Give up on a piece?

Animisha

I am thinking hard about giving up on a piece. But how to know?

One thing I already know, I won't be able to play it at the given tempo. But I listened to a recording at 75% and it is still very beautiful. However, even getting it to 75% is going to be very difficult. I spent maybe half an hour a day these last ten days on four measures, and I can now play them HT at 55 bpm for an 8th note. They need to be played at 90 bpm for a quarter note at full speed, so even if I play it at 75% I need to get up to 135 bpm for an 8th note.
I think that would be just doable for me.

But then of course, the piece doesn't have four measures, it has 43 measures. None of them as difficult as those four measures, some actually easy, but still. At least six more measures that will be a lot of work.

The piece is classified as "late beginner" and I consider myself "early intermediate", but I think the classification is wishful thinking of the arranger. This is by far the most difficult piece I have ever played.

How to decide?

Nightowl

Animisha Mmm, so you've spent around 5 hours on 4 measures, but you are still struggling to get those 4 measures up to a speed that you think would sound reasonable. If there are 43 measures in total, going at this pace might require about 50 hours more work... that might seem like a real grind. Perhaps if you park this on the back burner then revisit the piece in say, 3 months, it might be more manageable for you?
Is it a Chopin piece, by any chance? I have a similar situation with a Chopin piece in my Alfred's book 2 that is too difficult for me, and I've seen comments online where people say that the piece seems too advanced to be in book 2. I've played the first 8 measures then parked it, because although it's beautiful I'd rather wait until I'm ready for it than spoil my enjoyment of the piece. It's frustrating, I feel your pain.

PianoMonk

Animisha What is the piece?

candela

There are more options than just giving up or not. You could put it away for some months while continuing to improve as a player by practicing other things and see if it comes easier to you then. Or you could make it long-term piece and only practice it occasionally, like once a week, depending on how many pieces you are comfortable working on simultaneously.
I can't help you decide. Personally, I take difficulty ratings with a huge grain of salt. As players we have different strengths and weaknesses so difficulty is not a one-dimensional scale, nor do people universally agree on what is meant by beginner or intermediate.

Animisha

candela You could put it away for some months

Gooseberry come back to it after a couple of months

I am afraid some months would not make much of a difference. If it is too difficult now, it will be too difficult in March.
Such a difficult decision though!

Gooseberry

I think this kind of decision is very individual. I usually put such a piece on a shelf and come back to it after a couple of months or later if the piece requires too much work at the moment. But how much is too much only you can tell.

I don’t know if you do technical exercises, but if you do, you could extract those tricky measures from the piece and add them to the exercise part of your practice session for some time.

Re: how the composers/arrangers define the levels of pieces - I wouldn't rely too much on those, as there is no universal pattern of rating the difficulty, and every one of us learns different things in different time and find different things easy or difficult. I have recently learned in a relatively short time a piece that was graded as "early intermediate", but found another piece labelled as late beginner much too difficult to learn right now 🙄

MRC

Animisha I am afraid some months would not make much of a difference. If it is too difficult now, it will be too difficult in March.

You might be pleasantly surprised. Sometimes giving a piece a break while practicing something else can have benefits you wouldn't have imagined.

My strategy would be to treat it as a long term project. If the piece inspires you, it's a shame to just give it up. You don't want your whole practice time to be taken up with something you're really struggling with, and you can't know in advance how long it will take you to get to a satisfying level with that piece. If you stop playing it for a while, and then come back to it, and do this a few times, you will start to get a feeling for a possible rate of progress. You may think that in a year's time you could be playing the piece in a way that gratifies you. Or you may finally decide that it's not worth the struggle. In both cases you'll have gained something from the practice on that piece.

Player1

I've given up on pieces in the past so I know how hard it is to do.

What I didn't know then, and barely know now, is that looking at a piece and recognizing everything you see on the sheet, isn't the same as being capable of doing that stuff. For the pieces I was trying to play but couldn't, I could finger out the notes. I could find the harmony, melody, and rhythm. What I couldn't do was play it.

Why? Because I didn't have the technique. Technique is more than knowing all your theory perfectly. Or being able to recognize chord progression when you see it. Or any of the many other things we're taught and learn and practice from the very beginning of this journey.

Technique is being able to make your fingers do unnatural movements without having to concentrate on each finger moving in a specific way at speed while you do other things at the same time. That comes from your brain being conditioned to do multi-level physical and mental activities simultaneously. And while that sounds basic and stupidly obvious, it's the truth. What's also the truth is that until your brain gets to the level where it can do what you're asking it to do, you won't be able to play a specific piece of music credibly.

In sports, the better players can do this naturally at a younger age but for most of us we need to learn how to swing a bat, ride a bike, balance on skates, and so on one step at a time. Looking back it seems so easy but at the time it's not because the brain has to be taught to do it without thinking about it.

Combining the physical part with the audio requirements of playing music, and it gets complicated really fast in ways that aren't all that apparent on the surface. Worse, grinding away on a piece you're not ready for won't get you anywhere. If that's what you're doing, set it aside. You can either pick it up later, or toss it into the dustbin and forget it's there. (Until the next time you toss one in there and trigger the memories of all the previous stuff too.)

RFox

Spending time on a piece without sufficient progress makes it difficult to maintain motivation - often getting to the piano at all, not just that piece.

(My opinion is that no passage of only a few bars should be worked on with more than two or three repetitions at a time. These passages need to be sorted out during sleep, not at the keyboard. The time spent is largely wasted as far as progress goes on that piece and could also have been better used on a different piece - a double dose of waste! I aim for two twenty-minute sessions with a few hours between each to cover all my pieces.)

How does the tempo in this piece compare with your usual fastest playing? If it's in the same realm then you have enough ability to play any passage at about that speed (rate of finger fall not metronome tempo).

Is it possible that it's a fingering issue? You say the tempo is applied by the arranger so this may be a fingering issue in disguise. Consider, for example, passages where the LH plays above and below a RH Alberti figure or where the LH takes the lower note of a RH figure that you may not be distributing properly.

With fractures that are only a few bars, drop all but those few bars. Get those bars in your fingers regardless of tempo - anything countable is enough. Only when the playing is fluid need you worry about tempo. The first rapid rise in tempo happens when thinking time goes, the next happens when recall time goes. Tempo beyond that may need longer intervals of time.

Simpler 'fast' pieces will help to bring up your fastest playing speed. I don't know where you are on your journey but consider (in roughly ascending order of difficulty) Bach's Musette from the AMBN, the final Allegro from Haydn's Sonata Hob XVI/8, Benda's Sonatina in A Minor, the Presto from Clementi Sonatina No. 5 or CPE Bach's Solfeggietto as pieces for bringing up your finger speed.

JB_PT

RFox My opinion is that no passage of only a few bars should be worked on with more than two or three repetitions at a time. These passages need to be sorted out during sleep, not at the keyboard. The time spent is largely wasted as far as progress goes on that piece and could also have been better used on a different piece - a double dose of waste!

Agreed. Spending this much time daily on such a short section immediately brought to mind the suggestions from Molly Gebrian's book. At the very least, I think you would benefit from taking some time off from this and working on other stuff.

Animisha

Thank you all for your thoughtful responses! ❤️ Reading your comments, I let the decision make itself. This morning, I found that I have not practised this piece for two days in a row now, and I won't practise it today either. Apparently, the piece has been dropped.

Just one thing.

RFox These passages need to be sorted out during sleep, not at the keyboard.

No tricky passages have ever, as in ever in my life since I started to learn to play the piano, sorted themselves out during sleep. I wish! Practising the piano would be the easiest thing in the world.
No. I practise these four measures. I figure them out, then I put my metronome on 50 for each 16th note, I work my way up until I can put the metronome on 70 for each 16th note (no, not with blocked practice but with interleaved practice).
I go to sleep.
Next morning, I have forgotten how to play those four measures. Once again, I figure them out, put my metronome on 50 for each 16th note, and work my way up to 90 for each 16th note.

This is my reality when practising the piano. No amount of reading about memory consolidation during sleep will make any change. However, I never before have four measures taken such amount of time. As one of you said, grinding away on a piece I am not ready for won't get me anywhere. I am obviously not ready for this piece.

PianoMonk What is the piece?

Clubbed to death by Rob Dougan

candela

Another aspect that I haven't seen touched upon in this discussion is the question of what your own deeper reasons for playing the piano are, and if practicing this particular piece right now aligns with those reasons, whatever they are. I'm not expecting an answer, just trying to provide food for thought.

Sgisela

@Animisha you wrote in another post that you are subscribed to ArtistWorks with Zachary Deak. Have you sent these measures and asked for feedback on how to practice them? If you haven’t, I would do that. If you feel you’re still not making much progress after implementing the instructions on how to practice, then I’d reconsider the piece. But it’s possible you just need some guidance on what’s not working and how to practice it so that it does work.

Nightowl

Animisha That piece is based on The Enigma Variations by Elgar, which is a grade 6-7 piece - no wonder it's tricky! I totally understand now why this piece currently feels a bit beyond you - it's probably beyond many intermediate players. Don't feel bad about parking this one for a while, I think you'd end up hating it if you persisted with it at this stage.

(Edited as discovered the original source of my information was incorrect.)

RFox

It was I, not JB_PT, that proposed the initial sort-themselves-out-during-sleep idea. Let me try and explain...

Animisha wrote
I practise these four measures. I figure them out, then I put my metronome on 50 for each 16th note, I work my way up until I can put the metronome on 70 for each 16th note (no, not with blocked practice but with interleaved practice).
I go to sleep.
Next morning, I have forgotten how to play those four measures. Once again, I figure them out, put my metronome on 50 for each 16th note, and work my way up to 90 for each 16th note.

This is the problem: 1. During the 'figure them out' stage through the slow metronome phase you're using an initial sort out and reinforcing it while trying to coordinate the playing with a metronome. 2. Then you're trying to do the same some time later with a faster metronome. 3. Then you're expecting to remember them the then next day.
It doesn't work like that.

Figure out the measure into workable sized chunks that won't tax working memory - we're not trying to memorise the passage overnight, just trying to figure out a solution. Play it at the speed of no mistakes. This may involve holding down all the notes that are played together, relax all the fingers consciously, figure out the next note or note group, figure out (still holding down the current notes) what fingers will play, rehearse them in your head, imagine the voicing and dynamics if you're that prepared, make the change as quickly as practical and hold down all the playing notes. Repeat the process – hold the notes down, relax all fingers, figure out the next notes and fingers, rehearse the change in your head, make the change as quickly as practical, hold the notes down.
Continue this way to the end the bar or the end of the fracture.

If it's a four bar passage you might need to work each bar individually stopping on the first beat of the next bar not the last note of the current one.

Don't try to remember more than each note/beat change. Don't repeat this more than two or three times at any one time and ideally clear out the working memory with another piece between each repeat. This isn't about memorising, it's about reading afresh, thinking it out afresh and playing afresh each time. This is about fixing a passage you can't play at reading speed. If the brain wants to remember it then let it but don't add tension trying to memorise it.

Then sleep.

Example 1: If this were bar 1 of Chopin's Prelude No. 20, there would be a long pause after each LH chord. The sixteenth notes just before the fourth beat would be rehearsed as moving straight onto the fourth chord while still holding down the third chord. You might work up to the first chord in bar 2.
Example 2: the Rondo from Mozart's Sonata in C, K545, the double blind jump of each hand in bar 10. Hold down the B in RH and the D in LH. Rehearse the jump to E in RH in your head, then the jump to E in LH, then both jumps together (all while still holding down the B and D with relaxed hands and fingers). When you're ready make the double jump and finish the measure plus the first four notes in bar 11. (If you're planning a performance of this you might prepare to repeat the D in RH or quickly change the fingering to play FDCB, G# in case you jump to the D or F in error. I wouldn't expect to get the LH jump wrong or you can look at the low B while you're playing and make it a blind RH jump only - just for performance, mind!)

Don't try to speed it up on the same day. If you're adding a second session five or six hours later repeat the first attempt. Trying to speed it up is adding tension into the passage that may take more time than you'd think to eradicate. Tension is the enemy of speed. Slow, steady, easy and relaxed is the way to go. A better idea is to hum the melody in your head and work on better phrasing. Don't try to play it again, even in your head.
If you don't remember the passage the next day but you were trying to then you were doing too much so break the passage down further but that's not what this practise technique is about. The memory used is all working memory, and clearing that out is more important than storing anything. A passage you can't play is a source of tension. Don't build that into your piece. Either make it playable first or memorise the piece aurally before you tackle it at the keyboard.

Now, if you do this for a week (five days) your thinking time is likely to have reduced and your tempo increased from, say, 10 seconds per change to one or two. That's progress. You're still making every change with relaxed mind and fingers and you're playing the passage five times faster than when you started!

I would drop the passage for a week at this stage and work on another piece. When I get back to it the brain should have made everything run a little smoother and a little easier. You can repeat as is for another five days or you can double the length of the passage depending on progress, or the number of such passages per piece. Eventually the thinking time will be fast enough that you can play at the speed of slow foot tapping or beat counting. Then, and only then, need you start with the metronome.

Try it for two or three minutes a day with a new piece/fracture and see how it works for you over a number of weeks.

Animisha

RFox It was I, not JB_PT, that proposed the initial sort-themselves-out-during-sleep idea.

Thank you for your correction. I edited my post accordingly.

RFox Figure out the measure into workable sized chunks that won't tax working memory - we're not trying to memorise the passage overnight, just trying to figure out a solution.

Thank you so much for your help!

Now, first of all, I did not explain my practising process very clearly to begin with, because I did not think this would be part of the discussion. When I said that after ten days I could play the passage of four measures HT at a certain speed, and later gave an example of what could happen between one day and the next day, I did not mean to imply that on day one of practising I started playing the whole passage HT with my metronome.

No.

The first days I spent practising the measures HS, until I could play them fluently and correctly.

Then I started practising HT, two measures at the time. The two measures each start and end quite doably, but the tricky part is in the second half of the first measure and the first half of the second measure.
Now a large part of why this was tricky was counting rather than correct notes. In the first two measures, there was a triplet with two quarter notes and two 8th notes above four quarter notes. The mistakes I made were mostly playing the correct note at the wrong time. In the second two measures, the triplet had a dotted quarter note, a regular quarter note, and three 8th notes above the four quarter notes.
So I introduced the metronome as soon as possible (already when playing HS), and I counted, counted, counted.

Then I found that I too often confused the counting challenge in the first two measures with the counting challenge in the second two measures, and, conveniently, they were adjacent, so I put them together and started to practise them as a whole. However, I also regularly practised tricky part 1 and then tricky part 2, then did something else, then practised the whole passage again.

After all of this, at the end of a practising session I could play these four measures correctly at 55 bpm for an 8th note. I started to wonder if I really wanted to continue with this piece, and I wrote my post.

RFox 1. [...] This may involve holding down all the notes that are played together, relax all the fingers consciously, figure out the next note or note group, figure out (still holding down the current notes) what fingers will play, rehearse them in your head, imagine the voicing and dynamics if you're that prepared, make the change as quickly as practical and hold down all the playing notes.

This is basically how I practise when a passage consists of consecutive triads, apart from imagining the voicing and dynamics, because at this stage I need all my attention for figuring out the next chord.
Oh, and I don't relax my fingers! But that is actually a very good idea, so I'll try to incorporate that.

RFox Don't repeat this more than two or three times at any one time

Now here is where we differ very much. Because I usually repeat this process until I feel something click inside of me. An "Ah now I get it" feeling. Then I take a break from the passage and play something else.

RFox 2. Don't try to speed it up on the same day. If you're adding a second session five or six hours later repeat the first attempt.

So, two or three times only, and then once again two or three times only - leading to a grand total of six times every day. 😲

But you inspire me to experiment with this. Tchaikovsky's In church is on my list of pieces that I sooner or later will play, and RH m33-36 seem to be very suitable for this type of practising. Each day I will record the total time needed for these four chords, both the first time I play through them and the sixth time.

RFox I would drop the passage for a week at this stage and work on another piece. When I get back to it the brain should have made everything run a little smoother and a little easier.

Unless I know a piece very well, this has never been my experience. But now that I am experimenting, I will do as you say. 😇

It will be really exciting! Thank you so much for inspiring me to experiment in this way. 😍

Animisha

Now it is time to answer to Mx Fox and their advice.

RFox Figure out the measure into workable sized chunks [...] Don't repeat this more than two or three times at any one time and ideally clear out the working memory with another piece between each repeat. [...] If you're adding a second session five or six hours later repeat the first attempt. [...] do this for a week (five days) [...] I would drop the passage for a week at this stage.

I did this with four measures, RH only, with four chords. Five days of practice, five days of rest, and these last two days I have had three repeats twice a day again.

I am sorry to say, but it doesn't work for me. Three repeats per session, especially three repeats broken by another piece, is just too little to make a lasting impression. Yes, first attempt on day 2, I needed less thinking time than first attempt on day 1, and first attempt on day 3 was faster than first attempt on day 2 but since then, thinking time has not improved. First attempt on day 12 (five days practising, five days break, second day since break) was only marginally better than first attempt on day 3.

I compare my memory with strength training. If you’re want to build muscle, there is a minimum amount of work required for any real progress to happen. Muscles only grow when they’re challenged enough to need repair and adaptation. This means you need to lift weights that are heavy enough and do enough repetitions to properly stress the muscles. The weight also needs to feel challenging by the end of each set for it to count.
Here’s the thing: if you don’t reach that minimum, almost nothing will happen. You won’t build new muscle, and the little work you do might just maintain what you already have. It’s not about doing "some" work; it’s about hitting that threshold where your body is forced to adapt. If you’re not doing enough, you’re just spinning your wheels without getting anywhere.

Memory feels the same way for me. Repeating four chords three times in the morning and three times in the evening, just does not make enough of an impact on my memory. Nothing happens. When learning something new, I need to put in enough practice in the first days for anything to stick at all.

Animisha

Nightowl Thank you! Heart warming. 🥰

Nightowl

Animisha I recently came across a video which explores this subject:

The presenter rambles on a bit, but he speaks sense and echoes many thoughts that have been expressed on this thread. (He also has a nice accent and is rather easy on the eye... added bonus. 🙂)

pseudonym58

@Animisha
I know this is a cliché, but learning piano is a process, and if something doesn't work now, it's probably better not to spend a disproportionate amount of time slogging away on it. Come back to it later and you may discover that it's no longer nearly as challenging as it was. Meanwhile, you can concentrate on something new that might be more appropriate for your individual technique.

Bellyman

It's OK to put a piece on hold, for whatever reason.

I find it interesting that you can play it at about 50% speed. My thought would be to quit focusing upon it so much but fairly often, come back and play through it at 50% speed knowing what it is, but just come back and do that often. If you keep doing that, you may find that it'll become easier to take it to maybe 60%. And it's OK to leave it there for a while. Etc. It may take a year or two before it "clicks" and becomes something that your fingers remember, not just your brain, and suddenly, it's as though you're not making it happen, it's just flowing out of you.

I have occasionally had tunes that I tried that just did not work that for whatever reason, I revisited some time later and all of the sudden, they clicked. No idea why.

Maybe some players are different and can remember things exactly for long periods of time. I'm someone who forgets. If I don't actually play a tune for several months, it's sometimes a little iffy as to whether I'll remember it right. I seldom play with any kind of music other than maybe a lead sheet but the similarity from one song to another can be close enough that without concerted effort I could very well start out playing one song and end on a completely different song. Doesn't happen when I play through them fairly often. Ones I haven't played in a while, though... dangerous for me, at least in any situation that matters. Interestingly enough, at least to me, I have had instances when I've had to play for a singer and a song I couldn't exactly remember, but as they sung it, it just "came out". I have no idea how that works but have experienced it numerous times.

This music thing is fascinating, and goes way deeper than the intellectual playing of notes in organized sequence.

thepianoplayer416

Have to consider how far you are able to go with the piece. If you managed to learn all the notes but not yet able to play it at a desire tempo, you are close to getting it to a performance level. If you have not yet mastered the notes, you may decide to drop the piece for the time being due to technical reasons.