Dear Friends,
Quick note: Iโll be traveling to central PA this week, playing a recital at Susquehanna University on Tuesday evening at 7:30, and at Gettysburg College on Thursday evening at 6:30. Both concerts are free. If youโre in the area, Iโd love to see you there and meet you afterwards!
Speaking of preparing for recitals, I sometimes tell my university students that they will never have more time to practice than they do right now. They might feel very busy, and they are busy, but I try to remind them that after their student life is over, the demands on their time will multiply. This is why it's so important to develop a strong practice habit while you have the chance.
Of course, some of you reading this are well past your student years. You already know exactly what I'm talking about, because you're living it! If you have a busy work life, or a family, or both, it can be extremely challenging to find any consistent time at all to practice, and that can be incredibly frustrating if you are someone who cares deeply about making progress at the piano.
Professional pianists run into this problem, too. Between teaching, administrative responsibilities, family life, and other professional activities like adjudicating and committee work, there are long stretches where our own practice gets pushed to whatever time is left over.
The great pianist Gary Graffman apparently felt this so acutely that he titled his memoir I Really Should Be Practicing. I think that might be the most relatable sentence any pianist has ever put on paper!
For musicians, this time scarcity can lead to a persistent feeling that you always should be practicing more than you are. And what I've observed, both in my students and in the many pianists who write to me, is that this guilt-over-not-practicing can turn into something worse: resistance.
Maybe the resistance takes the form of perfectionism, where you tell yourself that if you can't sit down and really do it properly, there's no point in sitting down at all. Or maybe it shows up as frustration, where you think: I only have twenty minutes, what can I even accomplish in twenty minutes?
Either way, the result is the same. You end up avoiding the piano, not because you don't love it, but because the weight of what you think you should be doing makes it hard to start.
If this resonates with you, one thing I've found to be genuinely helpful is to make sure you have very clear, small goals for each piece before you sit down. Instead of telling yourself you're going to practice a whole movement, try something much more specific, like working out the fingering in three lines, or getting one short passage comfortable hands separately at a slow tempo.
When you know exactly what you're doing and why, even a short session can feel productive, and you can walk away from a few minutes at the piano feeling like you actually moved something forward.
But I think the thing I most want to tell you is this: Itโs really hard to learn effectively when you have negative feelings around it. If you sit down at the piano already feeling guilty that you haven't practiced in a few days, or frustrated that you don't have more time, you are not in an optimal place to do the kind of patient, focused work that practicing requires.
So this week, if you've been feeling frustrated about not practicing enough, I'd encourage you to try setting those feelings aside. Give yourself a fresh start: allow yourself to sit down with one small goal, work on it for whatever time you have, and let that be enough. Those short sessions, over time, add up to more than you might expect.
๐ Happy practicing,
Kate