What do I mean by practising problem passages in context? Let me start with this hilarious image I came across on Twitter a long time ago. I think it describes the practice habit of many of us. In fact, I have seen this very same picture used in other contexts since and I hope that whoever took the original will forgive me for using it here.
I am a firm believer that learning how to practice is as important as learning how to play. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that I originally stopped playing piano all those years ago as I had progressed to music that I was no longer able to practice effectively.
I was effectively doing exactly what is shown in the picture – just hammering through pieces in the forlorn hope that if I fumbled through often enough, eventually the problems would fix themselves. In fairness, this strategy had served me very well up to Grade 6. Probably because I didn’t find anything ‘difficult’ up to that level. By the time I was working on Grade 8, everything had become a struggle.
The wisdom of age?
Since returning to piano after more than 20 years away from it, I like to think that a little ‘wisdom of age’ has helped. After I had read Chang’s ‘The Fundamentals of Piano Practice’, I believe a light turned on in my mind. I could finally see that perhaps it wasn’t simply a matter of knowing how to ‘play’ something (so piano technique), but of knowing how to ‘practice something you can’t yet play’. Perhaps this latter option is in fact how we develop ‘piano technique’. Therefore, picking up good piano practice habits is important.
Thanks to Graham Fitch’s eBook Series and Josh Wright’s YouTube Channel to mention two of my favourite resources, I was able to learn many new practice techniques that literally revolutionised my practice sessions. However, even more important I believe is learning how to ‘join the dots’ – which brings me back to the original title of this post.
Why put back in context?
I have noticed that no matter how much time I spend working on a specific technical problem, unless I spend time practising problem passages in context, it all falls apart. Let me explain with an example.
Chopin’s A Flat Minor Waltz (L’Adieu) is (relatively speaking) quite easy to play. However, there are a couple of tricky parts that are anything but straight forward. For me, the chromatic run pictured below was super hard to play. Teenage Tommy didn’t used to worry about things like this. He would simply fluff his way through on the basis that ‘most people will never notice the wrong notes’. However, the shall we say the more ‘mature’ version is a little more exacting!
Therefore, I finally decided that I would just learn to be able to play this passage properly. I devised a whole set of exercises that got me to the point that I could quite easily play the run when I practiced it on its own. However, whenever I was playing through the piece, nine times out of ten, I would still stumble.
I then came to the realisation that in fact practicing the run in isolation was only half of the solution. So whilst I had been avoiding ‘playing through’ as being a ‘bad habit’, I had perhaps taken it a step too far. Indeed, once we think we have started to get an isolated technical difficulty under control, we really do need to put it back into context and practice it in that way.
Choose a good starting point
I’m not necessarily saying we need to each time start from the beginning, but we should go back sufficiently far – whether that be one or two measures or to the start of a section. Otherwise, we simply ‘revert to type’ as we play.
In this particular example, I found that simply going back to the point shown above was sufficient. As I initially started to play even from this point, then it seemed that all my hard work was wasted. I found that I still fluffed it. I therefore, needed to develop a strategy that allowed me to incorporate the newly polished run with the notes that precede it.
In fact, it wasn’t actually that difficult. I simply started to use the ‘add on’ technique. That is to say, rather than launching into the full run, play just up to the first note. Practice that and then play up to the second. Practice that and then play up to the third and so forth. This way we are replacing one piece of muscle memory (the messy run) with another (the polished run). For some thoughts on what muscle memory is, take a look at this post.
I’ve noticed this same thing happen in pretty much every piece I’m learning. In fact, I have now started to incorporate this principle more generally into my practising. As I fix problems, I then spend time practising problem passages in context. If you’ve noticed the same phenomenon, give this a try and let me know how you get on.
