There can never be enough reminders: Practice does not make perfect.
I can never say enough: Practice makes permanent. I'm so glad that someone decided to adjust that silly little axiom to say something vastly more accurate. The original wording is so wrong, so misguided, that I dare not repeat it verbatim. We all need reminders that practice time brings us no closer to perfection or artistic or technical mastery. Practicing only reinforces what we're doing, good habits or bad habits. It's worth noting though, when we have young kids that we're teaching, they can't innately comprehend the difference. It is so important that we help students and give them tools to make good habits permanent in their practicing. We see students for 30 or 60 minutes once per week (most of the time). They practice more than that at home and need to be able to work independent of a talented teacher. But, one thing that Suzuki piano training has taught me, is that we have a secret weapon at our disposal: parents. If my student's parent understands good habit-forming practice skills, they can guide their student at home. Parents need not be able to play piano, but there are innumerable things they can do to help their kids practice better. Parents can listen for balance between the hands. Parents can listen for a steady tempo. Parents can listen for hiccups in continuity. Parents can listen for an ugly note. Parents can listen for crescendos or decrescendos. Parents can listen for false accents. As long as you give them a specific item to listen for in one specific spot, parents can go a long way to helping students make permanent, good, habits in their practicing. I'm sure that psychologists have studied the age at which children become meta-cognitively aware of the differences between long term and short term memory. This is something I need to try to find out.
I came to the realization, with one of my teenaged students, that he wasn't practicing with his long term memory in mind. In The Perfect Wrong Note, William Westney writes some about ingraining the correct version of a piece in our mind. He laments the kind of practicing where a mistake is encountered, corrected and then never addressed again. What he's getting at, I think, is that there's the conscious, working, short term memory. Then there's the unconscious, storage, long term memory. Usually we practice so that our short term memory understands the right or the wrong way to play something, but we don't realize that there's no guarantee that our long term memory knows the difference. What gets stored in our long term memory will be the version that we've practiced most, the one that can be chunked and related to some piece of information already in our long term memory. Some day I'm going to try an experiment with a more advanced, teenaged or early twenties student: I'll assign them the task to memorize a few paragraphs of some text, maybe something musical to distract them from the point. I'll instruct them to only memorize the text for 10 minutes a day, each day for one week. Each day they'll take notes about what they did, how they approached memorization. I assume the way they'll practice memorizing text will be more conducive to long term memory storage, than the usual way we practice piano. I'm very passionate about practicing in efficient and effective ways. No matter how hard I try, I often feel like my ideas and tactics aren't appreciated, or even taken up at all, by my students. But I think we naturally will approach memorization of text differently. Ultimately, the problem is that we don't think about learning a piece of music as a matter of memorization. We're not memorizing the notes from the get-go. We're memorizing the gestures, the choreography of the piece, which are necessary to play it with fluidity, without making major mistakes. This is called implicit memory. I hope that the idea of memorizing text will help students connect to a more efficient method of practicing, where long-term memory is the ultimate goal. When you encounter a rest in musical notation, you should do anything but rest.
This observation isn't really new. It's a nice quip that many people have said. Teachers themselves, pedagogy instructors, and students. All have realized that so much goes on in a rest. I'm commenting on it, because I find myself as a teacher forgetting the advice. Or, I forget to consider this as a fundamental issue slowing down a student's learning process. Rests have musical value, of all kinds of variety. It could be interruption or surprise, and very often it's a musical breath, an essential aspect of voice-like phrasing. Often, rests are technical, and it's in this sense that I forget the maxim. Often times, rests mean to move. Whether or not a composer inserted the rest intentionally, we often need rests to find a new hand position. Think of a rest as a momentary pause is absolutely incorrect. The same could be said about long note values. It is difficult for younger students to engage with these in any way other than counting out the correct number of beats. But we want to draw students into a dual-way of approaching longer notes: both counting the durational value, but also using the 'hold' as a chance to look ahead and prepare what comes next, at least mentally, if one can't do so physically. 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.” 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. Occasionally I find that a certain theme shows up in my teaching, with all my students, whether they're little kids or college performance majors. It just happens to be one pedagogical or performance idea that I'm thinking a lot about that ends up applying to a majority of my students. Eventually that idea either becomes a mainstay of my teaching or it disappears.
Sometimes it's a saying, but this week it's been an analogy. I always try to shift how my students practice, especially older ones. I talk endlessly about strategies and techniques. I talk about isolating sections. But I find it really difficult to break their mentality that practicing means starting at the beginning of a piece, playing through till they make a mistake, stopping and restarting at the point of the mistake. I could go on about the errors here, but the point of this post is to discuss the analogy I've been trying out. I've been comparing this kind of practicing to reading a book, but not really reading. We've all experienced having words in front of us, knowing that our eyes are going over the words line-by-line, but our conscious brain isn't receiving any of it. We're 'reading', but we aren't processing; our mind is on something else. At the piano, so much of student practicing is skimming the piece, and allowing little conscious processing attention until we realize there's been some kind of error. In the past, I've asked students how they would go about memorizing several paragraphs from a book. Would you read it through, starting at the beginning and going to the end? Then repeat (not even any washing or rinsing). Of course not, they would study one sentence at a time, repeat it, review it, think about the point its making. When they can recite it, they add another sentence. If it's academic writing, we need to be able to track the argument the author is making. Study the thesis, the background evidence, and weigh that against the process of study, analyzing application of the results. Paragraph by paragraph, we can break down and analyze the overall structure. Even my young students understand this at a gut level, when it comes to reading and learning or understanding a text. I'm not sure why students have trouble applying these reading analogies to piano practicing. Perhaps seeing the final musical composition as a whole creates a desire to approach learning and practicing a piece as a whole. Maybe with text it's easier to see individual moments and practice and rehearse as such. I've had success with students breaking this habit, make no doubt. Sometimes they make the connection and change their habits drastically. Sometimes I force students to practice only individual measures by covering all other measures up with sticky notes. Sometimes I point them to a random number generator app, have it dictate the single measure number that they focus on. Or, number every system of the piece and practice just one line at a time. But so often, we talk about why it's so important to practice in small, isolated sections. They understand these analogies. We pull a random number generator and declare we're going to play one single measure. We talk about the difficulties in this measure, and what the student needs to pay attention to. Then the student goes to play it, and they try to continue past the measure. They don't seem to believe me that I mean literally, stop at the barline, or at a predetermined section. I wonder awareness of stopping points comes from a general mastery of piano playing. Maybe it's easy for me to practice this way because I've synthesized piano technique, artistry, theory and history to such a degree that I can become aware of good isolated practice segments at a metacognitive level. I'm still exploring the best way to instill this practice in my students. I'd welcome anyone's input on this issue!
I had one epiphany when I attended a summer festival earlier that summer. An excellent program with all kinds of strong and confident performers, the faculty were even more impressive teachers and performers. I was both inspired and humbled. Ultimately, I decided that summer that my repertoire plans and performance goals for the forthcoming year were too ambitious and that I had to go back to the basics.
I needed to play a concerto recital as part of my degree requirements, so I began learning Mozart’s K 467—a work with intricate passage work requiring just the attention to detail, both technical and musical, that I needed. At the same time, I was assigned a chamber group to play Franck’s Piano Quintet, which required a great romantic virtuosity and the technical approach to make the piano sound like an organ. As luck would have it, one of my chamber music coaches, in a chance conversation, recommended a book he had recently read and thought so highly of that he made sure the campus bookstore carried a few copies. Rather down on myself as a performer, I checked it out and my life was changed forever. The book was William Westney’s The Perfect Wrong Note. ---------- Early in the book, Westney writes of an illuminating experience he had playing a Beethoven sonata for a master teacher. Re-working the first measure over and over again, the teacher demonstrated, sang, conducted until finally applauding Westney for playing it correctly. Even now, no longer a student, Westney recalls, “I had no idea what made that repetition different from all the others. All I knew was that he loved it, because (presumably) that’s just how he would play it himself.” (pg. 42) Westney suggests that there are dangers in the way music is traditionally taught. Students get bored and quit. Students learn to copy rather than create. Students are passive not active. Students gloss over instead of fixing their mistakes. Mistakes end up being the main focal point of the book. Wrong notes can be perfect because they are information. Mistakes tell us what we need to work on, and thus, direct what we do in the practice room. Practicing should proceed in such a way that we try to make mistakes. “Let’s say you miss a note in the fourth measure. Fine. That note now becomes the last note of a practice segment. Go back a few notes, enough to create some context, and repeat enough times for your hand to teach itself the distances involved. Let your body figure it out in its own way, and that may take several repetitions to happen…The idea is to let it happen, not make it happen.” (pg. 87)
The benefits of this approach are numerous: An engaged attitude, really listening to yourself, which leads to a more engaging and original performance. A secure physical memory of the piece you’re learning. Faster learning since you don’t have to address the same mistakes over again. More awareness of how to fix mistakes which makes you a better teacher of yourself and others.
Westney suggests practicing with big energy, an intentional approach to your performance. Here the opening quote is relevant, “Stop telling your hand what it ought to do. Find out what it is doing.” This is by Eloise Ristad, an influence on Westney, in her related book A Soprano on her Head. The practicing suggested here will not sound pretty for a long time but that’s okay. We don’t practice to impress anyone, we’re alone in the practice room anyway. If we are worried about sounding good all the time in the practice room, we are more concerned with satisfying our own ego than creating an artistic product. ---------- The Perfect Wrong Note turned out to be an extraordinary influence on my playing. I truly believe that I would not have progressed beyond my bachelor’s degree had I not read it. This book allowed my inner musicality to finally be heard. It accelerated the path to growing my technique and my artistry which made me more receptive to my teachers and coaches. Through this book, I revolutionized my practicing. I learned how to apply all of the practice tips I’d heard over the years in such a way that they were transformative, rather than utilitarian. I learned to self-analyze small segments of my work, zoom in and address the individual problem I was having rather than ignore mistakes and hope they disappeared on the next run-through. I learned to listen to myself and consider whether I was happy with my performance or not. I learned to be confident in my playing and interpretations. I learned how to give convincing, effective performances of Mozart’s Concerto K 467 and Franck’s Piano Quintet and how to prepare myself to perform even more difficult works with greater maturity and fluency. None of these achievements were immediate, but the book engaged me in a process which brought far more success than I had found previously. I’d be skeptical of quick fixes. We grow and change as musicians (and people) so much, constantly, that anything that creates a quick fix is likely not going to benefit you in the future, it just happened to help in that moment. Westney’s book continues to engage my work as a performer and teacher today. I do not intend for this series to be an advertisement for my own work, but if you are intrigued by this book and would like to read further into the practical lessons I’ve learned from it, you’re in luck! Over the years I developed an in-depth document that chronicles many of the practical tips and the mental mindset I’ve developed as a result of this book. I’ve also created a series of videos, which I will always be adding to, to demonstrate my own work. I’ve turned this document into an e-book, ”Pianist’s Guide to Practicing” which you can get for FREE, just by signing up to my e-mail list. By doing so, you can get the book and stay closer in touch with my work as a blogger, pianist and teacher. Check out this link or see the signup form in the sidebar at the top of this page. Next in the Influential Books series I’ll be looking at…Creativity. **This post contains affiliate links. While I may receive a small compensation if you purchase any of the products mentioned, the words used to promote them are completely genuine and offered regardless of any personal earnings** |
"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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