I was introduced to a fabulous quote from Louis Kentner when I first read Graham Fitch’s eBook series on Practising the Piano. Kentner purports that:
“There is no such thing as difficult music, it is either easy or it is impossible. The process by which it migrates from one to the other is called Practice.”
This seems to ring very true when we watch great pianists play. No matter how difficult (and sometimes even frightening) the music might appear to us, they seem to play it completely effortlessly!
So, to a certain extent, they must now find that music relatively easily. I say relatively as of course there would have been countless hours of work that went into getting something to that point. Indeed, Evgeny Kissin said he was looking forward to the day he didn’t need to perform Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes so he’d no longer need to practice them.
However, I have come to the conclusion that to make our piano practice effective, we need to recognize an intermediate stage – that of difficult.
Let’s first try to define each stage.
Easy music
Music is easy when we have both done enough practice and are sufficiently skilled pianists to play a piece of music well. On sitting down at the piano, we expect to play it well and we’re not afraid of the music! I think this applies to all levels of pianist.
For a total beginner, perhaps it’s the first piece in Alfred’s All In One book that has been studied and practised within the context of that lesson. When sitting down to play, even as a beginner, enough work has been done such that any difficulties contained within the piece are resolved and we now find it easy.
At the other end of the spectrum, I’m sure when Yuja Wang sits down to play Rachmaninov’s 3rd Piano Concerto, she knows full well that she will do it justice. She has put in the work and whilst perhaps she might still practice certain passages to keep them fresh, she has resolved all the issues within it.
Impossible music
This is a piece that when we sit down to play it, we know from the get go that is isn’t going to go according to plan. We’re expecting a whole range of wrong notes and we certainly wouldn’t want people listening! If we simply trying to keep repeating it is very unlikely to change anything.
Difficult music
It is important we recognize the intermediate stage of Difficult. Difficult music is a piece we can, by the skin of our teeth, play on a good day. When we sit down, we’re never particularly sure if we’ll play it well or if it might fall apart. However, it’s no longer impossible to us – just not yet easy!
So, now we have the definitions, how can we take advantage of them.
Turning impossible music into something that is merely difficult
Unless it is at a ‘sight reading’ level to us, it will be impossible to play. Thus, the very first thing we need to do is to somehow make it only difficult.
We will generally do this by simplification. The two most obvious simplification strategies, especially amongst beginners, are to either slow it right down or to work on one hand at a time. In fact, we might initially start extremely slowly and hands separately. More advanced learners will have learned a whole set of other simplification strategies (such as dotted rhythms, skeletons, blocking …. I could go on).
It is by finding the appropriate strategies that we’re able to actually practice effectively and feel that we are making progress.
So far then, no real surprises!
Next, practice until it starts to become easy
The step of practising until something starts to feel easy is where I have often gone wrong. This, indeed, is the level of detailed work that we absolutely must do thoroughly. Better results are obtained when we practice our ‘simplified’ version until it starts to feel easy. If I still find that my current level of simplification leaves me with something I find difficult, moving forward to something even only slightly more complicated, is often a step backwards. Indeed, I find that sometimes, almost unwittingly, I will try to power through such that I now find what I’m attempting to be impossible again.
What when it doesn’t get any easier?
Whenever we’ve been working on something for a while and it doesn’t seem to be getting any easier, it points to one of two things:
- The piece is beyond our current ‘problem solving’ ability; or
- The ways we have found to practice it aren’t sufficient to fix the underlying challenge
As an example, I’ve frequently seen people post in piano forums asking for advice. They may have managed to get a certain piece to, say, 90 bpm (with a metronome) and need to get it to 110. However, they simply can’t get beyond 90 without it starting to fall apart each time.
Often, people will simply respond to keep working slowly and it will eventually come good. However, as Einstein said, repeating the same action and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. In cases like this, we generally need to broaden our approach and try different things.
Find other ways to practice it
If we’re working on speed for example, we might try ideas such as chaining, chunking, rhythms etc. There is an excellent presentation on the Online Academy (more on this in a moment) about different strategies for building speed.
The same applies to any other problem – be it memorisation, jumps, polyrhythms … There will alway be a wide array of strategies we can use.
I mentioned at the beginning Graham Fitch’s eBook Series on Practising the Piano which is packed full of such ideas. Graham and his team also have an Online Academy with a whole host of transformational resources for piano practice – including the eBooks.
You can take advantage of a 14 day free trail to see for yourself at this link.
Discretion can be the better part of valour
Finally, I’d say that there will be examples where we simply can’t find different ways to practice something, In these cases, discretion is often the better part of valour. There’s nothing wrong with putting something to one side for a while. Often when we come back to it we’ll be able to find those elusive strategies for getting it under our fingers.
