Bones of a piece attained in one long session?

[shingo]

Hey,
     My practice has been interrupted quite badly this week so not much has been done in regards to progression on my new piece(s).  Usually I practice in half hour blocks with a short break inbetween each for a total of 2 hour practice (excludin break time).
     I had read somewhere that someone had aimed to complete the body or skeleton of a Chopin etude within the time frame of one day and managed to acheive it. Bear in mind I use the phrases bones/body/skeleton to mean the notes and rough emmorisation of a piece, not a fully worked performance with dynamics etc.
     Does it require a special mind set than a normal session? And is it even that effective, can the brain only absorb so much and the rest after a certain point be a waste of time? Would I be better to stick to my normal routine bearing in mind that this new piece will only have 1 designated half hour slot (at the best 2) and thus mean a longer time scale for progression?
     I say all of this assuming that the physical elements will hold out, no tired tendons or aches. In Summary; Will the 'crash course' approach have a larger pay off than the steady attempts at progress at the moment.
     Any advice is much welcomed,
     Thanks again.

[schubertiad]

There is definitely a saturation point for the brain in any given day's practice. However, this point is reached much more quickly if the brain is being asked to do the same thing (or very similar things) for hours on end. For me, learning an entire chopet in a day would definitely be too much to ask for. The similar figurations throughout an etude would seriously confuse the brain, not to mention tire the hands if done for an entire day.
However splitting a day's practise between 3 or 4 pieces would probably be more productive overall. Why the rush to learn an etude in one sitting? If you learn 1/4 of it in a day, then do something entirely different, then i would count it as a pretty successful day's work. 3 days later you have the whole thing down, plus another piece or two as well.

[shingo]

     The piece I am learning is not a Chopin etude, that was just the example I heard someone else talk about. Having said that though it is still a 'hard' piece, not as hard as a chopet but would take some time.
     I am not in any rush neccessarily I just want to get it underway and if designating a large proportion of the day to practicing it would result in a high probibility of further progression over that of my normal daily slot then I would quite happily invest.
     I suppose the real question now is, how long is too long for practicing a piece. I understand this is subjective and includes individual differences, moreover that there are lots of posts from Bernhard on the matter.
     Thanks for your input.

[schubertiad]

I have been toying with this question for a while, and have now got into a routine which seems to be working quite well. My practicing used to be very haphazard, and i would end up with lots and lots of half learnt pieces. I have now become much more disciplined with my practice, and set myself 3 pieces at any one time, spending 1-2 hours on each piece. I will go much more for quality than quantity, and use many of the learning techniques familiar to people on pianostreet.
In the past month I have learnt Chopin's berceuse, 3 nocturnes, a bach p+f, and 2 classical sonata mvts. This would have been unthinkable had I taken my old approach (diving into just one piece until I got sick of it). Having said all this, I can only say what has worked for me. It may well be different for everyone. My advice is to experiment, and eventually you will pick up on what works and what doesn't.

[quantum]

I have done this for several pieces.  I found it works best for pieces with a lot of repetition or easily identifiable patterns. 

The aim is to have an understanding of the structure of the piece.  Become familiar with themes and motifs, where they are repeated and any transformations they undergo.  For learning the "bones" in one session, I would say analysis is more important than physical practice.  By understanding how a piece is put together you can identify repetitive themes and where and when the recur.  So instead of trying to learn a lot of material, the piece is dissected into easily identifiable chunks with a set of instructions for putting them in order.

What you end up with is a bunch of little sections that repeat various times instead of this one huge slab of information.  Like how LEGO blocks can turn into some bigger object.

Eg: Chopin 10/1.  Write out the chords for each change on the score.  Familiarize yourself with the chord progression first instead of trying to struggle with the arppegiation.  Organize the chord progressions into phrases, and just play solid 4 note chords in sequence. 

[amelialw]

how you learn lies and depends heavily on your practise routine.

in the past meaning about 1 and a half yrs ago when I started my ARCT pieces, it seemed to take forever to even learn 4 pieces and nothing seemed to stay in my head.

I changed my method, the way I practised and absorbed everything much faster.

I have 10 different pieces now so I simply practise 5 a day, sometimes I'll practise a piece on both days if it needs more work.

there is no neccesity to learn a piece in a day, in fact if you do that, you will probably get tired of the piece within a short amount of time.

because of the number of pieces that I learn, I usually take 1 weeks to learn the notes of a piece of my level and 2+ weeks to learn the notes for a piece of a more advanced level. Bottom line, my teacher expects alot to be done every week.
I simply highlight/mark the hard parts and practise them 1st everyday and when I pull the piece together, it makes everything easier.

[slobone]

Well, there are pros and cons. I think if you do one long practice session, you will be surprised how much you can learn. But when you go back to it the next day, how much will still be there?

Rubenstein claimed that he once learned an entire long and difficult piece (I forget which) by reading through the music on a train, without touching the piano. Might even be true.

[mike_lang]

there is no neccesity to learn a piece in a day,

On the contrary - I've had to do this quite a bit, particularly for chamber music and other collaborative rep given to me either on short notice, or when other music takes priority in my sessions.  As far as solo material goes, my childhood teacher had to do this regularly - Fleisher would give him his encores the night before the performance.

in fact if you do that, you will probably get tired of the piece within a short amount of time

Again, my experience is the opposite - the fewer days I spend on the initial learning process, the sooner I can do in-depth interpretation of the piece.  For me (and I suspect for most  ) this is the most fascinating part of studying music.  The fewer days I spend reading and fingering the score, the sooner I arrive at the technical and musical problems - I've never found a sole day of several hours on one piece to be stultifying, when used to this end.

Best,
ML

[amelialw]

On the contrary - I've had to do this quite a bit, particularly for chamber music and other collaborative rep given to me either on short notice, or when other music takes priority in my sessions.  As far as solo material goes, my childhood teacher had to do this regularly - Fleisher would give him his encores the night before the performance.

alright, it depends on the situation. My teacher has had to do this quite many times too.

[epf]

For years I would just plow through an entire piece playing it over and over looking not only at the underlying structure of the piece, but also looking at phrasing, lyrical content, technical details and so on. As a result, I found it very difficult to learn new pieces. Lately I've been breaking the pieces down into chunks of about 1 minute each, and then playing them over seven or eight times until they were firmly in mind, then I move on to the next chunk. Of course, I try to make the chunks musically whole -- that is, I don't break up themes, motifs, or lyrical passages.

This change in emphasis (only took me 50 years to get here) has allowed my old mind to learn many more pieces much more rapidly. In fact, I would say I now learn a piece in a quarter of the time it used to take -- and I get to performance standard in much less time than that!

Ed

[slobone]

Yes, that's pretty much how I work too. Work on one small chunk at a time, first learn the notes, then try to make it sound musical. Then of course go back and put the whole thing together. And if you really want to get good, that last step ought to be where most of the work is.