A Piano Training Program

Again, with the caveat that I am a decent amateur runner and a professional (for what that’s worth) pianist, learning a piece of music is so much more nuanced than running a race. As one example: I can’t pick which section of music to work on if I haven’t played through and come to a general understanding of the piece as a whole. So I’m fearing that my training/practice program has to be much more tailored and specific, which might detract from the simplicity and lack of choice that I was striving for.

Focused, productive practice for 25 minutes is really easy for me. I get a lot done, and, also, I feel like I haven’t gotten nearly enough done! But I kind of love that I’m limiting myself for the first week. I know that I have plenty of scheduled hours, so the consistency and the excitement for each practice session is really pretty thrilling. Doing two days of an hour and a half would actually be easier than 6 days of a half hour each, but less productive. Working up to 6 days of 2-3 hours will be great though. See, each practice session I’ve started working on what I was scheduled to do, but then very quickly realize something else that really would be productive work. I’ve kept to the schedule, (actually, I did cheat one day and did some extra work), but I’m definitely struggling with ideas of flexibility vs. consistency/no choices.

With age and lots of teaching, I’ve gotten extremely good at figuring out efficient and effective ways to practice. What I need is to couple the excitement of having a clear and useful idea, with the action to realize it.

What are the ways that people who get great at things fit the work into their life? It’s definitely a cliche, but you get out of college and life in the real world is busy! I mean, on the other hand, everyone’s “real world” is different. Your “real world” is different if you have kids or not, or if you own a house or not, or if your wife is in a heavy graduate program… And of course I have biases and blinders and therefore can’t think of all the things that could make my “real world” a lot tougher than it is now. What if my health was an issue? I am committed to this program, and won’t accept any of this as excuses for myself, but I think it’s only realistic to analyze why I might fail and where I have failed in the past.

“I think a lot about this relationship between cynicism and hope. And critical thinking without hope is cynicism. But hope without critical thinking is naïveté. And I I try to live in this place between the two to try to build a life there because finding fault and feeling hopeless about improving our situation produces resignation of which cynicism is a symptom and against which it is the sort of futile self-protection mechanism.”

or

Wisdom tells me I am nothing. Love tells me I am everything. In between my life flows.

Ok, back to the work:

What is the balance between working harder and making more space for work?

When you make more space for work, is it by neglecting some things, or getting someone else to do them, or simplifying so that those tasks aren’t there?

Some of the things that one could neglect could also be undercutting your learning. Sleep. Nutrition. Order. How do you decide whether or not it’s important for your office to be clean, both for the sake of a clear head for work and for a general ability to function in society! Or your lawn mowed… Things you neglect can also pile up into much larger problems.

Efficiencies seem to be a key, though sometimes it seems like they require a lot of effort and they may not have a clear result until after you’ve actually put them into practice. Would it be better to spend a half hour each day meditating, running, doing two loads of laundry, or tracking my budget? All of those seem like consistent efficient effort would make my life better, and possibly make my practicing more efficient, or I could ignore all of those and practice more! The best efficiencies are ones you can justifiably get paid for.

I would suspect that most people aren’t so conscious of these questions, and probably a lot of people who get great at things either luck into or unconsciously get into situations that work for them.

That comment by my theory professor on “is not motivated by external factors” has stuck with me in a deep way. I wish I could decide to focus better. I wish I could decide to focus on my wife and family better.

It is common practice among musicians to basically set up that kind of cycle. One of my earliest teachers told me that he simply put all the material he would be working on in a regular order on one side of the piano and moved it to the other side when it was done. Same thing every day. Am I risking missing consistent development by not having a daily routine?

Reason this failed: I set too high a goal. I took on too big/hard a program and didn’t have the initial skill, number of weeks, or number of hours per day to do it right without neglecting my children (my wife is tough, she can deal), or being absolutely terrible at my job, or injuring myself.

Reason this failed: I didn’t eat and sleep well, so I lacked focus and then felt a need to prioritize “balance” and relaxed too much.

Reason this failed: By sticking with my strict plan each day it didn’t leave me room to react to the deficiencies in my playing that I was hearing right then and there, and I did work that was planned rather than work that was needed.

Reason this failed: I strayed from the plans too much and followed impulses, not getting the real benefit of the weekly consistency.

Reason this failed: I wrote a lot about why it would fail and they became self fulfilling prophecies and easily found excuses!

A friend just told me: “Show your work, not your plan.” Eek. Cut me to the core.

This is a blog chronicling my attempts to take distance running training programs and adapt them for practicing piano. You can read an introduction to the project here and see my current program here. You can sign up on the left to get an email whenever this gets updated.

What does that mean? We probably would think of practicing difficulty for a musician as something that was more mentally taxing, whereas, with running, there is a mental component, but usually it comes in when you are trying to push yourself to physical limits.

The physical aspects of piano are, in large part, mental. Body mapping, whether you call it that or not, is huge. You have to have an accurate mental picture of the correct physical motion. Early in our piano life we probably get this through physical repetition, but that repetition is really training the brains signals to the muscles rather than the physical structure of the muscles themselves. Is this also true at a higher level of running, and I just don’t have an equally complex understanding?

I think we generally think that all of our practicing should be equally focused and difficult, and we often talk about how unfocused practice is useless. There are no useless runs. The easy runs have some very specific purposes, including increasing capillary density (which improves the efficiency of oxygen transfer to your muscles) and the size of your left ventricle!

I’ve often considered whether or not focused concentration on other aspects of your running would yield noticeable improvements. I haven’t done it, but I hear that a focus on your stride definitely can be noticed and helpful, but what if we did consistent body mapping of capillary density and imagined with every breath that our circulatory system was expanding and acting more efficiently? Is that any crazier than some of the visualizations and concentration on wrist circles etc. that pianists use to get a better tone?

I still don’t know that I would consider any of that “hard.” Hard is finishing your first 7 mile tempo run, or that 12th quarter mile sprint. It’s that feeling of physically pushing to the limit and, very importantly, mentally toughing it out to go even further that gives so much of that runners high and sense of accomplishment. Where does that happen in music practice? Can it happen?

Is creative practice somehow more difficult than just technical practice? Is shaping a line harder than learning left hand leaps? Am I way way way over-thinking this and should just schedule some days longer than others?! Sweet. This is why I need to journal about this, because after 400 words on the subject, I have a forehead slapping moment of obvious clarity…

But wait! Now I read, in the introduction to Mastering Piano Technique by Seymour Fink this nugget:

Practice in short, 10-15 minute intervals several times a day, progressing through the exercises in order, as several short sessions of the same cumulative length are more valuable than one long session. Balance your attention between improving old movements and acquiring new ones. Begin an untried exercise deliberately with enlarged movements, using visual and kinesthetic feedback to monitor your actions. Notice how the mind and body interact. For instance, of then the harder you try to concentrate on the task at hand, the greater the build-up of mental and physical tension _ then the greater the interference to coordinated movement. To counter this, imagine yourself as a detached observer, merely noticing your repeated movements in an objective, unemotional, quasi-dissociated manner. Working in the way decreases inner tension and mental interference, and increases your capacity for control, coordinated movement, and habit formation. In short, learning is faster. With experience you will find an optimal balance between intensity of thought and casualness.

If effort is an end unto itself, am I missing the point? But clearly hours on task is a HUGE thing!

I need a post on schedule and life and weekly total hours of practice.