The horror of a scatterbrained pianist.

[yooniefied]

How does a pianist get over the awful habit of learning bits of many pieces, and never truly polishing one?
I can't tell you all how many songs that I know the first page of...or the melody...or a bit here and a bit there. I have no real repetoire.

Should I simply force myself to work through one piece at a time so that I don't lose focus? I have tried learning a few bars of many pieces at once, and gosh...that sure didn't work; even over the course of a month or so.

Also, how do I re-approach a "half-learned" piece?

[counterpoint]

Perhaps it would help if you had a piano teacher?

Do you loose interest so fast, or do you skip parts, which are too difficult to play without effort?

[pianistimo]

in college they only give you 3-4 difficult pieces per semester.  you pretty much focus on those to the exclusion of other pieces until you complete your practice for the day on those.  i'd say piano lessons helps me stay focused.  otherwise, there's so much good music out there - i'd be doing the same thing.  and, probably am right now. 

also, time is a factor.  people tend to be more 'scatterbrained' about practice when they are working full time.  you have to have complete focus and be able to practice the required length of time to fully learn something (memorized) and keep adding to it daily.  it is much harder when you skip a day or do not put in the 'piano work' time.

it's like a novel, though.  when you have a story and it has a flow and a definate ending - it's much more satisfying to tell.  you don't want to just tantalize people.  otherwise, it seems fluffish. 

[leucippus]

How does a pianist get over the awful habit of learning bits of many pieces, and never truly polishing one?

I'm not at a level where I can polish anything.  I simply can't yet play the piano well enough to polish anything.  I'm still trying to learn how to play the instrument.   So I learn many different pieces simultaneously and for this reason it appears that I'm not "finishing" any of them.  But they will all come together eventually.  I'm not worried about it.  It's not like I've put any of them on a back burner.  I continue to work on everything that I've started.  And I continue to make progress on them all as well.

There would be no sense in me trying to finish and polish any of these pieces right now because I simply don't have the technical skills to play them yet.  That can only come over time.  I'm not the slightest bit worried about polishing musicality.  When I get to the point where I have technically learned to play the piano the musicality will take care of itself.

I don't believe in "music" teachers per say.  I don't believe that musicality is something that can be taught.  It comes from within.  A person is either an artist or they aren't.  If they are, their musicality will take care of itself once they have physically learned how to play the instrument.

I'm at the stage of physically learning how to play the instrument right now.  Once I accomplish that feat the musicality will take care of itself.  Trying to polish pieces at this stage would be absurd.  I simply can't play the instrument well enough yet.

So I don't see this as a "problem".  I simply see it as where I am currently at with trying to learn how to play the instrument call piano.

[pianistimo]

it's sort of like working out.  if you know you are going to see a teacher the following week - it puts pressure on you. unless you're really organized and methodical.  some of us aren't.  i'm fairly organized but not as methodical as i should be.  but, now i know how to do it.  taking notes at lessons is really helpful - because you are being given information that might take weeks to learn on your own (if ever).  teachers are there to guide you and not necessarily to tell you.  so you can take some information and leave the parts that you do not agree with.  for the most part - i've taken every bit of information and tried to assimilate it somehow (even if it is basic) to my 'routine.' 

[counterpoint]

I don't believe in "music" teachers per say.  I don't believe that musicality is something that can be taught.  It comes from within.  A person is either an artist or they aren't.  If they are, their musicality will take care of itself once they have physically learned how to play the instrument.

I agree with the "musicality is something that can't be taught"-statement to some degree. But teaching music is not that esoteric. The teacher looks for simple things: is the rhythm correct? are the notes correct? accents, piano, forte, legato, staccato, pedal, are fingers/hands/arms moving naturally, if there is a problem in playing a special part, whats the cause, what to change to get it played better etc. etc.

[zheer]

I can't tell you all how many songs that I know the first page of...or the melody...or a bit

here and a bit there. I have no real repetoire.

Should I simply force myself to work through one piece at a time so that I don't lose focus?

Also, how do I re-approach a "half-learned" piece?

  This is a method that works for me , divide your daily  practice routine into three. Start with pieces you like but are not willing to learn yet and sight read through them every day from begining to end. Select a number of pieces you really love and make it your mission to learn them, ie memorize and play them from begining to end. Finally spend some time at the piano just playing what you have learnt for fun or what ever you feel like playing. Good luck.

[jcabraham]

Very much good advice has been posted on this forum about this very topic, as well as information about good practice techniques in general, and how to go about learning and memorizing.  One person attempted to index all of it, and you can find it here.  Check out the  section titled "Practice" about 2/3 of the way down the page.

https://www.pianostreet.com/smf/index.php/topic,9159.0.html

Jim

[rc]

I was like that for the first couple of months that I began to learn piano.  I believe a lot of that was because I was tackling pieces that were too difficult.  It was taking too long for me to get the notes under my fingers, and as time passed I slowly became discouraged and bored with the piece, so I'd jump to a new piece.

[faulty_damper]

I can understand as I was once a "scatterbrained pianist".

It turned out that it was simply (or not so simply) that I had a horrible (relative to what it is now) technique.  (I was overemphasizing certain movements and was not interdependently coordinated.)  This meant that learning pieces took too much time and required me to "polish shiny objects".  I learned the beginning pages of many pieces but could never learn the rest of it because i didn't want to make the effort as the effort was already too much.  I also got bored with the pieces due to the "polishing".

See, playing the piano was an intense labor, even though I didn't realize it at the time.  I didn't like to practice but liked to make the effort of practicing.  I counted practice in terms of hours instead of experimenting with the correct coordination of my body to play with maximum ease.  Piano playing was just playing the correct notes at the right time with the right dynamics with the right speed.  How I did it wasn't part of the equation.

This is just what RC experienced though I labored through it for more than 4 years and only recently learned to interdependently coordinate my body.  Worst 4 years of my piano study going through 3 teachers, one of which promised that "I have no technical difficulties and none of my students have technical difficulties."  (This turned out to be untrue and though he was a famous pianist once, he too, had technical crutches which prohibited him from playing music that was beyond his abilty.)

Realizing this fault turned out to be one of the most revealing things that I have ever learned about myself.  It alone explained why I would jump from piece to piece never learning them entirely.  Once I started correcting this fault, I was almost immediately able to learn entire pieces because there was no need to "polish shiny objects"; instead I was polishing the movements of my body.  The even greater consequence was that pieces which were once impossible became easy.  I looked at pieces not about how easy or difficult they were but how I had to coordinate my body to make all of it easy.

Also, how do I re-approach a "half-learned" piece?

These were some of the most joyous occasions I have ever had with re-learning poorly played pieces.  When I learned these pieces, even though they sounded well to my teachers, they were difficult to play and always required practicing.  But going back to see if what I learned could transform these pieces caused fear; could I play them without the laboring I had?

Oh my god...
  Faster, more accurate, more control both pianistically and musically...

Easy.
I couldn't believe that certain passages I practiced hours and hours until my fingers, wrists, and arms ached suddenly became the easiest things I had ever done at the piano.  I got up with a big smile on my face within minutes.  Oh my god...  I had no one to share my joy with.

 The confidence that came with being able to do away with "hard", "difficult", and even "impossible"...  It was easy.

Learning became easy.  I didn't have to struggle with the first page or any page.  I knew by looking at the score if I could coordinate my body to play it or not.  If I wasn't sure, I went to the piano to learn the coordination.  See, once I figured out how to make the impossible easy, everything became easy, even getting past page 1.

[ramseytheii]

How does a pianist get over the awful habit of learning bits of many pieces, and never truly polishing one?
I can't tell you all how many songs that I know the first page of...or the melody...or a bit here and a bit there. I have no real repetoire.

Should I simply force myself to work through one piece at a time so that I don't lose focus? I have tried learning a few bars of many pieces at once, and gosh...that sure didn't work; even over the course of a month or so.

Also, how do I re-approach a "half-learned" piece?

I would:

1) Force yourself to not just practice, but learn from memory.  This means yo have to develop a technique just to memorize, and good tips can be found in the cheap Karl Leimer - Walter Gieseking book.

2) Whatever you memorize, play it for people on a regular basis.  As you memorize more pieces (and remember you can start with easy ones), start to categorize the different characters and combine them in different ways: programming.  That way if yo have 5 pieces memorized, and two are similar in character, you can play a program once with the first, once with the second, and so on.  This keeps pieces alive in your repertoire.

3) Listen to the pieces with the score outside of the piano, and use your brain, not your fingers!

4) Categorize the technical difficulties in various pieces, so that every time you ahve a difficult scale or arpeggio passage in one piece, you also practice and refresh your memory of the other piece.

These are not really in any particular order unfortunately.  But I think listening is the most important element, because when you have an idea of how you want a passage and an entirep iece to sound, you are working towards something, rather than just working aimlessly.

Forcing yourself to memorize is important because then you can rpactice in your mind when no piano is available.

I once had the idea to compile a book of excerpts from the piano repertoire that illustrated different technical points.  Rather than a book of exercises, a book of abstract problems, it was a book of the problems in action.  Turns out I was not the first person to have that idea, but I don't think it has been carred out.  I tried but it was too hard.  There are too many examples!  But I do it for myself when I play pieces: I identify the problems, and I compare them with similar passages in other pieces.  When the memory does not have to make everything totally individual, but uses synthesis, it takes away a lot of the effort.

Walter Ramsey

[phil13]

How does a pianist get over the awful habit of learning bits of many pieces, and never truly polishing one?
I can't tell you all how many songs that I know the first page of...or the melody...or a bit here and a bit there. I have no real repetoire.

Should I simply force myself to work through one piece at a time so that I don't lose focus? I have tried learning a few bars of many pieces at once, and gosh...that sure didn't work; even over the course of a month or so.

Also, how do I re-approach a "half-learned" piece?

Might I suggest something?

Begin with SMALLER pieces. Stuff that is at your level, but only a few pages long maximum. Working on a shorter piece may motivate you to learn more than just the first bar.

Phil

[bernhard]

How does a pianist get over the awful habit of learning bits of many pieces, and never truly polishing one?
I can't tell you all how many songs that I know the first page of...or the melody...or a bit here and a bit there. I have no real repetoire.

Should I simply force myself to work through one piece at a time so that I don't lose focus? I have tried learning a few bars of many pieces at once, and gosh...that sure didn't work; even over the course of a month or so.

Also, how do I re-approach a "half-learned" piece?

Most likely you have created a psychological wall.

You see, as you start learning a piece bar after bar, the first few bars become very nice and easy to play. You know them. but then the next bar is unknown. You have to struggle to master it.  Bu the time you are halfway through the piece, playing the half you already know is such a pleasant experience that you cannot face the drudgery of confronting that new bar. So you play the bit you already know and get even better at it, and even worse at the rest.

So here is how you deal with it. Say you have a 24 bar piece, of which you have mastered the first 12.

Start at bar 24 (instead of bar 1) Master it. It may be a struggle, but because you have not preceded it with the first 12 bars, it may be feasible.

Then learn bar 23 and join to bar 24 which you already know

Now learn bar 22 and join to bars 23 - 24 which again, you already know.

Keep going like that and you will be moving from a bar you do not know to a section of the piece you already know, while before you were trying to move from a section you knew well to a bar you did not know at all.

Logically, it should make no difference the direction you learn a piece - but as I stated many times, learning is never logical.

Psychologically it makes a huge difference. Learning a piece form bar 1 to the end can be a very discouraging experience, while lerning it back to front is exhilarating, empowering and hugely motivating.

But please, do not believe a word I said. Try it out, and then come back and tell us what happened (better still: select two pieces of similar difficulty and learn one in the usual direction and the other back to front and compare the results).

One last word. Sometimes, if a piece has a few especially difficult sections, it is advisable to learn these difficult sections first, rather than back to front, so that when you get to the difficult sections they will already be easy.

Best wishes,
Bernhard.

[bernhard]

Most likely you have created a psychological wall.

You see, as you start learning a piece bar after bar, the first few bars become very nice and easy to play. You know them. but then the next bar is unknown. You have to struggle to master it.  Bu the time you are halfway through the piece, playing the half you already know is such a pleasant experience that you cannot face the drudgery of confronting that new bar. So you play the bit you already know and get even better at it, and even worse at the rest.

So here is how you deal with it. Say you have a 24 bar piece, of which you have mastered the first 12.

Start at bar 24 (instead of bar 1) Master it. It may be a struggle, but because you have not preceded it with the first 12 bars, it may be feasible.

Then learn bar 23 and join to bar 24 which you already know

Now learn bar 22 and join to bars 23 - 24 which again, you already know.

Keep going like that and you will be moving from a bar you do not know to a section of the piece you already know, while before you were trying to move from a section you knew well to a bar you did not know at all.

Logically, it should make no difference the direction you learn a piece - but as I stated many times, learning is never logical.

Psychologically it makes a huge difference. Learning a piece form bar 1 to the end can be a very discouraging experience, while lerning it back to front is exhilarating, empowering and hugely motivating.

But please, do not believe a word I said. Try it out, and then come back and tell us what happened (better still: select two pieces of similar difficulty and learn one in the usual direction and the other back to front and compare the results).

One last word. Sometimes, if a piece has a few especially difficult sections, it is advisable to learn these difficult sections first, rather than back to front, so that when you get to the difficult sections they will already be easy.

Best wishes,
Bernhard.

And add to this all the excellent suggestions previously made by the other posters.

BW,
B.