What do you define as 'Practice'?

[phil13]

A subjective question if there ever was one.

I visit this forum all the time, and hear many people say how much they practice and what they are working on in terms of building their rep.

But what, exactly, could you say is "Practice"? Is it the mere act of playing the piano? Is it the work, regardless of quality, on a piece or plethora of pieces that you are learning? Is it to build musicality or technique? Is it the good-quality deeply-thought-out playing, regardless of the piece beneath your fingers? Is it just a bunch of scales followed by an entire repertoire? Or is it something different, or a combination of said items?

Discuss, and I shall contribute my opinion soon.

Phil

[Bob]

To me...

Practicing is anything that involves building up your skills or working up a piece.

As opposed to performing, although you could practice performing too, but that's usually not generally what I think of as "practice."

[pianistimo]

at my age, it's all inclusive.  if i spend time thinking about a piece - i consider it part of my musical day.  sometimes - it's learning new terminology or thinking about a new way of doing something.  as with any career, u have slow points and fast points.  i think the fast ones are where u find a 'better way' to do something.  memorize faster.  learn how to balance ur hand placement to play more notes evenly, etc.

i think it's learning to be 'smooth.'  noone thinks of someone as really professional who stops to turn the page.  i'm trying to re-cast myself - and at least play the lh thru page turns and stuff.  and, hopefully memorize all my pieces before the year is up.  i think my piano teacher looks at music as almost 'edible.'  by this , i mean he just devours everything in one sitting.  whereas i munch here and there - and go back and snack again.  i cannot remember things in one or two sittings - it has to be much more repetition.  maybe it's a learned thing -u start with a few measures and then u can add more and more until ur learning pages per day. 

discipline comes into play,t oo.  i like to mess around one day and play a lot of stuff that i just like to paly.  then, i act all serious another day and try to just relearn my repertoire stuff.  then - the following day - maybe something off piano street.  what i need is a 'prfessional trainer' or my piano teacher back to get some motivation and direction.  it's like u get sort of lazy and not as excited as when u hear someone else play really well.  whenever i hear him play - i say 'ok.  i'm going to do this.  i'm going to go home and really practice.'  it's kind of like this mount everest type of life challenge.  to play difficult music and to make it look easy.  there's little to no payback financially for me right now (except that maybe i could play at longwood gardens, or a restaurant) but mostly personal satisfaction.  but, i think if someone paid me to practic e- i'd practice all day.

[ivoryplayer_amf]

I believe practice is having a particular amount of timme per day that you have an organized routine with a variety of Technique & skill building as well as learning pieces that fit into that mold.  To me...someone who just goes in and plays music that they enjoy or whatever are not practicing...but if that music is being learned for a specific purpose then thats different.  I believe its all about purpose.  If what you are doing during your "Practice" time doesnt have a goal or purpose, then it cant really be called anything because it doesnt have the potential to be anything.  But a routine that has a specific driven goal to me is the definition of practice.

[gonzalo]

Practice is to turn difficult things into easy things.

Practice is the process by which you learn/perfect something so that you can perform it.

Practice is private, performance is public.

Practice implies improvement – you can even go as far as I go and say that practice means improvement. If you spend 10 hours a day playing the piano and at the end you have not improved you have not practised. You have done ten hours of piano activity for sure, but you cannot call it practise. Performance on the other hand does not imply improvement (although you may well get it as a side-effect). It implies that you have reached a point of perfection/improvement that you can and should share your art with others.

Practise leads to performance, but performance does not lead to practise

You can and should practise performance, but you cannot and you should not perform practise.

Practice is the process, performance is the product.

Best wishes,

Gonzalo

[m1469]

Commitment and growth.


m1469

[ramseytheii]

Practice is to turn difficult things into easy things.

Practice is the process by which you learn/perfect something so that you can perform it.

Practice is private, performance is public.

Practice implies improvement – you can even go as far as I go and say that practice means improvement. If you spend 10 hours a day playing the piano and at the end you have not improved you have not practised. You have done ten hours of piano activity for sure, but you cannot call it practise. Performance on the other hand does not imply improvement (although you may well get it as a side-effect). It implies that you have reached a point of perfection/improvement that you can and should share your art with others.

Practise leads to performance, but performance does not lead to practise

You can and should practise performance, but you cannot and you should not perform practise.

Practice is the process, performance is the product.

Best wishes,

Gonzalo

That's great, and you should send it in to Clavier magazine or some piano publication of your native country.  It's practically a poem!

I don't want to answer the original question completely, but would like to point out some concrete things.  Lots of posts on this forum deal, for better or worse depending, on the physical approach to many passages in piano literature.  You often find people writing, once you understand this or that, you will be able to play the piece with no problems.  THis kind of attitude especially crops up in posts about Chopin Etudes. 

However, knowing the physical relationship between your body and the keyboard is simply not enough.  F.M. Alexander proved that our kinaesthetic sense is hardly ever reliable, and one cannot simply direct one's body in the "right" way, never to have to think about it again.  Once the most comfortable approach is discovered, it has to be practiced.  "Knowing is half the battle."

Look for instance at the Cortot editions of numerous works of Chopin and Liszt.  Yes, he talks from time to time about the physical demands.  But he supplies more importantly, exercises based on the physically difficult music, in order to master it.  This is really a great kind of practice, that is, using the music you are trying to learn to make exercises, to make sure that physical comfortableness becomes permanent and usable.  Simply telling someone, "all you have to do for Chopin op.10 no.1 is expand and contract the hand, and you can play the whole piece" is actually lazy, and a cop-out.  Once you know what that feels like, then the practicing begins.

Walter Ramsey

[bartolomeo_]

Poetics aside, I define practice as time I spend alone at the instrument for the purpose of improving my playing.  It is distinct from playing by myself for my own enjoyment, from lessons, from rehearsing with others, and from public performance.

Not all practice meets the intended goal of fostering improved playing, but it's still practice.

[pianowolfi]

Practising is: repeating the right things over and over.

[practicingnow]

whatever it takes to improve your playing -
INCLUDING
performing,
listening to recordings,
reading up on your repertoire,
studying the life of your composers
AND OF COURSE -
hours and hours of chair time

[jlh]

From an article my former piano teacher wrote:

“The dictionary definition of practice is 'to exercise or perform repeatedly in order to acquire or polish a skill', or 'to form a habit of acting in any manner'. I prefer the second definition. Too many students practice by reading through a piece repeatedly in whatever way they can manage, usually carelessly and without any attention to detail, and then endlessly repeating this carelessness until it is firmly embedded in mind and body.”

[nightingale11]

 

[danielle1]

my piano teacher always tells her students that she doesn't care if you only practice a piece 15 min. a day, as long as your focused, and get some thing done. Playing through a piece mindlessly for 10 hours a day would do nothing but make you a bad pianist

[ted]

This is actually a trickier question than it appears because the use of the word "practice" implies the existence of another activity which is not "practice" but "the real thing". While these two states have clear meaning for professionals and performers, for piano playing and music in general the position seems to me much less obviously defined.

I can "practise" finger dexterity of various types; I can "practise" my keyboard vocabulary; but how on earth do I "practise" improvisation ? It happens with varying degrees of satisfaction and accomplishment but overall it either happens or it does not. Put more simply, I couldn't record two improvisations, one of which was "practice" and the other "real". In the end the result would just be two improvisations.

[bernhard]

That's great, and you should send it in to Clavier magazine or some piano publication of your native country.  It's practically a poem!


Walter Ramsey

I have to agree completely (specially the poetic part) 

After all I wrote it :

https://pianoforum.net/smf/index.php/topic,4429.msg41217.html#msg41217
(differences between practice and performance)

 

Best wishes,
Bernhard.