Dear Friends,
This past Friday, I returned from four days in central Pennsylvania. While I was there, I played two recitals, taught masterclasses and workshops, and had the opportunity to meet many wonderful people.
When you’re a professional musician, performances create natural deadlines. You have a date on the calendar, and that date forces you to get a piece ready and then move on to the next thing. My calendar is full of these dates, and they are what keep me practicing and learning new repertoire. Auditions, competitions, and recital performances work the same way for students.
While I was traveling, I found myself thinking about something that many of you have shared with me through the audience survey that I created. (More than 2,000 of you have filled it out so far; if you’d like to fill it out too, you can do that here.)
A significant number of you tell me you practice regularly, but almost never (or actually never) perform for other people. Of that group, a majority say they get too nervous playing in front of others. Others report that they just enjoy playing for themselves and have no desire to perform.
Many of you have shared about how playing is therapeutic, how it has helped you through grief or loss, how it feels like your own special time for yourself. These are all truly meaningful reasons to play.
Playing the piano simply for your own enjoyment, with no plans to perform concerts, is a valuable end in itself. In fact, if you look back to the heyday of the piano, in nineteenth century Europe, most middle class homes had a piano: the piano was a source of entertainment and personal enrichment within the home. In some ways, many of you are recreating that tradition in your own homes today.
But, if you are a person who practices for yourself without performing, and especially if you are self-taught without a teacher, there is one trap I want you to avoid.
If you don’t perform, you don’t have that external pressure forcing you to prepare a piece to a certain level, perform it, and then move on. And what I’ve noticed, both from talking to pianists and from hearing from so many of you, is that without those external deadlines, it’s easy to stay with the same piece for a very long time. You might work on something for what feels like forever without ever quite feeling like it’s finished.
I think this is partly because learning a piece of music doesn’t have a clear end point the way other projects do. If you’re doing a jigsaw puzzle or a crossword, you know it’s done when the final piece is in place or the final square is filled. But a piece of music can always be played a little better, a little more musically, or a little more securely. There’s no moment where it clicks into place and you can say, definitively, that it’s complete. Often, a performance will serve that purpose, but without performances you can end up learning the same pieces for years.
Unfortunately, staying with one piece too long can actually slow down your development as a pianist. One of the most effective ways to improve at the instrument is to keep learning fresh music. Each new piece teaches you something different. If you spend a year on one piece, you’re missing out on all the things you could have learned from the five or six pieces you might have worked on instead.
So if you are someone who plays for yourself and doesn’t perform, I’d encourage you to think about spending a season on a piece, rather than sticking with it indefinitely. Maybe you decide in advance that you’ll spend six weeks with a piece and then set it aside, whether or not it feels perfectly polished. Or you keep a running list of pieces you want to learn and give yourself the pleasure of starting something new on a regular basis.
None of this means you have to rush through your music or abandon a piece you love. But if you’ve been working on the same thing for a long time and you feel like you’re just not progressing (a concern I heard from a lot of you), it’s perfectly appropriate to move on to something new and come back to that other piece later with a fresh perspective and more experience.
The pianists who grow the most are the ones who keep learning repertoire, even imperfectly.
👋 Happy practicing,
Kate
PS If you’d like built-in structure and a steady supply of new pieces so you aren’t stuck on the same thing forever, I’d encourage you to check out Piano Marvel. I’ve looked at their curriculum and I think it’s quite well-designed. They offer a leveled series that takes you through progressively more challenging material, so you always have a clear next step. They also have a large library of repertoire to choose from. They offer a free trial, and if you sign up through my affiliate link and decide to continue, you’ll receive $3 off your monthly subscription.