Learning to Play Music When You are Too Old to Ever Get Really Good At It.

The Why and a Little of "How" to do this

Why write about this? Because there are not many of us and almost all music pedagogy is directed to the young and malleable. Written material, music schools, music camps, and music instruction all assume you are a beginner who is in elementary school and will need a bit of discipline and supervision to do this.

Learning to play music as an adult who is self-motivated is an anomaly.  I would love to hear from fellow travelers who are also taking this trek.  Different opinions are what makes almost everything in life more interesting, so please comment and share your experiences and thoughts.  So to prime the pump, here goes one such adventure…. It will be in irregular installments.

A story for no-one in particular not even for me as I already know it…at least so far.  But if there is someone out there contemplating learning to play a musical instrument for the first time; someone well past the usual ages for taking that project on, here is what I have discovered by taking that trip.

I was 68 when a combination of opportunity and latent interest collided and I began to learn to play the flute.  Why the flute?  Well, several Christmases before a friend gave me a plastic penny whistle that was packaged with a scant instruction manual.  There were only 6 holes to cover to play a few simple tunes.  I tried it and was delighted to be able to make a simple, recognizable tune.  I had never had a music lesson or learned to sing beyond the usual attempts in a resonant shower.  I can’t whistle or carry a tune do being able to play tones predictably was its own big reward.

I wanted more and so bought a few inexpensive Irish whistles and instruction books.  Metal tubes sound very different from plastic ones and seemed less a toy.  Copying what was shown in the fingering chart illustrations soon was not enough and I resolved to learn how to read music.  How hard can it be?  There are just five lines and four spaces to work with, right?  This did not seem like a big deal, but it was.  (My flute teacher might say still that it still is.)
I started off just knowing the treble clef’s names for lines and spaces.  But there are sharps and flats and enharmonic and time allotments to work out, let alone rhythms.  And you have to translate all this quickly into words that lead to finger movements and do it accurately to make sounds into music.

And then there is the instrument itself to make respond to your wishes.  A penny whistle just asks for a little air blown down the tube, but the flute wants a stream of air of just the right strength, width and angle to hit the sharp edge of the hole in the head joint just so. Do it wrong and you are punished.  To play C in four octaves requires a lot of air finesse. So the true beginner is having to learn a lot of nuts-and-bolts before we even think about dynamics or tone control.
The reason many adult musical instrument beginners don’t stay the course is that we know what the instrument is capable of when in skilled hands and that is what we aspire to do.