Piano Blog

Coming this Sunday

I'm really looking forward to Anton Nel's concert this Sunday at the Long Center in Austin, TX. It will be the first solo piano recital in the new center and on the new Steinway! If you are in Austin, then don't miss it.

Make a list. Check it twice. Or more.

Lately I've been going to to the gym a lot. As some of my students know, I've got a bet going with a friend that  I can get a six pack! Well, one thing I've learned in doing this is the importance of listing and recording my exercises. 

Getting in peak physical condition, like learning a piece of music, is a process that takes continued effort over the long haul. And if you aren't structured in your effort, a lot of time and effort will be wasted. One simple way around this is to keep a practice notebook (like a piano workout log). 

Here was mine from this morning. (I was working on the last two lines of the Chopin B-flat minor prelude): 

- Hands alone, ghosting (mentally playing one hand while the other hand actually plays), 3x each hand

-Mental practice, hands together, 3x

-Perfect playthrough with full concentration, hands together, 3x

This is just a sample list...I used it in conjunction with "penny practice" (see my recent post) to monitor myself.

There are many values to having a written list when practicing. For one thing it keeps you on task, while allowing for flexibility. For instance, mid practice-session I realized my left hand needed special attention, so I was able to practice it without losing sight of my overall goals. 

Another important value of a list is that it allows you to keep track of your overall progress with a piece. If you keep your list in a notebook, you can even make notes about what is going well, what needs more work in future practice sessions, etc. 

Moreover, as I've mentioned in previous posts, keeping a list is a very important way of allowing yourself to fully engage in music making without having to plan the actual practice session at the same time.

Earplugs!

Here's a quick tip. If you're doing mental practice and are as easily distracted by noises as I am, try a set of earplugs. (I highly recommend the "leight-sleepers" brand.) I find that wearing them increases my ability to concentrate and audiate. 

(In case you don't know, "audiate" means to hear the music in your head...I used to say visualize but of course that's not quite right.)

Do we have practicing and performing backward?

One of my teachers used to remind me that "practice doesn't make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect." Sometimes though, it seems like our best attempts at perfect practice leave something to be desired in performance situations.  

Of course a myriad of factors might contribute to this, but could one of them be that we are "backward" in the way we practice? Specifically, in the way we direct our attention and the types of goals we set. This is an idea that I've been tossing around lately, and I think its worth thinking about. 

What is the difference, psychologically and physiologically, between being in a practice room and performing? Here are two major ones. First, the chemical changes in our body during a performance necessitate a heightened degree of concentration. Second, the ultimatum we give ourselves during a performance is that we "must" play as well as possible, whereas the ultimatum we give ourselves in a practice room is that we "should try" to play as well as possible. 

Some coaches have suggested running sprints before trying out a musical performance, but short of this or injecting yourself with adrenaline, there isn't much you can do to mimic the chemical change brought on by performing. But what about the second difference; the difference in ultimatums? Lately, I've been tossing around the idea that many of us might have our ultimatums reversed. Perhaps we should be setting up "must" scenarios in the practice room, and letting loose a bit in performance situations.

Practice room goals may vary from ambiguous ("practice this piece"), to specific ("practice this measure five times").  But we probably never give ourselves a performance-type ultimatum such as "Play this line perfectly 5 times with total concentration". Granted, we have *runthroughs* of a piece, but this is rather late in the game. 

What if each stage of our practice was structured around an "intense concentration" task? Perhaps such a method would make the concentration required in performance situations the norm rather than the exception. 

I think this is an idea worth exploring. The question becomes how to structure the learning stages of a piece in such a high-concentration manner. There are two aspects to this that come to mind: 1) Have detailed goals that are challenging but realistic, and 2) Set up a self-monitoring system that aides in achieving those goals. 

Let me deal with these aspects separately.

1) Setting definite, realistic, goals

In a performance situation, the goal is clear and simple, albeit tremendously difficult: perform the piece as perfectly and artistically as possible. In the practice room, things may get more complex. For instance, in the very first stages of learning a difficult piece, it would be senseless to set a goal of "play this line 3 times flawlessly". A better goal might be something like "play the right hand 3 times under tempo with perfect fingering". Of course, "flawlessly" is a good goal at later stages; and flawlessly means musically...the whole package...not just hitting the right notes. 

Note: Mental habits. Dont  lose control of your mind. If you lose your focus for even a second, you are habituating an incorrect mental habit. This includes negative or positive thoughts. Some examples: "What does the audience think?", "I hope I remember what is next." "I'm going to mess this up". "What's for lunch today?" "Man I'm really mad about that fight I had earlier". Be careful...just because something is about the music doesn't make it a good mental habit. For instance, it would be a bad habit to think about particular fingerings or notes in a way the interrupts the flow of the goal you are engaging, e.g. "Does 3 or 4 go on F?" or "Is this an F or a G coming up." Certainly you want to isolate these aspects for certain types of practice, but you don't want them all all to become a mental habit. (For more about this watch for my forthcoming post on practice techniques and mental habits.)

2) Setting up a self-monitoring system

The analytical power of the brain is awesome. But part of rational practicing is knowing when it is time to reason about something. The fact is that the analytical part of your mind will greatly interfere with the flow-producing part if you try to use it during the process of flow. The solution is to separate these two functions.

For example, if your task is to play a line perfectly 5 times, do the analysis and planning before and in between each of these 5 times. Engage the intense concentration, flow generating, part of your mind during each run-through. As easy as this sounds, generating a flow process can easily lead you astray. How many times have you been at the piano for several minutes and thought "what was I thinking about the last several minutes?" This is a result of your conscious mind losing control over the subconscious mind. 

The subconscious mind will generate flow when given a specific task, but it must be monitored, but not analyzed by, the conscious mind during that task. To do this takes enormous concentration. Typically what happens when you zone out at the piano is that your conscious mind stops monitoring the flow process, but instead starts analyzing something else...say how your love-life is going. Maybe an interesting topic for analysis, but not great for practice. 

The important point here is that the subconscious mind, left to its own devices, will fall into habitual modes of practicing, and this is not a great way to induce the level of do-or-die concentration we are looking for. A self-monitoring system will help avoid this. It will let you separate the how of practicing from the what of practicing. Or to put it more simply, it will let you get flow going in your run-throughs without losing track of your overall practice.

With so much buildup, you might think that I have some grand "self-monitoring system" in mind. Really the one I use most often is so simple as to seem childish. I call it "penny practice." First, I select the passages to practice and make a list of specific things I plan to practice for those passages (see point one). Next, I place a few pennies on one side of the piano keyboard.  For instance if I want to complete each task on my list 3 times with full concentration, I'll use 3 pennies. Then for each time I get through that task perfectly, I move the penny from one end of the keyboard to the other. 

Like I said, it seems simple but it can be powerful. You will be amazed at how much mental energy is freed up when you aren't worried about planning any monitoring the overall practice session while doing the practice itself. Everytime your subconscious tries to take over, you'll see your list of goals and your pennies and get back on task. Try it!

Practical notes: 

Here are a few practical notes that are just dangling here at the end. Forgive me if I'm getting repetitive.

Set each goal independently of engaging it. Stop, assess, think, engage. Don't mix these elements. Thinking about the goal while engaging means your concentration has been diverted from the goal. If you were actually performing the piece, you would never devote some of your mental energy to thinking "Oh I should practice this line 5 times", so don't do it in the practice room either. 

Remember that you have to give yourself something to focus on when you engage. The mind responds to positives, not negatives, so you need a positive thing to focus on. At lesser stages this could be many discrete elements such as phrasing, fingering, correct notes. But remember that the ear must integrate everything. This means that even with these discrete elements, the sound is what you're focusing on. Always, always, listen and integrate everything else with the sound! 

In this respect, keep in mind also the 3 stages of aural awareness that generate flow in music making: 1) "listening ahead" as vividly as possible (hearing something right before you play it), 2) listening to the actual sound, and 3) assessing the result and making necessary changes. Or, as one teacher of mine used to say, "past, present, future." 

Well this post really became longer than expected! I will expand on several key elements in future posts, such as particular practice techniques, more thoughts on the concept of flow, mental habits, the practice of listening, etc. I would love if some people would try this idea out in their own practice sessions and give me some feedback!