The title of this episode, dear listener, is an actual sentence an adult man said to me recently. We were talking about what was preventing him from performing music, despite the passion he has for listening to it. Like a lot of people, he had internalized the belief that he was missing something, some innate talent or capacity that enables other people to make the music he loves. With love, he is 100% wrong, and if you believe something similar about yourself, well, you’re wrong too! This time, I want to talk about why the process of learning music can feel so intimidating, and how much your life can change if you give yourself permission to start.
Michèle Voillequé is a singer and a voice teacher living in Berkeley, California.
Yes, you can sound better! Opt-in for a free video training on the home page.
You can subscribe to Can’t Wait to Hear You wherever you get podcasts. If you have a question about your voice or how you’re using it, please email letters@mvmusik.com.
Our music is thanks to Katya and Ada.
The show is edited by K.O. Myers at Particulate Media.
TRANSCRIPT
Your voice is unique to you. It grows as you grow. It changes as you change. If you’re curious about the relationship between your voice and your body, your heart and your mind, welcome. My name is Michèle Voillequé and I can’t wait to hear you.
Someone said to me the other day, “I love music, but I’m not musically inclined.” And I replied, “Well, love is an inclination, so what exactly do you mean by that, that you’re not musically inclined?”
“Well, all of my friends growing up, um, played instruments and learned how to read music, and had a lot of fun in band and orchestra, and that just wasn’t me.”
And I said, “So, do you think there’s something fundamentally wrong with you that you don’t know how to read music?”
And I don’t remember whether he said yes or no, but I said, “Reading music is a skill. Just like learning to read or learning to do math is a skill. And if you’ve never tried to learn to read music, you’re not going to know how to read music. Your friends weren’t born with a separate musical brain attachment. They didn’t come out of the womb reading music. They learned how to do it. And you can learn how to do it too. You’ve learned how to do other things.”
This person was a grownup, has kids, has a job, you know, they’ve learned things. They know how to learn. They can read texts. And the skill for reading music is the same skill as reading written language.
“You don’t know how to read music simply because you haven’t ever tried to read music. You can’t hold that against yourself. That’s not fair.”
And we talked a bit more about his musical upbringing or lack thereof. And he said that in his school, everybody had to take music class and there was a moment when they had like an instrument petting zoo and you got to pick the instrument that you wanted to learn, and he really wanted to learn the trumpet.
And the people in his house thought it would be really good if he didn’t learn to play the trumpet, but learn to play something else. I don’t remember what the something else was. But it was something quieter, definitely not a trumpet.
This is not the first time in my life that somebody’s told me they really wanted to play the trumpet and their family really didn’t want them to learn to play the trumpet.
Anyway, so he tried the other thing for like six weeks or something, and completely lost interest and didn’t continue with music, because he didn’t like the instrument he was playing. That doesn’t mean you’re not musically inclined. That means he wanted to play the trumpet and he didn’t get to play the trumpet.
I had the great fortune of having, I have the great fortune of having parents who love music and even though neither of them play an instrument, they loved going to the symphony and to the opera and they would take me as soon as they could.
And I remember being at a symphony concert and one of them said, “Michèle, so of all those instruments up there, which one do you like the most? Which one do you think you’d like to learn how to play?”
And I pointed straight to the violin section and said, “That one.” I really wanted to learn to play the violin. I loved how it sounded, and that stuck.
And I got to learn how to play the violin, and I love the violin.
And I will tell you that even though cellos are also stringed instruments, the people who gravitate toward cello are different from people who gravitate toward the violin.
And the people who want to play the piccolo are not like the clarinetists entirely. Instruments have different timbres and human beings have different personalities, and timbres, if you will.
And I really believe that if a child wants to do something musical, they will gravitate toward the thing that harmonizes with them.
And so if you’re a parent or a grandparent and you have a child and you think they should have music lessons because that’s a thing that supportive families do is help encourage a musical education or whatever. You had music lessons. Do yourself and the child a favor by giving them an opportunity to pick for themselves.
There’s nothing that says that starting with the piano is the only and always appropriate thing to do with a little one to give them a musical education.
So many of my students were given piano lessons, or forced to take piano lessons, often as they’re telling me the story, it’s, “forced to take piano lessons,” and they did, and they learned how to read music a little bit, and they hated every minute of it, and they’ve never gone back to it, and they never want to see a piano again.
I’m not sure that did anybody a lot of good.
So that’s an, uh, an aside, but back to my conversation with this man, talking about his musical upbringing or lack thereof, and how his friends were with music, who were playing instruments that they liked and they got really good at it. And I pointed out, yeah, they got really good at it probably because they liked what they were doing.
We practice when we like what we’re doing. If you’re not interested in the instrument, or the song, or, the thing, whatever the thing is that you need to practice, if you’re ambivalent about it, you’re not going to practice.
But if you love it, if you’re jazzed up by it, if it excites you, it’s hard, but you really want to make progress, you really want to do it, you will practice and you will get better because you’re doing the thing that you love.
And while this isn’t true with everything, right? You can’t hope to love balancing your checkbook or does anybody have a checkbook anymore? Uh, you might not love keeping track of your finances, like monitoring your credit score or making sure you’ve got money in the bank, right?
You might not love doing that, but you do need to learn how to do that to be a successful person in 21st century America. That’s something that you need to practice to get good at and the practice, you know, you might not enjoy very much.
But other things like picking up a new sport or a musical instrument or learning a song or memorizing a poem. Oh my goodness. If you hate the poem, there’s no way you’re gonna memorize it, right? You’re just not.
Or you will, if you’re in school and you have to memorize the poem and you have to take the test. You will have a young enough brain that you can just cram it in there, spit it out, and then it’ll be gone. And you’ll let go of it, probably, as soon as you possibly can, if you don’t like it. Right?
You can make it work, but if you love the poem, if you love the way it sounds, if you love the way it looks on the page, it won’t be any effort for you to work to practice to memorize it.
Notice I didn’t say it won’t be any effort for you to memorize it. There is effort. The difference is that you enjoy the effort, so it doesn’t feel hard. Right? You’re not suffering.
Another thing we talked about was how difficult it is to be patient with ourselves in adulthood when we’re learning something. Because it’s been years since we’ve had to learn anything, probably, really new.
Right, when you’re a young person, everything is new. Absolutely everything is new. And you’re learning all of the time because you can’t avoid it, your survival is dependent upon you learning things like stoves are hot and ice is cold and gravity is real. And stairs can be complicated. All kinds of things.
But once you’ve grown up, left home, gotten a job, been in the job for a little bit, you probably haven’t had to learn anything new. And if you have had to learn something new, you might have bitterly complained about it.
Like when the online portal changes, like you’re used to logging into your bank in a particular way, and then they redo it, and you have to figure it out again.
Or even, passwords expire, and so you need to create new passwords. And that’s not like a big moment of learning, you just have to create a new password, but you’re irritated by it. Like, why do I have, why?
And part of the irritation is that we feel like we don’t have any bandwidth for that. Our brain is so full of all of the things that we’ve already needed to learn that we don’t need another hiccup, thank you very much. We just need things to run the way that we believe, we’ve learned that they ought to be running.
And so when you’re trying to do something big, like learn a musical instrument, your voice or an instrument that’s outside your body, as an adult, it can be really difficult to be patient with yourself while you sound bad, because you’re going to sound bad a lot of the time.
Even for me, I’ve been a musician pretty much my whole life, I still struggle with sounding bad. I don’t like that part, but I do sound bad because I am a human and I’m learning. When you’re a musician, you don’t ever get to stop learning.
Oh, this was a great conversation that I had with another singer and teacher about deciding to become a musician is really committing yourself to being a lifelong learner.
Because what musicians do is they learn music. And we’re always learning new music. And so the best thing you can do for yourself is to figure out how you learn and to get better at learning. Because basically being a musician is learning. You’re learning all the time. Such a helpful frame.
So if you’ve been in a kind of career or in a kind of life where you are not learning all the time, when you step into a learning environment, it’s going to be painful. I mean, psychologically painful.
It’s just important to give yourself grace, to hold yourself gently, to know that you’re going to be frustrated. Frustration is normal. And hopefully to have a teacher or other kind of support system around you to help you make it through. Because if you persist, you will sound less bad. You will even sound good.
But you won’t sound good if you don’t let yourself sound bad. That’s just one of the drags of being a person. I wish I could fix that, for you and for me. I wish we could just open our mouths and have it come out perfectly, but it just doesn’t.
And the last thing this man and I talked about was about how we learn how to use our voices by imitation.
And so if you grow up in a family where people are singing, you’re going to learn how to sing because you’re going to imitate the people around you. And you’ll learn to sing earlier and you might learn to sing better than other people because you had the benefit of an environment that was supportive of singing.
But if you grow up in a family where people aren’t singing, that doesn’t mean that you’re not going to be able to sing. It just means you’re going to learn later. You might have some more hang ups about singing, especially if your family is one of those families who says, “We’re not singers, we’re not musicians,” and that’s kind of a badge of honor.
“None of us can carry a tune,” like that’s just what it is to be in that bloodline. So that can make it harder to learn how to sing, I haven’t found any scientific truth to that, that if your parents don’t sing that you can’t sing.
My parents do not sing and I sing really well. And I learned later in life and it took me a lot more effort to learn how to sing well than other people I grew up with.
When I was in high school, I was playing the violin in the pit orchestra for the high school musicals and looking longingly up at the stage, wishing that I could be one of those girls in the pretty dresses who the boys thought were cool and, you know, who were popular.
And instead, I was down in the pit. Orchestra pits are, I don’t know the etymology, I don’t know why we call orchestra pits “orchestra pits,” but you know, when you’re 14, 15, 16, and you wish you were different than you were, and you’re in the pit, it’s the pits.
Yeah, wishing that I was like them.
And they were from families who sang, had more singing resources at their disposal than I did. And that’s a moment that I survived. Right? And playing in the pit was kind of fun. Cause you know, the orchestra has its own vibe. We have our own jokes. We have our own way of being with one another that also is really sweet.
And there is an upside to not worrying about everything about your hair and makeup and your outfit. As long as we were in black, we were clean, we were dressed in black, we were good. There’s something really nice about that, too.
And I guess this gets to “giving yourself grace and space to learn” is to acknowledge that when you decide to take on a project, to pick up an instrument, to bring more music into your life, to learn a new, learn a new song, take on a new identity or an expanded identity as a creative person – when you decide to do that, you may be very aware that you’re doing something that your family doesn’t support or doesn’t have time for, doesn’t want to have anything to do with.
And even if you’re a grownup, like you’re, living on your own, you’re paying your own bills, like you don’t need the financial support or protection of your parents anymore, stepping outside of the family groove can be hard.
Even if you’re even later in life, and your parents are gone, it can be hard to step outside that family groove.
So just to, I’ve said this before, give yourself grace, understand the magnitude of what you’re doing, not because therefore you shouldn’t do it because it’s a big thing, but just that it’s not nothing.
And for many, many people, deciding to access more creativity, bring more of the arts into their everyday lives, that is such a life giving, psychologically healthy step for them.
It’s a step I believe everybody should take. If you can find a way to bring more art, joy, creativity, music, drawing, wonder, awe into your life, it will improve your quality of life.
So, this, podcast today or this rant today started with the phrase, “I love music, but I’m not musically inclined,” and I just want to say that, that’s not a sentence.
Love is an inclination. If you love something, you are inclined toward it. You might not be good at it. You might feel shut out from it, but you are inclined toward it. And our inclinations, I think, are worth listening to. They’re worth honoring.
If you make any lists at the end of this year, I’m recording this in December of 2024, if you make any lists, make a list of what you love, what you want more of in your life. And maybe for 2025, allow yourself to have a little bit more of whatever is on that list.
Life is so short and life can be so hard. We need more joy. We need more art. We need more love. Thanks so much for listening.
If you enjoyed today’s episode, please rate and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new people find the show. Subscribing ensures you’ll learn about new episodes as soon as they come out. If you have a question about singing or speaking or being, please send me an email at letters@mvmusik.com.
That’s letters at M as in Mary, V as in Victor, M U S I K.com.
Transcripts and show notes are available on my website. You can subscribe to my newsletter there, too. Can’t Wait to Hear You is produced in conjunction with Particulate Media. I’m your host, Michèle Voillequé. I can’t wait to hear you.