The Practice of Piano Practice

How do you get to Carnegie Hall?

I was talking with some students at a local University today and one girl asked “How much did you practice when you were in school?” adding “I don’t know how you piano majors practice so much!”

I thought, “Wow! You know, I really did practice a lot in school. Many hours a day usually. I wish I still had that kind of time now.”

One thing my teachers would always tell me, and I never believed them until later, is how little time you have to practice once school is over. They would admonish me to appreciate all the free time and freedom I had a student.

Well teachers, you were right!

Having sometimes only an hour or less a day of my own at the piano makes me realize how precious this time is. It also makes me realize how important it is to practice as efficiently as possible. If only I could relive those years knowing what I know now.

So thinking about what to say to this girl, I wondered what was the most pithy bit of advice I could give.

I realized that I can’t really improve upon  I was told as a student when I asked the same thing of Charles Fisher. He thought for a second and said: “Make sure you know what you want to do every time you sit down to practice.”

That’s a simple sentence, but there’s a lot implied. Here’s how I unpack it:

• Have specific practice goal and aural image going in.

It’s far too easy to just start playing and see where that goes – usually nowhere good – since this pretty much guarantees your mind and ear will soon wander away. An example of a specific goal is: “I want to have a beautiful sound with perfect articulations on every note of lines 7 and 8 of my Brahms Capriccio.”

Remember that simply knowing the section you’re practicing isn’t enough, you have to generate in yourself a clear aural image of what you want that section to sound like before you can make real progress. This applies to playing your first 5 finger pattern up through a late Beethoven Sonata.

• Have a plan to reach your goal.

Once you know your practice goal, you still need some idea of how you’ll get there. A practice plan can involve many interrelated elements. Here’s an example of one: “First, I’m going to practice the first 2 lines on page two of this Brahms Capriccio under tempo making sure I get the exact sound quality I want out of every note.”

You can (and will) alter your plans as you practice intelligently, but you can’t change course if you don’t have one in the first place. If at any point in your practice you get a sense of “I’m not really sure what I’m up to now” . . . you need to step back and regroup. Ask yourself: What am I practicing right now and to what end?

• Keep your ear and your mind attentive.

Really great practice involves feedback; knowing what each step should bring and then listening and thinking about the results you got so you can alter course. If you aren’t really listening to every note, you can’t know whether you’re moving in the right direction or not.

• Track your progress.

Any way you can track progress from one practice session to the next helps tremendously. For instance, the metronome lets you track your physical and mental comfort level at different speeds. (I’m not advocating constant metronome practice, by the way, but that’s for another time.) Some pianists, notably William Kapell,  kept detailed practice notebooks, including what went well, what needs worked on, interpretive ideas, etc. You might even opt to audio-record yourself frequently, which happens to be a great way to generate aural feedback.

• Know when . . . and when not . . . to go big.

This is a pet topic of mine. Many students, especially more advanced ones, tend to make their short-term goals too grand, for instance “I will work on 8 pages of this piece this hour.” In essence, they tend towards what are in essence several play-throughs and away from the more demanding nitty-gritty of “spot-work”. Playing through large sections is a crucial part of practice, but all too often I see students drastically underestimate the attention to detail, and the repetition of those details, that’s needed for real improvement.

So those are some of my thoughts on intelligent, effective practice. What are yours?