Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum The last few miles of learning a piece?

You've spent a few weeks getting the fingering down on a new piece, you've brought it up mostly to tempo with at most just a few mistakes, but now you want to play it expressively and musically.

How do you 'practice' this last part?

I have trouble with that stage: concentrating on not making mistakes, while trying to focus on the bigger picture of the overall feel of the piece. My teacher says I tend to play a bit too cautiously.

Any tips? Thanks in advance!

Put it to the side for at least 3 months,
study something different in the meantime,
and give a second try if it feels to be the right time for you.
just my 2 cents

Justin,
This may sound snarky but I promise it's not meant to be. You have to learn to listen. At this stage it's really about listening to what you're playing. And that's more complicated than it sounds. Most people don't know how to listen to what they're playing (which is why a good teacher is so invaluable, they can listen for you until you learn how). Here is something that might help. Break the piece into reasonable sections and record yourself playing them. Take your best version of them to your teacher and listen to them together. Get his or her feedback. Have them help you learn what to listen for. Rinse and repeat as needed.

Warm Regards.

a few weeks on a piece is nothing. Learning the notes is the easy part but you will not really be able to work on it to be more musical until it is ingrained and that takes a while longer.

Agree with previous advise to record yourself which also quickly highlights any deficiencies and can be a powerful tool to motivate you to do better.

When I get close, I start getting obsessive about a piece. I love this stage, but it does make me late for work many mornings.

I am of the opinion that you should practice being expressive from the beginning, and not save it for last. Even though you are going slow and still making mistakes in the early stages, practice being musical even at that stage.

Also, the last 10% takes 90% of the effort - I think that's a universal law no matter what field we are talking about.

Sam

Expressiveness at the piano is a matter of adjusting touch throughout the piece.

Adjusting touch throughout the piece requires constant physical adjustments.

Learning a piece requires cementing a sequence of physical movements.

Adjusting a cemented sequence of physical movements is difficult.

Therefore, work on expressiveness while you are working on the foundation and not as an afterthought.

Regardless, polishing a piece still requires a lot of time and I'm not sure one is ever done.

I will quite often photocopy a piece I am working on and cut it up into small fragments. I will then take a fragment and work on that fragment only for a day, playing it multiple times til I think I have "perfected" it.

I know I'm in the minority on this, but it has made a huge difference in my playing over the last year (suggested by my teacher) and I have begun doing this with my students too with excellent results.

Learn the piece with musicality and expression right from the very beginning. Don't go past the first measure till not only notes and fingering are there, but all the dynamics and articulations too, and until it means what you want it to mean. At least for now. Doesn't mean you can't change your mind, but make it music before you go on and add more.

I find that both I and my students learn faster and play better this way.
I suspect it's because the notes we learn aren't anonymous (ok, that's a G then that's an A, or was it an F) -- they are musical elements (hello there, my friend the 2-note slur from G to F that goes BAAH-bum!)
And there is no muscle or ear memory of any non-musical way of playing it. Really, from the first instant you play a measure, you are creating a muscle and ear memory, so you might as well make it as good as you can.

The one thing we delay until later is tempo. Tempo can wait. Thinking about all this other stuff can be time-consuming so there's no need to push speed until everything is working well more slowly.

Yes, I want to start learning pieces this way, i.e. expressive from the start. I can't tell you how many times I've learned to play a piece through, then added the dynamics.... only I'd forget to put some of them in during a play through because I was so used to just playing notes correctly!

+1.

This is what my teacher insists from the beginning even when I was back at level 1. Learning to be expressive is not an after thought. Practicing to be expressive has to be from the beginning, from the very first piece of music doing the best you can, exactly what hreichgott says. You have to learn all the expressions along with the notes. In the long run, it will give you much better sight-reading results if you are used to thinking expressively for notes you are seeing for the very first time.

If you find the music too difficult to learn while practicing expressively, the music is either too difficult for you or you are trying to learn too many measures in one practice session. It is much better to learn just 2-4 measures and have it completely ready for your teacher, then you'll have a lot to talk about instead of the teacher waiting for you to finish the whole piece before talking about expressions.

What a helpful comment! I am going to do this from now on!

I completely agree with this. From the first measure of learning, the music needs to sing. Your ear gets used to hearing the piece the way you play it. Hence, if you play without phrasing and dynamics while learning, that is what you learn to hear, and adding those elements after the fact is a struggle.

I have been a guinea pig for both ways of learning. My current teacher has me sing each phrase before learning it. Where do you take a breath? How should a two note slur sound? What is quiet, strong, where are the accents? Then, from the first time I play a measure I am learning music, not just notes and rhythm. I pay much more attention to slurs and dynamics. It seems to me that I ingrain the music much more quickly. At first it is difficult to play ultra slow and maintain that musical feel, but it can be done.

My former teacher was "notes first" for accuracy. That resulted in ignoring dynamic indications, and I actually think it took longer to learn because I was not really connecting to the music. It was just a bunch of random notes. Playing musically from day one resonates better with me.

Obviously, in order to do this, I need to learn the music in very small chunks. In fact on the Bach Sinfonia I am learning right now, some sections are as small as a single measure.

Everyone, your responses are really fantastic and very much appreciated!

From the sounds of it, I have been going about learning pieces without learning dynamics and articulation from the beginning, and concentrating too much on fingering and playing accurately. Also I think I try to bring things to tempo too quickly, and I need to break the music down into smaller chunks and learn them properly.

A couple of weeks ago I started learning the 4th of JS Bach's Two-part Inventions, and I don't think it's too late to do this before getting too far.

Actually, now that I think of it, I believe my teacher has been trying to get me to think 'musically' about a piece of music as I start to learn, but I got too absorbed in getting the fingering right and not making mistakes.

I feel there are two types of expression:
- The basic things one should add right from the start when learning the piece, those are the things written in the score.
- But then there's that freedom of interpretation one gets when one is 100% (or maybe just 99%) sure of what one is doing and is free from concentrating on the written details. Then one can feel the piece as something more than just the score and put in some well thought personal choices. I very seldom get anything to this level, but the few times I have there's a big difference.

To have something on the latter level takes a huge amount of time for me and a lot of concentrated work and even going back to basics every now and then. But I wish I could devote mote time to this type of work in the future. Now it's more like developing skills and learning new pieces. Maybe it's just not possible until one has reached a certain level of maturity with the instrument. I also doubt it's something that can be taught, but one must learn by self evaluation...

When I play guitar I learned by listening to the piece everywhere I could, find different versions on you tube, mp3s etc and then found tablature to learn the fingering etc. I played each measure over and over again until I could put as much feeling as possible in it so that I was feeling the music rather than learning just the notes.

I now find I am automatically transferring this process to piano and if it sounds like music and I can feel it, then I am on the right path. I also can tell if it is getting better by how relaxed I am when playing certain parts and how much it is felt rather than heard (if you get my meaning). I am a total beginner and play pretty simple pieces (to you guys), but making sure it sounds and feels like music is my aim with every new piece of sheet music I start learning.

Wow, there is really some great advice in this thread. I have been struggling with this as well, without consciously thinking about it. Thanks!

Just a side thought, has anyone noticed how we use 'miles', 'journey', 'come a long way', 'how far' etc? I mean we always talk about distance when discussing piano progress.

I guess learning anything is a linear process, and a journey is a good analogy. But it implies there is a final destination, just around the corner. Which is very misleading.

With the piano, the more you learn, the further you still have to go!

Yeah, I think of my learning curve as a spiral I do think the "journey" is a handy metaphor. Maybe some people are in a labyrinth

When I'm first learning a piece I listen to several versions of it, not to imitate anyone, but to better understand the whole piece. I think about the mood of the piece and the story behind it. A piano piece is a narrative and with twists and turns, moments of surprise, tranquility, anger, bliss, melancholy, and the list goes on and on. Some pieces inspire imagery. In learning Ginastera Danzas Argentina I pictured gauchos riding through the pampas and tried to capture the movement of horses.

I also sing the melody in my head as I'm playing in order to bring it out in my playing.

Thinking about the dynamics of piece right from the start is a great suggestion, but sometimes I just need to get the notes under my fingers before I can do anything interesting with a piece - it depends a lot on the level of difficulty of the piece. But I usually have a good idea of where I want to take a piece dynamically.