music score in front of me and the notes are already decided for me, the notes of my life, and I just have to play them, read what is written, and interpret it, I mean, give it sense, and if I make the wrong decision, well, I change the piece, and I make mistakes, I play the notes that are not there, and I get so upset because of that supposed mistake that I get fixated thinking about what an idiot I've been.

“Do not fear mistakes. There are none," said Miles Davis. Well, of course, that's because he didn't study classical music with my teachers at the San Martin Conservatory, and that's because he was not a shy and insecure child like I was. I cried if I brought a piece less than perfect to my teacher. And she wasn't the one making me cry I cried because I had failed her, I had not lived up to her expectations. Mistakes had a furious red color for me; they represented the impossibility of perfection, and therefore, the impossibility of being loved, because if I wasn't perfect, I couldn't be loved, she would not love me like that, failed, with all those mistakes on top of me. Because, once made, the mistakes could not be eliminated, they are engraved with fire on the past. But music happens in real time, like life. One doesn't know that one knows how to do something until one does it. One doesn't know that one can play a piece perfectly, until one plays it perfectly. Words are worth nothing, promises, theories. The only thing that counts, it's (is) to play, in real time. Like life. To do, not to say. But mistakes, if taken the way I do, can paralyze. They are invested with supreme power. They are the ones that decide, thumbs up or thumbs down, life or death, they have the power to kill or give life. And I think, it is time to reclaim that power for myself, I mean, they don't dominate me, they don't decide. I decide. Tomá.


This past week, preparing my students for the piano recital, I realized that they too have a bit of a scandalous relationship with mistakes. They are too young, it's not good. And I found myself philosophizing for them. Telling them things that I should tell myself, and yes, I should try it too, see if it works. I told them that if they make a mistake when they are playing in front of an audience, they should do as if nothing happened, forget immediately that they made a mistake and keep going. Lo pasado pisado, as we say in Spanish, which I guess it will translate "the past, walked," or something like that. Both in music and in life, you have to look ahead, always ahead, because the music continues and if we don't look ahead we crush our noses on the lamppost, we stay behind, and it is then that we make mistakes, when we loose our concentration, when we stop being there in the moment, in the music, to be somewhere else that is not the here and now. We loose balance and fall into the temptation of speculating with things that we have no control over, things we cannot do anything to change, things that don't help us at all, on the contrary, they distract us and make us lose focus. "What might dad be thinking of me now? Does he like what I'm playing? But I made a mistake, now I fucked it up, its all wrong, all wrong, and I will keep making mistakes because when I make a mistake I cannot stop, and what are they going to think of me, that I cannot play, and yada yada yada.

And we keep making mistakes because we stop listening to the music, we get stuck on the mistakes. But, ya basta muchachos! In the moment, play. There is going to be time to analyze the why, how, and when of the mistakes after the recital.