Tips for developing focus?

[blackbird]

Hi there, I'm new around here, although been lurking for awhile, gleaning piano wisdom... I hope I am posting in the correct area.
I've been playing the piano forever, since I was kid. I went to school for music. After a (very) long hiatus in my 20's and 30's, I came back to piano study about 8 years ago, (and had to completely rework my technique at age 40-which I found out was so very, very wrong! It was like going back to the beginning, and starting as a child again.)
Anyway. Beginning to make some headway there, and playing at a higher level again with my "new" technique. And it turns out that my huge besetting problem, all these years, and which has prevented me from playing in any professional capacity, is an inability to stay focused while playing- it's still a problem. While sightreading, learning sections, or even with polished, memorized pieces, it' s a problem, still a problem. I can get through about two pages of music without pausing, stopping, "glitching," messing up- seemingly due to losing focus.
I am gobsmacked when I hear pianists playing pages and pages of chamber music or long pieces of any kind. Just can't even imagine being able to stay with it for so long, to continue maintianing focus and engagement! This skill impresses me above all others.
I'm wondering if anybody has any tips for me? How can an old lady start to develop some focused playing ability, or maybe, it's too late in life to learn this skill, and I should just be humble and stick with my smaller pieces that are never beyond 2, or at the very upper end of my capacity, 4 pages. How I would love to learn some longer sonatas or chanber music even- perhaps, too much to hope for?

[ranjit]

I think this would be hard for anyone. Are you tensing up? I feel like one of the best ways is to keep finding points to "reset". 1 8 page piece can be thought of as 4 2-page pieces, and if you have a long fermata or simple arpeggio or something at a point, that gives you a few seconds to relax your focus and prepare for what's next.

[brogers70]

I find it useful to try to always be imagining the sound of the next few notes I am about to play. If I can keep that up through a piece, the number of glitches, etc falls dramatically. It's a muscle, though, and it needs exercise. So I think you just work on maintaining that imagination of the next notes going through gradually longer and longer pieces. At first it may be hard to do it even for a couple of lines, but it gets easier. Filling you mind with a mental image of the sound you want may also help shut down the inner monologue which may distract you or even stress you out by voicing evaluations of how you are doing in the moment.

[jamienc]

There could be any number of reasons why focus is lost during a performance, and what we always battle against in doing so revolves around the fact that we simply are not very good at using fine motor skills (as opposed to gross motor skills), unless we repetitiously practice those gestures with a full understanding of the deeper processes that perpetuate the composer’s musical thoughts. With this in mind, I’ll ask a few questions and see if that helps you reinvestigate what is happening during your learning process with any kind of repertoire:

How deep is the understanding of the theory behind the repertoire you are playing? As pianists, we have not only the linear motion of the music, but the vertical nature of music to contend with as well. As opposed to a note-by-note approach to learning/performing, there needs to be an awareness of the “shape” or “position” that is being explored at that moment, and how the combination of chords, scales, and arpeggios play into that harmonic position with the fingering you have found to be most comfortable and logical.

With that in mind, are you practicing the passages with awareness of where you were, where you are, and where you are going? One of the toughest challenges is having to be in the moment, but also to be conscious of the immediate surroundings both past and future. That can be quite distracting, and the mind may wander too far ahead or linger too far into the past to be of any good use in the present. One must train the brain and body to limit the amount of peripheral musical vision so as to not be thrust out of musical context both technically and mentally. I often explain it to my student like this… your mind during a musical performance is like a magnifying glass hovering above a large page of newspaper. That glass is exposing a small portion of that page for specific words or phrases to be viewed more clearly while the rest of the page remains unfocused in the periphery. Maintaining the position and motion of that glass across the page is crucial if one is to avoid any mishaps that may be caused by material that lies outside of its window.

Is it the notes or what lies in between? I often have to remind my students that due to the expanse of the instrument from a physical perspective, it is the movement of the body from one place to another that can cause all kinds of mayhem if the gestures are mismanaged or if they are not fully considered as part of the practice mechanism. My students focus so intently on the notes that they forget that the physical movement from one place to another has to be as much a part of the regime as engaging with the notes themselves. Knowledge of how your body is moving through space, how you are shaping your hand to match the correct position once you get there, and even what your eyes are doing at that moment has a large role to play in avoiding any kind of mistakes that may occur because there isn’t enough awareness of what is required during that moment. Have you ever been performing and something about what you just did entered your mind that you never thought of before, and it distracted you away from the task? If so, it is likely a surprise appearance of some musical or technical revelation that was missed during a practice session. Slow practice with deliberate focus on what is happening between the notes can be quite revealing, and it will prepare you enough to diminish the chance that any surprises of the sort will occur.

Lastly, are you mentally diverting too much attention to one thing that takes away from another important component of the music-making process? For example, I notice quite often that my students unevenly divide the attention between the hands, particularly in places where the technical demands of one hand greatly outweigh the demands of the other. I’m not saying it should always be 50/50, because that is simply not how music for the piano works in most cases. However, piano playing is a “collective” cooperation of the hands that needs to be properly gauged so one of the partners isn’t “forgotten” in lieu of the other due to technical complications. Sometimes it might be 60/40. Other times it might be 80/20. It should never be mentally 0/100 or vice versa… I remember a long time ago there was a student playing the F major Chopin etude Op. 10 No. 8 with some difficulty. Several of the teachers got up to view what was happening to help, but few could figure out what he was doing that was causing all the problems. After a few failed suggestions, I asked the student to play just the melody at the beginning with the left hand. Not surprisingly, the student could not play it at all. What this meant was that he was not considering the melody as an important enough component due to most (or all) of the focus being placed on the right hand arpeggios cascading up and down the keyboard. Once he considered the melody as a participating layer, and knew what it was doing, the collective nature of the hands started to improve.

Sorry for such a long post, but I certainly hope this helps you to consider some things in the hopes that your confidence with larger pieces and the minimization of mishaps improves in your music making!

[lostinidlewonder]

... it turns out that my huge besetting problem, all these years, and which has prevented me from playing in any professional capacity, is an inability to stay focused while playing- it's still a problem. While sightreading, learning sections, or even with polished, memorized pieces, it' s a problem, still a problem. I can get through about two pages of music without pausing, stopping, "glitching," messing up- seemingly due to losing focus.

Firstly it's important to clearly define what is "losing focus". Pausing, stopping, "glitching" or messing up is not necessarily related to focus and a lot more so dependant on the amount of practice and how thoroughly you really know how to play your music.

When a piece is very well known the amount of focus actually diminishes, it certainly does not need as much attention than when you initially learn the piece. So this is why I'm not sure it is a focus issue more so than a practice one.

In the privacy of your own home the focus should be not an issue, I can understand if you said you were performing for others that your focus might wander to insecure emotions and thus cause you to mess up.

...  I should just be humble and stick with my smaller pieces that are never beyond 2, or at the very upper end of my capacity, 4 pages.

It's a fine idea and then if you can knit multiple small pieces into one another you can prove you can play multiple pages. I find most people tend to fall into the trap of learning works too difficult and thus have all sorts of issues. Learn smaller, easier pieces and if the same issues occur you have a much more important challenges to correct. Challenges faced with difficult and long music can just be challenges, but if the same occurs of easier/shorter works then this really reveals important foundations to improve and not just errors.

[blackbird]

Thank you all for the extremely helpful replies! There is much to consider in these posts, lots to ponder and put into practice. I appreciate such thoughtful help. Ranjit and  brogers70, such excellent suggestions. Jamienc, please don't apologize for generously giving me much good advice, I appreciate the long post and will reread and reconsider its points! All of you, thanks very much. Lostinidlewonder, (great name!) I was very surprised at the idea to string a bunch of well known pieces together to prove to myself that I can play for a long time. Now there is an idea that was hidden in plain sight! Yet, I do find that these glitches happen in shorter pieces or very well-known pieces too. An yes, theory was never my strong point even in university, and now I find I've forgotten so much of it-it's a bit of a struggle! I'm getting lower level books out to try and review, and hoping to get thriough harmony again and counterpoint at some point in the next few years. It's as if the brain to hand connection is momentarily just lost, and it's not an age thing, because I've always had it. Perhaps an ADHD thing, or just, a bad habit that developed early and now needs retraining, just like the technique retraining. I wonder if there are any step by step methods out there to retrain the ability to focus. In any case, thanks very much, for the valuable input!