Dear Friends,
Before we get started, I wanted to let you know about two performances that I have coming up soon:
- Monday November 9, 8:00 pm: Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio. [Click for info.]
- Thursday, November 12, 7:00 pm: Harding University in Searcy, Arkansas. [Click for info.]
On both programs I'll be performing Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel's "The Year." I will also be speaking from the stage about the piece. If you're in the area, I hope you can come! (Let me know if you will be there, and I will look for you afterwards!)
Anyway, the leaves here have been gorgeous, and recently I had the privilege of enjoying the beautiful fall foliage on my drive to and from a College and Career Day in an adjacent state.
At the event, I heard auditions from nine high school pianists. They each also did an interview, so I had the chance to get to know them a little bit as well.
One of the pianists I heard has been figure skating since she was two years old, and is now a prizewinning competitive skater.
In the interview portion of the day, she was asked how her experience as a competitive figure skater influenced her piano playing.
She didn’t hesitate in her reply: “To be good at the piano you have to be good at practicing efficiently. I've learned a lot about efficient practice from figure skating."
Here she smiled and shook her head, presumably thinking of all the hours she’s spent drilling turns and jumps.
“When I practice skating, I know when it's right. That's helped me practice the piano more efficiently. When I know how it's supposed to sound in my head, I can recognize it.”
Well said, I thought as I hastily jotted her words down. Well said, indeed!
Often when practicing, students just want to make it "better" but they don't really know precisely how they want it to sound.
I talk about this all the time with my students, and I used to struggle with this when I was a music student, too. I would practice and practice but I didn't always feel like I was making progress. I pretty much knew how I wanted the performance to sound, but I didn't have a sense of exactly how to practice it to get it to that final stage.
The strategy here is to be as specific as possible.
And actually, that's a lot of what a teacher does in a lesson: we listen for very specific things to work on or improve.
The more specific you can be in your own mind about the sound you want or the outcome you want, the easier it will be to know exactly how to practice to get there.
Now when I talk about knowing how you want it to sound, I'm not just referring to listening to a performance of a concert pianist and saying, "I want it to sound like that." (If only it were that easy!)
The key is knowing how you want it to sound for the specific spot you're looking at, at wherever you’re at in the learning process. Here are a few examples:
- how a passage sounds with all the right notes
- how a passage sounds at a faster tempo
- how a passage sounds with the correct rhythms
- the color or character you want in a specific phrase
- which voice you want to bring out more above all the others in a specific phrase
Having mental clarity about when it sounds "right" to you - for every spot in the whole piece - will make your practice much more efficient.
You can try this idea this week!
Every time you sit down to practice, choose a short segment of something you're working on.
Resist the temptation to jump in and start playing it over and over, or to start in that spot and keep playing through to the end of the piece.
Instead, first think about what you’re specifically trying to improve in that spot, and identify what “right” will sound like to you. How will you recognize "right"? Maybe it's a correct rhythm, or a more clear dynamic shape, or something to do with balance or expression.
Then, play it: just one time!
Next, compare what you just played to how you defined “right” in your mind a moment ago.
If it’s not quite there yet, repeat it again, trying to bring it closer and closer to that goal.
When you recognize it is right, repeat it a few times to solidify it, and then move on to the next spot.
And importantly, in the next day's practice, repeat these same steps for the same spots in order to really solidify it. Getting it "right" once is just the beginning. Let me know how this works for you!
👋 Happy practicing,
Kate
P.S. I'm hiring for 2 part-time roles: a video editor and a PDF designer. If you're interested, click on those links for more info, or just write back to this email! 😊