Piano Forum

Hi all,

I've been avoiding pieces at my level for some time now. I find them too demanding, challenging, laborious, exhausting, boring, grueling, rigorous, taxing, annoying, aggravating...

When practicing works near your maximum potential you are going to naturally face many of these challenges you mentioned. It is fine to work in this environment but I always wonder why people subject themselves to it exclusively, it is just not the most efficient way to learn for the vast majority of people.

Something like that (I think). These are around RCM level 7 or 8 pieces/etudes which are around grade 5 in other syllabi like ABRSM, etc. So, they aren't way, way up in the upper echelons in terms of study/repertoire.

I think it is a misconception that more difficult works have more to teach you. I learned a great deal more from all the thousands of smaller pieces I studied than anything I learned from very difficult and long pieces. Difficult pieces can become easy when one notices that they are merely constructed with many tools you already know well. The only way to know these tools well is to study many easier pieces where you can demonstrate them without any problems at all holding you down.

There really is so much more, "easier" repertoire available, that I've gotten accustomed to learning. I find it very enjoyable to play/learn these pieces in a relatively much shorter time and with much, much less effort.

Efficient learning, learning pieces with a controlled rate where you notice the improvement during every practice session, is a good study environment to put yourself in. People tend to frustrate themselves with tough pieces which takes them extended time to first get their hands around then followed by a half baked attempt at mastering the expression. It is ok to challenge yourself with tough pieces but it should not take up the majority of your daily practice. That is easy to say don't let them take up most of your time but it's not so easy to be strict on that one as difficult pieces tend to draw you in and frustrate you and thus eat up all your time.

Anybody else here, ever get sick of a piece that they use to love because they spent so much time practicing/working on it?

I never really had problems dealing with pieces which were far too technically demanding. If something is completely alien to my hands/mind I never obsess about them wondering why I can't play them. I have often returned to these once unplayable pieces after several years and they all of a sudden are possible, thus I never obsess with pieces that are too difficult for me and always pay attention to areas where I can make progress. However I got to a point where I had enough of constantly relying on muscular/sound memory for pieces many levels below my capability. The only way to avoid this was to improve my reading skills. Now I can play many pieces immediately with mastery without any practice at all. That is empowering and the reason why I think sight reading is one of the most important skills for all "classically trained" pianists.

Sometimes an individual needs to study piano with other tools first and neglect serious sight reading development. I personally was from this group of people, I really enjoyed playing by ear and muscular memory with only a small amount of reading here and there. I really hated reading music, but eventually I came around to understanding it my saviour. I had cornered myself into how far I could push my memorization skills and playing by ear skills, yes I could improve them but the steps in improvement were very small compared to the large amount of effort put in. When I turned to sight reading the potential for improvement was vast and thus I could work hard with a lot of material and notice the benefits.

Piano study is not all about repertoire memorisation and technical patterns (scales, arpeggios etc) yet many seem to only do this exclusively.