Dear Friends,
I'm writing to you from an airplane, taking advantage of some free Wi-Fi. I'm en route to New York to visit a friend in Brooklyn for her birthday. For those of you who are keeping track, my Fanny Hensel recording was rescheduled to October, which gives me a glorious feeling of freedom. I look forward to continuing to refine and practice it over the summer as I prepare for the recording sessions in the fall.
This week I've been thinking about what I've come to know as the Three Questions. Back in graduate school, a friend taught them to me. I found them so helpful that I wrote them on a pink post-it note which I stuck to the music desk of my piano, where it remained for months.
The Three Questions are:
- How do I want it to sound?
- How does it sound right now?
- What can I do to make it sound like I want it to sound?
Practicing using the Three Questions is surprisingly simple. Regardless of whether you're working on a musical or technical issue, or a long or short passage, simply ask yourself, as specifically as possible, how you want it to sound.
Then, play it and ask yourself how it actually sounded, compared to how you want it to sound.
After that, take a moment to figure out what you specifically need to do differently right now in order to make it sound more like you want it to sound. Only after you've clarified the action you need to take, play it again while incorporating that adjustment.
From there, the Three Questions start over - how did that actually sound, compared to how you want it to sound?
I believe the Three Questions are so effective because they address something that a lot of piano students seem to struggle with, which is the feeling that there's a mysterious, "correct" way to play a piece, and you might not quite know what it is yet, but your job in the practice room is to figure out what that correct way is and then reproduce it.
But when you approach practice that way, you're looking for the answer outside yourself.
When I started practicing using the Three Questions, I was able to shift my focus away from external assessments, like worrying about what my teacher would think at the next lesson. Instead, I started relying more on myself: learning to trust my own ear, my own judgment, and my own musical instincts.
If you're used to practicing with an external, evaluative eye, the Three Questions can be enormously freeing. For me, the process of repeatedly asking and responding to the Questions makes practicing feel more like I'm having a creative conversation with myself, and makes practice feel easier, more experimental and even playful.
Many people struggle with that first question. Sometimes in a lesson when a student is struggling to improve a passage, they turn to me and ask what they should do. I'll respond: “Well, how do you want it to sound?”
Often, there's a pause while they sit and grapple with that question. They know they aren’t happy with how it sounded, but they haven’t formed a clear picture of what they want instead. And without that, they don’t really have anything specific to listen for.
You can adapt the question “How do I want it to sound?” to whatever you're working on. The answer can be as simple as wanting to hear all the notes played correctly, with no hesitations. Or it can be about wanting to clearly hear a particular dynamic marking in the score, or hearing the melody sing over a quiet left hand. But notice that for each of those examples, you're focusing on what you want to hear.
Eventually the post-it note fell off my piano and I never replaced it, because by then the questions had become part of how I think when I practice. But I still sometimes catch myself worrying about what it "should" sound like rather than what I actually want it to sound like. And when I do, I come back to the Three Questions.
Give the Three Questions a try this week. Better yet, write them on a post-it note and put it where you can see it.
Let me know how it goes. I love hearing from you, and I read every email, even if I can't reply to every one.
👋 Happy practicing,
Kate