… and maybe week 6, too? It’s late, I lost count, and I don’t feel like going back and figuring it out!
Themes of the last couple of weeks: consistency, memorization, hitting a wall, fighting boredom!
Consistency
At this point, I know all the notes, all the trouble spots, all the frustrations; I don’t need to work specifically on learning the notes. What I do need on any piece after the first couple of weeks is to work towards getting all the notes right all the time. There’s a saying that I’ve seen quoted several times… the difference between an amateur and a professional is the amateur practices until he can play something right, the pro practices until he can’t play it wrong. That’s exactly where I am by this point … I can play it right and now I’m working on not being able to play it wrong. Some of the strategies I’m using for this:
- repeating the difficult passages
- putting together longer and longer sections
- repeating the difficult passages slowly
- playing from beginning to end without stopping
- repeating the difficult passages even more slowly
- altering rhythms
- repeating the difficult sections — even slower!
- shifting the downbeat
- repeating the difficult sections — maybe not quite so slowly, but still slowly
- isolating the 2-4 note units that still aren’t quite right
- umm… repeating the difficult sections — slow….err, yeah, you get the idea!
Memorization
Don’t get me wrong … I have no intention of playing this piece from memory in a couple of weeks! I’m allowed to have the music in front of me, so I’m using it. Still, it pays to memorize. Personally, I don’t find it at all necessary to be able to play from beginning to end of a piece without the music. What I do find unbelievably helpful — if not necessary — is to be able to look at a passage and to be able to play that passage without really looking. It is really the same concept as being able to look at a word and instantly know what the word is without having to go through it letter-by-letter, then expanding that to looking at a sentence and knowing the whole sentence rather than having to look at each word.
Hitting a Wall
No, this doesn’t have anything to do with a remodeling project … or a real wall! During the life of the learning process for any piece, I’ve always experienced a period of time that becomes so frustrating that I start thinking of literally hitting a wall. There is always a period (at least for me) during the learning process during which I feel like I’m making absolutely no progress no matter what I do. Intellectually, I realize that it is extremely unlike that I’m not making any progress, but it sure feels like it! Reality — there is a point at which just about everything in a piece is learned — most of the fingerings are down, most of the musical content — there are just those pesky details — a measure here, a connection there, maybe an altissimo note in another spot — that just seem to refuse to quit being a problem. My best solution isn’t one I’m comfortable with in this situation. This is normally a good time to put the piece aside for a few days or weeks and come back to it. But when there is an immanent performance looming, I don’t consider that to be the best choice.
My second choice is actually something I started a couple of weeks ago. I set up a microphone and recorded a couple of the problem passages back when I wasn’t doing so great with it, so now I can go back and listen to where I was 2 or 3 weeks ago and realize that I really am making progress — even if it is slow!
Fighting boredom…
AKA the Glazunov Syndrome! When I first heard and played the Glazunov Concerto, I loved it. Then, there was a point in my undergraduate days that I could have sworn every single saxophonist in the studio was performing “that stupid Glazunov Concerto” and I got to a point that I was so bored with it, I had a hard time tolerating sitting through a performance. A couple of years later, I still heard the Glazunov at least as much, if not more, but there was no longer an issue with being bored. What had happened was that I had gone from it being a new and exciting piece to thinking I knew it pretty well and then finally, to really learn all of the little nuances of the piece and loving it all over again. I’m hoping the learning curve I’m on with this piece is similar — but much faster! I haven’t come up with a really good strategy for this one, other than to just work through it and try to practice without thinking about whether I love the piece or hate it. We’ll see!
So, down to 2 weeks until D-Day! More to come…
