What do you accomplish in your Bernhard segments?

[shingo]

Hey,

     Just wondering how much you get done in the segments you choose to divide your practice into. At the moment I divide it into 20 minute slots and seem to get 1 line HT fairly stable at the end of it. I just wanted to see if this is slow or not as sometimes I feel it is...

     I know this is quite subjective with regards to ability and grade of music practiced, but on average, of music your current grade, how much would you say? Obviously with some easy pieces it is 2 or 3.

[rc]

I don't segment timeslots like that anymore. I just have some objective and take as long as I need to attain it.  If it takes 10 mins, that's nice.  If I can't quite get it after 45 mins, I take a break and try again later.

I've come to have a good feel for what I can accomplish in a sitting.  Sometimes it's tougher than I thought, so I just work at it more.

[lostinidlewonder]

Beginners and Intermediate students should segment and try to get end products as fast as they can. More advanced students should constantly sight read the entire score. So you slowly get an overall understanding of the entire piece instead of forcing the understanding of small sections. The reason we do this is because there are a lot of movements that can be automatically learned which we might otherwise waste time trying to force to learn. Sometimes sight reading a piece 10 times will memorize a great deal more than trying to sight read and memorize a small section and not move on until you prove to yourself you can do it perfectly.

[pianogeek_cz]

Of course, you then have to practice the really difficult passages. I'm working a bit like you said, lostinidlewonder, on the first movement of Prok 6: sight-read a few times, memorize in the process in a by-the-way manner and then Bernhard-segment the stuff I couldn't nail on the, oh, fifth try or something like that. (Needless to say that this applies to roughly half of the thing. It gets pretty difficult in places.)

The segmentation I do is not time-driven, it's phrase-driven (I find it easier to grasp technical things in their proper small-scale musical context, the only regular exceptions being jumps and awkward chord passages), so the time-to-learn is anywhere between five and fifty minutes. Score-wise, that translates as between one and ten bars, without a strong correlation between segment length and time it takes. Obviously, if I were to Bernhard-segment everything, session effectivity would go up - the easy parts coming in at roughly page-per-session.

(*re-reads the above paragraph* Obviously, COLING 08 has left significant traces.)

The results? After a week of more or less systematic practice, I can wad through - without major flubs - about two thirds of the thing. Not really at speed, obviously, and it took some ten hours of practice so far. Tomorrow's the lesson... There is work to be done this evening.

[avguste]

Personally I don't segment much anymore.Especially now that I teach and perform full time,I don't have the time to segment.In addition by now,I know what I can accomplish in the amount of time I have