Private music instruction can get fuzzy on boundaries. As a student, it’s easy to fall into the mindset that you have to heed every piece of advice or every demand made by your teacher. And not all teachers are the quickest to identify and interrupt this mindset. Many teachers see student behavior like this as positive because frankly an obedient student makes the teacher’s job easier. But in the long run…

We often are practicing and performing the same pieces for weeks, sometimes months and years on end. As we do this, it’s common to lose sense of our joy of playing and find ourselves burned out. When you get to that point, where the idea of practice is either is just so boring, daunting, or otherwise negative, what do you do?