Start SLOWLY

 

Okay, imagine you have a new song to learn (we'll pretend it is Für Elise) and you really want to rush home from your lesson and play it through just the way you heard it. You know this song. You can’t wait to try your hand at those arpeggios! The melody will flow perfectly from one hand to the other, because you know how it sounds already. It’s so exciting!

You get home and sit down on the bench. The score is in front of you, and you play the first few phrases, and it is still so much fun! When you miss a note or two, you pause and go back to fix it. Maybe you start over at the beginning of the piece, thinking that a running start will get you past the rough spot more easily. Maybe this even works on the first of those tricky parts. Then you stumble again. Do you start at the beginning again? And again, and again?

We all like to sight-re 

I like to sight-read a new song. The music is fresh and lovely this way, even when I have been listening to the song for years. But I have always run into trouble if I sight-read a piece at a speed that sounds musical. Most songs (and Für Elise is no exception) contain a lot of simultaneous information, which I cannot easily process when I play quickly. I might see all of the notes, and my fingers might even land correctly. But did I miss a rallentando or a decrescendo? How was my phrasing? What about the slurs and staccatos? 

All of these missed opportunities and all of the mistakes get encoded in my brain as muscle memory every time I play the song. The more I repeat it, the more firmly my body will believe that this (incorrect) way of playing the piece is correct, and the better my brain will remember the wrong way of playing the song. I find slowing down to be really hard. But I do it anyway. I don’t want to discover after weeks of practice that I have to fully un-learn a mistake and re-learn it another way. That is so much extra work, and it’s super-frustrating!

 

When I am starting to learn a new song, I set my metronome for less than half the recommended speed and I try to notice everything. I also only play the whole song through once in a while at first. I like to practice bits and pieces of my songs, polishing up the parts and then putting them together like beads on a string. If I want to experience a new piece at a high speed, I pull out my score and plug my headphones into my computer. Then I find a lovely recording of a virtuoso playing the piece after much practice. I listen and read along, learning from their interpretation of what I see on the page in front of me. If I’m lucky and I work really hard, maybe someday I’ll play the song as well as they do, and I’ll be ready to post my own interpretation online. In the meantime, I have some really beautiful and slow work to get me to that point.