keystring
The "traditional practice" is described as "many hours", "lots of repetitions". When I heard that, I was actually surprised. I don't know what I actually expected tbh. I know that on the one hand, how to practice at home is often not taught at all. But if it's taught, I didn't know that this "traditional" thing was prevalent. What did you guys encounter? Were you told "repetitions" and "hours"?
Yes to both. My piano teacher asked me to try to get in 6 hours a day of practice if I aspired to reach a professional standard, because that's what other professionals are doing. His question was: Can you name a concert pianist, or anyone at that level, who didn't put in days of 6+ hours of practice during their initial stage of learning (i.e. before their repertoire was learned and they transitioned to a "maintenance" regime)? Additionally, repetitions are incredibly important to get to the point where you can "not get it wrong".
Also, the idea was that the practice MUST be with as much focus as possible. Just putting in the hours without focusing doesn't lead anywhere.
Now, is it possible to maintain a high level of focus for 6 hours a day? There are three possibilities: No one can do it, some people who have an unusual capacity to focus can, or that it is commonly achievable probably with years of training to enhance focus. Which one is it? I do not know.
But the demands on focus seem to track with other elite intellectual professions.
When it comes to repetitions, I think that most good teachers who know what they are doing do not advocate for blind repetitions, except in the initial stages where you don't know what to aim for, or the final polishing stages where getting in multiple consecutive perfect repetitions is a strategy to ensure accuracy. I have heard all sorts of strategies which teachers have espoused, and they are generally variations on the theme of varying up your strategy.
I also don't know how much of an outlier my first exposure 20 years ago was. Definitely it was stressed vehemently that practice should be short periods, full focus, maybe several times a day in lieu of "hours" (the many hours part was a no-no). With many repetitions, the mind checks out, habits can get sloppy which you then "practice in", and if your mind checked out, memory hasn't kicked in that much.
The one thing I will agree with fully here is that there will be relatively short periods of focus interspersed with breaks. However, this may be something like 3 minutes of focus, followed by a 30 second break: repeat for 2 hours.
Maybe several times a day: I have tried this personally, and it leaves me too tired. It might improve efficiency by a few percentage points, but I prefer to work in one long 4-5 hour session, with a 15 minute break thrown in here and there. The problem is that if you are accumulating a total of many hours and have multiple breaks in between, you are essentially practicing from morning till night, and that is more tiring for most people than working in a single long bout.
You do not allow your mind to check out (as much as possible). Usually, you are varying up what you are working on. You don't really repeat one passage for more than 15-30 minutes. Some time is spent on technique, maybe sight reading, polishing older pieces, puzzling over certain sections, etc. And everyone I know takes short breaks of maybe a few minutes every hour or two. I personally take more breaks than that -- it's like I wait until that point where my brain is ready to accept new information, and then go back at it.
The most I have practiced in a day is 7 hours. Once, it was 3 hours + 4 hours, and at another point, it was 7 straight hours. Here's how that looked:
- Go through all scales, arpeggios, etc.: about an hour
- Work on 4 separate pieces, a few measures of each piece
- Play through pieces, and work on consistency of memory and some passages
- Work on sight reading for 30 minutes
For the most part, the practice was focused. But being able to maintain that amount of focus for that long is rare for me. Also, on both of those days, my sleep suffered at night as a result: I had multiple dreams about piano, and I was playing the piano and listening to the music on repeat in my dreams because I couldn't get it out of my system. And I couldn't practice much for the next day or two. So nowadays I limit myself to 6 hours at a maximum.
