Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner How quickly can you get a piece to 95%?

got that right dave; the musical equivalent of the pareto principle.

Maybe there is a less "quantitative" way of phrasing this, but I do empathize with the OP for posing this question. As adult students, we experience more uncertainties, I feel.

When I was a child and taking lessons, I was a pretty passive student. I learned what my teacher picked for me, and I stayed on it until she told me I was done (IIRC, a piece usually took a couple of months to satisfy her standard. Looking back, I have no idea where her bar was.) It was not a particularly good learning experience, but it gave me some fundamentals to work on a piece on my own. In the intervening years, I would try to learn some well-loved piece on an on-again-off-again basis. Years went by, and I don't think I actually made any serious dent in them.

Returning to taking lessons as an adult has been an interesting experience. It's certainly more effective to have the guidance of a teacher. Interestingly, I find the process to be very different from my younger days. My teachers now ask me for input about what I want to work on. They no longer explicitly tell me that I "passed." I have to take on a more active role in the direction of my studies. All of this is a positive development. However, because I haven't yet developed that sense of self musically, sometimes uncertainties gnaw at me: (NB: these are my internal questions; I am not expecting answers from the forum.)
- should I continue banging my head at some piece even though it's been months, and I feel I've plateaued?
- should I work on a whole bunch of pieces at the same time? How many is too many?
- how do I even set up a wish list of pieces to tackle in the future? There are so many, and after a certain point, there are no more "grades" associated with the pieces (e.g., pianostreet would suggest "grade 8+" for them, but we all know there are 8+'s and then there are 8++'s; besides, these grade differences are kind of meaningless anyway). Because I am not very good at sight reading, playing through a piece a few times doesn't really help me determine whether I have a chance tackling it.

Basically, these are all questions that a more seasoned musician would know by introspection. But we're not there yet. So curiosity makes us ask other more advanced learners. Everyone is different, but knowing what others' experiences are like is still interesting, and for some, perhaps reassuring.
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I'm surprised by the variety of unhelpful and off-point responses to the simple question, 'how quickly can you get a piece to 95%?' Perhaps I could have made the question less ambiguous. On the other hand, at least one non-native (I assume) English speaker seemed able to offer a clear, concise response that fully satisfied the call of the question.

Here is my motivation for asking this relevant question. I'm an adult beginner. I'm encouraged by how quickly I'm picking up pieces. I'd like to have an idea of where I might be headed.

What can the expert/accomplished/plateau'ed pianists among us do? This might give me and others like me an idea where I might be headed. It's only a curiosity, and a vague one at that. The responses will not affect my progress or my approach, which is centered upon a love of the music and the thrill of achievement. Perhaps others share this same curiosity, and for that reason I decided to make this thread: to satisfy my curiosity and perhaps the curiosity of others. If this has offended your sensibilities, perhaps you need thicker skin you have my apology.

Actually, I do loath being testy and sarcastic like this. However, something has to be said in response to the unpleasantness I've received. It is unfortunate, and it is a lesson to avoid asking sincere questions in this forum.

hawgdriver, there's a zen story that goes like this: a prospective student approached the master and asked how long it would take to reach enlightenment. the master replied "Mu", which means, "un-ask the question".

what you have perceived to be flippant answers are in many cases clues with which to better frame your aspirations. perhaps if you tried to 'understand' (stand-under) the responses instead of demanding your question be answered in a certain way you would see that your goal should be qualified, not quantified.

give it some thought.

Try to realize that unless a responder to your question were to give you a basic "history" of his/her experiences, past and present, at studying the piano, unless s/he were to give you a specific piece and try to estimate how much time might have been spent to getting it to a certain point, it really is very difficult to give a reasonable response to this type of question.

This observation is based on the fact that bringing a piece up to, or near, performance level may depend not only on how much practice one does on the piece, but on a host of other less quantifiable aspects: how familiar one might be with the particular style of the piece or with the composer's style; how familiar one might be with the piece itself from listening; what kind and quality of instruction - or lack of it - may have gone into the preparation of the piece, and so on.

I don't, for example, know what 95% really means; it may have totally different meanings for many of us. I have performed, publicly and privately, a number of pieces on which I have worked at in recent years, but I wouldn't want to even try to quantify the degree to which they have been "gotten to," nor given my failure to record, over the years, how much time I have spent on learning and then polishing any individual work, could I really say how much time I have spent on getting pieces to where they were when I performed them.

The question, viewed from your perspective, may seem a logical one, but some of us, for reasons similar or analogous to the above, may find it extremely difficult not only to answer but to understand how any answer could be relevant or informative.

A case in point : I have spent about two months learning/working on/trying to perfect the Mozart Sonata in B-flat major, K570. It's not ready for a "critical" public performance, (I know, because I just recorded it this morning and was not happy with the results) but my teacher is happy with what I have done with it and feels that it could be ready for a "first-run" performance at a private recital. That said, this probably doesn't mean anything because you have no idea of my past preparation, my current level of performance, my listening experiences; in short (again) all of the above-mentioned criteria that might contribute to my successfully dealing with the challenges of this Sonata.

I'm sorry that you think that some were un-helpful in their responses; I think that many were just voicing frustration at how nearly impossible - for some - to give a reasoned response to the question.

Regards,

Entheo, cudos on the philosophical nature of your response. It teaches us a method to analyze and respond to posts to our quesions that we may not desire.

Your experience with the Wanderer Fantasy might have given you some idea of what you're in for when you tackle difficult pieces on your own. This is a big-time piece, and you were able to get the first few pages down pretty well, but there are a lot more pages to go. You could eventually play them all--if you were willing to invest the necessary time and effort on them.

Eventually one needs to be selective with advanced repertoire. A top concert pianist can have hundreds, if not thousands, of difficult pieces worked up, but lesser players are going to have to pick and choose what they work on.

Chopin Ballades and Etudes are concert pianist-level pieces of the highest order of difficulty, and these would take the longest to work up. The same with certain Beethoven sonatas. Other of his sonatas are accessible to anyone. The Chopin nocturnes are accessible to everyone.

I had many yrs. of classical lessons as a child and then restarted as adult. Over the yrs., I've started on many advanced pieces but had to eventually drop them because they would have taken too long to work up. I've dropped several Chopin etudes after yrs. of effort on them. Likewise, a Chopin Scherzo and a Ballade, a Brahms Rhapsody, various concerto movements, other virtuoso pieces, etc. As of now, I'm working on one concerto movement, one virtuoso piece, and one concert etude. These are the three pieces in the vast ocean of classical repertoire that I'm most interested in; I've dropped everything else. I've been working on these pieces for yrs. (decades actually) and they are still not perfected, and I may be working on them till kingdom come.

Also, my piano tastes have changed somewhat over the yrs. and I now do a lot of jazz-type improvisation, mostly by ear, something that I never did till fairly recently, which takes time and energy away from classical repertoire.

So I think you'll need to be selective in what you choose to work on, since you may be working on it essentially for the rest of your existence.

OP, you have to understand how people choose the pieces that he or she wants to learn, and also their background.

If a person is intermediate level, say Chopin Waltz (not the hard Waltz, say Op. 64 No.2). The next piece that this person will choose to learn after this Waltz is something more difficult. If it took this person awhile to learn the Waltz, it will take even longer to learn the harder Chopin piece. But if this person, wants to learn similar level of Waltz, it will take this person faster to master the piece. Your question has so many variables that makes difficult to give black and white answer.

I think your approach should be : take a look at the score, if you cannot even figure out how to read the score, it means too difficult for you. If you spend like 10 min to figure out how to play one measure, it means that the piece is beyond your level now. On the other hand, if you can sight play the piece, it means that the piece is too easy for you.

I remember 23 years ago, I wanted to learn Revolutionary etude. I could not even play the first block chord on the RH. But I really wanted to play, regardless how long I spent, I still could not play it. But later, after my technique got better, I could play easily the stuff that I could not even play before.

So asking the length of time to learn a piece is a difficult question to answer.

Gyro - I don't believe the OP never mentioned anything about the Wanderer Fantasy. The Schubert D960 is a piano sonata - and the OP was only talking about it "hypothetically" - he hasn't actually attempted it. From personal experience I can affirm that the Wanderer is indeed difficult. I worked on it - on and off - for four years before I was able to play the entire piece in recital. Of course, I can't remember when I reached that magic 95% plateau with it....it was probably during the performance itself.

Work on the reading aspect of the music. This will help you get to 95% quicker. But the final 5% may not be there, regardless of how well you read and play from the score. Expose yourself to kinds of music as well.

The more experience you have with the composer, style of music, and the instrument in general determines how fast you one may get to the polishing state of a piece. Say if I've personally already have a few Chopin Nocturnes and Waltzes under my belt, crossing over and the time trying to get a Bach prelude and fugue to "95%" will not be the same if I decided to learn another small Chopin piece. I'm not sure how this piece of data regarding time to learn a piece may benefit the OP unless the OP wants to gauge his progress with how long an advanced pianists takes to learn a piece, which again does not lead to any precise assessment to the OP's topic.

The topic is easier to respond to if you it were:

"How do I shorten the time it takes for me to learn a piece to 95%" or "What strategies do pianists use to learn a piece in a given amount of time."

A little less time than it takes to get it to 96% .

Best answer yet! This is definitely a Zen-like question, and the above quote would be sort of a koan-like answer, I suppose.