Tag: piano

Sight Reading

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

I played classical piano seriously for nearly 20 years. I practiced for a half hour every day when I was a little kid and three hours a day or more when I was in college.

Despite my hard work and commitment, I was a terrible sight reader, which meant I was very slow to learn new pieces. It didn’t come naturally, and over time I resigned myself to this reality: I was good at a lot of aspects of playing the piano, but sight reading wasn’t one of them.

About a decade ago I was talking with my kids’ piano teacher, and I shared how long it took me to learn new pieces. Casually, she said something that unlocked it for me: “I just think about it like reading the words on a page. Words are familiar, as are sentences and paragraphs, and I just think of it like that.”

I don’t know why that stuck with me, but it did, and suddenly sight reading made sense. And, even though I don’t play piano much at all these days, I now can learn a piece at least three times faster than I used to—I’m not a great sight reader, but I’m much better than I was.

Looking back, I can’t help but reflect on what could have been had I figured this out sooner.

By my math, I clocked somewhere around 8,000 hours of piano practice from the time I was 6 until I was 22, enough to become an expert by nearly any measure.

However, I also now see that I wasted a tremendous proportion of these 8,000 hours. Something like one third of all my practice time was spent slowly and inefficiently learning pieces.

Think about that: one-third of the time I devoted—to one of the things I’m best at in the world—completely lost.

What could the fix have been?

While I’d like to think that a more evolved version of my 10-year-old self could have somehow figured this out on my own, I doubt it.

What would have made the difference was if a teacher had said to me, “You have to learn this new piece in a week.”

I’d have struggled and failed, but hopefully she would have said it to me again and again and again.

And at the end of what would have been a miserable year for my young self, I’m sure I would have cracked the code. And then I would have walked a different path, a more productive path, with the remaining 6,000 hours of piano practice that lay ahead.

Imagine all the ways, big and small, we skip the most essential steps and unwittingly undermine the long, hard hours we’re otherwise putting in, including:

Day to day stuff like learning to type, or becoming really comfortable with using and learning new technologies.

New stuff like using AI every day, until it becomes second nature to us.

Hard stuff like, if we say we want to write well, forcing ourselves to write badly and often.

Rigorous stuff like developing a discipline of shipping our work on time.

Personal growth stuff like ensuring we’re getting enough feedback, so we can develop an accurate picture of our strengths and growth areas.

And healthy living stuff, like developing a balance relationship with food or sleep.

These are just some of the many gateways that are precursors to making the time we invest later yield more.

Nothing special needs to happen: we just need to decide to go back to the steps we’d skipped or glossed over, and reconcile ourselves to the fact that getting this important stuff right won’t, at first, be much fun.

Or we can find an accountability partner, someone like my hypothetical teacher to crack the whip and hold us to a high, and temporarily uncomfortable, standard.

And, of course, if we supervise or mentor other people, it might be time to be the whip-cracking teacher, as an investment in the long term.

One way or another, we owe it to ourselves to get the core skills right first, before it’s too late.

Playing fast, slowly

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

My father, who is a concert pianist, reminded me and my daughter of this idea a little while ago.

Consider this passage, from Chopin’s Etude Op. 10 No. 5 (‘black note etude’).

This whole section, all 64 notes, goes by in less than four seconds if played at tempo. The question is: how to practice this section, or the rest of the piece for that matter, when you’re just getting started?

The natural, and most common, approach is to play each note one at a time at a reasonable tempo and, over time, increase that tempo.

My dad argues that this is a road to nowhere: there’s no way to play note by note by note and ultimately hit the fast tempo.

Instead, he suggests: play fast, slowly.

This means picking out very small sections, playing them at full tempo, then pausing, and doing the same for the next section. Like this:

In this way, you’re teaching your hand, and your brain, to play at full tempo, and using the pauses to give yourself enough space and time to set up for the next group of notes.

Over time, then, your job is not “play faster.”

Instead, your job is to “shorten the pauses” until they disappear.

This works for four reasons:

  1. You’re exposing and teaching your body the physical sensation of playing at speed. So much of what we learn—in piano, surely, but everywhere else as well—is learned in the body and not just in the mind.
  2. You’re transforming groups of 6 or 12 individual notes—each of which had to be thought of, processed, and remembered individually—into blocks. It’s easy for the mind to think of a 6- or 12-note block as ‘one thing’ after a bit of practice. And since playing the piano is mostly about your mind keeping up with the torrent of notes your hands have to play, any ‘chunking’ you can do of this overwhelming amount of information allows you to speed up.
  3. The breaks, at the beginning, are much longer than the time you spend playing. When doing something new and difficult, we need extra time to recover and reset.
  4. You’re taking something that’s dangerous—in the sense of “if I play this at full speed, it will fall apart”—and making it safe, thereby building confidence and competence. “I can’t play the whole passage at speed (yet). But I can play these six notes at speed, with full confidence that I won’t mess this little bit up.” And then, over time, the little bit grows, as does your confidence.

What’s powerful about this isn’t only the counterintuitive approach to solving the problem. It’s the conjecture that our standard approach must always have a view towards what it will ultimately become.

Is this an approach, or a process, that both works for where I am today and will get me to tomorrow?

The right reaction to a mistake

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

I come from a family of musicians and have played classical piano all my life. So, naturally, all three of my kids play too. It’s not always easy, because unless they practice regularly at home, they don’t make any progress–and very few kids want to sit down and practice every day.

In an effort to bridge the gap between how I grew up (rules for how many minutes, and then hours, to practice daily) and what seems possible in our family, I try to spend a good deal of their practice time with them to help them make the best of it. Over the years I’ve worked on finding the sweet spot between the helpful role I can play as a more experienced musician; the somewhat stern role I need to play to push them to practice more productively; and being careful not to be too tough on them and take the fun out of things. It’s a delicate balance, one I’m still working on, and I don’t always get it right.

This fall, I’ve been noticing my middle daughter as she’s been making her way back to the piano after a summer at camp. She’s started doing something new that I think is just wonderful: when she misses a note that she knows she should get right, she lets out a small chuckle. It’s almost as if she’s saying to herself, “oh, I know that’s a B-flat, isn’t it funny that I played a B-natural.”

What a lovely, elusive reaction to a mistake:

I see myself making a mistake.

I observe the mistake, and see it clearly.

I note what I want to do differently the next time.

And I take the whole thing lightly.

This is not the typical response to a mistake. Normally, when we notice that we messed up we show up with piles of excess emotional baggage. This baggage doesn’t make us better the next time, nor does it deepen our ability to make a change. All it does is associate our misstep with self-criticism and an imprecise emotional mixture of fear, anger and shame.

Much better to notice with curiosity, be deliberate about what changes to make, and let escape a nearly silent little chuckle.