My experience with Bernhard's concepts (this is really long, sorry)

[Torp]

Some thoughts while beginning to implement Bernhard’s teachings (sorry if that sounds a little like some sort of reference to a sermon).

Last week I began working on Praeludium 21 by JS Bach.  Not having had any piano teachers for the better part of 20 years I decided that I perhaps ought to have some sort of strategy in mind for tackling this piece, or any piece for that matter (I am also working on the Pathetique by Beethoven and a Czerny exercise, though this post is about either of those).  I had seen several posts regarding learning methodologies on Piano Forum so I looked around further until I saw a post from Sebastien in the teaching section with corresponding posts by Bernhard with references to a vast quantity of other posts.  I began to read and dissect what Bernhard had written (as I understood it) and began to apply it to P21.  Here are my initial results after one week:

My first step was to number the measures; there are only 20 so this didn’t take long.  For some reason having a definite number of measures somehow made the piece seem easier.  Being a naturally pessimistic guy I immediately realized that if the count had been 400 I may have come to a different conclusion.  Then, wanting to be open minded about the whole thing, and also being a naturally inquisitive guy, I decided to figure out how long 400 measures would take if I could “learn” a measure in a 20 minute session and I could average 3 sessions a day for 7 days a week.  I’ll save you the time of looking for a calculator and tell you that it is less than 20 days.  I was now beginning to understand the power of consistency.  I felt encouraged.  All of this, mind you, through the simple act of counting the measures.  Something about quantifying a problem in front of you that somehow makes it seem more manageable.  Anyway…on to step 2.

My second step was to analyze and notate, to the best of my knowledge, all of the fingerings (many of which were already in the score), and to notate the harmonic structure and the scales used (to the extent I understood what Bernhard meant by that).  I did these two things simultaneously because at the time it seemed to make the most sense.  There were really only two difficulties I experienced during this phase.

The first was some scale runs modulate from one key to another.  In analyzing the runs I could make the argument that certain parts of the runs were indicative of more than one mode.  As an example, the first 6 notes of a G-major scale are also the 1st 6 notes of a G-myxolydian scale (this is just an example, not an actual occurrence from the piece).  So, depending on what is happening harmonically around the scale, you could argue one way or another.  Since nothing else was happening harmonically besides the scale, I made my best guess.  I made a mental note to see if I could find other analyses of this piece to gain more insight.

The second difficulty I encountered was in choosing the fingering for the piece.  Now, I already mentioned that some of the fingering was provided by the score, so why the difficulty?  First, I’d never done this before.  The first time you try something it may seem overly challenging.  My best analogy is playing racquetball.  The first time I played I ran all over the court chasing the ball around because I had no idea how to “read” the ball or anticipate its behavior.  After playing a while it became easy…read the ball’s trajectory, take a few steps, hit the ball, repeat.  Some of the best racquetball players I ever met were fat and in pathetic shape, but, man, could they read the ball.  But, I digress.  So, there I was attempting to put in fingerings for notes.  Many, many times I closed my eyes, thought about the chord that was being represented, thought about the notes being played, their sequence, what note preceded it, what note the finger “had” to be on next, etc., ad infinitum.  In other words, I had to mentally envision the piano and what my hands would be doing on it, without the benefit of having my piano handy.  I thought I “knew” a piano inside and out.  This was humbling, and challenging in a good way.  The notation and fingering took about an hour.

I then looked over the piece again and tried to determine which passages I thought might be the most challenging for me.  There are several places where the music comes out of scale runs, goes into chord progressions in both hands, and then back into scale runs.  One of these scale runs is in the left hand.  Knowing my left hand is not as good at scales as my right hand I chose that section as my first section to work on.  I then chose all the other sections of the piece in what I considered to be descending order of difficulty.  I ended up with approximately 10 sections to work on.  Now, I’m feeling really motivated.  Hell, 10 sections?  Piece of cake, I’ve got 10 hours on Saturday to practice (everyone else was going skiing that day), that equals 30 sessions; I’ll be performing this baby by Monday!!!  On that note, I went to bed Friday night.

Saturday morning, I’m awake, I’m ready to play.  I get out my timer, my notes, and my music.  I hit the start button.  In what seems like about 5 seconds, 20 minutes goes by and I have not “mastered” the section I’m working on.  Well, I think, that’s ok, I just picked too big of a section.  I’ll make it smaller and come back to it next time.  I move on to the next most difficult section.  This one is mostly right hand activity so I’m feeling like this one will go pretty well.  The 20 minutes seem to go by in real-time this time around, but I arrive at the end far from mastery, though I could play that section from memory.  I make a note to decrease that section size too.  Then two things happen almost simultaneously; I come to the realization that my original indications of passage difficulty are a little too optimistic, and my ego shows up.

The first realization is a good one; it is, after all, just feedback.  I DID pick sections too large for my current level of technique in relation to the time span I gave myself to “master” them.  Armed with this feedback I could have simply revised my plan and moved forward.  The operative word in the last sentence was “could.”  However, as I mentioned, my ego showed up.  Now, not to badmouth my ego, it has served me well on many occasions, but, its presence certainly created some problems.  Since I was the one to have created the analysis of the difficulty level of the sections in relation to my own technique level I was forced to choose between two evils.  One, my analysis was wrong.  Well, for crying out loud, I’m an analyst in my job; that can’t be it!!  Two, I’m a worse piano player than I thought.  Ouch!!!  That can’t be it either!  Uh oh, here come the rationalizations.  “Maybe I wasn’t warmed up yet.”  “Maybe those are just the ‘really’ hard sections and all the other sections I picked will be the right size.”  “If I played these sections again then I could get them right.”  You get the picture.  Needless to say, rather than doing the logical thing, given the evidence, I did the illogical thing and attempted 4 more sections over 4 more sessions.  I mean, hey, if it ain’t broke you just need a bigger hammer right?

Some time on Saturday night when I had some time to reflect I came to several conclusions:
-My technique is NOT as good as I’d like to believe
-My analytical skills are NOT as good as I thought they were in relation to determining difficulty levels for me
-My ego should be quietly asked to leave the next time it tries to govern my practice sessions
-20 minutes can go by in a flash when you’re really concentrating
-20 minutes can seem like hours when you’re really concentrating
-Hands together really doesn’t work very well when you can’t play one hand separate
-There’s really no such thing as failure, just feedback (as long as you don’t quit)

I decided to take Sunday off from the piano (physically) and instead concentrated on analyzing some other music I was working on.  I had really intended to put together a new plan for the P21 to begin again on Monday, but I think my ego was still a little wounded and not wanting to participate.  In other words I procrastinated.  Thus, as of Sunday night I had no plan for Monday’s sessions, which, by the way were scheduled to start at 5:00 a.m.

At 4:51 a.m. I promptly decided that the morning sessions were not going to happen.  This decision weighed on me throughout the morning while I was at work.  Perhaps out of guilt, or perhaps out of anger, I “decided” (this is a key point) that I would go home for lunch and learn the first measure of P21.  My goal was to be able to play it at a constant velocity (i.e. no stuttering) with all the right fingerings, all the right notes, from memory in 20 minutes or less (that was all the time I had if I was going to make it back to work on time).  That was it, one measure, 32 notes (actually 36 if you count the first beat of the next measure), in 20 minutes.  I started with my left hand.  I looked at the fingering I had written down, looked at the keyboard, put my left hand over the keys and mimicked the motions in the air above the keys, and thought “crap, the fingerings don’t seem to flow.”  Not to be daunted I slowly played through a few times what I thought would be a better fingering, made notes of it in the score, put my left hand on the keyboard and I let it fly.

It seemed like almost instantaneously the notes were under my fingers.  I had the left hand notes and fingerings memorized so fast I was astounded.  Now, the first measure of this piece, at least to me, makes a certain amount of sense if you play LH separate.  However, the RH seems to rely completely on the LH for its rhythm and feel.  Each beat of the first measure starts with an eighth note in the left and a thirty-second rest in the right, followed by 3 thirty-second notes in the right.  This rhythm repeats for the first couple of measures (2.5 I think, I’m going from memory here).  So, for me, it is difficult to play a right hand pattern that starts with a rest on each beat.  If you look at the music this would make far more sense than it may be making here.  My point is, it seemed to make a lot of sense at this point to simply join the hands.

In a flash of inspiration, though it was probably rather one of Bernhard’s posts sinking in, I thought that rather than join the hands I could just play the right hand notes as chords to test the fingering.  The right hand notes that add the harmony come on the sixteenth-note beat in-between the eighth notes of the base line.  So, I could easily check the fingering without having to play the thirty second notes and could also count the piece as “one and two and” at the tempo I had achieved with the left hand.  I proceeded.  Although the fingerings worked, I realized immediately I had to slow down in order to even pull off this simplified HT.  No problem, I thought.  I concentrated on the first beat, then beat 1 to 1&, then 1& to 2, and so on until I could play this simplified version at tempo.  I then concentrated for a moment only on the right hand motion necessary to pull off the thirty-second notes at speed.  Somewhere along in here I realize that I have not looked at the score for a while and all this work is happening because I now know exactly what notes, fingerings, and rhythms I am supposed to be using.  “Cool,” I think to myself.  The technique of the thirty-second notes seems to come pretty easy and everything seems to be flyin’ at this point.  Time to bring on the FULL HT!!  Having learned a little bit in the last few minutes I figure I’ll back the tempo off a bit.  I stop for a moment, close my eyes, and envision myself going back through the steps I just went through.  I arrive mentally at the next, yet-to-be completed step and visualize what that will feel like.  I open my eyes and play.  I absolutely blaze through the measure.  Holy crap…that was fun.  Let’s do that again!  I play it again; it’s smokin’; it’s feelin’ good.  I decide to really let it rip.  Let’s open her up and see what she can do.  My fingers start to fly, the sound is great, and my brain farts.  Yup, my brain got confused.  Actually, it got behind (see below).  I backed off the tempo, concentrated on the motions I was using to produce the sounds and then practiced what I had “mastered” for the rest of my 20 minutes, which was about 5 minutes.  I left for work flabbergasted and in awe.

Then, Tuesday, I did what anyone would naturally do once they’ve mastered a specific technique on the piano, I naturally assumed that my learning had nothing to do with the method I had used and that it, of course, was all a result of some latent genius previously lying dormant within me.  In other words, on Tuesday, I abandoned all forms of the methodology I had used on Monday and “practiced” other parts of P21 with no real goals, no real thought about how to achieve the technique for that part, and no real time frame for getting anything done.  The sum total amount of material learned on Tuesday? Zero.

Sitting here as I write today, Wednesday, February 16, I reflect on some other things I’ve concluded:

-Seemingly, you can play ahead of your conscious brain (in other words, it seems that unless you can play a piece completely from your unconscious, your conscious brain needs to be at least capable of playing as fast, if not faster, than your fingers)
-Deciding you WILL do something has an immense amount of power
-Having a well-defined goal allows you to gauge your progress
-Having a time frame to complete your goal makes you choose a goal that is attainable
-Your ego comes in many different forms and guises and it will tell you all sorts of wonderful things about yourself that are utterly useless
-You can practice for hours with no discernable results
-You can practice for minutes with quantifiable, measurable results
-You never really know what you can do until you do it, and even then your brain may not accept the results
-Applying the principles of a teacher is the surest way to discover if they have value for you
-Even doing the wrong things can have positive results as long as you’re open to the lesson the experience has to offer
-You life can be enriched immensely by people you have never met
-Patience is useless without effort
-It requires less patience if your methods produce faster results, or any results for that matter

This has been my experience as a result of applying, somewhat haphazardly I admit, to the best of my initial understanding, some of the concepts that Bernhard advocates.  It has been one week.  The rest of this year should prove very interesting.

Jef

PS - Thanks, Bernhard.

[bernhard]

This was very interesting, Jef. Tahnk you very much for the feedback .

I will try to make a few comments over the wekend when I have a bit more time.

Best wishes,
Bernhard.

[mound]

Yeah, good stuff Jef.. I can relate to alot of what you said.  A few points I'll make, if I might be so bold:

1. Clearly by the length of your post, you are very enthusiastic about your endeavors. You needed to get your experience "out there" in order to better clarify it for yourself, and in order to solicit feedback (I have to assume) - That being said, imagine how cool it would be if you were to have experienced this with a good teacher by your side? (read: get yourself a teacher! it's emmensly beneficial)

2.  Again, great post! Just remember to let yourself be flexible in implementing the things you've learned from Bernhard, some, all or none may actually work for you, but trying them for yourself, keeping a log and critically examining what works and what doesn't, and WHY, and making changes as such in your routine, is the key.

good luck!
-Paul

[Torp]

Paul,

I actually DO have a teacher.  I just started with him last week though.  As such, he was the one who "assigned" the piece to learn.  It had been on my list for years so the assignment was fine with me.

I didn't really mention my teacher because my second lesson with the teacher was yesterday.  The first lesson he gave me some assignments and yesterday was really the first time I could solicit any type of feedback from him.  I wrote the post prior to meeting with him.  Talking about my teacher could be another lengthy post so I'll desist for a moment; except to say, he is a concert pianist from the Ukraine (now living in the US) and spends a lot of time talking about the Russian system and how Russian players have better tone than american players.  Not having an american player of equal caliber in the room to dispute that (I am not of equal caliber) I am left to compare his skills and tone against mine.  Mine come up lacking in that comparison.

So, while on initial assessment I have found that what my teacher wants and how he wants me to go about it are very different from what my other post describes, I feel that this can be a positive.  Afterall, when I'm done learning a piece "My way" and "his way" I will now have, at a minimum, two ways to learn something.

Thanks Paul for your comments.  Your #2 point is akin to what I like to call the Spock Principle.  When confronted with information, instead of saying it's good, bad, or otherwise, I like to say, "Hmm, fascinating."  I have found there is very little information out there that isn't based, at least in part, on some sort of factual basis.  Mostly the disagreements between people are as a result of differences in their respective perspectives about the information in question.

Well, so much for attempting to write a short post

Jef

[Torp]

This was very interesting, Jef. Tahnk you very much for the feedback .

I will try to make a few comments over the wekend when I have a bit more time.

Best wishes,
Bernhard.

You are, of course, very welcome.  Your comments are welcome as well.  Please don't feel as if they're "expected."  Since you've said they are forthcoming though, I must say they are anticipated.

Jef

[csco888]

>This was very interesting, Jef. Tahnk you very much for the feedback .
>
>I will try to make a few comments over the wekend when I have a bit more time.
>
>Best wishes,
>Bernhard


Bernhard,

We are eagerly waiting for your comments

Thanks,
AL

[bernhard]

>This was very interesting, Jef. Tahnk you very much for the feedback .
>
>I will try to make a few comments over the wekend when I have a bit more time.
>
>Best wishes,
>Bernhard


Bernhard,

We are eagerly waiting for your comments

Thanks,
AL

I am working on it...

[csco888]

I am working on it...

Take your time. We want a LONGGGGGGG comments