Dear readers, hi! What are you working on, in your practicing right now?
Your answers might include: old pieces, new pieces, your pedaling, your scales, trying to memorize the darned thing, trying out play-and-MOVE, working on your phrasing, unclenching your teeth…. As you well know by now, Pride & Practicing is devoted to offering support for all kinds of practicing issues, at all stages of the process. Today, let’s talk about starting something new.
First of all, how do we know when to start a new piece? It could be when we’re sick and tired of our old pieces, feeling bored and uninspired. Or when we feel stuck and don’t know where to go next with what we’ve been working on. Or maybe it’s after we’ve performed what we were working on before, or otherwise had some sort of experience of “closure” (for now!) with it. Or maybe it’s when we find something new (whether a specific piece, a composer or a style) just calling to us, never mind why! Or we might start some new piece when we feel we’re “supposed to,” when there is a narrative in our mind that says “time’s up!” on whatever we’ve been practicing—some arbitrary idea built of shoulds that takes hold in our mind (again: never mind why. There’s that other newsletter again—I seem to keep mixing them up!—and there’s practicing mirroring life in the worst as well as best of ways). Perhaps we want more variety in our practicing & playing experience: we might seek out a new piece to provide us with variety or balance. Or because our family begged us to. I could go on….
But—for whatever reason, the fact is, we are starting that new piece. All I mean to say, first of all, is let’s ask why! In the case of at least a few of the scenarios I just enumerated, may I suggest that a quick tour through the Pride & Practicing archives might refresh our approach to our current pieces, or point us in a new direction that bears fruit? Don’t get me wrong: surely it is never bad or wrong to learn something new! A quandary all pianists share: so much music, so little time!!! I only bring this up because I grieve at times for all the pieces we abandon too soon, perhaps even when we are just on the cusp of really being able to play them, understand them, enjoy them. AND because I think this asking why can help us as we do embark on our journey with our new piece.
Having made the decision to start learning Piece X: we know why we’re doing it, so we have that out of the way. And THAT means: don’t question it any more! Instead: commit to it. Make a firm decision to do this! That doesn’t necessarily mean we’re setting ourselves some kind of unrealistic expectation (read on). It just means we’re not going to flit around, in and out, maybe yes, maybe no, kind of, I changed my mind—oh, wait, I really want to! But…. None of that. Why not? Because it’s tedious and wastes our precious energy that we could be spending practicing! Having decided to work on it, now we can relax and roll up our sleeves. Our commitment may take different forms, for each of us in different circumstances and with different kinds of material. Maybe we give it a month. Maybe it’s the Concord Sonata and we give it a year! Maybe we say, it’ll be 20 minutes a day for a week and then we re-assess.
In fact, that re-assessing is crucial, because of course at the start, we are not necessarily in a position to know what the piece needs, how long it will take. And once again, please please PLEASE, no assumptions about how long learning this piece “should” take! If we set a timeline as we make this commitment to the piece, let’s be clear: that timeline is not for the music, but for US. It has nothing to do with how long learning this piece may take. It only gives us a window of time in which to not question ourselves every 5 minutes. When our time-period is up, having met our initial commitment: a) we’ll feel good about having done that, don’t you think? b) And we’ll have a pretty good sense of how well we like this piece, whether it’s a fit for us, whether we want to take it farther; and c) have at least a somewhat more realistic picture of the time and effort needed. If we are already experiencing mastery with this piece: hooray! If we begin to glimpse that it may take a decade or more, we may choose to re-evaluate.… Etc.
And that brings us to: knowing why we want a new piece, and having selected it, let’s know which bucket to put it in. Remember this? We’ll go about things differently, and hold a different set of expectations, if our new piece is one for which it’s realistic to think we can play it as well as it can be played within a reasonably short time frame (a “mastery” piece)—or if, on the other hand, it’s one we know will be our equivalent of climbing Mt. Everest, requiring the building up of many challenging pre-requisite skills, bringing said skills together through lengthy and rigorous training, many trips to base camp before attempting the summit (in other words, a “stretching” piece.) (I am assuming Mt. Everest is a stretch for you, but I could be wrong.) So: what is it? Mastery piece, stretching piece, fun piece, party piece, piece to relax with at the end of the day? Skill-building piece, emotional outlet piece, intellectual stimulation piece? Peace piece? Or—just Mozart! Enough said!—? Whatever it is for you, put it in the right bucket, so it can be comfortable and you can too. Hold expectations that fit the bucket this piece belongs in. Don’t demand the impossible of yourself with your stretching piece—but allow yourself to stretch (and don’t assume you know how far you’ll go!). Don’t sell short your expectations with pieces that are easy for you: play them as beautifully as they can be played.
Now we’re ready! NOW the fun begins!
• Re listening to recordings: I would suggest either not to, at this stage, or to listen to several different ones, for reasons discussed here.
• If we have the patience before diving in, it could be great to use this…..
• If we don’t have that patience, we could start by crashing through the whole thing, sight-reading it to the best of our abilities, giving ourselves a rough grand tour. It is my hope and strong suspicion that doing this once or twice may help us find the patience we need to go back to the link above….
• Then, we break it into sections. Choose a section (it doesn’t have to be the beginning! Though for anything in sonata form or a fugue, starting at the beginning is definitely advised, lest we misunderstand what’s going on there in the middle of page 3 where we dove in). Having chosen a section to start with, guess what? We commit to it! And that means, we don’t crash ever onwards. Instead: we sight-read through our section once or twice more, if we like, and then we settle in to really get to work. We might give ourselves a sort of mini-timeline for our commitment to this first section, if we find that helps: I’m spending the next 15 minutes on these 3 lines. Or: This week I will focus on the first 5 pages only. Or: today, it is just these four measures. Again, the timeline is about, and for, US, not the piece, and if we quickly realize we’ve miscalculated badly, we can always adjust. But still: commit, then, to that re-adjustment. Give things a chance to work! The discipline of not going on too soon is one that helps a lot when the piece is new.
We now have our designated practice section, and we’re diving in.
First step: evaluation. What’s there in the music? What’s there or not there in our playing, here at this slightly beyond sight-reading stage? What is needed? CHECKLISTS can help here, and there are several in the Pride & Practicing archives (see here and here), but here’s a quick and basic one to consider:
Notes
Fingering
Dynamics
Articulation
Pedaling
Next step: practice tools! Of course, what we find in our evaluation informs what we do next. We practice in different ways for different things (and please, never use this one on a new piece!). We’ll each develop our repertoire of ways of practicing—a balance between settling in with tools we really like and come to know well, and also flexibility and willingness to try things differently, when we sense that that’s what’s needed. The most important thing is that we have a toolbox, and since you are a reader of Pride & Practicing, I know for sure that yours is stocked with tools that work. We can trust them! If you truly use the practice tools here, carefully and in good faith, you will find that they can be relied upon. (And if you don’t use the practice tools here, maybe today’s the day to subscribe….)
To be a little more specific (although all of our situations are different): we’re starting a new piece, right? And if we want our playing to be fluent, not stumbling and halting, let’s build that in from the early stages of working with our new piece! How do we do that? By skillful choice of practice tools, which very often means Once and Only Once, Overlap, and the mother of all practice tools ….. Here’s a useful yardstick with any new piece: Am I able to play this phrase, and this phrase only, with everything on that list above, with fluency (i.e. no hesitations)? If so: I am ready to go on to the next phrase. If not: the areas that cause me not to answer “yes” point me to my next practice tools….
Next: re-evaluation. We made a “diagnosis” of sorts, of what was needed. We chose our tools accordingly, and applied them. Now what?
Now the questions are: is it working? and what next? Regarding the first of those questions: if yes, hooray! We feel our progress, we’re on a roll! (Even so: do whatever that thing is you’re doing, that thing that’s working so well, more times than you think you need to—just do it for fun, and be amazed at the results!) If the answer is no: then things become more subtle. Is it because it’s the wrong tool? That’s possible. (The wrong medicine; maybe our “diagnosis” needs correction.) But before deciding we’re using the wrong practice tool, let’s also ask whether the tool just needs more time (i.e. take this medicine for 14 days—do not expect results overnight). Or if the tool needs a different daily dosage (try 10 perfect repetitions of that hard fingering instead of two), or a different application (take it on an empty stomach… Dear readers, this usually means SLOWER). Sometimes, when we ask ourselves if it’s working, we sense that things are moving in the right direction but at a barely discernible pace—in which case, we can sleep on it and see how things feel tomorrow.
As this process goes on (evaluating what’s needed; selecting practice tools; doing the practicing; and re-assessing), we move ever forward with our piece. It doesn’t always feel forward though! Sometimes we really feel it is not linear; we are spiraling around, coming up against the same obstacles. But approaching our practice like this, we can’t help but grow. We keep hearing more. Each time we address some of those same “chronic” issues (those pedal changes again!), we deepen our understanding and further our skills. The practice is always fresh, because at each moment, we choose skillfully how we’re going to work on what’s needed now. The tools grow & change with us. The time comes to try Wrong Notes On Purpose after all! We are clear about what we’re doing; we commit to it (macro and micro, as in: I’m giving this piece a month. And for right now: I’m not going on to the next phrase until I have the things I’m working towards in this one). Having made our commitments, we don’t get in our own way with second-guessing or jumping to unfounded conclusions (in either the macro or micro contexts). We simply practice. And—have you felt it? We are really practicing now, and the time flies by, and the new piece becomes a beloved staple of our repertoire, and we ask ourselves….. is it time to start something new?
Happy practicing, everyone! If you enjoy this newsletter, please consider subscribing and share it with your friends.
Hello Rachel. I feel compelled to comment about your post about new pieces and how to find them. I have been most successful finding new pieces through sight reading, which is part of my daily practice. For example, a while back I downloaded an irresistably-named anthology from IMSLP: Album of Grotesques. As I worked my way through the anthology, a waltz by Wilhelm Grosz (previously a complete unknown composer) was so entrancing that I had to incorporate it into my regular repertoire as well as explore more works by him. My favorite way of discovering new pieces is through sight reading, and when I'm ready to start something new, I'll spend a considerable portion of my practice time sight reading until something catches my fancy. Thanks for the post, lots to consider (as always). All the best!