Ruining a piece you love and how to not do that

[sonata_5]

Whenever I pick repertoire with my teacher it is always something I love. But after months and months of practicing that piece,I can’t stand it anymore.Why does this happen?How to fix it?

[brogers70]

Maybe pick some pieces that don't take months and months to learn. You can always keep one "stretch" piece that you keep working on, but I think it's a lot more fun and helps develop musicality more if you are learning plenty of pieces such that you can get the notes and get it close to tempo within a month or less, and then spend the rest of the time getting it to sound the way you want it to. The best thing I ever did for my piano playing was to take a year and play nothing but lots and lots of very easy pieces and just focus on phrasing and voicing and getting comfortable being at the piano without always worrying if I was going to get all the notes right.

[bryfarr]

The best thing I ever did for my piano playing was to take a year and play nothing but lots and lots of very easy pieces and just focus on phrasing and voicing and getting comfortable being at the piano without always worrying if I was going to get all the notes right.

That's a great idea!  I've considered playing more easy pieces and less challenging pieces, but haven't implemented it.  Cool to hear someone has.  The problem is I can't think of many "easy" pieces that I'm drawn to.  What pieces did you play?

[bryfarr]

Whenever I pick repertoire with my teacher it is always something I love. But after months and months of practicing that piece,I can’t stand it anymore.Why does this happen?How to fix it?

Sounds like you've over practiced the piece.  You need to give it more rest time, practice it less frequently, and/or when you do practice it just focus on the problem spots.  You also may not be practicing with enough variety.  Probably could create a post on the many ways to practice a piece.

[brogers70]

That's a great idea!  I've considered playing more easy pieces and less challenging pieces, but haven't implemented it.  Cool to hear someone has.  The problem is I can't think of many "easy" pieces that I'm drawn to.  What pieces did you play?

There were no easy pieces I was drawn to, either. I just bit the bullet and played random stuff from Music for Millions, Easy Bach Dances, and the like. Eventually some movements of the Bach French Suites. It's more important how you think of them than whether you initially find the idea of them inspiring. So, for example, I'd get a super simple Mozart 2 page rondo, but while I played it, I'd imagine how it would sound if it were part of a concerto, hearing the string and wind parts as I played, phrasing as though I expected an orchestra to respond to a particular way of phrasing etc. There's almost no piece so simple that it cannot be made to sound interesting if you pay attention to making it as musical as possible. I did this for a year, and then went back to playing more technically difficult stuff, and I found that my technique was much more relaxed, I was way more comfortable with the piano, and I was paying attention to details of voicing and phrasing that I previously had ignored because I was so focused on hitting the notes in my dream pieces. Unless you are prepping for an upcoming conservatory audition, you have plenty of time, so taking a year, or six months, to do this is definitely worth it. At least it was for me.

Edit: The idea of spending a year doing easy pieces is separate from the idea of just maintaining a balance in your repertoire of pieces that are well within your technical range and those that are a technical challenge. I'd found that because I was ambitious, I was weighting my programs with too much stuff that was right at the edge of my abilities. Now I include more stuff that, while not the ridiculously easy stuff I was talking about above, is still well withing what I can do without a lot of stress; along with other things that are closer to the edge. It's really nice to start a program with something that you are totally confident with and that is relatively easy for you.

[mooshrimp]

I agree with the other posts, most of your pieces should not be taking months to learn. As you get better you'll love more pieces you play, but you can't get better if you're bogged down in one difficult piece for months. I say this as someone who has a playlist of piano that is 90% way too hard for me to touch right now. I get it, it's hard not to learn your favorites!

When you learn pieces at your level it should be taking weeks (generally it should only take 3-4 weeks to learn the notes of a 3-5 page song, otherwise it's probably too hard for you). An added bonus is that when you learn new songs quickly, it matters less if you LOVE them. Most songs I only get to 80% polished. Meaning it's not recital ready, it's comfortable, learned, and I can express good musicality without many errors. Then I move on. You only have to like them enough to feel motivated to practice. I heard someone a long time ago use a video game analogy I'm going to steal here.

Imagine you just started a game and want to level up as fast as you can. You decide that the huge boss that awards a ton of XP is your best bet so you spend hours trying to take him out. Eventually you do. But if you'd instead spent that same amount of time just leveling up with smaller bosses, you'd have far surpassed the amount you got from trying for hours, and that boss would have been easy to take out even sooner.

Piano is similar. Every time you're learning a new piece, you are honing your skills. If a piece is hard enough it's taking months to learn, that's months you're spending only learning the handful of skills for that one piece, when you could have learned multiple new songs and way more skills, and soon that really difficult piece wouldn't be difficult to learn. Meaning not only can you learn it faster, but you can play it better once you do. It was a bitter pill to swallow for me at first that my actual level is just not as high as I thought. But once I accepted it and started picking pieces that I thought were "too easy" I started churning through repertoire and have gotten better so much more rapidly than when I was stuck learning my big goal pieces.

[sonata_5]

What I meant by spending months on a piece is that usually when I learn a piece me and my piano teacher will not stop until we get it perfect