Question about Bernhard method

[Daniel_piano]

Hello Bernhard
I have a question for the 20 minutes practice method
you said people fail on mastering something in 20 minutes or less because they choose too much big chunks/parts and that the solution is to cut the part in a half
So, it seems that if you want to master a piece in 20 minutes or less you must practice on very few bars

So, giving this premise, what would be to you the best way to apply your method in a situation where you need to master 75 bars in a week and every piece is 18 bars long?

I tend to practice on the whole 18 bars piece and then I practice on another piece, but the first practice session where I master the 18 bars takes me longer than 20 minutes

So, would divide the 18 bars piece by three and practicing on 6 bars only per session (meaning 3 sessions per piece instead of my usual 1 session per piece) be a better approach or it wouldn't make a difference anyway?

Thanks for your help and sorry if my question is uncomprehensible

Daniel

[bernhard]

Yes, your question is a bit incomprehensible.

I cannot give you specific advice. For that you would have to be my student: I would have to see you play, and I would have to know the piece you are referring to. At the end of the day, it depends on the person and on the piece.

I can give you the general principles, and you can try to apply these general principles to your particular problem. The drawback is that you will have no feedback. You may misunderstand what I say, or I may say it in a misleading way. You may think you are doing what I suggested when in fact you are doing something quite different. You may have no clue about premises I take for granted, and I may have no clue about where your real problem lies, and my suggestions (that is all they are) may be completely off the mark. So you need some landmarks to make sure you are following the map correctly. You see, if I give you a detailed map for Paris, it will not help you if you are in Madrid.

So here is Your most important landmark: Expect progress or evidence of progress.

Progress should also be quick. Think of frying an egg. You follow the instructions: break the egg, put oil in frying pan, put eggs in frying pan. If after 5 minutes or so nothing is happening, something is wrong. It should take an egg 5 – 10 minutes to be fried and ready to eat. If after 2 hours the egg is still runny, you have gone the wrong alley. If you ask me, I would venture that you forgot to turn the fire on. You see, turning the fire on is taken for granted, so no such instruction is given. If you have never seen a fried egg before, you will not be able to ascertain if it is cooked or not. You may end up eating it raw and thinking it is a great delicacy (the origins of sashimi, perhaps?).

So what kind of progress are we talking about here?

The basic rule is seven repeats. Repeat what you are trying to learn seven times. If after that period you have not learned it, or have not experienced dramatic progress, you are trying to learn a chunk too large for your present abilities. Cut it in half. Try seven times again. If necessary cut it in half again. Depending on the piece you may end up with just 2 notes. However anyone can always manage two notes after repeating them seven times.

In the beginning this method will seem unnecessarily long and laborious. However as you apply it consistently over the course of a couple of weeks (or even a couple of days), you will develop experience and you will be able to look at a passage and immediately tell what size and how long it will take you to master it.

So seven repeats is what directs your decision in regards to the size of the passage you are trying to tackle. There is no slack here. It is not six repeats, and it is not 8 repeats. It is exactly seven repeats.

Having decided on the passage size, you are now ready to practise it. This you will do for 20 minutes. There is a lot of slack here. Maybe 2 minutes will be enough. Maybe you will need 10 or 15 minutes. However pianists are compulsive individuals. They will go on for ten hours. So 20 minutes is actually a maximum: do not practise any passage for more than 20 minutes. It is counter productive. There are several reasons for that which I have written about in other threads.

Perhaps the most important is that it will have the contrary effect to improvement. As you repeat something over and over again, fatigue (both mental and physical) sets in. As a result you start to make mistakes. Soon you are practising your mistakes. And as you become obsessed in getting back your previous degree of mastery – which you attained around the 10 minutes stage – you keep frantically repeating and repeating and getting more and more tired and making more and more mistakes. Since your brain usually stores the best your very last repeat, it will be these repeats full of mistakes that will be waiting for you next day first thing in the morning. So you always want to stop your practice at your best rendition of the passage.

Again in the beginning, this may be difficult to judge – which is why a teacher can be very helpful at the beginning: if he knows his stuff he will make you stop and even suggest the passage size for you.

Another important reason for not practising for more than 20 minutes is that it is not necessary. So why waste time?

One more reason is that it is very difficult to keep your focus and concentration on a passage for more than 20 minutes, and your practice will be mechanical. This is worse than not practising.

There are of course exceptions. I am mostly talking here about working on small passages. If you are going to practise your performance of the Hammerklavier (that is you will play exactly as you perform), it will take you 40 minutes just to play through it once. So obviously the 20 minute rule does not apply.

If you are working on certain practice tricks like repeated note-groups which take 45 – 50 minutes to complete, then again the rule does not apply.

And of course, I am not saying that you should practice a maximum of 20 minutes a day. I am saying that a single practice session should not last more than 20 minutes. If you want to get a lot done, try doing five hours a day, divided into 12 sessions of 20 minutes. If you do them one after the other, leave five minutes rest in between each (25x12 = 5 hours). Much better is to spread these 12 sessions during the day. In each session tackle a completely different passage/piece. Here is an example:

Session 1: First 2 bars of Chopin op. 10 no. 1, HT
Session 2: Complete outline of Chopin Op. 25 no.1 (outline: get rid of all the small notes – the arpeggio figurations, and play only the melodic notes).
Session 3: the first arpeggio figuration in Chopin op. 25 no. 1
Session 4: Work out the ornaments (away from the piano) in Scarlatti’s sonata K427.
Session 5: Play through (as in a performance) Schubert’s Impromptu op. 90 no. 3 which was learned last month.
Session 6: Work on the Bach fugue in Gm (no. 15 WTC 2), each voice separately, bars 3 – 5.
Session 7: Sight-read through the piano part of Arvo Part’s Spiegel im Spiegel for violin and piano.
Session 8: Bars 25 – 26 of Chopin’s op. 10 no. 1 HT.
Session 9: Beethoven sonata op. 78 – play as if in performance.
Session 10:Keep going with session 9 if necessary.
Session 11: Bars 76 – 79 of Chopin’s op. 10 no. 1 HT.
Session 12: Just play for pleasure.

This may give you the general idea. Notice:

1.      How varied it is.

2.      The section size in each practice session is not arbitrary: it was carefully decided using the 7-repeat rule.

3.      Some pieces you have just started, so you are doing only a couple of bars perhaps with hands separate. Other pieces already have sizeable chunks being practised. Other pieces still are mastered and complete, but you still need to practise musical or performance aspects of them (these are the ones where the 20 minute rule may be relaxed).

4.      The most important consideration when using this sort of method is planning. You must give continuity to what you are doing in each practice session. It is useless to practise the first two bars of a piece today and then drop it until 3 weeks later. You must sit down, and make a list of what you want to accomplish in 5 years time. Then you must break down this long term task in one year achievements, then in 3 months goals and finally in day-to-day practice.

Personally I believe that learning 100 superlative pieces in five years is really the minimum acceptable. Any lazy slob should be able to manage that if they follow the approach above. It is only 20 pieces per year, less than 2 pieces per month, for crying out loud! Of course, you can change your mind and drop some of these pieces and replace them for others (your taste will change within five years).

So here is an example. Let us say one of your pieces is Satie’s Gymnopedie 1. I believe (and have the evidence of several students who successfully learned it) that anyone, even a complete beginner could master this piece in a maximum of ten days by following the scheme below:

     Session 1 - bars 1 – 12 (Add first beat of bar 13.)
     Session 2 - bars 1 – 21 (Add first beat of bar 22.)
     Session 3 - bars 22 – 26.
     Session 4 - bars 1 – 26.
     Session 5 - bars 26 – 33.
     Session 6 - bars 1 – 33.
     Session 7 - bars 33 – 39 (Add first beat of bar 40.)
     Session 8 - bars 1 – 39 (This completes the first part.)
     Session 9 - bars  72 – 78
     Session 10 – bars 1 - 78 (the whole piece – Bars 40 – 71 = bars 1 - 32)

     What exactly you will do in each of these sessions would take me too long to explain, but believe me, it is not just repetition.

Take the first session: bars 1 – 12. In the next 20 minutes we would break it down into small bars, just bars 1 – 2, left hand only. Since bars 1 – 2 are repeated six times on the LH, this takes care of the full 12 bars. As we are dealing with the technical aspects (large skips of the bass, accurate landing on the chords, proper chord voicing), we are also considering the harmonic structure: We name the chords (Gmaj7, Dmaj7), we hear the chords, we feel the chords, we look at the chords. After a couple of minutes of this, believe me you will never forget these two bars. Then we move onto the RH which covers only bars 5 – 9. We ingrain the fingering. We learn and memorise the sequence of notes. We play the D major scale over two octaves (so scale practice gets inbuilt in the practice session). We notice that even though this melodic line uses all the notes of D major, it actually does note sound very “major”. This is because it is not the D major scale, but rather the Phrygian mode of the D major scale that is being used by Satie (he loved modes). So we practise this mode as well to get our ears used to it.

We still have not used more than 7 minutes of our practice session. We then join hands. There are specific ways and tricks to do this, so we do it as well. 15 minutes on and bars 1 – 12 have been thoroughly mastered. Not only we mastered the right notes at the right times, and memorised them, we also mastered the technique (= the movements) appropriate for the sounds we want to produce. We practised both the scale of D major and its Phrygian mode. We did a harmonic reduction and analysed how the melodic line and the chords interact. All that in less than 20 minutes.
     
     Now maybe, a particular student may not be able to achieve as much. Maybe all we can do in this first session is to get hands separate. It does not matter; we do hands together the next day.
     
     Now, comes the next day, we must give continuity to the agenda. We start by doing session 1 again. Is it mastered? Most likely it will feel as if you have never seen it before. Never mind. Just go through exactly the same steps you went through yesterday: do the first two bars LH only. Practice the D major scale and the Phrygian mode. Work on the RH, then join hands. Do not skip any step, do not cut corners (there is a huge temptation to just sight read through a session you have learned the day before. If you do that you will live to regret it, since you will just be practising the wrong thing and ingraining bad habits).

You will find out that yesterday it took you 15 minutes, but today, it will take you only 2 – 3 minutes for it all to come back to you. So you still have 17 minutes left to tackle session 2. So you do.
     
     And on the third day, you start by going through the previous sessions (if necessary going through all the steps you did before), and tackling a new one.
     
     On the fourth day, the actual practice session is to put together everything you learned so far. So it is quite a sizeable section. You are not worrying anymore about technique (that should have been mastered in the previous sections). Now you have a section sizeable enough to start working on phrasing, dynamics and agogics, in other words: musicality. Never leave musicality to the end. Start working on it as soon as the section is large enough to allow it.
     
     Got the idea?
     
     Now this is just one of the pieces you will be working on, and it takes only one of your daily practice sessions. What about the other practice sessions? You do other pieces! And they may take longer than Satie’s Gymnopedie. A Beethoven sonata may well require 300 or 400 practice sessions to complete. This means that Satie will be ready well before Beethoven. So what do you do? Just put another piece in place of Satie and keep working on the Beethoven. By the time you have the Beethoven sonata ready, you may have added 20 or 30 new pieces to your repertory.
     
     Alternatively you can devote more then one practice session a day for the Beethoven. So instead of 300 days (1 session a day), you may be able to master it in 100 days (3 sessions a day). Just make sure you are doing different sessions, and not the same session 3 times a day.
     
     You could easily learn the Satie in 2 days by doing the first 5 sessions in day 1 and the next five in day 2. Of course I ‘m talking a complete beginner here. Someone who has been playing the piano properly for 2 or 3 years and has the knowhow should be able to master the Satie in 10 –15 minutes.
     
     Sitting down with the score and breaking it down into practice sessions, figuring out all the scale and harmonic structure of the piece, selecting the most efficient practice tricks are all part of practice. You should have sessions just for that purpose. My students do not need to do this, because I do it for them (lucky b***s ), so I save them a huge amount of time. So, all of you guys out there who do not have a teacher: A teacher is not really to teach you. His main function is to save you time.
     
     Finally. And this is very important. Select your 100 pieces. Now your first step is to organise them in progressive order of difficulty, so that by mastering one you acquire the technical and musical resources to master the next one. Again this is an area where an experienced teacher can be absolutely invaluable.
     
     I hope this helps.
     
     Best wishes,
     Bernhard.

[bttay]

Benhard,

Compile what you have written in this forum and we will have a piano bible.  

I find your posts very helpful.

[Daniel_piano]

Yes, your question is a bit incomprehensible.

My question may be incomprehensible but you understood anyway what I needed to know perfectly, what a talent you have; your students are really lucky

Thanks for your wonderful detailed answer
Just a  clarification: when I have to repeat the bars I'm trying to practice seven times in order to understand if the chunk is too big, do I have to repeat them seven times hand separated or hand togheter?

Thanks again
Daniel

[bttay]

May I ask why is it 7 and not 6 or 8 repeats?

Thanks.

[Egghead]

May I ask why is it 7 and not 6 or 8 repeats?

Thanks.

Yes, funny, isn't it? Prepare yourself for some serious statistical analysis here! I believe Bernhard's answer to your question is already on this forum (use search).

My personal opinion: think yourself about what you exactly undertand by "learnt"; and what "exactly 7" means to you (what if you just played the section 7 times already, unsuccessfully trying to learn a large passage containing this section???)  

btw, hens can count to 7.  

[rlefebvr]

Yes, your question is a bit incomprehensible.


Session 12: Just play for pleasure.
      
     Best wishes,
     Bernhard.

Session 12....no wonder I don't get anywhere.

mmmm now how do you divide one note in two and play it seven times.....I think I am in trouble

[mosis]

Bernhard, your post contradicts something you once said.

You said that once you finish a 20 minute session, you should "forget about it for the day. Don't look at it again."

However, in those outlined sessions, you learn one section, learn another, and then play them together on the third session. Why?

I'm struggling to learn SIX pieces in a period of 5 months. They are Bach's Prelude and Fugue in C minor WTC 2, Chopin's Nocturne Bb minor 9/1, Beethoven's Pathetique movements 1 and 2, will start 3, and Rachmaninoff's C#- prelude, 3/2. Work will be started on Shostakovich's Three Fantastic Dances. On top of that, I have to practice every single scale, arpeggio, and four note pattern in the book, and I have a max of 3 hours to practice on weekdays, and unlimited on weekends.

Can you give me some general outlines of breaking up a piece? At least my Bach prelude, just to give me an idea of how I should go about practising it in the most efficient way? I mean, I spent about an hour on the fugue and got half a bar accomplished. I don't think that's acceptable by any standards.

[bernhard]

Bernhard, your post contradicts something you once said.

You said that once you finish a 20 minute session, you should "forget about it for the day. Don't look at it again."

However, in those outlined sessions, you learn one section, learn another, and then play them together on the third session. Why?

I may be paradoxical, but never contradictory.

I broke down Satie’s Gymnopedie into 10 practice sessions. You work on each one per day. So if you worked on session 1 (for 20 minutes give or take 5 – 10 minutes) today, that is enough. It should actually feel mastered. It it’s not, then my scheme was over ambitious; make it smaller. But if indeed after 20 minutes on bars 1 – 12 you mastered these bars, there is no benefit to be gained to continue practising it for the next 3 hours. Instead tackle another piece, or another session of Satie’s.

Next day, do session 1 again. If you can do it, fine, use the rest of the practice session to do another session. If you cannot, then repeat practice session 1 and relearn it. You will find that you will achieve the same degree of mastery of the previous day in a fraction of the time, and will have enough time to tackle another practice session.

Having learned session 1 on day 1, session 2 on day 2 and session 3 on day 3, you will devote the whole session 4 - on day 4 -  to join all the passages. This is like fixing a piece in an engine. You take the engine apart, clean the piece, fine tune and calibrate it. But then you must put it back into the engine and make sure it fits well and works fine.

In practice sessions 1, 2 and 3 you did a certain kind of work. Now the work is different. Memorising 4 bars put together is far more difficult than the sum of the difficulties of memorising each bar separately. Also, because the section is larger you can start working on musicality.

I do not really see where the contradiction (or the paradox for that matter) is.

I'm struggling to learn SIX pieces in a period of 5 months. They are Bach's Prelude and Fugue in C minor WTC 2, Chopin's Nocturne Bb minor 9/1, Beethoven's Pathetique movements 1 and 2, will start 3, and Rachmaninoff's C#- prelude, 3/2. Work will be started on Shostakovich's Three Fantastic Dances. On top of that, I have to practice every single scale, arpeggio, and four note pattern in the book, and I have a max of 3 hours to practice on weekdays, and unlimited on weekends.

This should be more than enough time. You probably could add another ten carefully chosen easier pieces (to act as ancillary material) to your workload if you organise your schedule properly.

Can you give me some general outlines of breaking up a piece? At least my Bach prelude, just to give me an idea of how I should go about practising it in the most efficient way? I mean, I spent about an hour on the fugue and got half a bar accomplished. I don't think that's acceptable by any standards.

That’s what I have been doing in over 2000 posts.

The prelude is really straight forward. Think of it as a two voice invention and follow the plan I described here:

https://www.pianoforum.net/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?board=teac;action=display;num=1081198385

(By the way, this prelude is not really a 2-voice invention form an analytical point of view, however as far as playing goes, it can be learned in the way you would a two voice invention).

This means that you have to learn it in three stages: first stage write a score that has only the motif and its variations. Learn this score.

Have a look here for help with the motivic analysis:

https://www-personal.umich.edu/~siglind/wtc-ii-04.htm

Second stage: add the missing notes and learn each hand separately.

Third stage join hands. Each stage will consist of several practice sessions (20 – 30 minutes), which meant that in this particular case you only start joining hands after you can play the whole prelude separate hands – this is important in counterpoint music. For other styles you can start joining hands while you are still working in small sections.

The fugue is far more difficult (in fact in my opinion this fugue comes 17 in a progressive order of difficulty). Again you will have to do it in five stages. Stage 1 rewrite the score in 4 staves (it is a 4 voice-fugue, even though the bass does not enter until entry 16 in bar 18 – so for 18 out of 38 bars there are only 3 voices) and learn each voice separately in its entirety making sure you keep the original fingering. Stage 2 learn the fugue in its entirety with hands separate. Notice that this will break down the continuity of one of the voices which will sometimes be played by the left hand and sometimes by the left. Once you master the whole fugue with hands separate, you must alternate between the four voices separately and the two hands separately. Your aim here is to memorise the sound of each voice so that when you play just the right hand you can mentally “complete” the middle voice whenever it is interrupted (because it is played by the left hand) and vice versa for the LH. Stage 3 you are going to play again just the right hand, but you are going to join the left hand whenever it needs to play the middle voice. In stage 4 you will play just the left hand, but the right hand will come in whenever necessary to complete the middle voice. Finally in stage 5 you play both hands together. So:

1.      Play each of the four voices separately  using the hand and fingering you will be using for the final version. Aim: to memorise the sound of each individual voice and to master the fingering/movements in a simplified form.

2.      Play each hand separately. The right hand will play the top voice and parts of the middle voices, the left hand will play parts of the middle voices and the bass voice.

3.      Play the top voice and the middle voice. This will mean that the right hand plays all the time with interventions form the LH when necessary.

4.      Play the bass voice and the middle voice. This means that the LH will be playing all the time while the RH intervenes when necessary.

5.      Play the fugue as written.

Each stage must use all of the practice tricks you can think of: breaking down in small sections, rhythm variations, etc. For the 5th stage, while working in small sections the most useful trick will be repeated note-groups. The most important consideration at the learning stage will be fingering. Fingering will make or break this fugue. When joining voices and later hand, make use of dropping notes extensively: it will guarantee hand independence and yet perfect co-ordination.

Finally, before you even touch the piano go through a complete analysis of this fugue. You can find one here:

https://www-personal.umich.edu/~siglind/wtc-ii-04.htm

And this one has animation while you listen to the fugue:

https://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~tas3/wtc/ii02.html#movie

and here for more details:

https://www.earsense.org/Earsense/WTC/Book2/02/index.html

I hope this helps.

Best wishes,
Bernhard.

[mosis]

Thanks Bernhard, that's some great info!

It blows my mind how you think I can learn 10 pieces on top of the ones I'm learning. I am struggling greatly with the perfection necessary, especially for the Pathetique (accuracy and speed is hard to come by). I really have no idea how to organize it so I can play as much as you say I can. :|

[bernhard]

Thanks Bernhard, that's some great info!

It blows my mind how you think I can learn 10 pieces on top of the ones I'm learning. I am struggling greatly with the perfection necessary, especially for the Pathetique (accuracy and speed is hard to come by). I really have no idea how to organize it so I can play as much as you say I can. :|

You are welcome.

And you are right: this is the real problem: learning how to organise it. This is going to take a while with lots of false starts and wrong turns. (I should know I 've been there). However it is possible, and the sooner you start investigating and applying these principles the better.

Best wishes,
Bernhard.

[mosis]

This week I am working on the Prelude and Fugue and my Nocturne. Do you recommend I start all of the pieces, or do 2 or 3 at a time? I think I can master the first page of the Prelude and the last page of the Fugue (I'm starting that one from the back), and I can pretty much finish off the nocturne. After this week, should I begin on the Pathetique and Rachmaninoff and let these two sit? If I don't have them completely mastered, should I continue practising those unmastered sections while starting on the Sonata and the Rach prelude? And finally, should I scope out a few (easier) pieces to learn?

I'll have you know that I'm learning these pieces because I want to do my Grade 10 RCM exam in June. I don't have ANY repertoire right now, so if I learn more pieces, they're going to have to be Grade 10 as I need competition and exam material.

[bernhard]

This week I am working on the Prelude and Fugue and my Nocturne. Do you recommend I start all of the pieces, or do 2 or 3 at a time? I think I can master the first page of the Prelude and the last page of the Fugue (I'm starting that one from the back), and I can pretty much finish off the nocturne. After this week, should I begin on the Pathetique and Rachmaninoff and let these two sit? If I don't have them completely mastered, should I continue practising those unmastered sections while starting on the Sonata and the Rach prelude? And finally, should I scope out a few (easier) pieces to learn?

I'll have you know that I'm learning these pieces because I want to do my Grade 10 RCM exam in June. I don't have ANY repertoire right now, so if I learn more pieces, they're going to have to be Grade 10 as I need competition and exam material.

It will ultimately depend on how much time you have during the day. If you have time to fit 6 (20 - 30 minutes)practices sessions a day, then work on all of the pieces concurrrently.

Have a look here for specific intructions on how to organise it all:

https://www.pianoforum.net/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?board=perf;action=display;num=1079229883


Once they are mastered (in the sense of ready for a first performance, not int the sense fo total perfection) you will not need to work on them everyday.

Although I understand your predicament (needing more pieces grade 10 for exams and competition), I think you should extricate yourself from it.

The point of playing the piano should not be to pass exams and win competitions. Concentrating on these as your end goal will actually defeat its purpose.

On the other hand if you have your aims right (= to play  the piano beautifully without regards for exams or competitions) you may find that you are passing exams easily and winning competitions all the time.

Best wishes,
Bernhard.

[mosis]

I want to perform on these competitions, and I want to get my Grade 10 out of the way, but I want to have repertoire so that I have something to perform anytime, anywhere. Considering that I'm learning 6 pieces in 8 months instead 16, it's not going the best for me. :/

[mosis]

Oh dear, Bernhard. I just noticed that you linked me to the C#- prelude and fugue. I'm playing the C minor one.

I found the page pertaining to that fugue, though. Thanks a bunch.