Abstract
Musicians tend to strive for flawless performance and perfection, avoiding errors at all costs. Dealing with errors while practicing or performing is often frustrating and can lead to anger and despair, which can explain musicians’ generally negative attitude toward errors and the tendency to aim for flawless learning in instrumental music education. But even the best performances are rarely error-free, and research in general pedagogy and psychology has shown that errors provide useful information for the learning process. Research in instrumental pedagogy is still neglecting error issues; the benefits of risk management (before the error) and error management (during and after the error) are still underestimated. It follows that dealing with errors is a key aspect of music practice at home, teaching, and performance in public. And yet, to be innovative, or to make their performance extraordinary, musicians need to risk errors. Currently, most music students only acquire the ability to manage errors implicitly – or not at all. A more constructive, creative, and differentiated culture of errors would balance error tolerance and risk-taking against error prevention in ways that enhance music practice and music performance. The teaching environment should lay the foundation for the development of such an approach. In this contribution, we survey recent research in aviation, medicine, economics, psychology, and interdisciplinary decision theory that has demonstrated that specific error-management training can promote metacognitive skills that lead to better adaptive transfer and better performance skills. We summarize how this research can be applied to music, and survey-relevant research that is specifically tailored to the needs of musicians, including generic guidelines for risk and error management in music teaching and performance. On this basis, we develop a conceptual framework for risk management that can provide orientation for further music education and musicians at all levels.
Highlights
A century ago, sound recording technology transformed performance
Students and musicians can be made more aware of the informative nature of their errors
Empirical error studies in music performance have allowed errors to be classified into categories (Palmer and van de Sande, 1993; Repp, 1996; Flossmann and Widmer, 2011), yielding insights into the planning and execution of complex tasks as, e.g., performance
Summary
A century ago, sound recording technology transformed performance. The main source of classical music became error-free studio recordings by great artists. Music students correspondingly strived for immaculate performances, becoming less adventurous and individual. Exaggeration of the importance of errors at the expense of other aspects of musicianship affected university admission procedures, competitions, instrumental teaching, and learning. The classical music world increasingly identified with a perfectionist, error-free esthetic that contrasted with, and increasingly diverged from, the more unconventional improvisatory esthetic of jazz (Hamilton, 2003). In the words of Martin (1996–2007), “Jazz is an art form that must strive for greatness on all levels; . .) if the artists are not encouraged to take risks, how can greatness ever be achieved? There are no sure things in life or art.” In the words of Martin (1996–2007), “Jazz is an art form that must strive for greatness on all levels; (. . .) if the artists are not encouraged to take risks, how can greatness ever be achieved? There are no sure things in life or art.”
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