Letting pieces rest

[pianorama]

Hi,

What do people think of letting pieces rest? This year, I spent from September to April preparing Tchaikovsky piano concerto (1, 1st mvmt) to a ~semi~ decent level, and I pulled it off for a festival but of course there were still a lot of rough edges. I was supposed to play it in another festival again this month but after the first festival I felt like I had hit a brick wall and just did not want to practice it anymore, so for the first time ever I actually didn't attend a festival I had signed up for.

Right now, I'm starting to learn new pieces for my next exam but am still interested in the concerto, and there might actually be a concerto competition sometime this fall (this is all up in the air though). What I'm afraid of though, is the loss of "fine tuning" I always notice of course when I don't play something for a very long time, even if I had it very polished at one point.

So, do you think it's good to leave something like this on the back burner for a while, or is it better to keep practicing the piece to some degree while you're learning other things too, until you're ready to take it on again seriously.

[jollisg]

I usually practice a piece until I think it's fine. Play it on some recitals and so. Then I stop practice it for a few months. When I get back to it, it sounds so much better and sounds more musically and the flow is just so much better!
I don't do that with every piece, just the ones I REALLY burn for. That also makes my repertoire bigger

[m1469]

This is the first time in my life that I've been learning and then more or less "maintaining" (though all of them are still in a state of learning) more than one program's-worth of music all at once, so my thoughts about this are still kind of like little newborns.  So far there are a number of different broader practicing routines that I do, one of them being where I'll concentrate intensely on only a few or several pieces for awhile (a week or sometimes 2), and then another routine would be to play as many of them as I can (or all of them, if I can), aiming at broader and less time-consuming concepts in all of them, or broad concepts through entire pieces with some and then just spots with intensive concentration in the others.  It depends on what each needs and what my long term and more immediate goals are with them.  I am not currently playing in festivals and recitals though so that may mean it's a little different for me, but I consider myself in training for them and in training for learning how to balance out and keep a larger amount of repertoire.

Something that I am preliminarily deciding is that truly productive and great work is not ever useless, even if there's a bit of time that passes between sessions on a particular piece.  That doesn't mean I advocate inconsistent work, but that it's *possible* to juggle pieces and not have truly productive work that was done before be completely pointless.  That doesn't mean there wouldn't be a little rust, though.

Also, it seems to me, that there are aspects to putting a piece down for awhile that help in its progression.  Even if some of that progress is abstract (like personal growth or conceptual cohesion and "flow"), there are also practical things like developing better practice habits while learning new pieces, or developing a better understanding physically and personally about musical patterns and playing techniques, which can end up being applied to the piece(s) that got put down.  Also, aside from that, in my personal experience, sometimes it's helpful to put a piece down so you can actually "forget" certain aspects of the former learning process and then pick it up again with a different perspective and cleaner slate.

I'm still learning though  .

[gerryjay]

I am very much pro letting pieces rest and then returning to them. If you can, as Jollisg pointed out, play in public before the resting period, even better.

My master teacher always said something like "a piece is not done unless it is done a new time around". although there are a few exceptions, I did find him right for most of the time.

Best regards,
Jay.