Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum How polished are your final playthroughs with you teacher?

I think there's a difference in teaching young ones or adults who are not used to finishing projects no matter how difficult. That has to be learned. But my teacher does not have to nag if we agree that something must be worked more. I also think I approach my own playing like a teacher: I hear so many things to improve (and that's why I don't like to listen to my recordings) all the time and don't let them pass without trying to improve. Not so much wrong notes, but balance issues, tempo issues, voicing issues, pedalling... All those things need to be improved but for me it just takes so much time and also intervallic work with rests. Not so much to figure out how, but to make it natural and automatic. The sad truth is that I will never be 100% satified with my playing, I've spoiled my ears by listening to the masters too much

So I must pick my battles and during lesson season I rather take advantage of my teacher's knowledge on new things than go every week to show what I have managed to improve. During the lessons breaks I do more polishing on the pieces. Also the recitals here require polishing work, so if I also tried to polish the pieces I work with my my teacher, that would be all I do instead of learning "new" things.

I've noticed that if I really care about the music I won't get tired of trying to polish it, no matter how long it takes. But if I don't I will lose interest in practicing very soon. We sometimes pick such pieces but I almost never even finish them. If I lose my inner motivation to practice I will quit. I have nothing to prove so just "getting better" does not motivate me.

Stubbie, this has already compounded beyond its worth but had you emboldened the words in your original post as you have now instead of highlighting words that Heather hadn't used and then begun with a declaration of nitpicking I wouldn't have picked it up, but you did so it looked to me as if it were you that had mistakenly read the terms as similes rather than Heather using them so and read meaning into her text that wasn't there.

Reading Heather's post I got no indication that she saw the stages as the same and the caveats in her middle paragraph contextualize very well what meaning her terminology covers.

That was all.

And now you've hit me with ...What I do is what is recommended by people with a large audience, like Graham Fitch and Josh Wright, so I can't see myself as an outlier. Maybe if, like Gould or Godansky, I got my pieces polished before I took them to the piano...

The terms you have picked out are so dependent on the student's level rather than an arbitrary one I would find more interest in a discussion of when the polishing stage might begin.

If someone sat down with the next piece that their teacher dropped in their lap and read casually through it with the intention of having the bulk of it fingered and workable for their next lesson I would say that the polishing stage is a good while away yet.

On the other hand if the student read quietly through it before going to the piano, the way they might a sight-reading piece in an exam, looking for the overall form and structure, isolating the phrases and perhaps looking for the piece's climax, then I would say the polishing phase has already begun.

I think Heather's definition suits me very well. We don't need a shoe to be well made to give it a shiny surface, we just need to shine what we've got. So for me, polishing is looking for the shape of a phrase taking into all that's written on the page and all that's missing from it. I don't think I need to play with anything approaching perfection to show that I've studied it beyond the dots on the page.

How strong are the accents, how are the dynamics affected by pitch and by tempo, how fast is the rate of change in a crescendo or accelerando? How much pedal and where? What makes is 'musically enjoyable' and 'satisfying to hear'? Polishing is striving for these answers, not necessarily finding them or realising them, whereas playing a phrase without even thinking about them is not.

Hehe . When I grow up, I want perform at Carniegie Hall, ....

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That?

My paragraphs hold regardless of where the student is at since both state what I would say if such a condition holds. It looks like you're misreading me again but maybe I'm punch-drunk

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I've gone to the dictionary and it seems it doesn't mean "drunk":



But! In the English-Spanish dictionary it says it can be "transitory" or "permanent condition".

I don't have anything polished, by the way.

I have a guilty conscience when it comes to playthroughs, because I rarely do them - I have the world's hardest time focussing through an entire piece. Or at least that's my story. Honesty, plus reading through this discussion, indicates that the problem may be "biting off more than I can chew".

I don't think it's awful - when I restarted lessons 4 years ago, the first task was to kick-start technique, and the stretch pieces I did certainly helped - let's say I learned from them, but did not master them.

I have a notebook where I put the xeroxed copies of everything that I worked on in the past, with notes, scribbles, sticky-tags and all - and I went through some of it this morning. Some of the passages that were problems then feel better now - so I think I have built up some strength since I last tried them. But some of the stumbling blocks are still there.

I just instituted a plan to start learning pieces by selecting "snippets" - pick a few measures, the ones that sound particularly good and present the most challenges, xerox them separately, and work only on them for the first week or so, un-tempted by all the lovely music on both sides of them. After a sufficient number of snippets have built up, promote the piece to full learning mode. Seems to work better for me (just promoted a Scarlatti piece), as long as the snippets are interesting (which, so far, they are), since I'm not tempted to wander off.

I think I'm going to select some polishing snippets as well - I have a Mozart Rondo that I love, and I beavered away at it for months when I was learning it, but polish, not so much. Why should I be surprised - there are 7 or 8 pages of music, that's a lot to digest! I know I didn't take the learning phase one step at a time, and it shows, but let's see if returning to the polishing stage with a new strategy will help.

For play-through practice, I'm going to take the hint that has surfaced everywhere in this discussion, and practice play through with pieces that have fewer technical challenges for me. Call it the balanced diet theory of piano learning!

Lucky you! I wish I could do that. My teacher tends to look at pieces that way… Literally. When I bring a new piece that I would like to learn, she will just sit for several minutes and look through it. Her eyesight is not so good, so maybe when she was younger she could just glance through it and see, but now she has to pore over each page. Sometimes I get impatient and wonder what she is looking for, or why, or what she's mumbling to herself.

My approach is to do what's easier and more natural for me… Just get my fingers into it and see (hear, rather) where it goes. I know that I miss the bigger picture that way, but one *will* take the path of least resistance. Structural questions can come later (goes my thinking).

I had another teacher who was a phenomenal sight reader, and he mentioned being able to see where the music was going on the page, just from looking at it. His words were, more or less, "I can immediately see where it's going and how it's going to get there, and what it's going to do along the way." Perhaps that was why his preferences were for pre-modern music... easier to see the structure of it.

I have no choice but to withdraw from this thread.

Cefinow, fwiw, what I was indicating is that I had one part of the equation but not the other. The ability to see the "picture" in music - the general structure, phrases, etc., was not that helpful unless I also had the underlying skills. So polishing, for me, took a different direction.

I am only responding because of a quote of what I had written, and now deleted.

The short answer, not that polished.

It's almost impossible for me to describe in words about how polished something needs to be before my teacher would say done. However, the recordings in my signature below on soundcloud are examples of pieces at the point in time where my teacher said done. Most if not all were recorded the same week my teacher said good enough to move on. I usually do about 3 takes, (usually choosing the 2nd or 3rd try) and none of them were edited. The point of these is to track my own progress over time. There are mistakes, hesitations, wooden mechanical playing from stress, passages out of balance, and some times extra notes, hitting the wrong chords so on so on in all of them, but I let them all stand. In one recording I even played an extra measure! I hope this gives you some ideas for your question.

You didn't ask this, but to give you an idea, I've been scoring on average about 80% for the RCM Exams repertoire section. To prepare for the repertoire, I generally bring back pieces I've put away early and practice for the next 4-6 months aiming for at least 90% because my performance suffers at least a 10% loss of quality due to exam performance anxiety. My recordings probably represent about an 85% for the typical RCM exam. I'd imagine if I don't learn my pieces habitually to this level, then not only would it be difficult to push them to 90% when necessary, but I may not even pass when exam anxiety kicks in. Without some sort of standards to measure against, it's impossible to discuss what polished or mastered even mean since it's completely subjective from person to person or from teacher to teacher.

OK so I went off for a day to play a concert and came back to find my post a bit over-dissected
I did mean, basically, the same thing by "mastery" "polished" and "performance level", which is:

If a piece sounds like it's being struggled-through, it's not at that stage yet.

Now: There is a huge range between how a piece sounds when we first master it and how it develops over our lifetime, if it's a piece we happen to love and continue to perform. But I'm not talking about going from stumble-ridden unmusical playing to mostly-fluent playing; I'm talking about going from a fluent, accurate, musical performance to a more mature and more beautiful and more interesting performance.

I agree with you 100%. My teacher's description would be similar to this. The playing has to be decent and appropriate for the grade level. The only thing I would add is that my teacher is increasingly more demanding as the music level goes up. If I were to learn a Beethoven sonata, her minimum standards would be appropriate to the music, and she would have no problem ripping me a new one if I even attempted it right now.

Just because my teacher lets me off on certain musical problems in a sonatina doesn't mean she would not throw the book at me had it been a Beethoven or Mozart sonata. I think most adult students don't understand this and believe if the way they played Fur Elise was considered decent, then the same level of performance for Moonlight or Sonata Facile is also fine. My teacher would say no way. For my teacher, the expectation of "polish" and "mastery" changes even for the the same student (me) over time.

I've noticed in discussions with other adult students that some teachers give their adult students an easier pass for just being an adult. Perhaps teachers find it hard to criticize and push and give someone older than them a hard time. Perhaps they figure we're all adults and life is tough, so they don't want to challenge the adult too much or he'll quit then where would the student be in piano? I cannot fault this line of thinking, but I wish it was up to me and not my teacher to decide whether she should give me an easy pass. I don't think she does, but often it is hard to tell, which is one of the many reasons I started participating in RCM exams.

Going back to the original question.

Ultimately your teacher will decide when to stop with a piece, and that decision will be based on your teacher's goals for you. The destination isn't necessarily a perfect piece: it may be in leading you closer to a particular skill, and that piece is a vehicle to that. Your teacher will know when that goal has been reached, and this is when your time with that piece is ended. Otoh, if it is being prepared for a performance such as a recital or an exam, then the goal will be to polish that piece as much as possible.

You wrote that playing through a piece in front of your teacher is a "performance". Actually it may serve you well to not think of it as a performance. You are both working together on a project, your skills, and your teacher uses your playing to observe what needs to be worked on. Often thinking about it this way takes away a lot of performance anxiety, and as you stop thinking about performing, your performance actually gets better. Paradoxically.

Answering the questions:

Often the goal set by both my teacher and myself is not to perfect a piece. In once case it was to solve a hand movement problem that was awkward; in another it was to use a particular counting approach to get a rubato that still had an underlying pulse; in others it is the fact of playing numerous pieces in order to acquire better reading skills. For such pieces, the verdict will be "the goal has been reached - let's move on". I didn't aim to perfect it, so I cannot write about ability to perfect.

Occasionally there will be a piece above my present level. We may bring it up to what I can do at present. For example, be able to get the notes correct, get a handle on sophisticated chords and progressions, or whatever. Then it gets put away, and revisited a long time afterward. With new skills, the piece can be brought to a new level, maybe even "polished".

Years ago, with another teacher on another instrument, there were pieces that dragged on forever. I did not know about strategies as I do now, and also not about going after underlying skills.

At present I did hold on to one piece for 6 weeks, because when I played those chords, my hands felt bad, and I wanted to get at a better way of moving which finally got found. This was something that helped with all pieces with similar chords.

Answering the second part of this first: NEVER - emphatically. That is a terrible way to work on a piece of music, and it also has nothing to do with polishing.

For a polished piece of music, it begins with the first stage for any piece of music: getting the notes right in small sections, and for us this also means reading skills. Fingering in piano is extremely important, because a poor choice of fingering will make it awkward to play. Fingering should be established, and then you stick with that fingering.

I have learned to work in "layers". So for example, first the right notes with correct fingering and easy movements. Then perhaps timing if that didn't get put in the first time round. Then interpretation starts getting put in, and this goes hand in hand with technique and again elements like dynamics and timing. Pedal choice also comes in. As a beginner, your teacher may have a huge hand in analyzing the piece for you, finding the sections, the phrasing etc. As you get more advanced, you take over this part more and more. The "layers" idea was first proposed to me by a professional musician, and an advanced music student working toward a performance degree, before I met my teacher. I was leaning in that direction myself, as this is what, ultimately, worked for me.

Since working this way, the pieces that we bring to completion do indeed end up sounding polished, up to the level I can reach now. At least as important: if something isn't ok, we can pinpoint why it's not ok, and what to do about it in practising at home.

In regards to what NOT to do --- Here is something that happened in my first early lessons, on a different instrument.

I was working on a piece, and each week I'd go in and would start playing that piece. There was a series of notes in "measure 11" - every time we got to m. 11, I could not play those notes in the right rhythm, because my fingers would stay glued down and I couldn't lift them. I'd have to try to play that measure a number of times - I couldn't get it right, so we'd go back to measure 1 until I got stuck on the same measure - rinse, lather, repeat. This went on for maybe 6 weeks. Finally the piece was dropped. I dropped the instrument for about 10 years.

I have now learned that you should not press hard with your fingers on that instrument, because it will lock up the hand. Starting from scratch, I practised nothing else but a light touch for weeks, to undo that habit. One day that "difficult" piece fell into my hands, and with trepidation I tried playing through. That "measure 11" was easy as pie to play. So back then, I had not been able to play the right rhythm because my hand cramped, because I wsa pushing down too hard. A proper strategy would have been:
- Why are those notes uneven? (because the hand is "stuck" and cramped)
- What to do to mitigate that (practise a light touch)
- Practise at home, just that passage, maybe other music or other passages, concentrating on a lighter touch. Observe in lessons whether this is improving.

This is where my obsession with skills came from, because for me at least, concentrating on underlying skills seemed to unlock the door to everything else. That - and strategy. How does one practise? How does one divide up one's practise in a week, and on any given day, and in any given session? Toward what kinds of goals? Once I started this, I would progress more in a week than I had in a month.

When I was a student, the answer was simple - none of my pieces were 'perfected' except for the ones I did for my ABRSM exams, which was three pieces (for one exam) a year.

The priority was to develop technical and musical skills, and learn new repertoire and become acquainted with lots of different piano styles, not waste time trying to polish every piece to performance standard (whatever that was - I never played any recitals as a student, nor would I have wanted to). As long as I could play the pieces reasonably accurately and with good musicality, I'd be moved on to new pastures by my teachers. All four of them. Of course, there were a few pieces that I liked so much that I returned to them by myself later, to polish them to a higher level (with the benefit of having acquired a better technique by then), but my teachers never would get me to return to them. And frankly, I think they were right to keep me moving on. Every piece my teachers gave me to learn had a purpose to it - usually combining both technical & musical concepts, and once I'd mastered those, it was time to move on. BTW, I never asked any of my teachers to teach me any specific piece - if I wanted to learn something for myself, I'd learn it without telling my teacher. And I did learn many, many pieces by myself all through my ten student years.

These days, I still adhere to the same 'concept' in that I only polish (and memorize - which I never did as a student) a few select pieces out of the several I learn every year - only not for exams anymore, but for performance purposes. And I still learn lots of pieces that I have no intention of performing, so they never get polished. But every one of those 'unpolished pieces' enrich my life in some way .

Well put benevis...I am probably more in your court, minus exams. Decided I would look at them, but not go through them. I have three pieces that are at performance/concert level, by that I mean, right tempo, dynamics and musicality. And many more like the way u described it. Some I will go back and add what I have learnt this far, for sure. My teacher knows when we hit a piece that I can get it to performance level. Everything becomes more experiences. As a 4 year piano student. I think another 2 years of lessons, more will be expected of me, and I would expect more of myself too. Happy, I am finally have some good pieces for recital. In fact, I am performing Mendelssohn songs without words op19 no 6 tomorrow to colleague/pianist! I will see how much of my nerves get in the way!

Love it!