Mastering a piece: what does it really mean?

[Daniel_piano]

We had an interesting discussion on Friday chat about what mastering a piece really means
The issue was whether you need to learn the notes of a piece in a kind of repetitive manner or if you have to just "understand" the piece and you can play it with conscious control of every aspect
I believe that you can't control anything when you do such a complex activity as piano playing, something will always be unconscious
So, I think the unconscious part should be the notes, the pedaling, the rhythm (the technical structure of the piece) while dynamics and expressions should be the conscious part of piano playing
So to play a huge repertory I think that technique and notes should be unconscious and interpretation should be conscious
What do I mean by unconscious?
I mean that your hands and your fingers know where to go without your brain being completely conscious of it
Someone said that mastering a piece means that you can play a piece while holding a tough conversation
This simply back the theory that many aspect of piano playing are mechanical and automatic

So, should we approach a new piece with the goal of first learning all the notes subconsciously so that the fingers know where to go even if you're thinking about what you'll prepare for dinner or we should just "understand" the piece and always play it with absolute conscious of any notes and rhythm without any fingers memory?

And if the best way to master a piece (at least its technical part) is to learn the notes and the rhythm subconsciously so that even when your brain is not thinking about notes, busy in dealing with interepretation, your fingers know automatically where to go, does that mean that this kind of subconscious memory is obtained through repetitions, repeitions and repetitions?

I know that some people who like the expressive and emotional aspect of music hate to think of piano playing as a mechanical, repetitive and automatic task but I think that many aspects of it are indeed mechanical, repetitive, automatic and subconscious

And even if interpretation, emotions, expression,  theory knowledge, analysis and understand of music play a huge role in learing a piece I think that learning a piece has a huge compenent of boring and mindless repetitions

What do you think?

Happy Holidays
Daniel 

[bernhard]

It is important not to confuse “mechanical” with “automatic”.

Of course piano playing has to be done automatically. Consciousness is simply too small to accommodate all of the necessary components.

Which of the components you are going to keep in consciousness is up to you: You may let all of the emotional stuff happen intuitively (which is another word for unconscious behaviour) and concentrate your awareness on getting the correct fingering on that difficult passage. Or you can let the unconscious take care of the fingering and so on and direct your awareness towards expressivity. You may even let the unconscious do all the work and go in a trance state, and at the end of the concert you will not even remember what happened.

What you will not be able to do is to be conscious of everything at the same time. You can only keep 7±2 items in consciousness at any given time.

For more on this, have a look here:

http://pianoforum.net/smf/index.php/topic,5179.msg49593.html#msg49593

Now there is the other important distinction. And that is between learning and performing. In order to do anything automatically, in “automatic pilot” so to speak, you must first program the automatic pilot, or in other words, the unconscious. You cannot play “intuitively” unless you have the “intuition” in the first place.

So you must break down the complex task of piano playing in all of its myriad components and consistently program each single one and each combination in the unconscious through careful repetition. This must be done in full consciousness to avoid sloppy actions getting ingrained in the uncounscious. And because you can only have a limited amount of information in consciousness at any given time, you have to make a hierarchy of aims. So, obviously, technique must come before expressivity as far as the direction you are turning your attention to is concerned.

But although you can break down piano playing in isolated bits as far as your attention is concerned, you cannot do so as far as your actual playing is concerned. So, as you start playing, you are already playing expressively even though all your attention is on the fingering. It is just that the expression is crap.You are not paying attention to it, and your unconscious does not have a clue about how to go about it. But you will not be able to pay attention to it until you sort out the fingering. With the fingering sorted out, you now can direct your attention to expression. But of course you will have to fight against all the bad expressive habits you acquired while practising the fingering. There is no way out of this predicament. You must accept that this is how things work. What you can do is minimise its effects. And that means never overworking any aspect of piano playing If you spend ten hours on fingering, you are setting yourself for failure, for two simple reasons:

1.   It is not necessary. Most aspects of piano playing can be made automatic in a couple of minutes if you choose a short enough section.

2.   Even if you reap enormous benefits in fingering by working on it for ten hours, you will have ten hours of sloppy “unconscious” practice on all of the other numerous aspects of piano playing, and by the end of ten hours, there will be so many bad habits ingrained that your performance will always be mediocre in those areas.

So, the secret is to change the focus of  your attention as often as possible: Work two minutes on fingering, then two minutes on movement, then two minutes on sound/touch, then two minutes on articulation, etc. You see, the moment you are playing the piano you are already working simultaneously on all that. It is just that one component will be on consciousness and all the others will be unconscious. So you must make sure to give the necessary resources to the unconscious (by consciously paying attention to what you are doing) as soon as possible, and not wait too much.

The worst way to work on a piece is to learn the whole piece paying attention only to fingering – an let us say this takes 1 week. Then once fingering is ingrained you dedicate your practice to articulation. Another week. But in the first week, you were doing some form of articulation – just it was a completely inappropriate one, since it was being done mostly unconsciously and at that stage your unconscious did not have the resources to do it properly – So now, as you try to add articulation to your piece, you are constantly fighting unconscious inappropriate patterns acquiring during the first week where you concentrated on fingering only. So after a week, you are nowhere nesar theproper articulation, so you give up temporarily, and move on to put the dynamics on. Now you have already been working on dynamics, since the first moment you touched the piano – but it is completely inappropriate since you were not paying any attention to it, so your unconscious just added any dynamics it pleased. And by now you have been doing it for two weeks. So you start another uphill struggle, but this time against the ingrained inappropriate dynamics. Meanwhile your articulation – now that you stopped paying attention to it – goes back to the inappropriate patterns first ingrained and get even more ingrained. Meanwhile your teacher has pointed out that your movement is not appropriate and shows you a completely different way of moving. But by now you have been doing the wrong movement for three weeks. Guess what, even your fingering starts to slip now. The whole piece is a complete mess.

Have you ever seen in the circus that act where a (usually Chinese) guy has several plates spinning on sticks? That is how piano practice must be: you start spinning a plate. The moment it is spinning with a certain speed and stability you start the second plate. Then the third. By now the first plate is loosing it, so you must quickly go back to it and give it some attention – but it requires far less time and effort than when you started form scratch. Do the second and the third plate, and you have time to spin a fourth and a fifth plate before going back to the first plate. Eventually you will 20/30 plates spinning and you just give each a tiny bit of your attention.

So work in small chunks, and change the focus of your attention to all of the aspects of playing necessary for that chunk (usually the chunk cannot be too small – a phrase is really the minimum size for you to start paying attention to all aspects).

Best wishes,
Bernhard.

[Daniel_piano]

Wow
Thanks a lot Bernhard for this detailed answer and for this unvaluable advice: change as often as possible the focus on different aspect of piano playing

Now, when you say that the "actions/movements get ingrained in young uncounscious" does this happen by hundreds and hudreds of repetitions?

There were an issue whether you get something ingrained in your unconscious in piano playing simply by understand the piece and its structure (analytical approach) or if you need simply hundreds of repetitions to get something ingrained in your unconscious and without them you can't really say to know or have mastered the piece

I know students who learn a passage after very few repetition (let's say 10 or 20) and when they can play it they say they have mastered it
But should these students rely on their "knowing" the passage or either they should oblige themselved to keep repeating it until it is ingrained in the unconscious?

Thanks again
Happy Holidays

Daniel

[bernhard]

Thanks a lot Bernhard for this detailed answer and for this unvaluable advice: change as often as possible the focus on different aspect of piano playing

You are welcome.

Now, when you say that the "actions/movements get ingrained in young uncounscious" does this happen by hundreds and hudreds of repetitions?

No. In fact the theory is that it is enough to perform a movement just once to immediately learn it. You see, the problem is not that the brain is slow at learning things. The problem is that the brain learns incredibly fast. If we could make sure that the very first time we do something we do it correctly, that would be the end of it. Unfortunately, we never know what is correct, so it takes a lto of trial and error (most of which is error). So by the time we start figuring out how to do something right, we have already ingrained all sorts of inappropriate alternatives. This remain forever in your brain, so you must repeat the correct one many more times so that when the brain chooses , it chooses the most frequently repeated. So in the long run it always pays to delay going to the piano. A lot of your practice should be done by mental rehearsal, so that by the time you actually get to the piano you have already got rid of all sorts of inappropriate movements, without getting them ingrained in the process (mental practice does not result in ingraining)

There were an issue whether you get something ingrained in your unconscious in piano playing simply by understand the piece and its structure (analytical approach) or if you need simply hundreds of repetitions to get something ingrained in your unconscious and without them you can't really say to know or have mastered the piece.

Just thinking about something will not get the something ingrained in your subconscious. You need to actually do it. However there are other issues at stake here. For instance, your fingers will comply with your mental image for the movement / mental representation of the sound. If these have not been worked out in advance, then your fingers will do whatever mental representations is there, available – usually an inappropriate one.

Another aspect is that in your mind there should be no problem in playing a passage perfectly. After all it is not real. It is your imagination. If you imagine a passage perfectly there is a greater chance that the fingers will comply. However most people either do not bother with representing something perfectly in their minds (it is hard work!) or they will unconsciously represent all sorts of failures and inappropriate scenarios. Then their playing follows such unconscious representations and they cannot understand why their playing sucks.

I know students who learn a passage after very few repetition (let's say 10 or 20) and when they can play it they say they have mastered it
But should these students rely on their "knowing" the passage or either they should oblige themselved to keep repeating it until it is ingrained in the unconscious?

A lot of people suffer from this sort of insecurity. However once something is truly ingrained you cannot get rid of it. Think about riding a bicycle. Once you learn how to do it, you will always know how to do it. Even if you stop riding a bicycle for 30 years. Or think about your native language. If you truly learn it (which may take 10 or 15 years) you will never forget it, even if you move to a foreign country for the next 40 years.

You only forget if you never learned it in the first place. Riding a bicycle is pretty obvious the moment you become proficient at it: you do not fall anymore and you do not ride with the beginner’s tension. With languages you become fluent. With piano playing however it is possible to get the impression that you mastered something when actually you have not. Students of that all the time with scales: Their scales suck, but they insist they have practised them enough and “can I please move on?”. The mark of true mastery is easiness. If it is not easy, you have not mastered it. In this respect perhaps the most useful attitude is to pay attention to details. If you truly pay attention and master the tiniest details of a piece/passage, your playing will be superlative. But no one wants to do that. Superficiality and being content with mediocrity have become a true hallmark of modern society.

Best wishes,
Bernhard.

[Mayla]

Thanks a lot Bernhard for this detailed answer and for this unvaluable advice

(perhaps you meant invaluable advice   ) 

[janice]

 Superficiality and being content with mediocrity have become a true hallmark of modern society.

Best wishes,
Bernhard.

You are so very very right!!!  It's maddening!!!  I have been hard pressed to find quality Christmas music concerts to attend.