Motivation in Music Lessons for Adults
Dodge all the bears on the road
Music lessons for adults come with a lot of challenges. It can be hard not to be demotivated. Learn here how you can ensure to stay motivated while making the most out of your music practice. We take you on a journey through your brain: how does it stop you from learning and what can you do about it.
Shoshin - The beginners' mentality
The other day I came across the term “Shoshin. In Zen Buddhism, this stands for the beginner’s mind. It is the open mind you need in order to learn something, the acceptance that you cannot yet do something (perfectly), the ability to start practicing and trying new things without expectations and preconceptions.
The term Shoshin is actually a summary of what I am going to explain below about what you require to make progress in music lessons as an adult. Everything applies to beginners as well as advanced and even professional students.
Table of contents:
How our brains hold us back in new situations
The first function of our brain is to make sure we stay alive. Therefore, from evolution, our brains are focused on three main things:
- Avoiding danger
- Foraging for food
- Reproduction (not very relevant for this topic)
The anxious brain: "No, I can't"
To avoid danger, people did what is safe and familiar. With anything that is not familiar, we feel fear or aversion, for example. Now that we no longer encounter bears in our daily lives, there are substitute targets of fear.
Take this bear, for example:
This device is the cause of great anxiety, tantrums and overdue rent. In the bank where I worked, this is a device that customers use to log in and make transfers. Granted, it is small, clunky and unrelenting when mistakes are made. But, it’s not dangerous.
It works like this:
1. Turn on the device | “Then how do I turn it on?” “By pressing the triangle in the bottom right corner.” |
2. You see five dashes | “I don’t see those, I don’t see five dashes.” “They’re a bit tiny.” “Oh yeah.” |
3. On those five dashes, you enter the five-digit PIN you came up with. | “What PIN then?” “The one you came up with yourself.” “I don’t remember that one … Oh, maybe I do … Yes!” |
4. You will then see six dashes. | “12345… 123456… YES!” |
5. There you enter the six-digit number you see on the computer. | “That number on the screen in the digipas?” “Yes.” |
6. You will then receive a six-digit code back from the digipas, which you can then enter on the computer. After that you click on log in. | “In het vakje?” “Ja!” “Let’s see… Oh no, the number is already gone again” “Then you were too late filling it in. You can try again. You can also write the code down first before entering it on the computer.” |
After this first failed attempt, people tend to give up. Comments like:
- "This thing is also way too small for my fat fingers."
- "I'm too old and slow for this digipas."
- "I get sick to death of this, I just want to make a transfer."
- "I get all stressed out with this. What a piece of crap."
- "Access through username and password was much easier."
These are variations on:
- "I can't."
- "I don't want to."
- "I just want to do what I already know how to do."
- "It's not my fault."
We make ourselves believe all these things so that we can run away from the new and dangerous situation. We take a nice cup of tea to recover from the horrors of the digipas.
Still, when it does work after several attempts, customers are very proud of themselves. They may still not be very happy with the digipas, but at least it is no longer an angry bear coming to eat them.
Bears in music lessons for adults
There are also a lot of types of bears in music making. These bears are there for everyone, from beginner to professional.
I met a big bear a month before I had an important exam at the conservatory. I got a lesson from a different teacher than I normally had, while the rest of my class watched along. I was already finding this very difficult, because I had started down a path with my own teacher and just wanted to continue on that path until my exam. This teacher wanted me to form the vowel ‘a’ in a completely different way. I had just worked so hard on that ‘a’ and I didn’t feel like singing it in a completely different way. The teacher then tried to make me sing the ‘a’ the way he wanted for half an hour. All I thought was:
- “I want to get out of here.”
- “This isn’t right, this ‘a’ is completely the opposite of what I’ve been working on for two years.”
- “I could never learn this in a half-hour class anyway.”
While the latter is obviously true, it was not at all about teaching me to sing the ‘a’ big and open instead of small and close in half an hour (Even though that teacher may have thought so). What this teacher gave me was a new ability to sing the ‘a’. Later I practiced his version of the ‘a’ on my own and now I can use it to make more color differences when I sing.
The lesson may not have come at the right time for me, but if I had thought, “I get an extra opportunity to make beautiful sounds” instead of: “This guy thinks he can change my whole ‘a’ in half an hour right before my exam, well no way!”, I would have been more open to his comments during the lesson.
The curious brain: "Hey, how do you do that?"
Fortunately, our brains are not just scared and angry at novelty. The brain can also be curious. To search for food, people had to seek out dangers as well and take new paths. So the curious brain wants to learn to deal with new situations, look for patterns in unfamiliar territory and find multiple possibilities.
To be good at learning, your curious brain should be on as much as possible and your anxious brain off as much as possible. Because there is always something remaining of the anxious brain, learning something new can feel uncomfortable.
Adults often have to break through a wall of objections and fears before they can learn with curiosity. So the first step is to recognize in yourself that there still is a wall. Then it is a matter of breaking it down as much as possible to get on the side of curiosity. Fortunately there are already quite a few people who have come up with ways to do this, even specifically for music. I will come back to this later.
- K. Taylor, C. Marienau, Facilitating Learning with the Adult Brain in Mind : A Conceptual and Practical Guide (2016)
Why adult brains may resist learning more than children's brains
From the time you are a baby, you start learning. You learn to crawl, walk, talk and do math. As a baby, basically everything is a new experience. You are constantly learning.
When you learn something, a new connection occurs in your brain.
These connections are formed the way deer form trails through forests. First one trail comes through the forest. Then several tracks come next to it. Until one trail gets deeper and deeper and forms a path. The other tracks now disappear as the deer continue to use the existing, fast path. The path they know is safe. That only gets deeper over time.
When you know something or can do something, this sort of path is formed in your brain. You can always follow this path now, and you don’t have to worry about something going wrong.
In adults, the paths are deeper than in children because they have been walking on them for much longer. It then becomes more difficult to build a new path. Why should you? After all, the old path is faster, takes little energy and you haven’t encountered any bears on it for years?
So if we are going to learn something new and shake up our old brain connections, we must be convinced that it makes sense.
- Brainjo, 9 Ways to Practice Smarter (e-book)
Download hier: 9 ways to practice smarter - W. Karsten, In de muziek : Over musiceren, studeren en het brein (2019)
You learn from your mistakes
You learn from mistakes is a well-known saying and it is true. In fact: without mistakes you learn nothing. Returning to the trails: deers do not choose the most efficient path every time. Sometimes they might detour, lose their way for a moment, or there is a fallen tree on the trail.
Suppose you are studying a new piece on the piano. You get all tangled up in your own fingers during the difficult passage. Your first reaction is: Yes, you see, I can’t do this. But it is quite normal to get caught in your own fingers now and then.
You have taken the wrong path. The further you advance in piano playing, the more rarely you take the wrong path. And if you do lose your way, you know how to find it again more quickly. After all, by now you have created a whole network of paths and routes.
Mistakes cause stress and we are trained to immediately go into defense mode when stressed. We come up with excuses like:
- I know how to do this, but I was distracted by this fly here in the room.
- Sorry, sorry, I went all wrong there… sorry….
- Never mind, there’s no point in doing this piece at all.
I'm right: back to what I already know
People prefer things they already know. This is because ultimately your brain wants to know for sure what is going to happen so it can ward off the danger of potential bears. The brain is constantly playing fortune teller.
In my singing lessons, I encounter many students who, for example, squeeze their throats when singing when a high note comes. They tighten the wrong muscles to force the high note out. After all, they are sure it will come out then. What is unfortunate, is that the note does not sound good and also does not feel good for the student and, moreover, can overstress the voice.
Danger in the music lesson
Your body is ready for this note in advance, while you are thinking “Oh no, here it comes again. We have predicted the note and let our body respond. Instead of letting go of the note and seeing what comes of it, we go into defense mode. We are afraid it won’t come, sounds ugly or is totally out of tune. The result is often that the note does come, but is still ugly and out of tune.
We brace ourselves to ward off the danger of the high note, but with all this control, we put the note all over the place. When we accept this, we can try to sing the high note in a different way.
Your new attempt may be uglier than the pressed assurance note. In fact, with changes, you are a little more likely to encounter a polar bear. Maybe your voice skips into a Tyrolean yodel. When that happens, students often mumble “sorry” and look embarrassed. While I then think, “Look, now something is happening!” Attempt two or three often goes better.
We learn by discovering the error between what we predicted and what the outcome of the prediction was. Only by then trying something different can we build new paths.
- K. Taylor, C. Marienau, Facilitating Learning with the Adult Brain in Mind : A Conceptual and Practical Guide (2016)
- G. Campbell, “Stanislas Dehaene on ‘How We Learn’” in: Brain Science Podcast (ep 167).
- W. Karsten, In de muziek : Over musiceren, studeren en het brein (2019)
- W. Westney, The Perfect Wrong Note (2003)
- P. Iske, Brilliant failures in Healthcare TedX:
TedX P. Iske
Learning music with your whole body: The difference between words and experiences
Making music requires your whole body. There is no music teacher who says, “Just sit back in your rocking chair, grab your book and start.” Learning costs your body energy, because you have to be alert all the time. Because making music primarily uses your fine motor skills, you have to try to be alert to small movements of your body.
Unknown Muscles in practicing music
You sometimes hear people attending a Zumba class at the gym for the first time say, “I have muscle pain in places I didn’t know I had muscles.” Suddenly there appear to be whole parts to your body that you never thought about before. They were always there and you could move them, but you were never aware of how you moved them.
During music lessons, you try to look at how you move with a magnifying glass. Your attention gets to unfamiliar places.
For example, while playing the piano, what do you do with the joints in your fingers? How do I keep my thumb under the neck of my cello? Where is the back of my tongue in my mouth when singing?
Try to be open to new ways of moving during music lessons.
Understanding is not being able to
A teacher may say to you: don’t squeeze that thumb so much. You then probably understand what the teacher means. You say “yes,” and then you squeeze your thumb just as hard again. You have understood what you are doing wrong, but do not yet know how to change it. To understand is not to be able to it. To relax your thumb you need to do exercises. The teacher can of course help you with this.
In this you have your own responsibility as a student: learning is something you do yourself. You have to practice for it. If you run away from the passage with the grizzly bear, it will never get better.
Own responsibility to investigate
For adults, not taking responsibility can be a major barrier to learning. Adults quickly understand explanation. In fact, our education system is geared toward understanding explanations. You can very well understand something and still do something different.
Wieke Karsten in her book In the Music, About Making Music, Studying and the Brain explains very nicely the process of learning music. One of the steps is “investigating”. This is what she says about investigating:
“Plenty of trial and experimentation is useful and fun, and creates a large amount of neural connections. It gives the brain the opportunity to strengthen the ultimately favorite connections and prune away the rest. So trying and experimenting are the opposite of “not being allowed to make mistakes. Giving ourselves permission to explore, so to speak, provides a sense of freedom: the learning process need not be finished. And when the neural wiring begins to take a final shape, we can do something.”
Karsten, In music : On making music, studying and the brain (2019), 27.
The beginner's mentality in music lessons: you can always build new paths
You now know that you can try to build new paths by trying multiple things. This gives you many more options when making music. You can do many different exercises, which is just right for you. If you keep repeating an exercise or part of a piece, you keep walking the same path.
This path does get a lot of attention at that moment, but it only stays in short-term memory. It disappears again when you ignore it. When you keep trying to change something in an exercise, you create multiple paths. This makes for a more effective learning process and the exercise remains better in long-term memory.
Take for example the exercise “ni-ne-na-noh-noo” on one note. This is a basic exercise for singing. The goal is a loose jaw and an open sound. The exercise in itself is not that difficult. That’s why at one point my student Raoul said to me, “Yes, I think I know this exercise now.”
Raoul could sing the right notes, the right sounds and keep the jaw reasonably loose. So yes, indeed, he could perform the exercise well. But that didn’t mean the exercise was finished. For example, he could try to blend the different vowels together even more. Because he just kept repeating “ni-ne-na-noh-noo” aimlessly at home, he didn’t learn anything else from the exercise.
Each time you do an exercise, you can give yourself a different assignment. After the exercise, evaluate with yourself how you thought it went. If something goes well, you can of course repeat it a few times, but still try to hear, see or feel exactly what you are doing when it goes well. This awareness is just as important when things are still not going so well. If you just keep saying to yourself, “I’m done” or “This was crap,” you won’t get better.
Your music teacher can help give you assignments, feedback and points you can pay attention to yourself. YOU are ultimately the one who performs.
- G. Wulf, A. Mornell, “Insights about Practice from the Perspective of Motor Learning: a review” in: From potential to performance: Training Practice and Performance Preparation in Conservatories.
Mess is scary
Not knowing or being able to do something feels uncomfortable. People can twist themselves into strange corners just to avoid admitting they don’t know something. In elementary school, I once peeked at the name of a river in a topography book during a test. I knew all the other questions and would have gotten a 9 if I had gotten that one question wrong. Still, I couldn’t stand it. What nonsense. The impact on my future life was 0%.
Raoul probably thought that after three weeks of doing his exercise he was doing it perfectly now. Otherwise he was underperforming himself and perhaps falling behind others. His reaction was, “I can already do that.” His brain couldn’t handle the fact that he could still improve on that exercise and repeating the exercise endlessly is boring.
Not knowing something is uncomfortable. There is no end to learning to play an instrument better, and there is no clear route from A to B. You can follow a method, but ultimately there are too many possibilities to put into a method. Finding new routes means that a panda bear can pop up just like that. People want structure so they can know and predict more easily. The mess is scary.
Learning to play a scale on the piano
Suppose you want to play a scale on the piano. You learn the notes of the scale and the keys that belong to it. You learn a convenient fingering. Then you also learn how to place your fingers most conveniently. You can now tick off the scale. What’s the next exercise?
Of course not… There is so much more you can do with the scale. How can you play the scale hard or soft? Can you use different rhythms? Can you play with two hands? Can you play the scale very fast? Can you play the scale so that you have no gaps between the different notes?
Then you can still learn to start the scale on all twelve different notes of the piano, then to play it in minor and in major.
The first three methodical steps can be understood quickly: notes, keys, fingerings. It makes sense when you then say, “I can play this scale.” Your brain produces some dopamine and makes you feel really good. And rightfully so, because you’ve learned to play a scale. It sometimes takes some effort to motivate yourself to continue after that. Some people stop completely and keep bragging for years about their first scale or the first two bars of Für Elise.
- L. Ridolfo, Adventures of an Adult Piano Beginner, E-book (2020).
Koop hier voor € 2,69: Ebook voor pianobeginners - G. Campbell, “Are You Sure? The Unconscious Origins of Certainty” in: Brain Science Podcast (ep 173).
- I. Awan, TOP 10 Mistakes Beginner Artists Make. Dit filmpje gaat over beeldend kunstenaars, maar sluit heel mooi aan bij dit verhaal:
Top 10 mistakes beginner artists
Strategies in learning situations: Break through your walls and hug the bears
To prevent you from getting further down the path of your first scale, here are some practical music tips that will help you get more out of your musical instrument and boost your confidence in yourself.
1. Different is fun not scary
You start a new piece. You listen to it on Youtube and you try to play two bars. Your reaction is, “What a stupid piece.” Try to think to yourself if this piece is really not your taste or maybe it’s stupid because you can’t play or sing it yet. Don’t give up right away, but try it for one or two weeks. Maybe you still think it’s awful or maybe it’s still too difficult. Then you can ask the teacher for another piece. But maybe after a little practice it will become fun!
You become curious to figure out the piece so that you eventually master it. You have stopped the disapproving brain so that the curious brain has free rein.
2. Accept what you can and what you cannot yet do
Almost everyone has moments of absolute euphoria or total insignificance. Almost never those moments are objective observations. Unfortunately, for many people, the moments of total insignificance are the majority, and that is how we become demotivated.
Accept what you cannot do, but also what you can already do. This allows you to make goals of what you want to improve in making music. When making goals, also make sure they are appropriate to your progress. If after three piano lessons you set your goal to: I want to learn to play Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto, you will have to work hard for years before you reach that goal.
Chances are you will lose motivation again in the meantime. Your goal should be manageable, such as that you want to learn to move your two hands independently across the piano. Or even: that next week you will be able to play or sing those two bars that are difficult for you. Your teacher can assess your level so you can set good goals.
To achieve your goals, it is important that you give yourself feedback on your playing and singing.
3. Give yourself feedback
Self-reflection. Who has not filled out endless evaluation forms during training or work with questions such as:
- What can you take away from the “Team Building in the Garden” workshop to the workplace and how can you translate this to your own performance?
- Give 3 tips and 3 tops about yourself on how you handled the group dynamics.
Practicing with feedback
You’re playing a song on the piano and your left hand just won’t play along. Why is that? You find out that you only focus on the melody when playing the piano and you don’t hear the accompaniment in the left hand, but play by mechanical feel. Next time you play, try hearing the left hand. Why is this so difficult? You realize that you have never listened to the left hand as its own part. You play only the left hand several times trying to explicitly hear the sequence of chords. Then you play the right hand again. Slowly you manage to focus more and more on the left hand as well.
Without feedback, practicing went as follows
My left hand doesn’t want to go along with this song. I play it again. It fails again. I play it again. It fails again. Never mind, I’ll try again next week. You then get a form of repetitive study that Gabriele Wulf and Adina Mornell call Blocked practice. As mentioned earlier, this form of learning is less efficient than giving varied assignments because what is learned remains mainly in short-term memory.
So for good self-reflection, you really don’t need to fill out endless forms or lecture on your own abilities. Small assignments that keep you awake and send you on an investigation are enough. In music class, the teacher can help you with these assignments, but when studying at home, try to keep them up as well.
Exercise: ask yourself questions before and after playing/singing
For example, after each time you attempt a difficult piece, ask yourself one of the following questions:
- What is already successful? Eg: I sang in tune, I played the right notes
- What is not working yet? Eg: singing a high note, the rhythm was uneven
- Why not? Eg: my breath support is failing, my fingers are too stiff.
- What can I do differently the next time I play this piece? I make sure my breath support is ready in advance for the high note, I focus on the musical line and not on my fingers.
Then you repeat the piece. So it’s best to just ask one of the questions, repeat it, and then pick the next question. You don’t have to know the answer to a question for sure. For example, you may know that the rhythm is uneven, but not yet why. Your goal then can be to become aware of that.
Exercise: record yourself and play it back
It is very good to record yourself from time to time. These can be small pieces. You might find out that what you’re doing doesn’t sound as terrible as you thought. Or you might suddenly hear a note jump out, even though this was not your intention.
The important thing with both exercises is that you try not to punish yourself. And people are very good at punishing themselves.
4. Get past the negativity bias
This brings me to the fourth point: people tend to prioritize negative thoughts over positive thoughts. In Facilitating Learning with the Adult Brain in Mind, this is called the “negativity bias”. When studying and in performances, we suffer a lot from this. Wieke Karsten has categorized these negativity tendencies into circles of attention. She has translated these circles (created by Hans Ebersprächer) from sports psychology to music. There are six circles of attention in which we can find ourselves. As many as four of the six circles are negative, one is neutral and one is positive.
The circles are
- Me and my task – conscious experience
In this circle you are in the music, enjoying making music and being aware of the sounds and how your body moves. - Oh yes – thinking, reflecting and instructing
This is the reflection circle, you think about what you are doing and what you want to improve and how: “Oh yes, I can relax my jaw.” - Oh no
Again, you are reflecting, but your negativity tendency takes over: “Oh no, now I did it wrong again.” - The environment
Instead of focusing on yourself and your playing or singing, you are preoccupied with what is going on around you and what others think of you. “My piano teacher probably now thinks I haven’t practiced at all,” he says. “My neighbors can hear me sing and I can’t sing well yet.” - Past and future
Here you think about what you really should have done and should be doing differently. For example, “I really should have practiced more this week, now my cello lesson will be a flop.” - Existentialism: what am I doing here?
When playing or singing feels like a complete mess, you may find yourself in circle 6. You then no longer know why you are making music at all. You feel that you are worthless and that things will never get better. Your defensive reaction is that you want to quit.
According to Karsten, the key is to practice as much as possible in positive and neutral circles 1 and 2. While performing, you should try to stay only in circle 1. You can train this while practicing and in classes.
Exercise: circle awareness
Every time you study, try to see for yourself if you encounter any of the circles of attention. Who doesn’t let out the occasional sigh or curse when something still fails after several attempts. Or thinks about next week’s lesson that has not been optimally prepared. Then try to go back to circle 1 and 2. Give yourself small and different tasks before you start and reflect on them when you are done (circle 2) or follow completely the music you just love (circle 1).
5. Let go of control
To get to circle 1, we must learn to let go of control. By wanting to maintain control, we often tighten all kinds of muscles that are not at all useful in making music. This takes a lot of energy and effort, which we would obviously rather put into the music itself. Barry Green says the following about this:
“It’s not hard to have the confidence to sing when you’re alone in the shower. You know you can do it – you don’t feel like you have to ‘try’ to do it, so you’re not afraid of losing control. You can start and stop whenever you want, you don’t have to worry about how you sound, you can release your inhibitions – and it’s wonderful. It is difficult to maintain this same confidence when you are faced with a more difficult and important task. It feels very different when you get a master class in piano from Rudolf Serkin. [Famous pianist, 1903-1991]”
B. Green, W. T. Gallwey, The Inner Game of Music (1986) 95-96.
You would prefer to keep the feeling of singing in the shower even when studying at home, in class and when performing. A good practice for this is to alternate challenging pieces with something easy.
Exercise easy/difficult
There are always bits that are already going well in the music and bits that are still a little less so. On the latter you should study the hardest. But of course, if you keep studying those two almost impossible bars all the time, you may get stuck. What you can do then is first play or sing an easy piece. This may also be Twinkle twinkle little star, for instance. Concentrate completely on the music. After that play your more difficult piece. This way you do a mental interval training.
Exercise roleplaying
It is easier not to judge yourself and let go when you are not yourself for a while. For example, while playing, imagine you are your favorite artist, or an athlete like Usain Bolt who has a super focus. There’s a whole audience in front of you who are fans of everything you do. Or you sing like you’re a mountain climber facing the summit of Mount Everest. Choose someone who is meaningful to you and vary with that.
7. Be ridiculous
This is a very good one from Barry Green: don’t worry about whether you’re doing something ridiculous. In my classes, I often do an exercise where students have to stick their tongues very far out of their mouths. This feels very uncomfortable at first. You see them in circle 6 thinking, “What am I doing here?” Then they get more used to it.
Eventually my students are standing on balance boards, doing squats and swinging their arms at random. When they find that it actually has an effect on their sound, they start doing it at home.
Being ridiculous can also be done in music without making strange movements. For example, you can try playing something one bar very loud and one bar very soft. Or omitting half the notes and putting rests in their place. Or making very strange sounds come out of your instrument. This gives you the under-the-shower-singing feeling. You are no longer concerned with how weird you sound, but with making the sounds. In other words, you are training yourself to stay in circle 1.
- W. Karsten, In de muziek : Over musiceren, studeren en het brein (2019)
- G. Wulf, A. Mornell, “Insights about Practice from the Perspective of Motor Learning: a review” in: From potential to performance: Training Practice and Performance Preparation in Conservatories.
- K. Taylor, C. Marienau, Facilitating Learning with the Adult Brain in Mind : A Conceptual and Practical Guide (2016)
The beginner's mentality when making music as an adult
In this way, music allows you to go on an exploration of your instrument. Because you try a lot of different things, you use your curious brain, you don’t get into negativity, and you walk as many paths as possible.
Your music lessons, practice sessions and performances change from endless confirmation of your ignorance to endless questioning of what you can still learn. You discover new patterns in the music and in your movements. And then when a bear comes your way? Then you turn it into a teddy bear!
music lessons for adults: want to start right away with the right structure?
Motivation in Music lessons for adults
Listen, read and watch:
- I. Awan, TOP 10 Mistakes Beginner Artists Make:
Top 10 mistakes artists
- V. Campbell, “Are You Sure? The Unconscious Origins of Certainty” in: Brain Science Podcast (ep 173).
- V. Campbell, “Stanislas Dehaene on ‘How We Learn’” in: Brain Science Podcast (ep 167).
- B. Green, W. T. Gallwey, The Inner Game of Music (1986)
- P. Iske, Brilliant failures in Healthcare TedX:
TedX P. Iske - W. Karsten, In de muziek : Over musiceren, studeren en het brein (2019)
Download cirkels: Download cirkels - L. Ridolfo, Adventures of an Adult Piano Beginner, E-book (2020).
Koop hier voor € 2,69: Ebook voor pianobeginners - Taylor, C. Marienau, Facilitating Learning with the Adult Brain in Mind : A Conceptual and Practical Guide (2016)
- J. Turknett (Brainjo), 9 Ways to Practice Smarter (e-book)
Download hier: 9 ways to study smarter - W. Westney, The Perfect Wrong Note (2003)
- G. Wulf, A. Mornell, “Insights about Practice from the Perspective of Motor Learning: a review” in: From potential to performance: Training Practice and Performance Preparation in Conservatories.