One annoying thing I have noticed is that that pieces I previously thought I had mastered (or as close as I’m likely to get to mastery) seem to subsequently deteriorate over time. Why, once we have overcome the hurdles, isn’t it ‘in the bank’? I think I found the answer to this in William Westney’s great book The Perfect Wrong Note (you can read my main take aways from it here). I’ll paraphrase it as the Piano Performance Account.
Technical Achievements
William writes that we should “think of technical achievement as a sort of bank account. Each performance spends some money out of the account, and constructive maintenance work puts deposits back in.”
I remember thinking to myself ‘wow, so that’s what’s happening!’
This, in fact, concords with something that Evgenny Kissin said in the documentary ‘The Gift of Music’. He made the remark that he was looking forward to the day that he no longer needed to perform the Liszt Transcendental Études as he would no longer need to practice them. So, clearly, even at his level there are instances when constant maintenance is still a feature of the pianist’s life!
I think this is made all the more important for we mere piano mortals. I’ll bet that much of what we play tends to be getting towards the limit of our technical capability. Whether we are relative beginners or more advanced, we tend to mostly be working on music that is ‘difficult’ (to us). This is why we need to spend lots of time practising it. There are always exceptions that prove the rule of course. We all have those pieces we learned long ago (so now we find ‘easy’) yet continue to enjoy to this day. However, for the most part, we learn things and we move on. Probably maintaining a certain amount of our most recently learned repertoire at any one point in time.
Complacently playing through?
We will likely then be ‘complacently playing through’ as William Westney puts it, thinking that this will keep the piece fresh. However, experience tends to prove that this is simply taking money out of our Piano Performance Account. Anything that was ‘hard won’, without a significant effort to maintain it, will not stay ‘in the fingers’.
Therefore, I think we need to work out a proper ‘maintenance’ plan as we decide a piece is now ‘finished’. It can be too easy to forget both the things that we found difficult to master. These, after all are probably the bits that will require the most maintenance.
A Maintenance Plan
With this in mind, I think it is an excellent idea to write up our learning experience with any piece we intend to maintain going forward. This would include things such as how we might have broken it down into sections. It would also detail how we initially practised the different difficulties. Did we create any little exercises to help us with tricky spots. Also, what about fingering? Have we noted this in the score (all too frequently, I’ll not have done this!). From this, we can then derive a plan that ensures we don’t just ‘play through’ and thus spend our credit.
Incidentally, I was interested to read that Stephen Hough annotates his scores in detail so that when he comes back to a piece, he doesn’t have to do all the hard work again.
Finally, I think it’s also useful to have a recording of it when we had it ‘at its best’ so to speak. This can be especially important when we come back to something later as we’ll likely be much more objective about just how good it actually was. I know when I listen to older recordings, I always find things that I don’t like that I didn’t notice at the time.
So, let’s make sure we don’t go bankrupt and keep topping up our Piano Performance Account.
