The Perfect Wrong Note – Review

I was chatting with a pianist friend I met through the Practising the Piano Online Academy (of which I’m a member).  During our conversation he mentioned a couple of ‘must read’ books.  The first of these was The Perfect Wrong Note by William Westney.  On returning home, I fired up my iPad and ordered it from Amazon.

 

Perfect Practice Makes Perfect

Before jumping into my thoughts on this book, I’d first like to consider some traditional ‘wisdom’.  For we amateur players, there are lots of ‘sound bites’ doing the rounds.  One of these is that ‘Perfect Practice makes Perfect’.  We’re often told to ‘slow it down until you can’t make any mistakes’. 

You might have noticed that very few pianists will ever post videos of their ‘practice sessions’.  Those that do, seem to be sitting there playing away perfectly and interrogating themselves over tiny details.  We might think that this is what our own practice sessions should look like. 

Ultimately, we’re sort of led to believe that wrong notes are the enemy.  We should never play any and, if we do, then we’re not practising properly.

Sound familiar?

When are Wrong Notes a good thing?

Well, The Perfect Wrong Note turns this thesis on its head!  Grossly over simplifying (you can of course get the full details by reading the book), William Westney points out that in every other sphere of life, we learn by making mistakes.  Indeed, we all know the famous ‘the man who never made a mistake never made anything’ quotation.  In fact, there are a couple of very similar ones – one attributed to Roosevelt and another to Einstein.  Therefore, why, when learning piano, should we believe that ‘mistakes’ are to be avoided at all costs.

Here’s a quotation from The Perfect Wrong Note of that traditional thought process:

• The mind-body system is like a computer, retaining with exactitude all the information it receives. 
• Therefore, if we want accurate results, we must feed the system only accurate raw data. 
• Even casual mistakes become learned permanently.
• Mistakes should be prevented, since they will eventually mess up everything. 
• Mistakes can be prevented by hesitating, slowing down generally, playing with extra care.
• Mistakes are generally a sign of shoddy, inattentive practicing.

*Chapter 3

Only part of the picture

The first thing to note is that William Westney doesn’t say that this is ‘nonsense’.  Clearly, there are elements of common sense in there.   However, the danger is that we can tend to take this advice in isolation and believe that it must be applied universally and rigorously!

However, let’s think about how we operate in other areas of life.  Let’s say we’re learning to shoot a bow and arrow (I’ve been watching Sherwood recently on the BBC).  We can imagine that initially, we’ll miss the target more than we’ll hit it.  Indeed, missing the target actually helps us.  We work out where we went wrong and we adjust our aim.  We try again, miss again, adjust again, then try again.  Fundamentally, practice on the archery range will be a case of trial and error until finally we start hitting the target more often than we miss it.  

I’ve used this analogy as William Westney makes the comment in The Perfect Wrong Note that often piano practice can equate to Target Practice!  Again, over-simplifying his thoughts so that they fit into a short review, the only way we’ll get good at hitting the target is by ‘going for it’.  No over thinking, no hesitation, no timidity. We need to ‘relinquish control’. If we end up with a ‘juicy mistake’ (the title of Chapter Three), all the better.  This is what he calls an ‘Honest Mistake’.  We then need to look on this honest mistake as an opportunity to learn.  It is only ‘shoddy, inattentive practising’ if we simply repeat the same action and expect a different result (another Einstein quotation). 

The Honest Mistake

Indeed, the way he explains this is:

How can you tell if the mistake was an honest or a careless one? If you weren’t paying attention at the time, and you didn’t take the mistake seriously and deal with it immediately, it was careless, a mistake that will cause you trouble later on, just as we’ve always been told. But if you were paying attention and the mistake happened anyway, it’s probably honest.

The principle being that when we have an Honest mistake, we have something to learn from!

How reliable is this idea?

Now, it’s all well and good to make statements like this as sound bites.  Often such sound bites do sound so logical don’t they!  Equally, it’s easy to draw parallels and apply them to piano.  For example, we’re told that when going to the gym, it’s ‘no pain, no gain’.  Yet, most people have understood that whilst this might be true enough if you’re trying to build lots of muscle, it won’t work when applied to practising the piano.  Yet years ago, people did believe we needed to build ‘muscles’ in our fingers – hence Schumann’s famous torture machine!

A well developed thought process

What is reassuring about The Perfect Wrong Note is that William Westney develops this thesis over eleven detailed chapters.  He starts off with how children spontaneously react to music and then passes through the practice room, the teacher, the student and even the masterclass as he develops the ideas.

In full disclosure, I had a similar, though of course less developed thought, that I nicknamed the ‘manageable mistake’ – see my YouTube video.  My idea was that thinking there will be ‘no mistakes’ is probably unrealistic.  We need to make mistakes so we know what to correct.  My sub-conscious bias therefore will have drawn me to William Westney’s views – after all, we all like things that reinforce our beliefs!

Essential reading for both Students and Teachers

However, that aside, I would most definitely highly recommend this book to any student or teacher.  It’s a little gold mine of ideas.  Here, I have mentioned only the main idea, the book itself is of course much more comprehensive.  I found myself highlighting away as I was reading it! It is a book that I will most definitely read it again and further reflect on what it can teach me.  The idea of ‘relinquishing control’ might sound strange.  However, as I wrote once having watched Martha Argerich on YouTube, it seems that she plays with absolute abandon.  She just throws her hands in the general direction of the notes and they land ‘as if by magic’!  Once you’ve read the book, I’m sure you’ll wonder, like me, if there isn’t a connection here!

You can get The Perfect Wrong Note on Amazon as either hard copy or Kindle (#adv).