Hi Reader,

Late August is back-to-school time for me, and by this point in September the fall semester is well underway. I have a crazy lucky job, and most days as a college professor I feel like I have won the proverbial job-lottery!

Ironically, though, when you are a piano professor, one of the most difficult things to find time for is..... well, practicing. 🎹

I find it difficult to "protect" my practice time when unexpected things come up in my university position, whether it be a high volume of email to answer, a committee meeting that was scheduled right in the middle the morning, or a student who needs an impromptu advising session.

So I have learned to embrace incrementalism: the idea that doing a little bit every day will move me toward my projects more than not practicing at all... and then trying to cram for a performance when it is nearing. 😬

This is my 20th year as a university piano professor. Over the years, I’ve adopted a few strategies to ensure that I have time to practice. The first is to lower my expectations; during the academic year it’s unlikely that I’ll have time to practice 4 hours every single day. Secondly, I have established periods in the academic year when I know I should not expect to have much practice time: for our typically North American university calendar, those windows are the four weeks between Thanksgiving and the end of the fall semester (around Dec 20), and the five weeks between Spring Break and the end of the spring semester (around April 30). Third, I practice in the morning, and try very hard not to schedule anything before 11:00 am. And finally, I set (and write down) specific weekly goals for WHAT I will be practicing, so I don’t ever sit at the piano and wonder what I should do next!

These strategies help: I can’t say I always succeed at getting my practice time in; it’s often a struggle. But it’s a worthwhile struggle, because practicing is at the heart of what I do. Practicing makes me a better teacher. Practicing allows me to prepare for concerts, and performing is a key part of my life as a pianist. And the fact that I actually practice (rather than just talk about practicing) allows me to share my thoughts on practicing with you, with the knowledge that I also need to hear these tips and continue to work on following my own advice!

Some of the readers of this newsletter are currently college music students. If so, congratulations: this is the time of your life when you will have the most time to practice! Take advantage of this gift, and enjoy it! 🥳 Other readers of this newsletter are piano teachers and fellow collegiate faculty. And yet others are amateur pianists who do something else as your main job, and you practice piano as a hobby. For all of us, practicing plays an important role in progressing at the piano and provides so much more besides. For most of us, it will take effort to carve out the time to practice consistently. But it's worth it!

Feel free to write back and tell me your own strategies for fitting practice time into your busy life! I’ll share the best ideas in a future newsletter!

Happy Practicing! 🎹

-Kate

In every newsletter I share one practice tip based on that month’s practice theme. September’s theme is “Starting a New Piece.”

Today's Practice Tip: Identify the "Hands Separate" Practice Spots!

When you first start practicing a new piece that you intend to learn and add to your repertoire, your goal is going to be somewhat different than if you are sight reading it for one session and then moving on. It’s important to approach your new piece with an eye to getting a handle on where challenges might be in the future.

To that end, it can be enormously helpful to identify places where you will need to practice hands separately in order to work out the coordination.

If a piece is at the correct level for you, you will be able to read sections of it hands together, even if you are playing under tempo. However, there will likely be spots, or even sections, of a piece that are too complicated for you to read hands together.

An example of this could be a sonata movement, where the exposition is not that difficult to read hands together, but then the development may be much more complex, as is often the case.

In that case, it can be helpful to isolate and actively practice the harder parts hands separately.

This week’s exercise: For a brand new piece that you (or your student) are learning, read the whole piece through at a tempo where you can play reasonably steadily (even if it’s under tempo). When you get to a spot that is just too difficult to play hands together, drop one hand out and keep going.

After you get to the end, go back through with your pencil and mark the places where you had trouble playing hands together. These will become your practice “spots” that you can isolate and work on, intentionally and hands separately, as you practice your new piece.

This strategy will help you use your time effectively, so you aren’t wasting a lot of practice time playing the whole piece hands separately even if there are entire sections that you could already be practicing hands together.

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