Getting past frustration and burnout

ByBret Pimentel

Every musician (and music student) goes through periods of frustration and burnout. But there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. Here are just a few ideas to consider:

  • Talk to someone. It might be a colleague who can directly relate to what you’re going through. Or a friend or loved one who cares about you. Or a mentor who can offer wisdom. Or a professional counselor who can listen dispassionately and offer coping strategies. Or maybe all of the above.
  • Get organized. Sometimes taking control of your life can bring some calm and make problems seem more manageable. Clear your desk, make a to-do list, review your calendar, clean out your instrument case, make your bed.
  • Get inspired. Go back to what gets you excited about music. Listen to or play through some old favorites or something new you have been wanting to try. Go to the opera or a rock concert or a jazz club.
  • Do some self-care. Get some exercise, get some sunshine, get some sleep, get some air, stock the fridge with nutritious meals, meditate, worship, or do whatever else makes you feel balanced and healthy.
  • Take some time. If you can, take a little break to recharge. Depending on your circumstances, that might mean going on vacation for a couple of weeks, or spending a quiet weekend at home, or just taking a few minutes between practice sessions to rest and recover.
  • Ride it out. Bear in mind that frustration and burnout are extremely common complaints. When appropriate, it may be helpful just to recognize and accept the negative feelings, and forge ahead anyway.

To expand on one point from above, if you find that you are no longer finding happiness or fulfillment in your musical pursuits, and the situation seems to be more than the usual ups-and-downs, consider checking in with a professional counselor. (If you are part of a university community, you might have no-cost or low-cost access to counseling services on campus.) Counseling isn’t just for people who are “sick” or “crazy”—most of us can benefit now and then for talking things through with someone who is good at it, and who, if and when needed, can identify issues that are treatable with medications or other therapies.

Have more ideas on coping with frustration and burnout? Please share in the comments.

Similar Posts

  • What does it mean to “interpret” music?

    ByBret Pimentel

    As a new undergraduate music student I was often frustrated by my teachers’ attempts to get me to “interpret” music.

    I would play something, and my teacher would stop me and ask me to play it louder. I would play again, but this time it was too loud, too slow, too fast, too staccato, not staccato enough.

    I didn’t understand yet the purpose or the process behind musical interpretation. My teachers seemed to have excruciatingly specific ideas about how each and every note of the piece should sound. I couldn’t wrap my head around how they were making these seemingly arbitrary decisions, or how they expected me to guess correctly what they were thinking.

    To be fair to my excellent teachers, there’s a strong chance that the problem was on my end, not theirs. But here’s what I wish I would have understood at that point.

    • When faced with a foreign language, one might rely on an interpreter to explain what is being said.
    • When dealing with some raw data, a researcher might interpret the data to show how some pages of numbers, which don’t make sense without context, support a hypothesis.
    • When performing a musical work, a performer interprets the piece to help the audience understand what’s happening.

    Here are just a few examples of things in a piece of music that might need interpretation for the audience’s benefit:

    • Where does one phrase end and the next begin?
    • Are there melodies, textures, or other ideas that repeat in important ways throughout the piece?
    • What moods, characters, etc. does the music portray?

    You might spend months getting to know the piece, but your audience might be hearing it for the first time. You need to point out the important things to them, so they hear the story, not just a bunch of notes.

    When you speak, you offer a variety of clues about how to break up what you are saying into comprehensible chunks. You probably do it without thinking much about it, but it involves things like the pitch, volume, and speed of your voice. To interpret music, you use similar tools: you might demonstrate that a musical phrase is ending by slowing down a tiny bit and bringing the volume down. Or you might help the audience hear what you believe is a warlike quality in a certain passage by using bombastic accents and a strict, military-inspired tempo.

    All of this requires you to have opinions about the music. Two tour guides might give different tours of the same place, because they have different opinions about what is interesting or important—they are each interpreting. You might personally enjoy one tour more than the other, but it doesn’t mean either is wrong.

    Your interpretation of the music should be based on synthesizing lots of factors. One of the most crucial ones is hints from the composer, so pay close attention to any markings or words the composer uses. (Sometimes they are in a foreign language—it is your job to find out what they mean.) Your interpretation might also be informed by tradition: maybe there is some broad consensus among performers of the piece that it should be played a certain way. That doesn’t mean 100% that you have to go along, but it’s something you should think seriously about. If you are collaborating on the performance with other musicians, you’ll need to work out some agreement with them about various aspects of interpretation.

    If you think all of this sounds difficult or complicated, you aren’t wrong. But if you understand what musical interpretation is and why it’s important, you can start to absorb your teachers’ interpretive ideas in a more meaningful way. You can listen to recordings of great performers and steal their interpretive ideas (this is allowed, and even encouraged!). And you can start to use what you have been learning in your music theory and music history classes as fuel for your own interpretive decisions.

    As a brand-new freshman music major I was content with my performance if I played the right notes at the right times. That’s important, but it falls pretty far short of the satisfaction and achievement of a meaningful musical interpretation. Keep at it!

  • How are you going to improve this?

    ByBret Pimentel

    I’ve blogged previously about getting my students to give more than pat answers about how they think their playing sounds:

    It’s an ongoing battle to get my students to listen more deeply than that. Was the articulation “not good” because it started with air noise instead of tone? Because it was accompanied by an unwanted percussive sound? Was the articulation technique perfect but you failed to follow the composer’s markings? Or was it something else?

    The next step is getting students to make a clear, actionable plan to improve. That conversation often goes like this:

    Me: Okay, what are you going to do to improve that aspect of your—

    Student [rolling eyes]: Practice.

    Me: Well, obviously. But how are you going to prac—

    Student [sighing]: Keep practicing until I get it right.

    Me: No, I mean what specific practice tech—

    Student [through clenched teeth]: Use a metronome.

    In other words, the “plan” is usually to suffer for a few hours in the practice room, and maybe, against all odds, emerge with the problem magically fixed.

    But practicing without a plan rarely produces the desired results. I’m much more optimistic about the student’s success if they can tell me something like: “Well, I need to slow this way down, slow enough that I can get it exactly right, and use the metronome to make sure I’m not rushing. When I can play this passage with the correct articulations 10 times in a row without mistakes, then I’ll inch the metronome up by a couple of clicks and try again.” That’s a clear commitment to a tried-and-true method. It will probably be a much more productive and satisfying practice session, which means the student is more likely to put in some more good hours the next day.

    Less-experienced students might have a smaller repertoire of practice techniques, and I consider it a lesson-time priority to teach them more of those techniques. Trial and error in the practice room will help them refine these techniques, and determine which ones are most effective for them.

    Productive practicing requires identifying an area to improve, selecting a technique (or series of techniques) to apply to it, evaluating progress, adjusting the practice technique as needed, and noting what does and doesn’t work for future practice sessions.

  • On purple violins

    ByBret Pimentel

    Photo, Glamhag

    I’m a little late commenting on this, but I still think it’s an issue worth addressing. Last month there was a minor scandal over an incident in a Farmington, New Mexico school orchestra program, where a beginning violinist was informed that she would not be allowed to use her own, um, unique instrument. Most of the reporting on the story took a similar tone to that employed by the Los Angeles Times:

    The gift violin was a surprise from her grandmother. The color was purple, the girl’s favorite.

    Lopez encouraged her daughter to stand up for what she believed in. “I told her, ‘Camille, you’re not like everyone else. We’re all different.'”

    “She’s done with the orchestra class,” Lopez said. “She switched out. She no longer plays.”

    Lopez said she’ll never know whether the decision ended the career of a budding Yo-Yo Ma. “I’d pay for private lessons if I could afford them,” Lopez said. “But it doesn’t matter now, I guess. Camille is taking choir now.”

    The Times story sets up the uninformed reader for outrage: an underprivileged but spunky girl, a gift from a grandmother, stifled individuality, personal “beliefs” under attack, abandoned dreams, and a stodgy, stuffy establishment.

    But a more careful reading of the Times story reveals some details that won’t escape the attention of music educators.

    Read More “On purple violins”

  • How to convince me not to play your newly-composed piece

    ByBret Pimentel

    My inbox runneth over with invitations to buy and perform composers’ new pieces. I’d like to play new works, but some composers make it harder for me to accept their invitations. Here’s how:

    • Failure of fit. If I’m clearly just on your email-blast list of 3,000 clarinetists, there’s a fair chance your new piece doesn’t have any special appeal for me. But if it scratches one of my particular performance itches (like pieces for multiple-woodwinds soloist, woodwind instrument with live electronics, or “world” woodwinds) then a more limited mailing or a brief personal note will definitely catch my eye.
    • No reference material. If I have to guess what the piece is like from a title or a description, I probably won’t invest the money or time to give it a closer look. Give me a perusal score or recording, and preferably both. Recordings that are mediocre or computer-generated are acceptable—I just need a strong hint about what the music is like, not your fully-realized vision. And watermarked or even partial scores work, too. If I can’t find the reference materials on your website, I’ll assume they are not available, and probably won’t email you to ask.
    • Too restrictive. These days my recital performances are for a relatively small in-person audience and a larger online audience. If you’re uncomfortable with me putting a video on YouTube, I’m less interested in putting time and effort into it.
    • Logistics too costly. Pieces with extreme difficulty, large or unusual ensembles, complicated staging, rare instruments, etc. present real, practical obstacles to performance. The piece has to be compelling enough for me to decide to spend limited resources (time, money, called-in favors) on it. Some flexibility, such as piano reductions, optional cuts, or adaptable instrumentation, can convince me to try the piece in a lower-cost situation first, and then maybe like it enough to keep it in mind for the rare concerto opportunity later.

    Let’s work together and get some new works performed!

  • Practice fewer notes

    ByBret Pimentel

    I can’t remember where I picked up this tip, but it has been a game-changer in how I practice technically-challenging passages. (If you know a source, please let me know!)

    The idea is this: practice only as many notes as you can keep in your head. So, if I’m practicing an unfamiliar passage, and can only memorize the first 3-5 notes at a glance, that’s the size of chunk I should practice.

    If the music has an obvious or familiar pattern, such as a common scale or arpeggio, I might be able to memorize more of it at a glance, so I can practice a larger chunk. Or, as I get increasingly familiar with the piece, I might be able to hold more of it in my memory at once, and can graduate to longer passages.

    It’s tempting to practice in larger chunks, but start smaller at first to really develop your muscle memory. Gradually build to larger segments as you are able to store them in your short-term memory.

  • Isolating problem spots

    ByBret Pimentel

    Earlier this month I posted about a fundamental practicing concept that sometimes escapes my less-experienced students. Here is another:

    Me: Play your D melodic minor scale.

    Student: [Begins D minor scale, plays a wrong note in the second octave.]

    Me: Whoops, remember to play B-natural.

    Student: Okay. [Starts over, makes same mistake.]

    Me: Please start at the second-octave A, and play just from there to—

    Student: [Starts from second-octave A, makes the same mistake, proceeds to finish the scale.]

    Me: No, I want you to start at the A, play just to the B-natural, and stop.

    Student: [Plays.]

    Me: Okay, that’s correct. Now—

    Student: [Starts over, makes same mistake.]

    Practicing in overly large segments is an issue for less-experienced students for at least three reasons. The first is that is it makes it difficult to notice exactly where the problem is happening. Students may tend to “power through” a section and evaluate it as a whole (“That wasn’t very good”), then simply start over again and hope for the best. Sometimes my younger students are surprised when I point out that they are actually making the same mistake over and over. In their minds, it’s a roll of the dice every time, hoping that everything turns out right, and if it doesn’t, then start again and hope for better luck this time. Practicing in smaller segments makes it much easier to identify and isolate problems.

    photo, Basheer Tome
    photo, Basheer Tome

    The second issue is that even if the precise problem is known, practicing it within too large a segment increases the cognitive load—it’s hard to devote enough attention to the actual problem when there are so many other notes to think about. Plus, practicing too long of a segment raises the stakes in a way that often doesn’t work well for inexperienced practicers: by the time you actually arrive at the problem spot, the pressure is really on to get it right, since you’ve already invested a lot in this run-through. If you isolate the problem to a much smaller segment, it’s not such a big deal if you have to start again.

    The third issue is efficiency. If your goal is to correct one wrong note, which lasts less than a second, and you play 30 seconds’ worth of music leading up to it and another 30 seconds’ worth after it, then you can only get about one repetition done per minute. Even if you get it right, it will take you hours to really solidify that passage. But if you can narrow the problem down to two seconds’ worth of music, you can do many repetitions per minute.

    In most cases, the problem that needs fixing has to do with getting from one note to another successfully. It may be that the second note isn’t the right one, or that it doesn’t respond right, or that the articulation isn’t correct, or a variety of other things, but the crucial concept is that there is a pair of notes, and the first note is right, and the second one isn’t.

    Step one is to practice just those two notes, not just once through, but many times. If this is only accomplished with difficulty, it may be due to the second note having a less-familiar fingering, or perhaps some kind of particular response difficulty. Practice those two notes—and only those two notes—over and over until they improve. If they don’t, consult a teacher who can help to you diagnose and improve your technique.

    If playing the two notes is trivially easy, then the problem is something about the context in which they appear. Add one more note before the first one, and repeat it several times. If it’s still easy, add one more. Continue until the problem returns, and practice that sequence of notes slowly and carefully until it feels natural and solid. If it becomes clear that adding more notes before the problem isn’t what’s triggering it, then start again from the two notes and gradually add notes after them. Sometimes anticipating what follows can cause something to go wrong.

    Don’t be overly anxious to put the (former) problem spot back into the “context” of a whole scale or etude or movement. Make most of your practicing small-segment work, and very gradually reassemble the small segments into slightly larger ones. Repeat the slightly larger ones many times, then combine them again into still larger ones.

    Take the time to break your practicing down into smaller chunks, isolate the problem spots, and work them methodically and repetitively.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Comments that take a negative or confrontational tone are subject to email and name verification before being approved. In other words: no anonymous trolls allowed—take responsibility for your words.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.