Music Video Lesson: How Failure Breeds Success in Music

Hi, this is LivingPianos.com. I'm Robert Estrin. The subject today is how failure breeds success in music. You see somebody who's accomplished on the piano and you think things must be just easy for them, things must just naturally come to them. They're so talented. Well, you know what? If you see behind the scenes what it takes, it's the people who can fail again and again and again, and yet keep trying. Those are the people who become seasoned artists. But this isn't just in music. This covers a wide range of activities.

Now, as a child, we vacationed in the Finger Lakes and we had an opportunity to water ski, and I was gung ho I wanted to do it. I tried and I tried. I'd start up and then bam I'd be down and again and again. I was relentless in trying it and again and again and again. I didn't want to give up. I really wanted nothing more than to be successful. I even stood outside off a tree and tried to imagine in my mind what it'll be like to try to get the sense of it. Try as I might, I could not seem to stay up.

Now, my sister today says that at the time the skis didn't fit me. Maybe that's true or maybe she's just being kind, because it was really a kind of... I guess it could be an embarrassing situation, although I wasn't embarrassed. I was just wanting to water ski so darn badly. Now, eventually they had this contraption that was supposed to hold the skis together and then lift up. Well, it held the skis together, but I had never lifted up. There I went halfway around the lake, hunched over and that was the degree of success I had in water skiing.

Well, the epilogue to the story is many years later, I was on a boat with a friend and they were offering water skiing. Did I say no? No, of course, I said, "Let's try it." But I was successful. So that was one story. Now, how does this relate to piano? Well, as a child, my hands were very weak. I have smaller hands anyway and as a child, I could barely reach an octave, even in my teens. An octave I could only reach around the keys. Now, the way I reach a 10th around the keys, which is not very useful, by the way. That's about what an octave was for me. A little bit, maybe slightly better than that.

Can you imagine how difficult it was to play? I was playing some pretty sophisticated music and I couldn't even reach an octave. At the end of Golliwog's Cakewalk, it ends like this. My father said it was so anemic, that last octave. I played the whole suite when I was 13 years old, which was really an achievement for me. It was something I rose to the occasion to play the whole WC Children's Corner Suite and to end the whole thing and sounding like this.

That was about all I could do. So my father actually had me do this on the very end, leaving out the octave in the left hand. That was a really good workaround. So I had to struggle for years to develop strength. I remember when I was in Salzburg, Austria in high school, I had a summer to study at the Mozarteum. It was a time that I really practiced a lot and I was working on the list Hungarian Rhapsody No. 6.

I spent hours and hours to the point where I had the line where the fingernail meets the finger, the little line of blood there, I mean, cracked nails. I mean, I was just trying to develop strength. It ends with a huge octave section that you've probably heard before. It goes on and on and on. So that's what I did to try to overcome a natural weakness.

Now, other pianists too here might have completely different obstacles to overcome. I remember one of my father's students who was very talented from an emotional level, just fire in his playing, a pleasure to listen to, but the brain didn't always cooperate. So his challenge was just holding the cohesiveness of the form together, having the intellectual capacity of holding together an extended work or the whole program. He had the fire, he had the passion, he had the technique, but that was his challenge. So he worked very hard and he's a seasoned artist with a career.

So everybody has to find what failures they have and build upon them. It doesn't come naturally. It's how you deal with failure that makes the difference. If failure makes you feel defeated and you stop trying, well then that is the outcome you're going to have. But for those of us who choose to fight on and not accept failure, that's the secret to success. It doesn't happen easily to people. It just seems that way on the outside.

So remember, if you're suffering from failure in your playing or in anything in life, just keep persevering. You can learn from your mistakes as to how to solve them appropriately in the future. Because the more things you try, the more things you know that don't work. As a matter of fact Edison, in inventing the light bulb, he said basically that paraphrasing now I know all the things that don't work. Basically, that was the idea he was expressing, and that's what it is with the piano. You try and keep trying and find the answers that solve your problems so you could overcome failure in your music.

I hope this is helpful and perhaps even inspiring to you. Again, I'm Robert Estrin. This is LivingPianos.com, your online piano resource. Thanks for subscribing, the thumbs up, all of it. We'll see next time.

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