accommodating practice time

[liszmaninopin]

I feel I need to practice the piano more, but there is a problem.  In general, I can play hours every day in the summer because I don't have school, but this time of year I don't get nearly as much time.  This is because I have maybe an hour in the morning between the time when I wake up and I go to school, and then maybe an hour or in the evenings of free time (which I generally use for practice) before I go to bed.  What are some ways of making very economical use of practice time, or fitting in more time?

[bernhard]

One possibility is not to think of practice sessions as hour-blocks. If you have a piano available in school, you can do 5 – 10 mins. practice blocks whenever the opportunity arises. For this to work you will have to be very organised and consistent.

For instance, if you are learning a new piece, and just pick up a couple of bars and work on them for 5 – 10 minutes, after one week of doing this every day, they should be perfect.

Now comes the difficult bit. You must list everything you want to learn/master and divide in 5 – 10 mins. practice sessions. Then you must organise the several 5 – 10 mins. sessions available during the day so that everything is covered everyday. I think you get the idea. You may have to work in very little sections, but if you are consistent, it will add up. You can then use your one hour section to work on joining it all together.

Depending on how many 5- 10 mins. sessions you can manage everyday, you may have no choice but to limit what you are trying to accomplish. In any case it is better to have two or three items perfect, than twenty that are going nowhere.

If you do not have a piano available in school, you can still do practice away from the piano – Glenn Gould claimed he did all his practice this way. Another pianist renowned for learning and practising pieces exclusively from the score was Walter Gieseking, He actually wrote a book explaining how to do it (Walter Gieseking & Karl Leimer – Piano Technique – Dover). The idea was that you should have your piece completely memorised before you even got near a piano.

Finally, if none of this is feasible, you will have to drop some other activity to make way for practice, or sleep less hours!

Now, that I come to think of it, drop school!

Best wishes,
Bernhard.

[BoliverAllmon]

I agree. mental practice away from the pinao can help alot. I do that whenever I can.

boliver

[cziffra]

i have a story to tell about mental practice.  (yay! i'm old enough to have stories!)

for my end of year performance exam i was doing the sibelius romance, op 24 :9, which had been in my repertoire for 6months or so.  my only other performance met with general comments like, "sounded like a dripping tap" or "very mechanical" which usually happens for my first performance of any piece.  however, for the exam, i decided to prepare differently than normal, by not playing the piece, AT ALL, before the exam.  instead, i layed the music out on the floor, played the air piano, and sang it to myself.  

i ended up playing it far better than anything i could have hoped for, and i got something like 9.5 out of ten for it.  it was definitely one of the best performances of my life, and i know i owe it mostly to the mental preparation i did beforehand.

[BoliverAllmon]

My teacher says that if she doesn't spend at least half of her time mentally practicing before a recital she knows she is asking for trouble.

boliver

[barnowl]

i have a story to tell about mental practice.  (yay! i'm old enough to have stories!)

for my end of year performance exam i was doing the sibelius romance, op 24 :9, which had been in my repertoire for 6months or so.  my only other performance met with general comments like, "sounded like a dripping tap" or "very mechanical" which usually happens for my first performance of any piece.  however, for the exam, i decided to prepare differently than normal, by not playing the piece, AT ALL, before the exam.  instead, i layed the music out on the floor, played the air piano, and sang it to myself. 

i ended up playing it far better than anything i could have hoped for, and i got something like 9.5 out of ten for it.  it was definitely one of the best performances of my life, and i know i owe it mostly to the mental preparation i did beforehand.

That's a wonderful story! I enjoyed it a lot and I'm glad you did it. Took courage.

[wishful thinker]

If you do not have a piano available in school, you can still do practice away from the piano – Glenn Gould claimed he did all his practice this way. Another pianist renowned for learning and practising pieces exclusively from the score was Walter Gieseking, He actually wrote a book explaining how to do it (Walter Gieseking & Karl Leimer – Piano Technique – Dover). The idea was that you should have your piece completely memorised before you even got near a piano.

I'd like to know more about this idea of Walter Gieseking, before I decide to buy his book (Amazon won't despatch for two weeks, and I am not that patient).  Has anyone tried his method, and does it work (or at least did it work for you?

[brewtality]

I'd like to know more about this idea of Walter Gieseking, before I decide to buy his book (Amazon won't despatch for two weeks, and I am not that patient).  Has anyone tried his method, and does it work (or at least did it work for you?

My impression was that the book was almost solely written by Leimer. It provides interesting reading. He advocates memorisation by visualisation, that is when you begin a new piece, look at the key, time signature then patterns. eg the piece starts on the second beat of the bar with descending sixths that start from x and continue down 2 octaves etc.

He claims that students who use this method memorise things much quicker than before. I haven't tried it myself, since I don't actually spend any time practising but playing, but I'd imagine it would work.

I saw this documentary series 'the Human Body' and in one episode they were discussing memory. They interviewed some bloke who was a memory master and he explained that to memorise the series of cards he would use them to tell a story by associating things with each card value and number. This seems to be kind of what Leimer was advocating, rather than learn every note, work out patterns and fill in the rest.

[bernhard]

I'd like to know more about this idea of Walter Gieseking, before I decide to buy his book (Amazon won't despatch for two weeks, and I am not that patient).  Has anyone tried his method, and does it work (or at least did it work for you?

This is a most wonderful little book (in fact the Dover edition consists of two books).

If you want to have a gist of the process, have a look at reply #9 on this thread:

http://www.pianoforum.net/smf/index.php/topic,7399.msg74758.html#msg74758
(the details of the process using “dozen a day” as an example)

On the book, Leimer/Gieseking provide ways to do mental practice on five complete pieces: Bach´s invention no. 1 in C, Sinfonia no. 1 in C and the Allemande from the French Suite in E, plus Beethoven´s Sonata op. 2 no. 1 and a study by Lebert and Stark. There are also several excerpts from the standard repertory used to exemplify their ideas.

Besides teaching how to memorise these pieces away from the piano, there are many astute observations on technique, practice, interpretation and musicality.

Highly recommended (and cheap too!)

Best wishes,
Bernhard.

[mephisto]

Do you belive what Gieseking sais?

[bernhard]

Do you belive what Gieseking sais?

Which part of it? (And does it matter? After all it is not really a matter of belief. You do it and you decide if it works or not.)

BW,
B.

[ramseytheii]

This is a most wonderful little book (in fact the Dover edition consists of two books).

If you want to have a gist of the process, have a look at reply #9 on this thread:

http://www.pianoforum.net/smf/index.php/topic,7399.msg74758.html#msg74758
(the details of the process using “dozen a day” as an example)

On the book, Leimer/Gieseking provide ways to do mental practice on five complete pieces: Bach´s invention no. 1 in C, Sinfonia no. 1 in C and the Allemande from the French Suite in E, plus Beethoven´s Sonata op. 2 no. 1 and a study by Lebert and Stark. There are also several excerpts from the standard repertory used to exemplify their ideas.

Besides teaching how to memorise these pieces away from the piano, there are many astute observations on technique, practice, interpretation and musicality.

Highly recommended (and cheap too!)

Best wishes,
Bernhard.

I agree.  I find the book a bit wordy, and the Dover edition is typed in small print very densely on the page.  But there are so many ideas.  Recently I saw an exhibit on the work of Jane Goodall, the chimpanzee expert.  They had manuscripts of several pages of her field notes, and the field notes were also written very small, densley on the page, and they read much like a Leimer analysis: "Whitebeard reached his left hand out.. Grabbed three stalks of reed.. scratched side with right hand first two fingers...' etc.  So it is with Leimer's book, that he observes every detail in the music, but the real benefit is that he links the details to larger forms, so that you are not lost in a sea of detail!

In other words I recommend it.

Walter Ramsey

[mephisto]

Which part of it? (And does it matter? After all it is not really a matter of belief. You do it and you decide if it works or not.)

BW,
B.

Ok my post was bad.

What I ment to ask was, do you belive that Gieseking could just look at a score(for some time I guess) and then just play the piece pefectly?

[bernhard]

Ok my post was bad.

What I ment to ask was, do you belive that Gieseking could just look at a score(for some time I guess) and then just play the piece pefectly?

Again, I don´t think it is a matter of belief. He actually could do it according to several reports. And apparently it is not uncommon, I have heard that this kind of feat is more or less commonplace. (Argerich, Richter, Gould, Pletnev, and others can do it.)

And I am sure you yourself can do it. Just follow the steps in the thread I mentioned in reply #8 and you will do it after a few minutes. Of course the example I provided is very simple, but that is how you start: with simple pieces. As you proceed and increase the dificulty of the pieces the steps of the process will become unconscious and very fast. It is hard work only at the beginning stages when you are doing it with focus, concentration and conscious awareness (which you must, if you want to internalise the process correctly).

Best wishes,
Bernhard.