STUDIO
The practice of practising: for professionals
Concert pianists spend much more of their lifetimes practising than they do playing concerts. It’s not just that pieces need to be kept in the memory – muscle and mind – but the very act of playing the piano is physical and athletic. It involves reflex and endurance. It might be true that you never forget how to ride a bicycle, but if you and it are rusty there’s not much hope of winning or even completing the Tour de France. So we need to practise. The key is how we make our time offstage best serve our briefer time onstage. A pianist who has concerts has little time to spare, so it’s important that those spare hours, even minutes, be used well.
My teacher, Gordon Green, used to say, ‘In practice a perfectionist, in performance a realist.’ In other words, prepare assiduously, tirelessly, at home, but when onstage accept the situation at hand without wishing the piano were more in tune, the audience were more appreciative (or larger), you hadn’t made a mess of that octave passage, and so on.
Being a ‘realist’ sounds rather prosaic when faced with bringing to poetic, passionate life the masterworks of master composers. I might put it differently from Gordon: in practice an engineer, in performance a pilot. Nuts and bolts in a plane are incomparably important, but when you sit at the cockpit of a Steinway concert grand your eyes need to look ahead not underneath.
The purpose of practising is so that we (offstage as engineers) make sure that we (onstage as pilots) are completely free to fly to the destination of our choice. That destination is one involving imagination and creativity and spirituality and danger and ecstasy of course, not merely the A to B of playing the notes – but without the nuts and bolts in place we shall never be airborne. The greatest interpretative vision of the final pages of the final sonata of Beethoven will nosedive to oblivion if we can’t play an even trill.
So, moving inside the hangar, spanner at the ready, how do we practise? There are as many answers to that question as pieces in our repertoire, but maybe some signposts can help.
Study
Relish the task, whether beginning to learn a piece or revising one long familiar. Decode the message behind the notation. Map out the journey. Look for the obstacles. Know the (good) tradition of historical evidence; distrust the (bad) tradition of ‘it’s always done this way’. You might be Brahms’s secretary in the practice room, but on stage you are his mouthpiece. And a composer’s message is always more than words: it’s a drama in which you and Brahms are a single character.
Slow
Slow practice can be a complete waste of time if the mind is not working quickly. Simply to trawl through passages like a contented tortoise is a waste of the felt on your piano’s hammers. Good slow practice is more like a hare pausing to survey the scene: sharp in analysis, watching through the blades of grass, calculating the next sprint. My favourite kind of slow practice is the half-and-half variety. For example, in a semiquaver passage I will play four notes at performance tempo, then four notes exactly half the speed – then reverse the groups. It can sometimes be useful to do this with eight-note groups. It stops any testudinal ambling, and it focuses the mind quickly from one reflex to another. It is a hare with alert eyes.
Mind
As important as it is to have strong fingers, muscles, tendons and joints loose and lithe, we need a strong mind at the piano too. Strong in concentration, on- and offstage; ever striving for improvement but relaxed when none seems to take place; aiming the dart tirelessly at every bullseye but gentle and kind when it clatters to the floor. Muscles are effective when they are able to tense and relax at will, not just when they bulge in a ripple of aggression. This is true for the physical side of playing as well as for the mental challenges. The mind’s clear vision is not a stare; it needs to be able to focus near and far with flexibility and wisdom. There is a well-worn saying: practice makes perfect. I don’t believe this, at least in reference to playing the piano. Abstract ‘perfection’ is rarely what we seek but good practicing does make it more likely that we shall give a good performance. Its attention, its concentration, its tightening of the screws enable the concert experience to take wing in freedom.
The practice of practising: for amateurs
So much for students and professionals, what about amateur musicians? I think it’s important to begin with the origin of the word ‘amateur’. It comes from the Latin amare and it means ‘to love’. An amateur is not someone who is less good than a professional but rather someone for whom love overcomes obstacles – and practising is all about overcoming obstacles. In fact, many professionals could learn a thing or two about the love for music that fills the lives of so many who have other daytime jobs. The French novelist Julien Green wrote that if students still wanted to read books after they’d completed his literature class he considered his teaching to have been a success. If we think of practising itself from the viewpoint of love I think many things will slot into place.
But love is not quite enough, as anyone who has placed stiff hands on keys or dry lips to a mouthpiece will know. The first problem is how to maximise limited time at the end (or the beginning) of a busy day. There is no question that a lot of time is wasted when practising, particularly in music colleges. Passages are repeated over and over again with no improvement and no concentration. The hands of the clock are impatiently urged forward: ‘Three hours done; oh, that’s enough for today.’ Nothing of the amateur about this attitude. But by the time a student has become a professional there can be surprisingly little time to practise – on the days of concerts perhaps only twenty minutes grabbed backstage in a dressing room.
What’s essential is to focus on why something is not good, and in almost every case there is a clear, logical reason. There is not room here to go into every example (and every problem will have a slightly different solution) but mistakes occur for the pianist when fingers fall in the wrong place. That might seem like a banal truism but it’s surprising how useful it can be to think in these terms. You want to hit that E; therefore your hand needs to be there in order to do so. Take all the time you need to get there (there’s always a split second more than you think) and play it calmly, however frenetic the music might be. And however expressive the music, playing an instrument is doing something finite: a practical, physical action. The effect of that vibrato might be to create a tear in the corner of an eye, but what’s actually happening on the string is a wiggle of a finger in the right place.
Perhaps the main thing that can hold an amateur back is the sheer physicality of muscle development and stamina with insufficient practice time to achieve it. To do anything technically difficult requires the body (the fingers, the lips, the arms) to be in good shape. Possessing good shoes and a good posture will help you run better, but you won’t win the marathon without serious training. Some people have a natural flair at the keyboard and learn much more quickly than others, but for some people certain pieces will never be possible. It’s not a bad thing to realise this and not to waste time banging through that Liszt piece, which you know in your heart is never going to be rid of the lumps and bumps. Choose repertoire sensibly … but do stretch yourself as well. Keep polishing your old party pieces (especially if you plan playing them at parties) but always try to learn something new. Maybe one out of five days can be for new repertoire.
Finally it’s important to remember that being an amateur (a lover) should be a carefree task. Leave the ego-posturing to the professionals. Make demands on yourself, fill the time well, concentrate … but then enjoy. Find joy inside the music you play and inside yourself. Who knows, you might end up bringing some of that joy to your family and – one can always hope – to your neighbours.
Random practice tips
And so, here are some random practice tips for professionals and amateurs alike:
Let’s (not) start at the very beginning
This is true in a multi-movement work and even within movements. I’ve often noticed in masterclasse
s how students play the exposition (the first time the themes appear) better than the recapitulation (when they return in the final section). I think this is because they always start working at the beginning, and practise that section with greater focus and energy. In Brahms’s Second Concerto, for example, we can spend a good hour or two working on the first half of the first movement and then find when the second-subject material returns that we’re already tired or distracted. Try sometimes starting to work from the development section onwards and see what a difference it can make.
Take a bite
It’s not always necessary to practise a piece all the way through on a single day. For instance, in a big sonata it can be helpful, say, to practise the first movement on Tuesday and the rest of the piece on Thursday. Even within a work this can be useful. Let’s say you’re playing the Fourth Ballade of Chopin – a challenge to any pianist’s hands; you might want just to practise the last three pages or so of the piece on one day. Take an hour and home in on the specific difficulties there, calmly and coolly, then put it aside and work on something else. It stops that feeling of being overwhelmed by how much needs working on. If you practise that tricky coda carefully, out of context, it should feel more secure when the footlights are at full glare and a microphone is poking its nose inside the piano.
Either side of the crack
When you reach a hurdle in a difficult piece and stumble, keep going for a few seconds. Don’t stop and go back straight away, because if you do this too often you will find that the problem will have become ingrained. You will never have actually played the passage without this ‘stopping and going back’. An example of this is in the final Chopin prélude. There is a descending run of chromatic double-thirds that often causes difficulties. I’ve heard this practised in conservatories over the years. Students reach this point, get in a tangle, stop for a second and then have another (usually more successful) go. By the time they come to play the piece in an exam or concert the mistake itself is ingrained. Not only should you keep going beyond the stumble before going back, but make sure when you do go back that you start a little earlier than the problem moment itself to cover the crack. Very often getting into a passage is more difficult than the passage itself.
Tick tock
Some people are disdainful of the metronome, as if using it means that you are somehow ‘unmusical’. This is irrational as it can be a really useful tool to check tempos and to check steadiness of rhythm within those tempos, enabling us then to be free to be free. But it has a further use in practising. Josef Lhévinne used to work on certain passages or pieces at four different tempos. Let’s say your performance tempo is crotchet (quarter-note) = 120. Try practising at 100, 80 and 60. You’ll find that different difficulties rear their heads at the four different tempos, and that the middle two levels are often the hardest to maintain.
Be boring
Don’t feel you have to perform with full emotional expression at every practice session, especially by filling the hours crashing through pieces without improvement. This is a common occurrence in conservatories – Rachmaninov concertos pounded with adolescent passion and coarse, crude effects. In the same way that an actor will go over lines backstage, sometimes it’s really good just to go through the notes, thinking about what you want to do expressively but not fully engaging with it. This is especially valuable on the day of a concert: don’t let the rehearsal use up all the energy for the performance.
Foot off the pedal
If you take your foot off the pedal when you practise, the sound instantly becomes semi-skimmed, and you’ll really hear what’s going on. You’ll also see whether the fingering you’ve chosen is lazy and a fudge, or whether it will enable you to sing every line with fervour and confidence. In addition it will help you to be boring, as in the previous tip.
Close your eyes
Leopold Godowsky and Josef Lhévinne both recommended practising with eyes closed, and it’s an astonishingly effective technique. It forces us to use our other senses more acutely – hearing, of course, but also to map out the geography of the keyboard (my teacher Derrick Wyndham’s term). It’s helpful for almost everything, but especially if you’re working on a passage with jumps. If you can play that passage in Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz no. 1 or the end of the second movement of Schumann’s Fantasie op. 17 with your eyes closed (even if it’s at the speed of a tortoise with a missing leg) it will be much easier when you open your eyes again.
Rainbow
I like to use coloured pencils to highlight particular points of interest in a score: inner voices, important notes in harmonies, shapes of phrasings, patterns in passagework, unusual pedallings, aids for memory. I find that writing in a score is an essential tool in the excavation process of learning a piece, especially when choosing fingerings.
Don’t warm up
Gordon Green used to warn me against warming up before playing. He meant to alert me to the danger of having a specific routine, favourite exercises without which I didn’t feel ready to begin playing the pieces I was studying. As most of the problems in playing the piano are in the head not the hands this is wise advice. Any superstition or artificial requirement we build into our psyche is dangerous because there will be a time when it can’t be fulfilled. Many times I have played in a concert hall where there was no warm-up piano backstage, and I’ve just had to go out onto the platform cold. We need to prepare for this eventuality in our heads, and in our practice rooms.
Massage and table tops
However, following on from the previous tip, we shouldn’t just start playing the cadenza of Prokofiev’s Second Concerto, full-tilt, straight after breakfast. At home we can begin with physically less strenuous passages to loosen up, but what do we do when we’re backstage at a concert hall with no piano on which to doodle? I’ve spent many hours of my life drumming my fingers on table tops – not while waiting for a barman to bring over a Martini, but nervously trying to get my fingers warm in a draughty dressing room. I don’t think trying to play the patterns of an actual piece is of much help, but taking simple, Hanon-like exercises tapped out on a hard surface (I’ve used sinks, chairs, walls, music stands, water machines) can be a good way to prepare for playing. I would add to this stretching and massage – and not just our hands. Tightness in any part of the body can be a handicap at the keyboard. Just before a performance I like to tease out the knots in my forearms and between my thumbs and forefingers. A good way to do this is to take a non-sharp corner of a piece of furniture and gently press on the various pressure points.
Know the score
Most pianists, when learning a new concerto, begin with the two-piano reduction with the orchestral part transcribed for a second piano. Not only is this score readable and carry-able, but it enables us to run through the piece on two pianos before playing it with a full orchestra. But we need to study the original, orchestral score too – not only to learn what’s really going on in the other parts, but because there are sometimes mistakes in the two-piano scores.
Waiting for my carriage
The great Hans von Bülow had a tip that I’ve found very useful over the years: ‘Do not despise the fifteen minutes spent waiting for your carriage to arrive.’ In other words, a lot can be achieved in a little time. I like to take a problem passage from a piece I’m working on and slowly, carefully, study it in those free minutes. It’s related to advice from fitness gurus who tell us that even a short walk (especially up a staircase) can make a significant impact on our health.
Descaled
Many great pianists talk about the importance of practising scales. Even if we don’t do it every day it’s still quite good to isolate a technique like this from time to time, out of the context of the piece we’re working on. For instance, if you’re learning Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’ Concerto you might want to spend some minutes just playing scales and arpeggios; there are certainly enough of them in the work itself. Or, if you’re playing a piece with a difficult octave passage, pract
ise some octaves by themselves – simple scales and arpeggios can work well.
Rhythm method
Pianists and their teachers tend either to advocate practising in rhythms with an evangelical fervour, or to maintain that it’s a total waste of time. All I can say is that I have found it useful throughout my life for certain passages, if done correctly. Very rarely do I use dotted rhythms, but rather stopping on the first, second, third and fourth notes of a group. What is essential is absolute rhythmic stability. If these rhythms are done sloppily they will merely make you play more unevenly. A metronome is a good way to keep the spacing between the notes of military precision. I discussed a variant of this earlier – playing one group at one tempo and the next at exactly double or half the tempo. These ‘groups’ can be two, four or eight notes – or one bar, or even two bars. Again, this is useless if it’s kind of a bit slower, then kind of a bit faster; we must keep the same pulse but vary the note values. You’ll find that it not only helps accuracy and velocity but can aid memory too.
Rough Ideas Page 13
