If your primary aim is composition..what should your piano practice routine

[opus10no2]

...Consist of?

I myself gave up the 'dream' of being a concert pianist long ago, but I've maintained a passionate interest in musical creation; improvisation and composition.

If your aim isn't to perform pieces, what kind of piano practice do you do?
Maintaining technique is good for performing your own works of course, but is learning pieces valuable for the expansion of one's own 'vocabulary' and stimulation of new ideas via the personal creative transformation of the ideas of others?

I'm curious if anyone else is in this same boat also?

[soitainly]

 I would think that you would be improvising quite a bit. Learning music by ear vs. only reading. You can still do as much traditional practice as you need or want. There are some days where you are just maintaining what you know, others where you may be more inspired, so you should be willing to be a bit more flexible.

[clouseau]

I would practice piano in a way in which i could be exposed to a lot of material. Quantity over quality. This way you learn different styles and composers, and will get a lot of ideas. Sightreading will also prove usefull for the same reason.

Otherwise, I would still do what is necessary to maintain a good level of technique, as sometimes ideas seem to come out of nowhere when the fingers are in good shape. Also, you are composing for the piano and idealy must be able to play what you compose. Sometimes you might have in impulse which you want to turn into notes, but your technique is not ready to convey, so you have to put a lot of efford which might disrupt your flow

Improvisation is not only fun, but will provide you with unexpected material and also helps to deepen your knowledge of theory, through practice. For example, you can choose a harmonic progression and improvise on that (look for John Mortensen videos on youtube, who advocates classical improvisation).

[pianoplunker]

...Consist of?

I myself gave up the 'dream' of being a concert pianist long ago, but I've maintained a passionate interest in musical creation; improvisation and composition.

If your aim isn't to perform pieces, what kind of piano practice do you do?
Maintaining technique is good for performing your own works of course, but is learning pieces valuable for the expansion of one's own 'vocabulary' and stimulation of new ideas via the personal creative transformation of the ideas of others?

I'm curious if anyone else is in this same boat also?

1. Practicing a style such as cha-cha, mambo, stride, pop, etc.
2. Using numerical references to chords such as I IV V as opposed to C F G - in case you want to change the key.
3. Sometimes just playing a few notes or scales as smoothly or roughly as possible.
4. Jam over a descending bass line - Pachelbel did it with Canon in D but he was not the only one !

[xdjuicebox]

Me me me me me! My first question: composing for piano, or for orchestra or both?

Here's the routine I'm doing right now:

https://www.pianostreet.com/smf/index.php?topic=64809.0

My routine's pretty off the deep end (because I'm like that lol and I don't usually get through all of it every day), so cut what you need to, except the scales, arps, and chords. And the patterns as well.

I think the most important thing though is that you get very, very, very, very used to playing things that you think up instantly. Competition practice or concert pianist practice, a lot of the time, is geared towards perfecting a specific piece (or pieces), or at least that's how I was taught.

So the most important thing is that you're exercising your brain; just take a bunch of stuff you expect to use and play it in every key. Take chord shapes you like and play them in every key, etc. I agree with the stuff about scale degrees, that helps a lot for me.

[ted]

...Consist of?

I myself gave up the 'dream' of being a concert pianist long ago, but I've maintained a passionate interest in musical creation; improvisation and composition.

If your aim isn't to perform pieces, what kind of piano practice do you do?
Maintaining technique is good for performing your own works of course, but is learning pieces valuable for the expansion of one's own 'vocabulary' and stimulation of new ideas via the personal creative transformation of the ideas of others?

I'm curious if anyone else is in this same boat also?

Nice to see you back, I always found your posts interesting. I am more or less in that situation, but since the age of about fifty-five I have embraced recorded improvisation as my principal creative medium. I can say how I practise, which may or may not be relevant to your objectives.

The only pure technique I consciously practise is on my Virgil Practice Clavier, at around eight ounces, for about ten minutes morning and night using movements of my own invention which are relevant to my improvisation. During the day, I usually cycle through my small repertoire of pieces for an hour or two. They don’t interest me much any more (except my own compositions and my permanent infatuation with ragtime) but as I have have played most of them since I was a kid  it seems a pity to drop them. If I am not recording, later in the day and at night, I practise those aspects of improvisation under conscious control - methods of idea generation, exploring voicings, haptic and phrasal cells of interest, all that sort of stuff. I usually record in sessions of an hour or so, but once into that, all practice and technique are thrown out the window in the cause of music. At seventy, given the frequently demanding way I enjoy playing, I find keeping physically fit is important, if that might be construed as “practice” !

I am probably neither pianist nor musician in any commonly accepted sense of those words, I just enjoy creating my own highly individual universe of music, and that is how I “practise” to do it.

[mjames]

I'm still in the initial phase of composing/improvising, basically all I'm doing is emulating the style I love the most. The best way to do that for me is just play and analyse as much music as I can from my favorite composer(s). The best thing is they're fairly technical, so my technique pretty much improves along the way as well.

It's probably not the best way but it's how I've improved my improv.

[ronde_des_sylphes]

It depends on what style you are looking to compose in, and the level of importance you ascribe to improvisation. From my personal perspective (ie lots of improvisation, composition in a romantic or post-romantic vein) technique is important, but it gets practised through improvisation, thus it almost looks after itself. I would argue that a good working understanding of theory and compositional techniques is every bit as important as performance technique, maybe even more so. There have been many successful composers who weren't true virtuosi! It strikes me as paradoxical that when I decided I wanted to compose fairly seriously, my approach was to work on piano technique and take proper lessons. It was good in a discipline sense and definitely expanded my vocabulary, but in retrospect I wonder why I didn't take composition lessons instead. As it happens I've intuitively assimilated various compositional techniques through repertoire and analysis, but I'm not sure this is an optimal approach.

[fftransform]

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[fftransform]

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[ahinton]

The only realistic answer to that question must depend upon whether or not - or to what extent - one is a pianist or not in the first place. Many composers these days are not pianists (including me, sadly), although quite a few do at least have some proficiency at the instrument. If I might speak for my own experience, although I knew that I had not a shred of pianistic talent, I became ever more drawn to the instrument and what it could do; this created the problem as to how I could even begin to write effectively for it as the great pianist/composers did. I think that the piano is probably one of the worst cases in that it's harder to write well for it as a non-pianist than it is with many other instruments. I tried to resolve this dilemma by spending hundreds of hours cooped up in basement practice rooms at college haplessly trying to sight-read my way through sheaves of Chopin, Liszt, Alkan, Busoni, Medtner, Rachmaninoff and others as well as the complete Chopin/Godowsky Studies, the last of which is perhaps about the most absurd thing to try to do when you can't really play the insrument. I don't ever regret the exercise, however - arduous and often frustrating as it was - because it did eventually help at least to give me some kind of perspective on (a) what it must have felt like to be able to play as those composers did and (b) the sense that, for them, the borderline between piano performance and writing for the piano seemed so nebulous as barely to have existed at all.

I don't suppose that this is much help but it's the best that I can do!

Best,

Alistair

[doug123]

Professional composer here.

In addition to the fine advice given so far, make sure you regularly are practicing music dictation (often called transcription) by ear. 

Practice making variations on the material you transcribe. Make sure you notate out the source material and the variations. Do this by hand.  Avoid computer notation programs until your piece is ready to be type set.

Another exercise I found very helpful is to write out from memory, away from the instrument, a piece I know. Solfege is wonderful, and you can even give your self tasks of solfege a voice of the music.

The basic premise would be that if composition is your end goal, then the more you train your mind to move at the speed of music, the better craft you will have.

By all means, add improvisation and sight reading to the core list.   

It just sometimes is a "mind-set" shift to think of practicing as not just moving your fingers. 

Lead with your mind, and sing a lot.

[ahinton]

Professional composer here.

In addition to the fine advice given so far, make sure you regularly are practicing music dictation (often called transcription) by ear. 

Practice making variations on the material you transcribe. Make sure you notate out the source material and the variations. Do this by hand.  Avoid computer notation programs until your piece is ready to be type set.

Another exercise I found very helpful is to write out from memory, away from the instrument, a piece I know. Solfege is wonderful, and you can even give your self tasks of solfege a voice of the music.

The basic premise would be that if composition is your end goal, then the more you train your mind to move at the speed of music, the better craft you will have.

By all means, add improvisation and sight reading to the core list.   

It just sometimes is a "mind-set" shift to think of practicing as not just moving your fingers. 

Lead with your mind, and sing a lot.

All of this makes very good sense.

Best,

Alistair