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Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) was created in California in the 1970s by Richard Bandler and John Grinder. The name asserts a connection between the neurological processes (“neuro”), language (“linguistic”), and behavioural patterns learned through experience (“programming”) which can be altered or harnessed to achieve specific goals in life. Popularly known as “the study of human excellence”, NLP uses the criterion “does this work?”, and gives us the tools and processes to deconstruct how we do things to discover the key elements of a positive strategy to enable us to do something more successfully. Equally, it can highlight negative issues and help us to discard unsuccessful actions and impulses.

In NLP the word “strategy” is used to describe how we organise sensory representations – external and internal images, sounds, sensations and feelings. This determines how successful we are in doing something, assuming we have the relevant skills.

NLP has been much used in sports training after the writer W. Timothy Gallwey formulated a coaching method which employed the “inner game”, that of focus, concentration and self-belief, discarding bad habits, and learning to trust oneself. In simple terms, sports men and women were encouraged to visualise a positive outcome and to imagine the physical and mental processes they would employ to be successful. When a player relaxed and held a picture and feeling of the desired result, the player improved. Mr Gallwey has gone on to write many popular books employing the inner game strategy, including the excellent Inner Game of Music with Barry Green, a manual for overcoming anxiety and self-doubt to achieve excellence in playing and performing. I have found this book enormously useful in my own development as a musician, and a teacher.

These principles of coaching, enhanced by the tools of NLP, can very successfully be applied to teaching and performing music. In my teaching, I use NLP techniques to encourage positive development and learning outcomes in my students. This includes aspects such as:

Positive feedback and reinforcement. The student may have played with errors, but I would never start a teaching session by saying “Oh that was dreadful! So many mistakes! You haven’t been practising this properly, have you?”. I will always try and find something positive even in the most ropey performance. This gets the lesson off to a good start and the student feels rewarded for his/her efforts. Rewards lead to emotional and physical relaxation, which encourages a positive learning experience, and (hopefully) better playing.

Avoid calling attention to incorrect movements and ‘mistakes’. Instead, draw attention to what the student is doing correctly – a good hand position, a lovely tone, an understanding of the technique of arm staccato, and so forth.

Visual, aural and kinesthetic techniques:

  • “Imagine the sound” is frequently heard in my studio. It is a technique I use myself in my own playing, and one I find students respond to easily. By reminding students that the piano can be any instrument – or indeed any sound! – we want it to be, they can imagine the sounds they want to create: trumpets, bells, violins, voices, growls, raindrops, deep bass drums. Hearing, both internal and external, is a crucial element of a successful strategy for learning and studying music.
  • “telling the story” – what is the music about? what kind of picture are we trying to create for the listener? how are we going to tell the story?
  • “what colour is this note/notes/chords/passage”? I’m a grapheme-synaesthete – I see numbers, letters, days of the week, months, and musical keys in colours – and I use this “colouring” of music a great deal in my own study and teaching. A note that is red might have a strong, proud sound; a gold note might be shiny/sparkling; a dark purple chord might be rich and sonorous.
  • How did it feel, when you played that passage beautifully? Can you recreate that feeling each time you play the passage?

Problem solving and seeking solutions Students learn more if they are encouraged to find the answer to a problem themselves, whether technical or artistic. How might one approach this or that passage? What kind of technique (staccato, legato, rotary) might be helpful? What is the composer asking of you at this point in the music? A right answer is rewarded with praise and positive reinforcement, and, hopefully, this will ensure the student remembers the answer/s in the future.

Banishing the fear of failure: Older students, particularly adults, can suffer from the fear of failure, of making a complete hash of their playing in front of teacher, and there can be some very harsh, self-critical and perfectionist internal dialogue going on in these students. If the student is hesitant and anxious, when their level of skill should be allowing them to play more fluently, it is likely that a negative internal dialogue is getting in the way. Most people are unaware of their internal dialogue until it is pointed out to them, and it is often derived from things our parents and teachers said to us when they were either cross with us, or frightened for our safety. NLP seeks to turn negative thoughts and feelings into positive ones. One of the lessons of the Inner Game of Music is the ability  “switch off” that voice inside us that seeks to remind us of our weaknesses, and instead turn to the one that says “I can do it”.

And in performance situations:

Positive thoughts, positive outcomes Performance anxiety can be the bane of the musician’s life, and can develop at an early stage (unpleasant exam experiences, a memory lapse in a concert). Learning how to deal with anxiety is an important part of the musician’s training.  We have different experiences of performance through our individual thoughts and beliefs, and we can use good experiences and positive thoughts to achieve an optimum performance. This is the “neuro” element. Meanwhile, language can be used to enhance learning abilities by simply ruling out any negative comments (“linguistic”). The “programming” is putting these tools into practice in a stressful situation.

Here are some of the strategies I employ when approaching a performance:

  • Continual affirmative reinforcement of my abilities, and a positive outlook when practising.
  • I am well-prepared: I have nothing to fear. Even if I make a small slip, I can recover
  • I know I can do it.
  • My last performance was good. I try to recall the positive feelings and sensations from that performance.
  • No one in the audience is going to boo or slow hand-clap if I make a mistake. In fact, it is unlikely anyone will even spot an error.
  • Just before going on stage, I visualise myself walking across the stage, taking a bow and sitting at the piano.
  • As I approach the piano, I visualise the opening bars of the music and hear the music in my head.
  • After the performance: I try not to dwell on imperfections, except in the most positive “how can I make it better next time?” way. I try not to post-mortem a performance and instead look towards the next one.

Self-belief and identity issues also play a role in creating a successful strategy: while most self-belief must come from within, the positive endorsement and praise of peers, mentors, and colleagues (and even reviewers and critics) can be invaluable to building confidence. How special it is to walk off the stage to a group of friends/colleagues applauding warmly and telling you how well you played!

Another strategy I have employed successfully is not to constantly compare myself to others – something I used to do far too often, in the mistaken belief that I too could be a great concert pianist! (this chart, while somewhat tongue-in-cheek, is a useful reminder of the negative thoughts and feelings musicians can experience). One can look to professional pianists and great performers for successful modes of behaviour, values and beliefs; one can attempt to emulate them, be inspired by them, but one should not seek to compete with them. Instead, one should learn to listen to one’s inner voice, and to trust one’s own instincts and musical integrity. The striving then becomes a personal quest, to meet the standards set by the composer and the literature, rather than by others in the profession.

A good article on the Inner Game of Music by pianist Alisadair Hogarth

The Musician’s Way Blog has many useful articles on strategies for successful practising and confident performing

The Inner Game of Music website

An earlier post on Synaesthesia and music

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I met Chris at one of my teacher’s weekend courses in March 2011, where he impressed us all with a very committed performance of Liszt’s ‘Vallée d’Obermann’.

I started to take an interest in the piano at around the age of 9. My father, a keen amateur pianist and dance band leader, died when I was very young and I have no clear recollection of him.  What he bequeathed to me – apart from some vestiges of his musical talent – were an old but still functioning upright piano in the living room – a Challen, if memory serves – and a huge stack of sheet music which included much of the pianist’s basic repertoire – the Beethoven sonatas, numerous Mozart and Haydn sonatas, Book 1 of the 48, lots of Chopin, almost everything by Mendelssohn and Weber, a few pieces by Liszt and one by Debussy – Reflets dans l’eau, which remains my favourite Debussy piano piece to this day.  Plus some more popular stuff, in particular a selection of pieces by Billy Mayerl…

My mother, a keen music lover, guided me in the early stages and taught me to read music and the rudiments of piano playing. Once I got hold of the basics there was no holding me back. I soon acquired a huge appetite for trying out the pieces available to me – bashing them out note by note, chord by chord, determined to reach the end. The musical results were of no value, but that wasn’t then the point: what it did was to breed in me an ability to sightread and a constant need to seek out new music, both of which have remained with me.

This early phase, before any formal training, culminated in my performance of Mozart’s D minor Fantasy at a primary school concert at the age of 10. How did I manage it? No idea. What did it sound like? I shudder to think – mercifully no recording of this event exists.

Ah, the confidence of youth… How one’s attitudes change. That’s the sort of piece I would now spend weeks or months getting up to performance standard. And even then be dissatisfied with the result.

After that I had lessons with an excellent local piano teacher and went through the usual run of exams – Grades 5 to 8, an LTCL diploma, then on to university where I met many other musicians and had the chance to play in ensembles for the first time. After university I spent a year at the RCM under David Parkhouse. He was a very good teacher but alas I was not a good student; 3 years of the relative freedom of university life had ill prepared me for the relative straitjacket (as I saw it) of music college. Yet despite that the things I learnt from him about piano technique – notably phrasing and how to relax and avoid stress in performance – have stood me in good stead ever since.

My life then followed a predictable course – building a career, marriage, children, a mortgage… I never stopped playing the piano, though time and opportunity were not always on my side. Not to mention the fact that in the pre-digital age living in flats, terraces or semis limited the time in which you could play for fear of annoying the neighbours. Thank heaven for the brilliant Clavinova which I’ve had for the last 10 years and which does everything a mechanical piano does, and more, with only a very limited downside. In the last few years I’ve had a little more available time, during which I’ve become a member of an excellent London music club, the OCMC, which is full of talented amateur instrumentalists, singers, composers and conductors and has opened up to me a wealth of possibilities for making music in groups large and small.

The piano is the ultimate solo instrument and you can be self-sufficient in your music making, as I was for years. But there’s a strong social aspect too, especially if you’re interested in performing in chamber groups and accompanying, or if you’re lucky enough, as I have occasionally been, to play concertos with an orchestra. Through the piano I’ve got to know, and to make music with, a whole range of people I would never otherwise have met and my life is richer as a result. One opportunity leads to another and I now do more playing than I’ve ever done since my student days.

Despite cajoling from friends I haven’t yet tried my luck at any summer schools. I have attended some of Penelope Roskell’s 3-day courses and found them beneficial. The social aspect of gatherings like these is just as important as the playing; it’s another way of meeting fellow musicians, making contacts and exchanging ideas about piano playing.

For those wanting to take up the piano, or who had lessons as children and want to start where they left off, I’d say don’t hesitate – do it. It doesn’t matter what level you’re at; making an effort to create something beautiful, however imperfectly, as well as the sheer physical thrill of running your fingers across the keyboard, are enriching experiences. And there’s surely nothing better to keep body and brain working in harness.

I don’t play scales and arpeggios much – too boring. I prefer to get my exercise through playing real music. It’s the difference between taking a walk through a beautiful landscape and pounding away on a treadmill in a gym.

There’s only one book of exercises that I’ve ever bothered with – the ones by Dohnányi. They’re totally cut to the bone – they make no claim to any musical quality but just concentrate on mechanical processes – scales, thirds, octaves, broken chords, wrist-, arm- and finger-strengthening and flexibility. You can spend five or ten minutes a day on that sort of stuff if you want to and it’s enough.

As for repertoire, I flatter myself that my tastes are fairly broad. They range from Bach and Scarlatti onwards, but I find the 19th and early 20th century repertoire the most congenial – Beethoven (the sonatas are probably the first ‘big’ music that I got to know), Liszt, Chopin, Schumann, Brahms (the early work far more than the later stuff), and somehow I feel a particular affinity with the Central and East European repertoire – Smetana, Dvořák, Janáček, Bartok, and Russian masters like Balakirev, Rachmaninov and Prokofiev. And I’m a recent convert to the music of Nikolai Kapustin, with its unique take on classic-jazz fusion .

Nowadays my appetite for sight-reading new music has to some extent been replaced by an urge to spend longer getting pieces up to a high standard. I practice far more than I ever did when I was younger. Whether that’s because the goals I set myself are higher or simply because advancing age makes learning that much harder, I don’t really know. Probably a bit of both.

Practicing can be a frustrating activity since you often feel that you’re making massive efforts for little gain. Yet it does bring results in the long run if you stick at it. I don’t work to any specific number of target hours but I’m always ready to grab an opportunity – a few spare moments in the morning before leaving for work, waiting while the microwave warms up the food, last thing at night before going to bed as well as longer periods at weekends and on free days. I’m lucky to have an understanding wife who puts up with my presence at the piano and the music that flows from it. Well, not music exactly – more likely the click click of the (to her) silent keyboard, while I hear things with perfect clarity through my headphones.

Despite determined efforts there are some special pieces which remain obstinately beyond my reach. One that has sat for decades on the top of my piano and which I try from time to time to get to grips with, but never quite succeed, is Rachmaninov’s transcription of the ‘Scherzo’ from Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I think this is the greatest piano transcription ever – a near perfect recreation of a near perfect original. There are a few little piquant harmonic twists typical of Rachmaninov but other than that it’s pretty much note for note. The ingenuity of the way Rachmaninov transforms a piece which seems quite unsuited to the piano into an elegant pianistic tour de force leaves me amazed. Oh, and giving a half-decent performance of the Hammerklavier would be rather nice. I like to aim high and challenge myself to the limits. That’s all part of the fun.