A report on how practicing Chopin helped me play Brahms last week; some quotes from Chopin (and one from Chuck Close); thinking through my next performance (with a request for your ideas); snippets of all 24 etudes (I’m ignoring the other three for now); an impromptu play-through, with some yelling, of 10/5; how I’m practicing 10/11 (and a couple of minutes of actual practicing).
Thanks so much to listeners who have written reviews on iTunes. Unless I get 100 reviews by December 20–and it doesn’t yet look like I will–there will be only five more episodes of this podcast. Thanks for being my practice buddy!
Warning: this episode is more rambling than usual, and contains some fairly awful and geeky singing. The results of gardening; a pep talk to kids; trying to make the practice room feel like the stage, my lifelong quest to improve my focus; a strategy (from this book) to work on accuracy and rhythm in 25/4; a confession about scales; a plan about jazz involving a place and a book; some serious theory geekery, including how I teach sonata form (see above warning about the singing).
Tools for focused practice; strategies for Chopin 25/11; a mediocre performance of 25/2; bits of 25/3 and 25/5; an attempt at improvisation (and a confession that I find improvising a little scary).
Specifically, a practice technique I learned here, and that I assign to my students this way:
Practice Recipe Week
In order to jump-start the fall semester, you will follow and notate a careful plan for your practice for one week, and show your notes to me at the end of the week. In most cases, you do not have to follow these guidelines for the rest of the semester, but you may find them helpful when you need to be extra disciplined. You will use the following guidelines, adapted from Burton Kaplan:
1. You will figure out exactly when you have time to practice and write it in your calendar for the week. Since it’s the first week, you are required to block out at least four hours every day.
2. For each day, you will plan your practice time for 80% of your allotted time; for example, if you have blocked out five hours, you will plan for four hours.
3. For that 80%, you will schedule your time PRECISELY, writing your schedule down. Your schedule might look like this:
10 minutes scales
10 minutes sight-read Beethoven slow movement
10 minutes tricky rhythm Beethoven p. 3, slow and then faster with metronome
15 minutes sixteenth notes Beethoven p. 2
15 minutes harmonic analysis of Beethoven first movement
10 minutes play through Beethoven first movement
10 minute play through Chopin under tempo
10 minutes play through Chopin and mark trouble spots
10 minutes Chopin run m. 48 figure out fingering
10 minutes Chopin run m. 90 with metronome slow then faster
10 minutes Chopin sixteenth notes pp. 3-4 in groups
20 minutes read through Bach p & fs (shopping)
20 minutes play through old Mozart and Debussy—sloppy ok but be musical!
10 minutes Bartok jumping chords p.2
10 minutes Bartok rest of p.2
12 minutes write out plan for tomorrow
4. As you practice, you will set a timer (your phone works fine) for each timed section minus five minutes. When your timer goes off, you re-set it for five minutes and finish up with what you’re doing. When it goes off again, you check off the item on your list and you STOP PRACTICING THAT THING. If you’re dying to practice it more, write it down at the bottom of your page.
5. You will write down exactly when you start and stop practicing. If you answer your phone, or go get a drink of water, or have a conversation with someone, or stop practicing for any reason, your timer stops.
6. You will probably find that at the end of your list, you’ve used up most of your allotted time. If you have any extra time, you can practice things you wanted to catch at the end, or practice something else, or just mess around on the piano, or stop practicing and go outside. You’re done.
7. Make sure that the last part of your scheduled practice is your time to write out tomorrow’s plan; that way when you start in the morning, you’ll know exactly what to do.
Play It Again Swig 