Ok, here is how to go about speed.
1. Forget all those deeply ingrained notions about slow practice. People wax lyrical about slow practice, but usually they have no idea of what it is all about. Is slow practice important? Certainly. But important for what? There are only two reasons to do slow practice and each reason requires a different kind of slow practice.
i. Slow practice is essential to check your memorisation of the piece. Please notice: it will not help you memorise the piece, it will simply verify if you did. Basically you play slowly, very, very slowly. Set the metronome at 32. Then play each note every four beats of the metronome (you do not need to use a metronome, this is just to give you an idea how slow is slow). Go even slower. Stay 10 seconds on each note. You see, when you play this slow you destroy hand memory. There is no way you can trust your fingers to do the job. You must have a true, complete and exhaustive memory of all aspects of your piece if you are going to play this slow. You must know the harmony, the motif development, the form and structure, everything. So by playing this slow, not only you stop hand memory form interfering, as you give yourself enough time to recall all these different aspects of your piece.
If you find that you cannot do that – even though you can play the whole piece form memory at the correct speed – you have a problem. You will be relying completely on hand memory. That is when the black out occur, and you have of start again from the very beginning. So if you cannot play the piece form memory at a ridiculously speed, it is a sure sign that you have to work a lot, but a real lot more on your piece before venturing into performance. On the other hand, if you can play it slowly without mishaps, you can be confident that even if something goes wrong you will be able to swiftly recover.
In several threads people keep mentioning how Rachmaninoff (an din some versions Glenn Gould) have been overheard practising excruciatingly slowly. And the implication is that this is the way they develop their exquisite touch and acquired their formidable technique. Sorry. This is complete nonsense. They were simply testing their memory of the piece. No more no less. And it was not a regular thing either. They did it occasionally as a memory test. This is plain common sense. Take the Hammerklavier sonata. It takes over 40 minutes to play it at full speed. Play it at this ridiculously slow speed, and you end up using ten hours just to get through it once. A good idea if you are going to do it one single time to check that your overall memory of the piece is fine. Do it everyday as a practice routine and you will not have time not even to eat (besides I doubt very much that anyone in the universe would have the necessary powers of concentration). But humans are easily conditioned. They unquestioningly accept the most absurd propositions and will violently defend untenable positions simply because their teachers said so, or because they read in an interview that such and such famous pianist assured us all that this is what s/he did (and let us not forget that Gelnn Gould was renowned for being a prankster, so anything he said in interviews should be taken with a large pinch of salt).
ii. The second reason to do slow practice is to make sure (by performing it slowly) that you are doing the correct movement. This is what I call slow motion practice. This is far, far faster than the slow practice discussed above - and for which the correct movement has no relevance. This second kind of slow practice can be pretty fast, but it is always slower than the final speed of your piece. It is as slow as you can manage in order to have perfect accuracy and in your movements and not loose hand memory. This is a bit like tai chi speed. It is slow motion, but the complete movement is there. While the slow practice I referred to above is more like a series of snapshots.
This second kind of slow practice – slow motion practice – assumes and presupposes that you already can play the piece at speed; that you have already spent a sizeable amount of time investigating different movements/fingerings and that you have already arrived at your optimal technical solution.
The purpose of slow motion practice is to make sure that as you repeat endless times your passage/piece you only ingrain the correct movements/fingerings. It is as simple as that. As the famous reply of Wilhelm Backaus to an interviewer who asked him how come he never played any wrong notes: “I only practise the right notes”.
So now, you are going to slow down while keeping the same ideal movements as when playing fast. How are you going to figure out this ideal movement? We will get to that in a moment. The important point here is that slow motion practice cannot and should not be exploratory. That is, the worst you can do when faced with a new piece is to practise it slowly. Why?
It seems reasonable that if you do not know a piece, you should approach it slowly, so that you can figure out how to play it. And what is the alternative? To play it at tempo? How are you going to do this if you do not know the piece?
So here is why, and here is how something that makes perfect sense can be utterly wrong. (After all the earth is not flat).
If you go to the music shop, buy your copy of a piece you have never seen before, rush to the piano and start to slowly work on it straight away, you will be doing all sorts of wrong movements, fingerings, etc. and because you are doing it slowly you are going to get away with it. Unfortunately, these movements, fingerings, etc. will never work at speed. But your body does not know that. It just imprints all these inappropriate actions in your motor centres and there they stay forever. And as you keep repeating time after time slowly all these wrong movements, they get more and more ingrained.
Why not use a metronome? Make sure you go up just a notch, so that the increase in speed is almost imperceptible. By the time you get to half speed, you will have repeated slowly (and getting away with it) so many times the wrong movements that by then they will have become a) habitual; b) comfortable; c) natural. But as you increase the speed, those movements will start to become inadequate. At faster speeds you will not be able to get away with them anymore. In fact when I say faster speeds, I am talking about pretty slow speeds, speeds that are nowhere near the final speed of your piece. You have successfully created a speed wall. You can practice for as many hours as you please, you will never go beyond that limit speed that is nowhere near the final speed. Yet people insist on using and suggesting just such a methodology to acquire speed in passages. It may make sense, but it cannot produce results.
But worse is to come. Because now, if come across a good teacher who watches you play and can immediately pinpoint the wrong movements and direct you to the correct movements, you will be unable to do them, because the wrong movements have become a) habitual b) comfortable and c) natural. This means that you will be always fighting a battle you cannot possibly win. Ultimately you will never be able to play the piece. Yes, that is correct. You will have to give it up. So, go ahead, all of you who wish to learn Rach 3 with 6 months of learning the piano without a (good) teacher. Just do a lot of slow practice and you will get there! He he.
So what is the alternative?
2. When you come back from the music shop with your new piece, approach it the same way porcupines make love: carefully, very carefully. Do not even think of rushing to the piano to sight-read it. This was understandable one hundred years ago, when sight reading was the only way to figure out what a piece sounded like. But today? Get a CD of the piece and listen to it! Then start working on the score. Divide the piece in sections. Figure out which sections are going to give you a lot of work. Rewrite the piece separating the voices (if it has several voices). Tap the rhythm, sing the several voices. Do a harmonic analysis, work on the motifs. In short know your piece back to front without ever going near a piano. Once this preliminary work has been done, then select a small section (depending on the piece this may mean just two notes) and finally go to the piano. But before playing it, rehearse in your mind how you are going to do it. Feel the fingering you have decided on in your mind before actually doing it. Then and only then, press the keys. In short, make sure you are never ever practising wrong. Like Backaus, only practise the right notes.
[given the size of this post, it will continue in the next post]
Topic: Zoom Zoom