PRACTICING SERIES
THE HARD PART OF PRACTICING
Photo by Giuseppe Ruco
Two kind of activities happen every time we sit and practice: playing is one, practicing is another.
It’s easy to say we should practice more and better, but it’s hard no matter what. Unless we get used to sit down and play just for fun we wouldn’t consider practicing in first place. We all love to play with those keys, wander about for as long as we can, perhaps forgetting our sorrows or engaging in deep daydreaming: it’s perfectly fine to just play! However, if you are reading this you might be looking for advices on effective practicing.
First of all, if you feel that your practice routine is not effective as you wish, welcome to the club: we all belong to it I suspect, so don’t beat yourself about it. Second, if playing is different from practicing, you might have to put in stand by your daydreaming for a while and do actual fixing. Let’s look into it.
The fixing that a performative artwork needs is inherently different from the fixing of a car engine or solving a math problem: our perspective on the ‘matter’ to fix constantly changes (rightfully so), our intellectual and emotional involvement develop with our exposure and understanding of it, so the real challenge is figuring out exactly what to do to fix in a meaningful way, to stay in line with our current perspective and to last.
My piano professor back in Italy used to tell me: “If after a practice session your piece is better by one aspect only, that was effective practice.” In other words, it takes one whole practice session to figure out what exactly is that single operation that will make your piece better by one dimension. And the fixing usually takes a smaller amount of time compared with the search. While the fixing is just practical, knowing what to fix is much harder. It requires you to evaluate your performance, to be dispassionate about it, to isolate a problem or a set of problems, to make a series of possible diagnosis, to experiment and see which diagnosis applies best, then to decide for one or more different approaches. The fixing hasn’t happened yet, but if you have done all that your time at the piano is already more effective than just playing the passage over and over.
The hard part of practice is to find out the exact point at which something (among the many things to try) turns into actual progress. Your teacher should help you finding the exact line each time, where out of the many possible things to try and experiment only a few will result in an actual improvement.
Few weeks ago I was discussing with an advanced jazz student how come, despite his intense discipline in practicing with the metronome, his timing was often off. It took a while for both to discover that the problem was not keeping the tempo but relating with the pulse, which is not necessarily a problem you fix with the metronome. In this case the exact point of progress emerged only after a search, many attempts and various exercises around the beat, so we adjusted the diagnosis, given that the previous cure (the metronome) wasn’t helping at the exact level he needed.
Another time a different student was stuck at the point where, despite knowing well enough her classical piece (which required fast jumps around the keyboard) she felt she couldn’t move it any faster, getting understandably frustrated. Weeks spent learning accurately from the score to the point of knowing the full piece but being unable to play it at a more flowing and enjoyable tempo. She got used to take out the score and play it from beginning to end, but her choice to diligently play from the score prevented her to reach a more appropriate level of fluency. The acrobatics required in the piece were slowed and often interrupted by her looking back at the paper. To master quick tempos and jumps she must forget the score and look only at the keyboard! Memory needs to take over, and to memorize you must stop playing from beginning to end and work on isolated passages. New level, new diagnosis, new cure..
The lesson we take from all this is: progress comes when the next step to take is clear in front of us. You need to invest some energy into figuring that out, cause just repeating won’t make much difference. Experimenting and searching is in order, what you are looking for is a new perspective on your music. Hint n.1: it is often the case that we ought to take a step back and review things we think we know well (but we actually don’t) in order to move on to the next level.
So, after you have done some playing today, you could list the reasons why it is nowhere near satisfactory, or put the playing in standby and try some fixing. What is exactly the exercise or practice that your music needs right now in order to improve?
Alberto L. Ferro
I teach at the London Contemporary School of Piano, open to all students in UK and abroad. For inquiries contact me or the school directly.
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