The Blog Returns/Learning Difficult Music (10 Steps)

Hello Again

Part of me is tempted to use my absence from this blog as a metaphor for how bad practice habits can become catastrophic.  My previous post was from November 2015, well over 2 years ago.  Did I mean to take a 2-year sabbatical from this blog?  Or did I mean to quit the blog entirely, and just came back early?  No and no.  Right after November, came Christmas.  In January 2016, I was preparing a show.  After that...  Okay, there aren't any real excuses except that it became easier and easier to move this down on the priority scale.  It's easy to say:  I'll just keep what I've already posted active, but there's no hurry on getting any new posts.  Then it becomes a habit not doing new posts.  Then it becomes hard to get around to it.  Practice is like this.  One excuse becomes two excuses, becomes multiple excuses, becomes the habit of not practicing.

Okay, so I did give into that temptation.  I don't have a fixed schedule for this blog, but I still have plenty more to say that doesn't need to be limited to individual lessons.

Learning a Difficult Piece or Passage

I was in the midst of practicing Cesar Franck's Prelude, Fugue et Variation, op. 18 - originally an organ piece that has been transcribed for piano by Harold Bauer - with a "business as usual" approach.  I got to a 11-measure section that was difficult, 5 measures which I found VERY challenging.   I also was working on a piece by Prokofiev that starts sight-readable (see my definition below under step 3), but every 8 measures gets more and more difficult. When this happens, and it WILL, you have to modify your approach, but can still have a very productive practice session with it.

1.  RELAX
This is a lesson that I didn't follow as a child (or even young adult).  Decades of experience have taught me that getting frustrated is never the cause of success and is usually an impediment.  Just relax and take a deep breath.  Also, try this:  Shrug your shoulders and give yourself an amused smile.  Try a chuckle.  Think or say, "Oh well.  Here we go."  This is the first of 2 attitude adjustments.  The second is...

2.  ACCEPT THE CHALLENGE
You can do four things with difficult music.  (1) Don't try it.  Quit.  (2) Practice it with carelessness and/or apathy.  (3) Practice it carefully while dreading it.  or (4) Practice it with calm delight.  Please tell me you've never seriously considered the first two.  I can't help you there, but hopefully I can encourage you to move from the third approach to the fourth.  Accept it!  This music (piece or section) is hard.  You're not going to be able to just plow through this or sightread it.  You're going to have to dissect it, slow it way down, concentrate harder, and struggle...yes struggle.

There's a great quote that is the basis for many memes: "Embrace the struggle. It will make you stronger, and it won't last forever."

This will be hard, but this will be fun.  And in the end, you'll learn this just like everything else, and you will be SO proud that you stuck with it.

3.  CUT YOUR MUSIC IN SMALLER CHUNKS
Here's a good scale that I use.  EASY - means I can just about sightread it up to tempo, or at least 2/3 of performance tempo.  SIGHTREADABLE - At a slow tempo, I can keep playing without much difficulty.  NORMAL DIFFICULTY - Too challenging to sightread well, but I can work for 20 minutes or so within an 8 measure section and make significant progress.  DIFFICULT (what we're talking about) - Need to cut to 4 measures, or maybe 2, or maybe JUST ONE measure at a time.  Review the steps RELAX and ACCEPT THE CHALLENGE, and just go ahead and do this.  Trim your music until it gets to be an appropriate section for the challenge.

3a.  Identify what are truly the most difficult passages within your section and work on those first.  Often, it's a few beats here and there.

4.  ENGAGE THREE SENSES with INTENSE FOCUS
(1) SEE the notes on the staff.  SEE the keys you are playing.  LOOK at your hand-shape and finger alignment.  Are you hitting each note or chord squarely?  (2) LISTEN to the sounds of each correctly played note or chord.  (3) FEEL the shape of your hand.  MEASURE the distance from one jump as you do it repeatedly.  Pay hard attention to each of these.  Don't play them while your brain wanders off somewhere else.  If you want to learn difficult music, you have to give it your FULL ATTENTION.

5.  REPEAT EVERYTHING MANY TIMES.
Get it right once and it's possibly a fluke.  Get it right 5 times, and you're on the right track.  Get it right 10 times, and you probably have it.  Get it right 20 times, and you've probably mastered it.

6.  SLOW TEMPO, NOT SLOW MOVEMENTS
This is crucial.  Slow the beat way, way down.  If it's 1/10 performance tempo, who cares?!  Slow it way down.  However, move from one position to another with deliberation and full speed.  Play the keys full speed and with emphasis and confidence.  Trills, grace notes, arpeggiations, and other ornaments all go at full speed ASAP.

7.  MAKE A TECHNICAL EXERCISE
This can include practicing in varying rhythms.  If it involves broken chords, block them.  If it involves scales or arpeggios, try some that are similar to your passage.

8.  SEPARATE THE HANDS
If two hands are hard, try just one until that gets easy enough.

9.  STOP WHEN YOU NEED TO
If it's truly difficult.  You probably won't master it in one sitting.  Make progress, and know when to move on.  Don't be surprised if the next time you practice feels like you've regressed a little, but you should quickly get back to where you were and be able to surpass it.

10.  PRACTICE DAILY UNTIL MASTERED
Don't get this started (like I did this blog), make some progress and leave it alone.  Leave things alone when you cannot overcome frustration.  If you're making progress, no matter how slowly it's coming, and can stand to face it again.  Keep coming back.  Eventually, you will have it and may soon forget why you found it difficult.

Welcome 2015, Becoming Observant

Yes, I am still here.  In 2014, I was involved with 9 shows.  That was more than I did in 2012-13 combined.  Also, I spent the year teaching at a local community college.  Needless to say, many things fell by the wayside including this blog, but I'm not at all short on things I want to share, so I hope to be giving you more frequent things to read.  I am doing fewer shows and only teaching privately, so hopefully this will help.

Coming soon: I will talk about suggested goals for this year.  In the meantime, you may want to read what I suggested for last year.

IMPROVING OBSERVATION

One general way that nearly all of my students need to improve on for becoming better music students is to sharpen their powers of observation.  In music, you need to notice several things:

• Familiar chord progressions and voicings
• Key signatures
• Melodic patterns
• Repeated sections and their variations
• Textual instructions (slow down, up an octave)
• Dynamics
• Fingerings

...and so on.  I can't tell you how much lesson time is spent pointing out to a student that they simply need to look more carefully at what they're playing.  They know what the note is, but they don't notice it until I say "check it again."  They get to a repeated section of something they played well the first time and approach it like it's new material.  Musicians are people who are very observant.  They notice things they see and things they hear.  When my wife logs off on her wii, she tends to do it at the same rhythm to get 3 distinct patterns of 2 notes, 1 note, and 2 more notes.  I went to the piano and found that they make a great waltz.  Did you know that cylindrical fluorescent lightbulbs constantly hum on a Bb?  Have you ever listened to the rhythm of a car alarm, or the complicated songs of birds?

There's late '90s British television show called Spaced that has this one scene that nails how many musicians think.  This minor character, Tyres, is visiting his friends.  He's usually wearing headphones, frequently visits a lot of clubs, and basically transforms everything into music.  Watch what happens inside his head as soon as the phone starts ringing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJ0zGZ2t7xE

One exercise I've always suggested to people for improving observations is to select a mundane object, like a clock on the wall, and write down 20 things about it.  Today, I found this article about How to Boost Your Observation Skills and Pay Attention.  Please read it, as I think you will find a lot that will help you with your music and with life away from your instrument as well.