Learning Longer Pieces

BartK · 2024-10-28T16:59:44+00:00

This has been bothering me for a while but have a problem with learning longer pieces. By longer I mean anything longer than a few pages. The longest pieces...

ranjit

BartK Unfortunately, I think a large part of keeping up that motivation is the ability to learn large pieces relatively quickly. While polishing everything from the start can make sense for shorter pieces, for longer pieces I'd say sight reading through the entire thing until you have an idea of the sections and can somewhat play the entire piece, and listening to recordings until you can imagine how it sounds is very valuable.

I also break pieces down into "mini-pieces" in my head of around 4 pages or less, and then into sections. This allows you to have a sense of progress, as it feels like finishing one movement a time of a multi-movement work.

Even with all that, I would spend as many hours as possible in the initial few days of learning a large piece trying to learn as much of it as I can. Motivation will naturally diminish after a few weeks, so it helps for everything to at least be memorized by that point (in less than 1-2 months).

ranjit

BartK It's polishing the piece to a presentable state once I have the whole piece in my fingers that takes so much time.

I just saw this. Could you go into why it takes so long? If you go over a piece with a teacher so that they immediately point out most of the technical and musical concerns, would that cut down on the time it takes? I think the answer would heavily depend upon that.

If you want to be able to have the motivation to slog through a piece for hundreds if not thousands of hours, I think the only possible way is to love the piece so much you basically never get bored of it. It can help if the piece feels "addictive" to play -- I find that Liszt often falls into this category, as does some Chopin.

BartK

ranjit
Thanks for your insight Ranjit. I really thought about what you wrote but I think our minds work differently. For a long time I have been doing exactly what you are saying - learning a piece quickly to get a sense of the whole then gradually working on the details - but I think that is exactly the root of my problem.

You see, once I can "play" the piece through I get to a stage where the immediate gratification of being able to play the piece is over and all that remains is only the hard work to make it sound less crappy. But as I work through the sections if I occasionally play the piece through it still sounds crappy and that is demotivating.

On the other hand, I know that given enough work I can get even very difficult passages to a decent level because I have done that with Chopin etudes - playing only exerpts and treating them purely as exercises without having any intention of learning the whole piece. If I dissociate each small section from the whole and just treat it as an exercise that I work on for whatever time it takes to make it good then it seems I can achieve some progress. I'm testing out this approach on some pieces right now although I don't know if it will scale to larger works.

JB_PT

BartK You see, once I can "play" the piece through I get to a stage where the immediate gratification of being able to play the piece is over and all that remains is only the hard work to make it sound less crappy. But as I work through the sections if I occasionally play the piece through it still sounds crappy and that is demotivating.

This is exactly why I tend to avoid polishing pieces...the length doesn't even matter. Just recently I've given myself a 'talking to' and I'm now sticking with at least one piece at a time to continue working on those details. Even working with a teacher is not a magic bullet for me, but it certainly helps...I just need to have the discipline to stop making those pieces quietly disappear once I start getting frustrated with them. I really can't imagine going through this process with 10+ pages, so I can certainly understand where you are coming from.

Stub

Sgisela what I often find when working on a longer piece is that I will start working on one section. Once that’s learned to an OK place, then I will move to another section — so to me, this feels like working on ‘something new,’ even thought it’s in the same piece. For the section(s) I’ve worked on already and are in my hands, I continue to work on those, but in a more ‘polishing’ way. So it’s kind of thinking of one piece as several projects in different stages of learning.

This is basically what I do with longer pieces. You can mix and match the sections to keep things interesting (to a point, anyway).

BartK You see, once I can "play" the piece through I get to a stage where the immediate gratification of being able to play the piece is over

If you find yourself tiring of the piece before you've got it to a satisfactory level, then perhaps it would help if you avoid, as much as possible, Playing Through. Not only is playing through is an inefficient way to learn, it will "dull" your appreciation of the piece through over-repetition, as you state above. This would be where coming up with discrete sections to work on would help, as would mixing up the order (and frequency, depending on what needs more work). I have been trying to cure myself of the habit of playing through. It's a hard habit to fix, for sure.

Player1

Polishing is a whole 'nother subject on top of learning a piece.

Polishing, at least for me, requires that I play the piece and identify where I mess up, fix that mistake and try to integrate the repair into the whole. I continue to do this until I can play through without mistakes consistently. At that point it's flow and melody/harmony which is where I try to improve.

BartK

Ithaca When I read this, I think that probably you are taking on pieces which are, overall, too technically demanding for you

You are probably right. 😆 The most advanced pieces I did with my teacher are easier that what I'm trying to play now, but I must have made some progress over four years, right? RIGHT? Or am I just fooling myself? 😉

Ithaca Can you find long-ish pieces which you enjoy, which are generally a significant step down in technical demands from the long pieces you're currently taking a long time to learn, but which still have (only) a very few demanding sections?

The only pieces that I can think of that would be both easy and 10 pages or longer would be sets of pieces from a suite. The trouble is in a set there are usually outliers that are much harder. Maybe I can do the Bach French Suite 2 like I mentioned in my first post, or maybe the Kinderszenen. I don't think there are any individual pieces ABRSM grade 8 or lower that are over 10 pages long. If anyone knows of any please mention.

Incidentally, I have been doing the opposite - technically demanding diploma level pieces that are 2 pages or shorter - in order to push my limits. There are many pieces like that - Brahms waltzes, Scriabin preludes, Prokofiev Visions fugitives, movements from larger pieces, etc. That approach works for short pieces but for long pieces I probably have to do the opposite like you're suggesting.

I know I need get a teacher and I'm going to look for one shortly.

Sgisela

BartK I don't think there are any individual pieces ABRSM grade 8 or lower that are over 10 pages long. If anyone knows of any please mention.

My recollection from my lessons as a kid (which were much more structured than my adult lessons) was that the longest pieces my teacher assigned were sonata movements/sonatas, and my sense is that in a lot of traditional piano teaching, studying sonatas is really important to developing the toolbox to tackle longer pieces. So that’s where my head goes, in terms of offering suggestions. I looked at the RCM syllabus, and there are a lot of classical sonata movements listed in Grade 8, 9, and 10. Maybe take a look at these and see if any appeal? You could start with the first movement and then if inclined, do the others.

BartK

Sgisela
Thanks! Yes, I've played a lot of individual sonata movements and I love Beethoven especially. But even complete sonatas of that difficulty are less than 10 pages. The 3 easy Beethoven sonatas are all pretty short.

I browsed through my library yesterday and I think I might try playing the Grieg Peer Gynt Suite 1. It has some very famous movements and isn't too hard but the whole thing is 13 pages long. I could takcle it in stages and put it together at some later point.

Sgisela

BartK take a look at the Clementi sonatas on the RCM grade 8 syllabus. They seemed to be on the longer side. I haven’t listened to them so I’m not sure how appealing they are… my experience with Clementi is limited to a couple of the sonatinas, which were good for me as a student but I wouldn’t go out of my way to play them. You could also look at Beethoven Opus 2 no 1. This is RCM grade 10, which I think is pretty comparable to ABRSM grade 8. It’s early Beethoven, but I think it’s a fantastic piece, and I have a soft spot for it, as it was one of the pieces I worked on in high school. I think RCM has a couple other Beethoven sonatas at this level in their grade 10 syllabus (although they test on 2 movements, not the full sonata). Another piece you could consider is the Mozart c minor fantasie, which is 10 pages. It’s a beautiful piece, but I think one of the benefits of a sonata is that you have the faster outer movements/slower inner movement, and you don’t get this in the Fantasie.

The Peer Gynt suite sounds like a good option.

pseudonym58

This is such a long thread that I have not read all the responses, and I apologize if this has already been suggested:
Learn more than one longer piece at a time, and bring it up to a certain level, and then start working on another, and possibly after that, a third, depending on how much time you have. In alternating this way you can gradually learn all three longer pieces without becoming bored. It works for me, and it's the way I learned the five "Images" that I transcribed recently. I am a slow learner, so it did take me a while to learn all five, but switching off on them kept me from getting bored.
@BartK

lilypad

pseudonym58 I love your suggestion! Long pieces typically take me a month to learn and 2 more months to polish. Choosing a new one is agonizing because I know it will be months before I get to choose the next one. I generally have a steady stream of shorter pieces to work on, but my backlog of longer pieces I want to play just keeps growing.

twocats

I really need to love a piece to be motivated. When I start a very long and challenging work it always seems overwhelming at first but over time when it "gets under my fingers" suddenly it doesn't feel so long anymore! Since I'm mostly working on chamber music for an annual workshop these days, it really helps that there's a built-in deadline so that I give myself plenty of time (about a year) but there's also an end date and I don't keep playing the same thing for years and get bored.

I think once you find a teacher, it will help a lot since you'll naturally be working on improving things that you just didn't know to work on before 🙂

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