This post is a direct follow-up from last Friday’s post, “Two types of practicing”. Today I’m again drawing inspiration from The Bulletproof Musician, and specifically a post called “When is the Best Time to Start Memorizing a piece for Fast, Accurate Results?”. I’ll let you read the article for yourself, but I want to highlight some of his practical applications: The best memorizers began testing their memory much sooner, by trying to sing at least a few bars of the song from memory in their very first practice session. And this self-testing ramped up even more in their second practice session… while the fast memorizers made many more errors in their early practice sessions, they fixed them, and made fewer and fewer errors toward the latter practice sessions. The slow memorizers avoided errors early on by singing from the score, but had more and more memory issues as they began testing themselves in the latter practice sessions, ultimately making a ton in their final session when they were furiously trying to cram the piece into memory. As I describe in my e-book “Pianist’s Guide to Practicing”, I differentiate between memorizing as just playing without the score, and memorizing implicit cues necessary to perform a piece; by this I basically mean “choreography”. Last post I emphasized that pianists should practice small sections in depth, and my point really is so that they’re building implicit memory early on. They should take risks, they should mess up. In doing so, they are testing their memory. In my experience, testing my practicing early is essential to guide my next steps. Testing my implicit memory means deciding on a predetermined section of a piece, at a predetermined tempo (one that is reasonable to achieve, but not too comfortable), with a certain set of decided interpretive decisions in place. Then I play the section, and try to execute everything, without stopping, until the end of the section. Then I analyze the results. It may be messy, it may sound horrible. But I’m testing my implicit memory, and I’m getting a lot of information I use to decide on my next steps. I’m a huge advocate of active practicing. Too many university performance majors practice passively, without taking risks, without testing wherever they’re at. Through years of graduate work, I’ve spent a lot of time sitting in my office overhearing other piano students practice. One thing I’ve noticed is a tendency to perform, instead of practice, in the practice room.
Maybe put another way: some students practice with the intent of performing, while others practice with the intent of learning. In the first category, students run through pieces, constantly. When it’s new, they run through the piece slow, eventually they try it faster. When they’re perfecting a piece, they’re simply performing, performing and performing. I’m not sure where the nuances of interpretation are addressed in this process; presumably they analyze issues in their performance in bulk at the end of one run. In the second category, a students practicing doesn’t exactly sound like the final result. They work in short section which they repeat often, one right after another. They manipulate passages of the score, working in a variety of ways to create challenges for themselves within the text. On a certain passage, they may go from a slow practice to performance tempo in a matter of 10 minutes, but they’ve covered just a small patch of ground. I’m highly in favor of the latter approach. I would always rather make a lot of progress on a small section of music, rather than a small bit of progress on a lot of music. If I dig into a passage intensely, I’m going to make observations, solve problems and test solutions incessantly. More than likely many of the strategies I use in the first one or two sections are going to inform how I work on the rest of the piece. In the end, I’m going to have a much deeper understanding of a piece that’s going to make the rest of the learning process much faster. I also think it’s going to be more secure, but more on that on Monday. How do you get young students to slow down? Certain children love to speed through their playing. This causes, at best, the stuttering mentioned a few posts back, at worst, general frustration.
But “slow down” doesn’t make sense to them! Their desire to speed precludes any logical thinking. Even when I manage to slow them down they don’t see the connection between tempo and success in a passage. One pedagogy mentor explained it this way: kids who have high energy, and love playtime, associate “slow” with one of two things. You slow down either when you’re tired, or when you’re sick. If I’m asking one of these kids to slow down, they think I’m asking them to be tired or sick, and why would they voluntarily feel like that? I’ve had success with certain kids to play like a turtle. Occupying their imagination with thoughts of imitating slow-moving animals ‘tricks’ them into adopting a successful tempo. I’ve been trying out one new strategy, one that I think will work best with 9 or 10 year old students (or older); kids that understand fast and slow, probably even know that slow practice is better, but choose not to do it. I ask them to adopt “thinking” speed. I’ll explain thinking speed as the tempo where their brains and their fingers can talk to each other. (Or if it’s a reading exercise, I’ll sometimes substitute brain for eye; for my Suzuki students it’s sometimes their ear.) Again, the idea is to fill their mind with a different thought that inadvertently causes them to adopt a desired tactic. I think with certain students, saying “slow down” causes a certain number of guilt, especially when they know that a slow practice tempo will be more successful. Using ‘thinking speed’ instead allows me to make a more neutral suggestion that gets the same result. I've always had the best intentions to get to know The Bulletproof Musician blog. If you don't know it, you owe it to yourself to visit. Here a musician-turned psychologist-turned musician/psychologist posts weekly studies on cognitive and behavioral practices and finds deep and insightful conclusions meant to bring out best practices in performing musicians. Going through some archives, I was recently intrigued by this post about how easy or how difficult our practicing feels. He’s studying the difference between practicing “to make things easier” and “wanting practice to be easy”. There’s a slight difference: in the former, our practice goal is to start with something hard and progressively make it easier to play; in the latter, we start with something easy and end with something easy, in fact, we avoid difficulties altogether. The article is based on a study of people playing a simple control game; some were allowed to practice at consistently difficult levels, others were held back. Both groups practiced the same amount of time. Tested at easier levels, both groups performed well. When the stakes were raised, the first group performed significantly better. The author suggests this is an obvious conclusion (“well duh”). But he’s concerned about the practical application to us as musicians. When we learn a piece, we know what to do, but at some point we plateau (as he says, when we need to get from “good to great”). His suggestion is that things not be perfect before we make our practicing difficult, to avoid plateaus where our practicing is easier. Think about applying this principle to practicing your repertoire, where he’s saying it’s okay to move on before something is perfect as the more we challenge ourselves, the better the finished product: “Like assigning a set of scales at quarter note = 60, but asking a student to increase the metronome by 2 clicks as soon as they can play it [3] times in a row with <[5] mistakes. As opposed to simply asking that they play the scales at quarter note = 60, and not increasing the tempo until they’re 100% mistake-free.” As a follow-up to the last post: I can’t stress enough how important it is to sing while you practice.
Playing the piano is a study of diminuendo. Every note dies away right after it begins. It takes a special ability to make a true musical phrase that isn’t full of false accents. It takes an even greater ability to make a phrase that is truly beautiful at the piano, one with direction, one that pulls on the heart-strings. By singing, I’m not just getting a shape of the melody. I think singing a line actually helps me shape the accompaniment. Take a simple melody and Alberti bass, something like Mozart’s K. 545. The left hand accompaniment helps lead the phrase along. With subtle rhythmic acceleration and dynamic shape, it can build the perception that the melodic notes are actually growing and transforming. We can trick audiences into hearing shape on single notes. Many students are resistant to singing out loud! Usually at first I don’t require them to in front of me, but I suppose I need to build the resilience that my undergraduate teacher used with me (spoken of in yesterday’s post!). At some point in my undergraduate years, my teacher began forcing me to count out loud while I played and practiced.
This was incredibly difficult at the time. She of course wanted me to become aware of my poor rhythm, or unstable tempo. But it seemed that counting out loud just exaggerated the problem. I could either count out loud, or play, not both. But she was insistent! I imagine now that I had one or two lessons where most of the time was spent with me struggling to count out loud (because I was stubborn and didn’t try it in the practice room during the week!). If my counting drifted off, she’d stop me. If I counted incorrectly, she’d stop me. If I played incorrectly, she’d stop me. We would repeat and repeat endlessly. I’m so glad for her stubbornness! Eventually I was able to do it, and it’s an indispensible part of my practice toolbox. I found once I got it, it’s been easier since. I don’t even use this just to fix tempo or rhythmic issues: it’s more about having a metacognitive awareness of the piece. By multi-tasking, my sense of time is sharper, but my technique is more independent, and I listen much better than I ever have. Those weeks of struggle forced me to transcend passive practicing and cultivated greater awareness of my work. Adding my voice to practicing led to me singing while I practiced (more on that in tomorrow’s post), and helped me collaborate, as I could be more attuned to the rhythmic events outside of my own playing. I often doubt or second guess the things I say in lessons. Sometimes it’s just a lack of clarity. I don’t always think ‘on my feet’ very well and use a lot of extra words that just don’t get my point across clearly.
Sometimes I say the wrong thing. Yesterday I used an analogy with a student that I’m not sure about. She was playing a soft, romantic, broken chord pattern in both hands and encountered several problems: her soft tone was nearly inaudible, and uneven, and the small knuckle of her fingers collapsed. All of these problems were interrelated of course! Part of the issue was the piano in my teaching studio: it has stiff keys that are hard for students to adjust to. Part of the issue was also a recurring problem with this student of inattention to hand position, and flow. So, I wanted to give this student a kinesthetic experience to get the desired affect: I suggested curved fingers, and under each finger she was crushing brittle little bugs. I wanted something that would give her a sense of stability in the structure of her finger, that she could then transfer all the way to the key-bed. The result was very effective: she had a consistent, singing piano tone, and she achieved a projecting soft dynamic immediately. My fear, though, is that the idea of crushing something with her fingertips could lead to a complete isolation of the fingers. Instead of integrating her arm, the rest of her body would be cut off by a tight wrist and her fingers would try doing all the work. In the short term this was an effective strategy. I’m curious to see how this student develops and whether it inhibits her technique later. Have you found a better, more technically sound, analogy for this type of problem? Any thoughts about how to adapt this analogy to a good technical approach? I’d love to hear from you! Please send me an email by clicking here. Another habit in my students that I’ve been trying to combat has been “stuttered” practicing…Where the student plays a few beats, stalls and stutters, collects enough information to play a few more beats, before stalling and stuttering again.
I’m okay with intentional pauses, in fact I encourage students to learn music in small, isolated, predetermined sections. But within that section, students need to keep going no matter what. This way, we start to get a sense of the choreography needed to play a piece. But of course most student stuttering at the piano doesn’t work this way. They simply sight read a little, stop, and sight read a little more. There’s no intentionality, there’s no organizing of the physical technique needed to internalize a passage. This kind of practicing yields incremental results. Intentional practice yields exponentially greater growth. I’ve been saying to these students: “The keys aren’t going anywhere. It’s our hands that have to figure out where to go. We only have 10 fingers but we have to convince our audience that we have 88. Practice so that you can trick your audience.” Right now, of course, the music is tricking the student and it’s obvious to anybody listening. A good crescendo is hard to come by. A good decrescendo is even harder.
Most students will define crescendo as “getting louder”, and they intuitively know that that means you start soft. I’ve been emphasizing with a lot my students that the point of a crescendo is not so much the beginning or ending dynamic. It’s the ‘getting’ part. The joy of a crescendo is the journey from one dynamic to the other. The ‘getting’ isn’t a means to an end. The music is in the journey. Lately, I find myself telling my students: "assume your audience doesn't know anything" (this is an improvement on the original: "assume your audience is stupid").
Now I don't mean that you as a performer ought to look down upon your audience. Nothing high-brow or elitist helps anyone who's supposed to be an ambassador for their art of their ideas. What I do mean is that you want to be absolutely clear to your audience what your musical ideas are. Something I've learned over and over again is that my musical ideas might seem clear to me, and I might think that I'm expressing them clearly. But usually those ideas have to be exaggerated for my audience to understand them. Assume your audience knows nothing about classical music. Express your ideas in as big a way as necessary to make it abundantly clear to them what your musical intentions are, what story you're trying to tell. This is how we get an intentional pianist, someone who's artistry is communicative and engaging. |
"Modern performers seem to regard their performances as texts rather than acts, and to prepare for them with the same goal as present-day textual editors: to clear away accretions. Not that this is not a laudable and necessary step; but what is an ultimate step for an editor should be only a first step for a performer, as the very temporal relationship between the functions of editing and performing already suggests." -Richard Taruskin, Text and Act Archives
March 2021
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