Question for "virtuosos"

[dss62467]

Just curious how much time a virtuoso spends practicing.   I'm in my 9th year of lessons (with about a 25 year hiatus between years 7 and and I spend many hours a week practicing.   I can't stand going to my lesson unprepared.  I'd say on average I practice at least an hour each weekday evening, sometimes 2 or 3.  Then on the weekends... I could take up a whole afternoon if I'm not paying attention.

When I get to a particularly tricky part, I play it over and over and over until I am satisfied that my teacher will at least recognize that I put work into it.   So this makes me wonder at those people who are actually gifted - how much time do you spend practicing?   Is it a case where you can just sit down and sight read something and play it like it was intended to be played, or do you struggle too?   

I enjoy the process of learning a piece, the feeling you get when you play something beautiful that you KNOW inside and out, and concuring a particularly difficult passage.  But there's definitely part of me that is so jealous of the person who can play the Pathetique!

[stevebob]

Everybody—and every composition—is different.  The time and effort expended to learn new music depend on one's current level of technical skill, innate ability (i.e., to learn quickly and easily), and the degree and type of the challenge.

Proficiency at sightreading can be expected to be lower than the difficulty level of pieces one can learn with practice over time.  It's typical for novice players to practice sightreading with the simplest material, for intermediate players to sightread beginner-level pieces, and for advanced players to sightread accurately intermediate-level music.

I've heard that there's a lot of variation among professionals in the amount of practice time they require, but even advanced players need to learn their repertoire if it's to be performed well.  I remember somebody once said on another forum that even an amateur should practice like a virtuoso or with a virtuoso "mindset."  I really didn't understand that, and questioned just how one's frame of mind could be transformative.  The answer:  "The typical amateur practices until he gets it right; the virtuoso practices until he can't get it wrong."

Make your practice deliberate and mindful.  Practicing those tricky parts over and over is only beneficial if you're playing them correctly.  Even then, there's a point of diminishing returns after a certain number of successful repetitions.  Keep in mind, too, that the integration and assimilation of what you learn in a productive routine takes place between sessions or even during sleep.  Positive results happen the next day, or as the product of many days' cumulative effort.

[dss62467]

I have noticed that about the diminishing returns and taking a break makes a difference.  I tend to get a bit obsessive about it.  The piece will be playing in my head ALL day the way I want to play it, so I have to get on the piano to make it happen.  Makes me late for a lot of places I need to go.       But if I leave it and try again the next day, it's usually much better.

Whenever I get a new piece assigned to me, I immediately go to iTunes to find a recording of it so I can have a reference.  Some passages you just KNOW you aren't playing correctly, so it's good to have something to hear which is correct. 

I like to see how learning the more difficult pieces affects the pieces I've already learned and put aside to play just frequently enough to not "lose" them.   Something that seemed tricky before is now so simple. 

If only I had known when I was 16 and quit how much I'd wish I had those 25 years of experience when I started again....

[3htohn]

Hi Dss62467,

How much time a virtuoso spends practicing? I don't know because I am nowhere near to being a virtuoso, but over the years I've known some excellent players to practice aound 6 hours a day to become a professional musician. I suppose it would be 8 or 9 hours a day for a virtuoso.

I myself cannot stand going to a lesson unprepared, and in some instances I have actually rung up my teacher and said this and cancelled the lesson (honesty is the best policy). Because there are other factors that affect my availability to practice: time, work, emotion, domestics even the weather. But in an effort to avoid this, I spend every waking moment thinking about either what I am playing now or what I am thinking about to play. And, apart from my usual pieces I practice, I love to sight read... Beethoven. I've got book one of his piano sonatas and every day I just flick the book open at any page it happens to open and just play that page (separate hands of course) and maybe both if I feel so inspired. If there is something I want to memorize, I'll play it before I go to bed (sleep) and as I doze off, I let my brain to put the notes on little hooks and there they seem to stay. But I would be lying if I said I could remember everything.

But I can understand your envy. Occasionally I'll see green then red when I hear 12 year old kids play Pathetique (especially as Beethoven is my favorite composer). But then I just think well, there are the gifted ones and the rest of us just enjoy it. I'd like to refer to my post in Piano Board / Student's Corner / Re: chopin etudes  which reads "I went to a piano lesson once and another student who was just finishing off Chopin's Polonaise (the one that is usually played on the radio). And as I was waiting for my lesson I thought to myself, my G_D wow this is incredible playing, I could never do this... I still carn't. But as the student was playing, the teacher turned around to me with a disinterested look and rolled her eyes. And when he stopped playing she (the teacher) said, next week when you come back I want you to playing with a bit of feeling, THIS IS CHOPIN!, she roared." So as good as this person was, I was bamboozled by the playing and realize now that there was no feeling in the music. Strangely enough, this was how I came to appreciate good and bad playing (I'll never forget that incident). So I suppose it would be good to be able to just sight read anything, but if you don't know what your playing and not moved by it or moreover if I'm not moved as a listener, then what is the point.

But at the end of the day, we are all musicians regardless of whether we are amature, professional or virtuoso (others would disagree I am expecting). But don't forget there does not appear to be many of us (musicians) around. Ocassionally, I'll bring piano (or even just music) up as a topic of conversation and outside my circle of music friends, and it's rare that someone pops up and says 'yes I play the piano'.

Ah, yes it would have be great to have a crystal ball especially at the age of 16! But would that make us better musicians?

Энтони.

[dss62467]

You've completely nailed my feelings!   

[birba]

For a while, Arrau practised 13 hours a day.  In his later life, he cut it down to 3.

[dss62467]

Ahhhh.... then it makes sense that they're so good.   I think my fingers would bleed if I tried it for 13 hours a day. 

[scottmcc]

I read an interview with Marc-Andre Hamelin where he said that he spends "surprisingly little" time actually at the piano, and that most of his time is spent studying scores or listening to music. 

Various sources will say it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert at something, but this strikes me as an oversimplification at best, based on a nice arbitrary, large, round number.  A clear counterexample to this is learning to be a surgeon:  5 years of residency training, 80 hrs a week, 50 weeks a year: 20,000 hours, yet freshly graduated residents are hardly experts, and most don't reach the peak of their game until they've been in practice for at least 10 years after residency.

One can only focus intensely for a certain number of hours per day in order to truly be practicing and learning.  Clearly each person will have a different amount of time they can focus, but there are distinct human limits, and overpracticing can have its detriments.

[gyzzzmo]

I read an interview with Marc-Andre Hamelin where he said that he spends "surprisingly little" time actually at the piano, and that most of his time is spent studying scores or listening to music.  

Various sources will say it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert at something, but this strikes me as an oversimplification at best, based on a nice arbitrary, large, round number.  A clear counterexample to this is learning to be a surgeon:  5 years of residency training, 80 hrs a week, 50 weeks a year: 20,000 hours, yet freshly graduated residents are hardly experts, and most don't reach the peak of their game until they've been in practice for at least 10 years after residency.

One can only focus intensely for a certain number of hours per day in order to truly be practicing and learning.  Clearly each person will have a different amount of time they can focus, but there are distinct human limits, and overpracticing can have its detriments.

To become a (basic) surgeon it actually takes 12 years of study: 6 years medicins, then 6 years specialisation for surgeon.

[scottmcc]

To become a (basic) surgeon it actually takes 12 years of study: 6 years medicins, then 6 years specialisation for surgeon.

in the US it takes 4 years of college, 4 years of medical school, and 5 years of residency.  I was only counting the 5 years of residency.  assuming you don't take any breaks, you finish training at 31 years of age.  trust me, I know first hand what it takes to be a surgeon.  entirely way too well.  :/

and really, I think the skills required to be a surgeon, at least dexterity-wise, are far easier to acquire than those to be a pianist.  most of our operations aren't timed, there are very few two-handed tasks, and most of the operations boil down to repetition of a few basic tasks such as sewing or dissecting.  the hard part is the thinking outside the OR, the deciding what operation to do and when. 

[lostinidlewonder]

A virtuoso is a mix of rare talent combined with a superior level of discipline that remains for the majority of their life time. A virtuoso also has something unique to offer listeners, when you listen to them the way in which you viewed a piece may be changed or enhanced furthermore!

Not everyone can be a virtuoso just like not everyone can be a good actor, painter, etc etc no matter how much they try. But usually a virtuoso is considered these days as someone who plays "complicated" compositions.

I think the term virtuoso has been skewed and changed over the years, I think in the past it use to be someone who can improvise a piece on the spot, play any composition in any key, compose their own music etc. These amazing feats usually where attached to virtuoso's just being able to play a difficult piece extremely well didn't suffice. Nowadays everyone is called a virtuoso who plays a challenging piece well. I think it is a stupid thing to say because in my mind I call a virtuoso someone who changes and/or enhances my view on music, a virtuoso is someone who you can know you are listening to just by listening to the greatness in their recordings! They have a unique sound fingerprint (ok bad players also etch their unique badness into your mind, but not in a positive manner lol)

So in the end, sorry no amount of practice will make you a virtuoso. However if you are extremely talented then start working on your discipline and push that to its limits then you may indeed become the next real 21st century virtuoso. In saying the word "talent"  we open another trap since it is a term which is an even more overused term (compared to virtuoso) to describe students of music!

[dss62467]

So in the end, sorry no amount of practice will make you a virtuoso. However if you are extremely talented then start working on your discipline and push that to its limits then you may indeed become the next real 21st century virtuoso. In saying the word "talent"  we open another trap since it is a term which is an even more overused term (compared to virtuoso) to describe students of music!

That's well put, I think.  It was just a curiosity, really.... I just play for fun and have no delusions of greatness.  I don't ever want it to become a chore.

[CC]

I am not sure that virtuosity, as we see it in real life, is totally inborn.  A lot of it can be a result of proper knowledge. If you were to take today's average 5th grader with his knowledge of math and science, and put him in Egypt 5,000 years ago, he would have gone down in history as the greatest mathematician of all time.

My home page below discusses numerous ideas about how much of talent is inborn (look up "brain" in Index). For example, we know that we can speed up a slow computer by adding memory; likewise, if you learn how to memorize well, your IQ will effectively increase.  Since we can't change our genetics, knowledge is the best way to achieve as much virtuosity as each of us can; eg, how did Mozart do some of what he did?  I'm sure Mental Play played a major role.

[lostinidlewonder]

I am not sure that virtuosity, as we see it in real life, is totally inborn.  A lot of it can be a result of proper knowledge. If you were to take today's average 5th grader with his knowledge of math and science, and put him in Egypt 5,000 years ago, he would have gone down in history as the greatest mathematician of all time.

This is assuming that learning an instrument is more based on cognitive prowess rather than the physical/musical aspect to it (and I think the musical aspect of piano playing is more predominantly untouched by conscious observations and more a feeling, a sound aesthetic instinct at the highest levels, of course at lower levels we can learn it but we just will not touch the highest level if it is always a conscious effort). For example, not to blow my own horn, I was always confused why music had dynamics in them because I naturally know what it should sound like, but I meet many professional pianists who do not have this sense and must read everything, be spoonfed all directions, music to them is not their native tongue but something they speak as a 2nd language (and often quite fluently!).

Unfortunately to produce a master sound and interpretation of a piece requires not conscious logical thinking or practice technique but rather a keen sense of the ear and a high level of musical taste and commanding technique. The sound produced is a complicated product of musicianship, technique and yes cognitive processes. But how we express something in a piece cannot be always boiled down into conscious thought steps, but rather the crafting ability of ones musicianship as it etches away at our pieces over time. Only the virtuosos create an unforgettable sculpture the rest of us lesser mortals produce wonderful pieces as well but just not on a genius  level. That is not to say we cannot entertain the world and be top class pianists.

[avguste]

I dont know if I could call myself a virtuoso, but I practice about 3-4 hours per day, except for saturdays and sundays

[gyzzzmo]

in the US it takes 4 years of college, 4 years of medical school, and 5 years of residency.  I was only counting the 5 years of residency.  assuming you don't take any breaks, you finish training at 31 years of age.  trust me, I know first hand what it takes to be a surgeon.  entirely way too well.  :/

and really, I think the skills required to be a surgeon, at least dexterity-wise, are far easier to acquire than those to be a pianist.  most of our operations aren't timed, there are very few two-handed tasks, and most of the operations boil down to repetition of a few basic tasks such as sewing or dissecting.  the hard part is the thinking outside the OR, the deciding what operation to do and when. 

Well if you add college (i didnt), it actually takes 6 years of college, 6 years of medicins and 2, 4 or 6 years depending on the super-specialization. I know too from personal experience
But yes it takes less finger-practise ofcourse, however to be a pianist you kinda dont have to know anything, surgeons though.....

gyzzzmo

[anna_crusis]

Just curious how much time a virtuoso spends practicing.   I'm in my 9th year of lessons (with about a 25 year hiatus between years 7 and and I spend many hours a week practicing.   I can't stand going to my lesson unprepared.  I'd say on average I practice at least an hour each weekday evening, sometimes 2 or 3.  Then on the weekends... I could take up a whole afternoon if I'm not paying attention.

When I get to a particularly tricky part, I play it over and over and over until I am satisfied that my teacher will at least recognize that I put work into it.   So this makes me wonder at those people who are actually gifted - how much time do you spend practicing?   Is it a case where you can just sit down and sight read something and play it like it was intended to be played, or do you struggle too? 

It sounds as though you might be a bit obsessed with mechanical practice (I could be wrong). A sound grasp of musical theory, sight reading and scales/arpeggios will transform your playing in ways you can't even begin to imagine. With a good understanding of theory you can make a hour's worth of practice count for four.