An interloper! Included because (a) she’s a modern and approachable representative of the much-bigger literature on how to learn piano; (b) she writes interestingly about motivation; and (c) she covers topics relevant to learning that few of the other authors address. She’s one of three woman here, fewer than one would expect from the distribution of elite musicians.
Get Ms Van Betuw’s book here. (Free.)
Goals
Van Betuw is closest to Provost in focus on goals, but frames the question differently. While Provost discusses performance goals, Van Betuw is more inward, orienting the question around asking oneself, why learn to perform music? I doubt either would disagree with the other, but perhaps a way to frame it might be, Provost emphasizes doing and Van Betuw being. (‘if you [write] down a reason that doesn’t make you feel anything, you need a better reason.’) She suggests writing out the answer, big print, and putting it prominently in one’s practice area. Shorter-term goals are then derived from the larger goal (top-down decomposition). In the example of her own goal, she makes clear that the large-scale doesn’t have to be only one thing.
Van Betuw’s approach founds self-regulation on one’s core motivation. Sensible. Most of the authors reviewed include some form of multi-path learning for effective retrieval, e.g., visualize the score while hearing the music. This is a variation on that theme at the level of self-regulation: the discipline of working on the current goal(s) is intertwined with the larger goal(s), so that each reinforces the other. There’s evidence that the larger framing changes how we interpret feedback, which includes our moment-to-moment self-assessment as we practice. Since we’re spending a lot of time in the region of proximal learning, which is hard work, the reframing is a significant advantage.
She further advocates setting short-term goals with deadlines. She is the only author reviewed to add the deadlines. Cramming is rarely effective if long-term savings are the goal. Very different than a context of mutual obligation, as for example in ensemble playing and being ready for rehearsals or performance. Self-managed deadlines, as she advocates, did (in the only study I found) improve learning.
Aside: a potentially useful effect of deadlines might be in developing accuracy (or at least decreasing inaccuracy) in estimating how long something new will take to learn. This is an aspect of judgement of learning, which is essential for self-directed practice.
She recommends three-month (seasonal) short-term goal reviews, believing that the difficulty of seeing the long-term goal terrain past that horizon is too great to form realistic goals.
Setting
Perhaps because pianos are less portable than guitars, she devotes a section to practice setting, the only author to address this. Edward Thorndike, an influential early experimental psychologist, was a maniac for setting, believing that transfer was heavily influenced by setting, that is, knowledge gained in one setting was diminished according to the degree of difference compared to another setting. For us, the principal ‘setting’ is the guitar, but the circumstances in which we practice are different than those in which we perform. Elite players sensibly prefer performance rehearsal in the halls in which the performance will take place. Van Betuw’s discussion of practice setting can perhaps be generalized for guitar in three ways:
- Make your practice area a physical place you want to be (to the extent you can, which for most people will have at least some shared-space constraints)
- Minimize cognitive noise, that is, distractions, other things going on around you, &c. (Unless you plan to play in bars or cafes, in which case intentionally practicing with surrounding distraction, following Thorndike, and John Wooden, may be a necessary component of your practice.)
- Make it as easy as possible to do the thing you want to do. Said differently, minimize the cognitive burden of self-regulation by the structuring your environment to minimize or remove elements your self-regulation would otherwise have to manage or overcome.
This aspect of self-regulation is often overlooked or undervalued. Moving practice away from ‘Discipline’ into an environmentally-elicited response minimizes motivation ‘weight:’ ‘This is where I play music and practice playing music; the only thing I do here is play and practice music; I’m here.’
Talent (capacity, as contrasted with skill)
‘… talent is largely a fictional thing.’ She quotes Bach: ‘I was obliged to work hard. Whoever is equally industrious will succeed just as well.’ I like Bach a lot, but—no.
I think the ‘hard work is it’ illusion comes from an unconscious Cartesian dualism, that somehow our minds aren’t bound by limits we comfortably accept regarding our bodies. Minds are produced by bodies, but we mistake the elasticity of mind for unlimited elasticity. It would be surprising to hear someone say, for example, that there’s no such thing as high-jumping talent. In their much-cited paper, Ericsson et al acknowledge that height and body size may influence success at various sports, but categorically reject any other role for talent. This gave impetus to a number of popular books, Gladwell’s Outliers the best known. Ericsson et al were of course wrong. A recent replication study, also finding their ‘deliberate practice is the whole story’ claim to be inadequate, is here. Talent matters.
Van Betuw is far from an ideologue about it, though, and one expects she’d agree, it’s the journey, not only the destination. After acknowledging differences in learning speed and performance competence, she goes on to remark that ‘when you love something, you’re going to absorb information about it a lot faster than someone who doesn’t have that love.’ ‘Accept and embrace’ whatever native capacity you have and dive into the work. She ends her discussion with Mozart: ‘Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of a genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of a genius.’
Note: After a discussion with Ms Van Betuw, it might be fair to say–my words, not hers, to be clear–that absent developmental difficulties, everyone has enough talent to play beautiful, emotionally rich music.
Structure of daily practice
Set your intention, warm up, do the hardest thing immediately after warm-up. Practice doing it right, which likely requires slowing down. For new pieces, map it out first.
Three elements distinguish Van Betuw from the others reviewed.
- Consciously setting your motivation for each practice session. ‘Take a few moments before you start practicing to connect with your goals and your reasons for playing,’ and binding what’s up for today with the long-term aspiration, connecting the small to the large. Absent experiments with controls, this seems likely to strengthen savings.
- Do the hardest thing first (after warm up). Her reason is quality of concentration, which seems valid, but it seems likely as well that ‘end high’ is an important element. That is, do the hardest thing early, and end with already-learned repertoire (which is generally fun).
- Mapping out new pieces. Mathews and Viloteau advocate this, but Van Betuw recommends a step prior to score analysis, namely, listening to the song. ‘Listen to a piece several times, preferably with the music in front of [you]. Get to know it.’ She recommends a number of different perspectives for this, including singing the melody, either with the recording, self-accompanied on the instrument, or a cappella. Learn the song as a listener prior to learning the song as a performer.
Anyone who’s worked in rehab or who’s watched closely as young children learn to speak will recognize the difference between receptive (what you can understand when others say or do it) and generative or performative (what you can yourself do). In the Introduction I discussed how many authors said that musical intention precedes musical performance. Van Betuw elaborates this further than any of the others reviewed: learn the song thoroughly before beginning the learn to play the song.
She wants us to ask ourselves, what story does this song tell? This is a riff on the same idea as in Viloteau and Mathews, on having the whole in mind when working on the parts. It’s fun to think about songs in story genres: mystery, novel, action/adventure, romance, comedy, slice of life, and so on: an unusual version of (a kind of) cognitive synesthesia. Note that Van Betuw does not suggest deciding whether a song is a romantic comedy! (Or, say, for Wagner, an overwrought melodrama.) The association of vivid emotion with material to be learned aids learning for multiple kinds of content, so conscious attention to the emotional schema of the song is likely to aid learning, including both savings and retrieval.
Aside: if a performer’s story for a song is an escalating fight with a lover or spouse that leads to make-up sex, I think I’d want to hear his or her interpretation; on the other hand, if the mental arc is getting up in the middle of the night to change and feed or nurse the baby—less sure I want to hear that one, however evocative it might be.
Like Kappel and others, she provides ideas for making repetition more fun, and she explicitly warns against robotic playing. Viloteau’s ‘always play music’ echoes here. Like many, she recommends taking breaks and organizing practice in 10-15 minute sections, both of which feature spacing.
Like other authors, especially Iznaola, she emphasizes ease. There’s a different emphasis, though, as she advocates making it as easy as possible on yourself while learning, e.g., by decomposing into small sections, going slowly, &c, which I translate (hopefully correctly) as minimizing cognitive and physical ‘noise’ when focusing on a section. She quotes Louis Kentner approvingly: ‘There is no such thing as a difficult piece. A piece is either impossible – or it is easy. The process whereby it migrates from one category to the other is known as practicing.’ This is a little loosely tethered to reality. (‘There is no such thing as a difficult four-minute mile. A four-minute mile is either impossible – or it is easy.’) Nonetheless, I take her message to be, the goal of practice is learning, learning is hard, so thoughtfully structure your practice to make it as easy as possible to learn.
There’s an interesting tension here. On the one hand, focus deeply and exclusively on the thing to be learned now; on the other, keep the larger musical structures, your long-term goals, the overall and local music-theoretical constructions, the emotional content, and so on all in mind concurrently. Strong assent from Mathews and Viloteau.
Van Betuw recommends a stretching session after each practice. Probably pragmatically good for avoiding injury, and as well a physical reward for completing a session. Beyond that, it is measurably good for long-term learning: it’s not stretching per se but whatever you might do that has you resting after encountering new material.
As well, there’s research on cognitive/perceptual tasks after endurance exercise (they improve!) Stretching to complete a practice session seems good practice—even if not aerobic, guitar practice is physically strenuous, as it requires the trunk to be stable enough for the hands to perform extremely fine movement control for prolonged periods.
Van Betuw is the only author to recognize what you do immediately before, and then after practice influences the learning effectiveness of the practice.
Reward accomplishment
Van Betuw is unique among the reviewed in calling for giving oneself a not-necessarily-musical reward for accomplishment, e.g., mastering a song, completing a book of etudes, &c. ‘If you’re relentlessly strict and unappreciative of yourself and your work, you won’t be as motivated to continue.’ This is a practical insight: the nature of practice is to focus on the region of proximal learning, that is, what we can’t do but believe we’re near to. The mental discipline of continuing to come back daily to our realm of incompetence can be wearing. She says: associate outside-practice rewards with specific behaviors/achievements. The underlying (I believe correct) assumption is that motivation is a learnable skill, which itself requires practice.
Curiosity and going for a walk
We know heterogeneity of paths to knowledge aids retrieval. Van Betuw suggests applying one’s curiosity to current music: if you’re playing Chopin, read about him, about other romantics, about the times and contexts in which they wrote and played. David Russell relates a story about Barrios Mangore’s Una Limosna por el Amor de Dios, that an old beggar would come to Barrios’ door and beg for alms. Russell hears the knocking on the door in the first two measures of the song. (Having heard him recount the story, I now hear it too.)
She also recommends going for a walk as part of a break from practice. She reports that it’s helpful for her in resolving technical and interpretive problems. Walking has been shown to boost creativity; for learning, there is solid evidence it benefits memory, and may even be dose-sensitive.
Summary
Van Betuw broadens the scope of music learning to include where you study, what order you do things in, what you do before practice, what you do immediately after, what you do well away from the instrument, treating motivation as a skill, structuring practice to ‘end high,’ and full integration of fundamental musical goals with day-to-day practice as part of your musical development. In each of these she is well-supported by learning research.
Learning music on guitar 