Never Too Late: On Being A Grown-Up Beginner

One of my favorite books about teaching and learning music wasn't written by a music teacher or even by a professional musician, but by a passionate amateur musician. It's Never Too Late by educator John Holt. 

You may remember Holt as a pioneer of the home-schooling movement, or for his groundbreaking books How Children Fail and How Children Learn. And one of the most interesting things about him is that he himself kept learning, and questioning the limits of learning, throughout his life.

In the early 1960's, at the ripe old age of forty, Holt did something that forty-ish folks really didn't do in those days: he decided to take up an instrument as an adult beginner. After first trying the flute, he eventually settled on the cello, which he continued playing with great love - if not, as he readily admitted, with great skill - until his death in the early eighties. 

Holt's viewpoint was that learning is a process that should be intrinsically motivated, by desire and interest (not extrinsically, by rewards or test scores) and that assumptions about what we can or cannot do often get in the way. In Never Too Late, he memorably wrote: 

"It is not our proper business as teachers... to make decisions and judgments about what people are or are not 'capable' of doing. It is our proper business, above all in music, to try to find ways to help people do what they want to do."

In my experience, most people who want to play an instrument really aren't looking to someday perform at Carnegie Hall. They want to play for their own enjoyment, or to stretch themselves with a new challenge, or to be able to participate in amateur music-making with family and friends.Where is there even room for a "can't" in there?

But most of those people never dare to actually try. I've lost track of how many adults I've met over the years who have told me wistfully about the guitar that's been sitting in their closet for decades, that they really do aim to learn to play "someday," or about how they always wished they'd learned the piano when they were young. "Why not now?" I ask, and they shake their heads in embarrassment, offering the disclaimer that they're obviously too old to learn now.

I'm reminded of one of the twiddles in the sidebars of Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, which goes something like this:

"But do you know how old I'll be by the time I actually get to be any good at it?"

To which the answer is:

"Sure. Just as old as you'll be if you don't."

Life goes on, one way or another. You can either have a life with more music in it, with more learning and laughing and testing your boundaries, or you can have a life that doesn't include those things. Take your pick.

You may never get to Carnegie Hall, even if (as the old joke goes) you practice, practice, practice! But the music is no less sweet for that.

How good can you get, as an adult beginner? I don't know - and neither will you, unless you try. 

Or, in the words of John Holt:

"Of course there are limits. But they are much further out than we think."