Keeping Them Polished

[Antnee]

Once your piece is ready for performance how can you be sure that it will stay that way? How should I practice finished pieces or how often to keep them in a polished state and ready for a performance at moments notice? I feel I sometimes waste too much practice time playing through finished pieces to keep them up to par so how often is too often?

-Tony-

[rph108]

Well, it all depends on how large of a repertoire you want to keep. You cant upkeep all your repertoire, you have to let some go if you want to learn new pieces. I do recommend that you learn alot of new pieces because this is how you get better. If you want to enter a certain competition your looking at, you might want to learn your repertoire according to the required ones in the competition.

[rosie]

I've had performances and competitions with the same pieces spread out over a few months. For me, it helps to play through them slowly, concentrating on everything going on in the piece. I find this also keeps them fresh in my memory. Also, sometimes taking a few days off from practicing that certain piece, can help you come back with a clearer perspective. I can play through it maybe once, do some work on a tough section, and that's good for me. Of course as performance time gets closer I will play through it more. But sometimes it helps a piece you've had for a while to go back and look at it like you would a new piece.

rosie

[bernhard]

Once your piece is ready for performance how can you be sure that it will stay that way? How should I practice finished pieces or how often to keep them in a polished state and ready for a performance at moments notice? I feel I sometimes waste too much practice time playing through finished pieces to keep them up to par so how often is too often?

-Tony-

Be warned. You may not like this answer.

After mastering a piece to your satisfaction, abandon it completely for 6 months or even one year. Your aim is to actually forget the piece.

Once the piece has been totally wrecked from sheer negligence, relearn it from scratch . And I mean from scratch. Treat it as a completely new piece. Since this is a piece you once knew, the temptation to cut corners when relearning it will be overwhelming. Resist this temptation. Go through all of the phases of the process of learning a new piece pretending you have never seen this piece before.

Even if you do that you will still learn the piece on a fraction of the time it took you to learn it the first time.

After you completely mastered it a second time, play it for a while, and then neglect it again, repeating the same process all over. You will see that the third time around you will relearn it even quicker.

Eventually by the 4th or 5th time, you will simply know the piece so well, that no amount of neglect will result in you “loosing” it ever.

Trust me, once you get to this level of mastery of a piece, piano playing becomes like riding a bicycle: you will never forget a piece.

The secret is now in planning. You must plan your long term goals (5 years) in such a way that you are always relearning some old piece from scratch.

Best wishes,
Bernhard.

[xvimbi]

Be warned. You may not like this answer.

Relearning the pieces has the additional benefit of coming up with new ways to play them. Five years from now, you may interpret a piece completely differently. If you keep playing the same way for the rest of your life, you'll keep playing the pieces you learned when you were sixteen like a sixteen year old.

[Shagdac]

Bernhard wrote:

abandon it completely for 6 months or even one year. Your aim is to actually forget the piece.

Bernhard, is there a minimum amount of time you can set the piece aside and get the same results, say a month or 2? Or is it any length, as long as you have forgotten it?

You're right, this would be hard to do! Especially after taking considerable time in mastering a piece, to be able to trust this enough to just completely set it aside
......and forget it, after spending months learning it!
Kinda scary!

S

[bernhard]

Bernhard wrote:


Bernhard, is there a minimum amount of time you can set the piece aside and get the same results, say a month or 2? Or is it any length, as long as you have forgotten it?

You're right, this would be hard to do! Especially after taking considerable time in mastering a piece, to be able to trust this enough to just completely set it aside
......and forget it, after spending months learning it!
Kinda scary!

S

The time is just an example, it is not set in stone.

What you really want is to neglect the piece for long enough so that when you sit at the piano and try to play it, it is as if you have never seen it before. The first time you try it, it will feel very frustrating. However if you persist in trying, after a few repeats – sometimes as little as 2 repeats - it will more or less come back.

These few repeats is what I am warning you not to do. You must regard the piece as a new piece and learn it from scratch as if it was completely new piece you had never seen before.

At the same time these few repeats can be very illuminating in the sense that the piece will fall apart on certain spots and go smoothly in others, so you will know where to concentrate your work.

Of course it may also happen that after neglecting the piece after a couple of years, you sit at the piano and play it perfectly. In which case you truly mastered the piece and you will never really need to practise it again, it is part of your repertory and you will be able to summon it at will.

You are right, the main obstacle to trying this method is psychological. We obsess about our latest, favourite piece, and we do not want to let it go. However, as one repertory grows, there is really no option. There is simply not enough time in a day to keep practising more than a handful of pieces in any consistent and intensive way. If you had learned all of Beethoven sonatas, just to play them through once daily would take around 12 hours. Now, since we know that several pianists mastered these works and play them proficiently, it follows that it is not necessary to keep practising them daily.

I found this particular solution quite naturally. And it involved three separate realisations:

1.      Once upon a time I was asked to play something that I had learned in my teenage years and had completely neglected and had never again played. I could hardly remember how the tune went. Being a reckless sort of guy, I sat at the piano and had a go anyway. To my great surprise, I was able to play it perfectly. Somehow my fingers remembered it, and as I played, my own playing reminded me of how it went in other levels too. It was as if I had just practised the whole thing the day before and not some two decades before. Lured in this way into a completely false sense of confidence, I decided to launch into another neglected piece of the same time period but this time with disastrous results. This was a puzzle: Why could I remember one and note the other, since they were both equally neglected?

2.      Many years ago, when I started experimenting with several ways of making my practice as efficient as possible, I divided my practise periods in two parts: One part was devoted to learning new pieces, and another part to keep my favourite pieces in top condition, so that I would not forget them. After a couple of months, favourite repertory had grown to the point where it was simply impossible to do it. To keep it polished in a regular way would mean that I would spend the whole day just working on 20 – 30 pieces. Clearly there was something very wrong with my assumptions, namely that in order to keep a piece in top condition you need to constantly be practising it. If that was true, how could people like Arrau and Richter keep a repertory of over a thousand pieces in readiness for performance? In fact due to pressures of life, very soon my well organised program of practice (well – organised, but based on completely false assumptions at the time) gave rise to a much more chaotic program.

3.      Then I got my breakthrough. That is when I decided that I was not going to teach the way my teachers taught me – which was sitting at my side, listening to my playing and making comments, never touching the piano to demonstrate (“it might interfere with your ideas about the music” – what a crock of potatoes!). I decided that I was going to learn the piece from scratch together with the student. At that point (that was many years ago), several of the pieces where pieces that I had learned myself in my youth, so I sort of already knew them. But because I wanted to show the student not only how to play them but also how to learn them I went through the whole process in all of its minutiae myself. Then after the student learned that particular piece, I would neglect it simply because I had other pieces to learn with other students. But sometimes after some months had elapsed, another student would come along and request that very same piece. So I would again go through the whole process of learning it with the student. After three or four times of going through this, I was able to simply never again practise that piece and there was no way I could forget it. This explained why I could remember certain pieces and not others. On recollection, the pieces I could remember were the ones I had learned from scratch more than once. The temptation to cut corners with a once well-known piece is overwhelming. You must resist it and not cut any corners. I solved this problem through teaching: even though I want to cut corners I am forced to go through all the steps, and some times stay on certain steps until the student can master them.

I thought that I had invented something new in piano pedagogy. Unfortunately (as with most of my ideas ), this idea had been around for centuries. Why no one told me about it?

I know that you are worried about leaving aside your competition pieces. What if you truly forget them? Isn’t that a risk too great to take?

I agree with you, so I suggest the following. Try the method above with a piece(s) that does not present a real risk. You can do it with an easy piece that will not take you long to learn. Then neglect and forget it and relearn it. See how well it works for this piece, for you. Either you will discard the method as unworkable, or you will be amazed and trust the method enough to try it on the pieces you deem really important.

Finally I will give you one last suggestion. Write a manual on how to learn your piece. Imagine you are giving written instructions to a total beginner on how to learn the piece. You will have to break it down into its smallest components and put it all together again. You will need to analyse the piece and give directions on how many times to repeat a passage, when to use the pedal and how, etc. etc. Be as detailed as possible, and use your own learning process to guide your instructions. You may need to go to the piano and observe what you are doing before you can describe it in writing. After you finish the manual, follow it yourself everytime you need to relearn the piece. This will guarantee that you do not cut any corners.

I hope this helps.

Best wishes,
Bernhard.

[Sketchee]

I've tried Bernard's method many times on accident!  After a while of working on new pieces it's easy to forget which pieces I know and forget to play them often.  Going back and relearning them I horrified at my old fingerings anyway.  Since you've most likely been working on other pieces in between some of your new technique will carry over when relearning your old pieces.  Like was said earlier, you'll quickly realize new ways to see the piece and notice things you didn't know before.  

[goalevan]

very interesting, I'm going to try this on a couple pieces that I learned right when starting that I think I played incorrectly (my fingering was horrible for the most part) and see how it works out. Fur Elise and Raindrop Prelude. I sat down the other day and tried to play them and couldn't remember most of the notes.

Might want to add this to the FAQ page as well

[DrEvil-]

Whats the best way to keep a large amount of fresh repertoire ready for a competition next year? Lets say there's about 2 hours of music and I have 5 or 6 hours a day to practice.

[ted]

Tell you what I'm going to try your method on, Bernhard - the huge heap of my own works I haven't played for years; that is to say, the ones I actually bothered to write out. Now that will be a most interesting experiment. My wife has complained recently that I no longer play the "nice" pieces I wrote twenty-five years ago. Fancy having to relearn one's own pieces ! She probably has a much better aural memory than I do.

Mind you, there is a sort of surreptitious delight in finding an old forgotten tape or score lying around the house and realising it was mine. Good job I don't earn my living through music though. The worrying thing is that some of these old things I rejected now sound pretty good. This means I must have had abilty and no discernment then but discernment and degenerated ability now ... no, I don't think I'll reason along those lines...

[scubasteve]

What happens when you want to re-learn a song, but you re-learn a different arrangement of the song that you learned a year ago?  Does that help in keeping the new arrangement in longer term memory, or does that help keep the older arrangement in longer term memory?  Or do they have no relation at all?  When I'm talking about different arrangement, I'm saying pretty much the melody would pretty much be the same, but there would be a lot more arpeggios and extra enhancements in the piece.

I ask this because I have learned this song last year, and recently I heard an even better arrangement, and I found the sheets for it, so now I want to kind of relearn this song but with all the extra enhancements in the piece, hoping to establish the piece into my long term repertoire maintenance plan.  At this point, I'm guessing that if I want to keep this new arrangement in my long term repertoire, I would basically be learning this arrangement from scratch, and I'd have to relearn this same arrangement months or years from now.  Please share your opinions!

P.S. I know this topic is really old, but I'm kind of a new pianist and I couldn't explain what I am talking about without having an older topic to reference to.

[gorucan]

Bernhard, that's exactly what i wanted to suggest when i read the topic!
I do this most of the time and it REALLY is benefitial so i warmly suggest this to anyone who wants to master some piano composition =)