Hi,
I've always wondered if you should practise a piece at its suggested tempo from the day you start off at it or slowly build towards it.
For e.g. if the piece says "Allegro , 130 q.p.m." , is it better to start working this out at this speed right from the start or go from Moderato , say 100 q.p.m. and build / work towards the correct tempo ?

I would love to hear from you guys , especially piano teachers as to how they approach this and what works best for the development of the student.

Thanks and regards,
Avi.

You should always work up a piece at a much, MUCH slower tempo than it will finally be. This helps to avoid building in tension and muscle memory of mistakes. It will gradually speed up naturally as you get to know the music better, but if it doesn't once you feel you have mastered things you can use the metronome to help you get it up to tempo little by little.

I always recommend using a slow underlying beat when practicing a new composition. But in playing deliberately behind the indicated tempo, one should always be musical and phrase beautifully. I tell my students that the perception of the flow and shape of music should be imprinted right from the start.

I have some technique related videos at my blog site that demonstrate the graduated build up of scales from quarters, very slowly to the more rapid 16th note values.

This is somewhat of an example of how to layer learning, but in the case of approaching new compositions, you have an expanded amount of time to cultivate all the necessary steps needed to reach a desired tempo.

Shirley Kirsten
http://arioso7.wordpress.com

Well, if you can play it right away, well, at the target tempo - why not? For me my biggest problem is consistency. The first movement of Mozart's K545 which I've "finished" (you can never "finish" that piece) is a prime example. There are some passages which I can play at the right tempo but not the whole piece. Unfortunately, one of those passages is the first few bars which makes it difficult to track.

So now I try to find the hardest passages and use that as the starting tempo and move from there.

Good plan. You are going to spend ninety percent of your practice time on five or ten percent of the piece, so you might as well calibrate to those parts.

I agree that when first learning a piece, slowing down a little bit will provide extra capacity to handle other musical aspects of the piece which are hard to grasp when the student's energy is directed to playing up to speed.

But I also find some fingerings or hand positions that work perfectly for a slower tempo simply do not work for a faster tempo. What works best for me is to slowly play through the whole piece first, then chop it into small sections and try to play each section up to speed in order to identify any potential tempo barriers and make adjustments accordingly.

Also, considering it takes at least 3 correct passes to increase every 4-8 bpm while you work up the tempo, I would be careful not to start it too slow. If a piece says "Allegro," my ultimate goal would be playing at 168 and I would start at least around 132 (usually I start at 144). In any event, I would not try to play the piece at under 120 (at moderato) because that might potentially change the "feel" of the piece.

Of course, everyone learns differently. I am curious to hear how others work this out.

I find that the slower I play a piece, the quicker I learn it. If I bring it up to tempo too fast I end up with a mess (buried melodies, flat dynamics, horribly inconsistent tempos, missed nuances) that takes forever to clean up.

I've read (can't remember where) that you should almost always practice a piece significantly slower than it should be performed.

Might have been somewhere on PW.

I work similarly to pianist d'amore, and for some of the same reasons, except that I *do* play really slowly sometimes. I've been working on playing with less tenseness, because it makes playing fast feasible But I find that if I play *really* slow I can play *much* more relaxed, and then when I speed up I can do so in leaps in bounds and still be relaxed.

I also think that doing something like "interval training" - short bursts of fast and then some slow - seems to help with stamina - like runners do.

For me it's also helpful to play at the final tempo I want on occasion before I'm really technically able to do that. I get in a habit of hearing it a particular tempo, and my brain thinks about it at that tempo, and it's important to me to break that habit and to think faster.

But most of the work, on expression, finger facility, all of it, is slower than tempo.

Cathy

I agree with your comments. If there is a difficult section, I generally, take those measures apart separately, and play behind tempo. I recorded K. 545 on You Tube, and there are things I really would like to re-do, but I enjoyed the flow, and the tone was what I had striven to produce.

One of my students is currently studying K. 545 and we are spot practicing the troublesome measures. She also has trouble with the trills.. which we are building up rhythmically. For trills I like to use 3231 fingering instead of 3232 etc

http://arioso7.wordpress.com

I agree, slower is better, until the ripening time for up tempo.

I concur with what you said.. and particularly like the part about hearing yourself render a piece at the designated tempo, even if not completely ready.

I tell my students, and myself, in fact, that no matter what tempo I am practicing in, I should phrase, shape, and approximate the projection of style period in any tempo..I think a lot of time, at least, my students tend to play slow, and yes, too relaxed, a word you mentioned. They don't bring the same energy to their slow playing, and that's where I remind them they should. I look at the piece as blowing it up, with a big lens when they play slowly. Just an interesting metaphor.

Shirley K
http://arioso7.wordpress.com
Latest blog about warm-up routines with 10 year old student demonstrating

Morodiene and david_a, (and anyone else who wishes to offer an opinion) I have a question. When a new piece is being learned, it is advisable to begin at a much slower tempo than the final tempo. But how fast is "much slower" in quantifiable terms? I ask because, after reading pianoist d'amore's post, I wonder if perhaps when I begin new pieces, I begin at tempi that are too slow. Often, my starting tempo for a new piece is half the final tempo, or even slower. (For Bach pieces, sometimes quite a bit slower than half the final tempo.)

I start by playing a piece thru at whatever tempo I can get it mostly right Then I work on the parts that weren't right - the hardest parts - until I can get them at the same tempo as the rest of the piece, and well-integrated, whether or not that's at tempo yet. Then I work in iterations from there. And "right" includes not just notes, but phrasing, accents, staccatos, rhythms, etc.

I never really have a piece "finished" There's always something else to deal with

Which isn't the same as saying that I never have a piece well enough done that I play it in public. I do. I just always have something that I go back to and start slowly again, in order to improve it.

So for me there's no one-and-only answer about how slowly to start. Every piece has a different answer, and sometimes I'm working on getting the right notes, and sometimes a better take on phrasing, or pedal, or accents.

Cathy

I'm my opinion, this is one of the reasons learning to play the piano is so much fun!


When learning a new piece, I also start at whatever tempo I can get right, whatever it happens to be. With certain pieces, such as those from the sonatina literature, I can play them somewhere between one-half and three-fourths of their final tempo in fairly short order. But when learning a Bach piece, I have to begin at glacial speeds, and even then merely learning the notes is much harder than learning the notes of a sonatina. Mostly, I was concerned if the need to begin extremely slowly when learning a new piece is a sign that the piece is too difficult to attempt in the first place. In the meanwhile, I will continue working on those difficult, but oh-so-satisfying Bach pieces

I wonder what my teacher would think if he observed the process I go through when studying a new piece of music. I think he might sometimes be horrified

Avi, I don't know how advisable this is, but occasionally I'll play a piece I'm working on much faster than the maximum tempo I've establish up to that point. Basically, I do this because I'm curious to know how badly my playing will fall apart. Sometimes I'm surprised, and there are sections that are not nearly as disastrous as I would have expected.