Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum Seven year itch

Some of us, of a certain age, will remember the movie with Marilyn Monroe and the unlikely Tom Ewell (I had to look him up) as the "romantic" lead. He lived in a New York apartment, his wife and kids had gone to the country for the summer, and Marilyn Monroe had moved in upstairs. He got the "seven year itch".

There is a piano tie-in, of course. He reasons that the best way to get Marilyn in a romantic mood is to play Rachmaninoff. Turns out the only thing they can play on the piano is chopsticks.

This is the movie with the famous shot of Marilyn standing over the subway grate with her dress blowing up...

Now back to the piano discussion...

Sam

Sam - The scene is indelibly etched into my memory banks - there is a lot to be said for certain women wearing dresses...something wonderfully feminine and alluringly sensuous...NOW, back to the piano discussion...

Personally, I don't have an issue with keeping pieces in my fingers, they just sort of stick once I've developed the muscle memory. I'm not a world class pianist who can play 75+ full concertos at the drop of a hat, of course (and yes there are pianists who can do that) but there is a substantial amount of repertoire I can probably play on the spot.

However, the best way to maintain pieces is to play through them each day. There is no way around it. You should pick 5 minutes of repertoire to keep polished, and just play through them once. They will never leave you.

(After a while, just from having played it consistently over a period of time, you must at some point internalize it and you will find that you can play it less and less and still remember it, until it is second nature and you will literally NEVER forget it (unless you suffer some kind of brain damage). That's how all the great pianists learned those pieces that you wonder how they remember.)

I'm not too sure one can accurately generalize this way about this capability - besides basic, inherent natural ability in this regard (and leaving considerations of "brain damage" aside for the moment) there are a lot of variables such as how many pieces in one's repertoire, how long they are, how complex they are, how often one can reasonably work on maintaining any given work, recycling it back into one's practice schedule, etc., etc.

What are the real capabilities here? What are the typical or normal limits? Can maximums be stated, or even averages?


And did Matthew really die in that car crash at the end of Season 3?

You can probably generalize to this ...

The more often you play a piece the easier it will be to recall it when you wish to play it. Pretty simple.

And in addition, the better a "reader" you are, the easier it will be to restore it to memory after losing it.

The moral of the story is ...

If you wish to retain it in memory ... play it regularly.

If you wish to be able to put it back in memory more quickly, learn to read notation better.

Pretty simple.

I haven't been at it for as long as the OP, but I'm getting to that point as well. To really progress, I need regular practice, but then sometimes it feels like a chore. I ask myself why I'm doing it on a regular basis. It seems that I never just play the piano; I'm always practicing. I do enjoy it, and sometimes I feel like I really don't want to, but then once I get started the time flies by. But it does use up a lot of time, and I often feel that I'm behind in my practicing if I've had to miss certain days or cut sessions short.

So far I have never successfully internalized a piece. There is one currently that I'm very fond of, and maybe in a year it will have stuck. Though I'm a fast memorizer, the pieces seem to fade away just as quickly.

I do have a teacher and take lessons weekly, so the pressure to progress each week is a motivator, and it's nice to have someone else take interest in my progress. I try to post videos to YouTube of my finished pieces, as another poster suggested. And about once a month I get to play for the other adult students that take lessons from my teacher.

One of my problems is that there is just so much I want to do musically that I can't fit it in. I've always thought of piano lessons as a starting point - a solid musical foundation. But there are other skills I yearn to have - coordinating singing with accompanying myself on piano, composing, transcription, playing by ear, etc. I've scratched the surface of all of those, but just barely, as there is a constant stream of new pieces to be learned.

But perhaps the main problem is that learning piano is such a solitary activity. My fantasies of impromptu good old-fashioned piano parties have not materialized! I am a software developer, so my days are lonely enough as it is. I'm currently trying to figure out how I can make my musical endeavors more social. Perhaps that's something you could consider as well. I've surveyed my friends to see if any of them have secret musical talents, but that didn't turn up much. Looks like I'll need to seek out musicians and make them my friends instead of the other way around. It's daunting though, to try to match musical abilities and interests, especially when I'm so indecisive about which music interests I want to focus on. I am pondering getting involved in traditional Acadian/Irish/Scottish music, which has a culture of jamming, and maybe even picking up a different instrument in order to do that. I grew up with that sort of music, and I'm finding myself drawn to it as I age. Of course, I don't really want to leave my piano teacher, so I'm not sure how I can possibly fit more in, but we'll see. We're all just figuring it out as we go.

Quarkomatic, I have even less experience than you. However, if you want to do other things besides learning the assigned pieces, speak up, and then go ahead and allocate both your practice time and possibly lesson time to those interests. Your teacher may or may not have expertise in those other areas, but you'll never know if you don't ask.

This would almost certainly mean learning new pieces at a slower pace, but so what? Especially, if you haven't learned any pieces well enough to truly know them and never forget them. Another suggestion is to spend 20% of practice time on old pieces, so some of them stay long enough to be part of you. Again, it will mean learning new at a slower pace, but it may be more rewarding in the long run to have at least a few pieces that are part of permanent repertoire, instead of a series pieces learned then discarded as the originator of the thread seems to have also done.

Another path others have suggested is more focus on sight reading so that old pieces can be picked up and enjoyed very quickly if there is the desire or need to do so.

Yes, dance communities tend to be more social. However, if one is a musician, and not a dancer, there is a wall. Meetup is a site that has some music and dance groups as well as all kinds of other groups. I don't know if Toronto has any active music groups at your level, but it is worth a look. Local music schools might be another place to look, though at conservatories the level of seriousness might be more than you are looking for. It can also be intimidating for a hobbyist to mix with aspiring full time musicians.