Molly Gebrian - seven months later

Danieru have just read again about "choking" in chapter 13 of the book. This chapter is pure gold. She says that main two reasons are internal distractions and explicit monitoring, which means trying to micromanage every aspect of your playing.

She then says that during performance we should focus on the big picture, like expression, sound quality and phrasing. This is what she calls external focus and she describe how good this works in sport research. So she says this is the way to reduce the likelihood of choking (unfortunately it never will be reduced to zero). It is all about building the confidence that focusing on the big picture will leave the muscular memory do it's job, while you know where you are in the music and you focus on how do you want to sound.

Thanks for posting this!! I have not finished MG’s book, and now I know I really need to!

One of my main issues is what I have always called a problem of concentration…. A lot of pieces I play are longish — long is relative of course, I’m not playing classical pieces that are twenty minutes long, but for example my recital piece was just under 5 minutes, and one of the pieces I’m working on right now is over 7 minutes. I often have the experience of having the piece polished and performance-ready, and then whether in practice, at my lesson, or while recording, I make a big flub near the very end. In my recital piece, it returns to the beginning theme at then end, so after a more challenging section, the ending gets easier again. And it was in the easier section where I would flub, this same passage comes at the beginning, which I never mess up, so it’s not a technical issue.

I’ll have to read what she means by choking, but the comments about focus, and knowing where you are in the music, resonate with how I experience this problem, so I suspect it’s relevant.

When talking about this with my teacher, he said “find more things to pay attention to in the music.” And I have been thinking about that ever since…. I suspect that aligns with MG’s “external focus.”

Some people, @keystring comes to mind, have (rightly) pointed out that a lot of what MG says isn’t necessarily new (leaving aside the way that she uses a review of research findings from neurological studies to guide her practice recommendations, which is new) but I find that sometimes we hear what is essentially the same advice from many different sources, but one person will present it in a way that really clicks, and that’s when we finally become able to incorporate the advice.

So that may be part of what MG “gets right,” in other words, she may be presenting a combination of new and not-so-new ideas, but she’s obviously presenting them in a way that really resonates with people….

Anyway, I really need to finish reading the book…

Danieru She then says that during performance we should focus on the big picture, like expression, sound quality and phrasing.

I don't see how someone can do that if they are still having difficulty playing the right notes in their right rhythm which was the case with the poster you responded to. That idea makes very little sense to me. While it's good to try and play with some expression all the time I don't think that should be the focus until one no longer has problems playing the correct notes and rhythm.

What MG suggested seems appropriate when one is at the stage where one has learned the piece well enough to perform it for others and probably that's what MG is talking about. But I don't think it applies to the poster you responded to.

Animisha so my recommendation for the problem you’re having with the passage and those particular notes would be something like this:
It sounds to me like you probably need to be moving your RH sooner than you are. You should reach that note well before it needs to be played. And I think it would also be helpful to feel how the LH and RH playing events relate to each other. I would probably try to feel this as moving the RH to the first eight note just as the LH is playing the eighth note. So playing the LH eighth note triggers the RH to move. I’d practice just the first part of measures 10 and 12 (the parts I bracketed in green) as separate practice blocks.

Also I’m not sure if this is helpful, but one way you could visualize the triggering is perhaps like this:

Where the arrow indicates the triggering. Also if playing just this section remains tricky, you could start by omitting the final LH note and add that in later (hence my dashed Xs).

Here is a slight modification to the above that might also work. Given you have the pedal down, you could alternatively move the RH even sooner — so that it moves at the same time the LH moves to the quarter note and just stays prepared to play C in m10 and B flat in m12. I think either could work in this context. I think the big point is that if you’re getting to the note right as you’re playing it, there’s a lot more room for error than if you get to the note well before you need to play it.

pianoloverus If I may, I would like to gently suggest that at some point, you should probably start reading the book if you’re going to go much farther in your critique of MG…

Sgisela Animisha so my recommendation for the problem you’re having with the passage and those particular notes would be something like this:
It sounds to me like you probably need to me moving your RH sooner than you are. You should reach that note well before it needs to be played. And I think it would also be helpful to feel how the LH and RH playing events relate to each other. I would probably try to feel this as moving the RH to the first eight note just as the LH is playing the eighth note. So playing the LH eighth note triggers the RH to move. I’d practice just the first part of measures 10 and 12 (the parts I bracketed in green) as separate practice blocks.

Given you have the pedal down, you could alternatively move the RH even sooner — so that it moves at the same time the LH moves to the quarter note and just stays prepared to play C in m10 and B flat in m12. I think either could work in this context. I think the big point is that if you’re getting to the note right as you’re playing it, there’s a lot more room for error than if you get to the note well before you need to play it.

I think practicing the parts you have in blue brackets separately definitely makes sense and is a very good idea. But I don't recommend getting to the first 8th note in the right hand well before one has to play it as being necessary or useful since it's so close to the note before it.

ShiroKuro pianoloverus If I may, I would like to gently suggest that at some point, you should probably start reading the book if you’re going to go much farther in your critique of MG…

Why? Other posters have expressed ideas in the book and, assuming what they say is accurate, then it's perfectly reasonable to comment on that. If I disagree with something, I virtually always give reasons for the disagreement. Then if someone disagrees with what I've said, hopefully they'll explain why also. I think that's what any reasonable discussion is about.