Recovering from Mistakes

As any good musician will tell you, when you make a mistake, you're supposed to just keep going. The goal, though, is to hide the mistake and keep going, hoping no one notices the mistake. 

Of course, some mistakes are incapable of being hidden. A discordant note in the middle of a basic chord is highly noticeable and cannot really be ignored. 

What we hope for, at those times, is that people won't judge us for a few wrong notes - instrumentally or vocally. 

I have been lucky one particular time, and then today during a live-streaming performance of some original tunes. 

The first time was during university. I was in my second year of the Music portion of my combined degree. I was singing my 'final exam'. This required singing on stage for three judges: the three vocal instructors (including my own personal one) who sat at the very back of the auditorium. It was intimidating to say the least. Standing there, unable to see the lonely three individuals in the audience, with only the marvelously talented accompanist to keep me company, finding my place in the crook of the grand piano. I was to sing two songs and they would grade my performance based on every little minute detail: my posture, openness, breathiness, nasal sounds, vibrato, fidgeting, facial expressions, clarity, mouth shape, tongue placement, tension, memorization, pronunciation (especially in different languages), breathing style, and about a hundred more pieces of criteria. 

It gets intense. 

My first song went well, with a few notes that felt either a touch sharp or flat, and a few passing notes that were too straight and missing some vibrato. It was in French, a language in which I have always enjoyed singing, and I loved it. The second song was also a favourite, and was in German. German was obviously more difficult because it is not a language I speak regularly. It is also much more difficult to memorize. Therein lay the problem. 

I forgot the words

In the middle of the second verse I blanked entirely. 

My professor had told us once that we needed to learn how to fake lyrics in a different language to hide problems with memorization. 

I had practiced some authentic German words that I would *hopefully* recall if I ever came to such an embarrassing moment. 

I did it!

I managed to fake enough words in German while I searched my mind for the true lyrics. In all, it was likely only one phrase; maybe 10 words. Either way - not one of the professors noticed. Not even my personal instructor who helped me learn these difficult songs. 

This was a huge win for me, and resulted in straight A's. 

Today was not as dramatic - or even 1% as important. Today I accidentally played a wrong note on the keyboard within one of my original French songs. Luckily, the imposing note happened to still be in the key that I was playing. Very lucky! So instead of simply ignoring the note and playing on, I continued to play that note on the repeated passages of the melodic phrase. I added it into the arrangement so it would not seem like one stray note. 

It's not that big of a deal. All musicians have done this at one time or another in whichever instrument they perform. I did feel a touch of pride, though. 

It is okay to make mistakes. 

No, I recommend making mistakes. It helps you learn how to recover from them, how to conceal them, and sometimes it helps to enhance an arrangement. It is even more satisfying when you prepare yourself for the potential of mistakes (not because you expect to make them but because you want to instinctively know what to do if they occur), and those preparations manage to work! 

Happy mistake-making my musical friends. 

I love My Musical Life!