Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum Beginner-know when to drop an old piece?

The teacher of my youth always told me that we should know at least 110% of a piece in the hope of performing at 95% when on stage.
Being an impossible target I felt, like many others, constantly unsatisfied of my performances with few rare bliss moments here and there...
That was the time before my injury and when I was still on route to try to be a professional.... and was the right attitude.
Many years later that idea is still inside me, but the time to pursue it is gone and makes me feel very inadequate to perform any pieces because I always hear or feel a blemish, but at the same time... I do hear the blemishes.

Let's divide the pieces in two categories:
1) performance pieces
2) etudes ( not "performance etudes", but can include parts or section of performance pieces where we need to develop a certain technical facility, for example... mozart k545 first movement to develop facility in scales or a bach suite to develop endurance and good sounding counterpoint )

if it's a performance piece... we should drop it after we did play it correctly way more times than we did play incorrectly. IF it took a month to get it right under the finger... we should practice it at least another month.

If it's an etude, is more tricky, but in general we want to drop it as soon as possible to avoid repetitive stress injuries. For example... exercises with held notes or double sixts scales... incredibly useful, but you can't achieve that freedom in a single session, you will need to go back to it many times, every time improving a little.

one particular case are the chopin and liszt etudes. both have incredibly useful techniques and are performance pieces. for me they are almost impossible to be learn in a single shot and they might distract you for too long. learning one smaller section at the time and than, over time put them together is more doable.

Polishing includes putting into the music the parts that are not explicitly given in the text but are implied by our tradition and our notation system.

In England in my youth the recorder and singing were compulsory. This teaches familiarity with the treble clef and the greater demands of higher notes than lower. In common time the accents fall strong weak medium weak and our counting should match the basic rhythm of these accents.

It is common for beginners to overlook these fundamentals when first learning a piece in the struggle for getting the right notes with the right fingers. Simply adding back the accents can lift a piece even if only a small amount.

Each phrase has a climax. We don't speak in monotones nor should our music be subjected to it. Even if the phrase doesn't have a strong climax the 'words' that make up the phrase have a natural intonation. The highest note in a phrase is typically the climax of it and the phrase ending usually comes down from it. Polish includes building the dynamics up toward the climax and releasing it for the phrase end. And then we build all the phrase climaxes up to the main climax of the piece.

In order to point the notes just so we need to be not just familiar with the notes but our mechanism should be used enough from playing it that we have mental capacity left over to add these tiny touches, a slightly shorter staccato here, a softer one there and a clearer break between those two phrases. This demands more time having been spent on the piece, perhaps having much of it in memory. It takes time to learn what the piece is really saying - that is, our own interpretation of it, and then to be able to bring it out.

Time and effort spent on these things usually makes them part of the learning process at the beginning of a piece and even when sight reading.

When harder pieces are learnt some of these implied attributes are ignored or are too difficult to maintain while we're struggling with unfamiliar or awkward movements just playing the notes.

The accents and base dynamics should be applied before the piece should be considered ready to be dropped but the tiny touches from greater intimacy may be left for those pieces that appeal and will be maintained as repertory.

The first line of Happy Birthday, an example from another thread, has the accent on 'to you' where it rises to the tonic (e&oe, I'm at my desk without the score). In the second line it rises higher to the supertonic and singers will need a touch more breath for it. On the third line the Climax of the whole song is on the dominant for 'birth' which demands the most breath and the close of the phrase falls to allow an easy release of the failing breath. The last line falls prematurely to tonic but doesn't close there as it falls on a weak accent for 'day' and needs the next 'to you' to close on a strong accent and on tonic. Adding these things is polish. Though all the notes are mezzoforte, except perhaps a forte on the main climax, they are not all of the same dynamic value. A good reader will have them in as part of their fundamental technique but a beginner would have to add them after getting the notes.

I am going to address this more directly than the first time round. The beginner student has to be PHYSICALLY ABLE to do these things. "mental capacity" is not enough. Playing an instrument involves physical skill and coordination which need to be developed over time. Trying to do this too early can be crippling or at least frustrating.

Great example zrtf90.

keystring -- you're completely right, in which case my question remains, why not stick with pieces the student *is* physically able to play well once fully learned? with a slight but not insurmountable challenge on each new piece, until those physical skills have developed over time?

I'd like to turn that question around. Why not stick with skills that student *is* physically able to handle? This is what I was saying. In the example of playing one voice louder than the other, this happens in any piece, even the simplest ones. But you wouldn't ask this of a student who is just learning to coordinate the basic playing of notes with a generally controlled touch. Any piece can be played at various levels.

This is something I think is very important for any student to understand. Listen to a great pianist play something level 3. No amount of practice on the piece NOW will enable me to do that (which means "fully learned" isn't possible), it's a long term goal. I move forward and build up all kinds of skills and hopefully one day I can play that piece as beautifully.

I wouldn't know about others but I have never been completely satisfied by my playing of a piece. I always find that there are micro changes that I can make to improve it, especially when I record it and listen again. I always find there is something left to "polish" further.

The only time I "drop" a piece is so that I can re-learn it, which I feel strengthens my memory of the piece.

You are definitely not alone there.

I do, and that's what was asked of me.
I don't do it at the same lesson where we learn the first 2 RH notes along with the first 2 LH notes. We spend a few lessons on notes, except for quicker or older students who need less time, and then if the student hasn't naturally brought out the melody then we start working on that. About half of them bring out melodies without prompting, some combination of natural attachment to melody plus right-handedness, and about half need some helpful exercises.


Also totally true! I think I just have a different opinion about the minimum level...

EDIT: I assumed you meant "basic playing of different notes in each hand." If we're talking about basic playing of notes, period, then that's what one handed pieces and unison pieces are for.

Doing what you can does not promote growth. Development comes from increasing what you can do.

Our approaches may differ here. I wouldn't ask a student to coordinate the basic playing until they've mastered the even more fundamental skill of playing with arm weight instead of their fingers (speed or strength). Once they are capable of making music with each hand separately then they can start coordinating the hands together.

If they are using a 'generally controlled touch' using weight through the fingers and bringing out the accents, that's fine. If they aren't managing the dynamics they need to sort that out first. That's the difference between the piano and the organ or harpsichord.

The piano is a dynamic instrument and the dynamics are fundamental. Accents need to be brought out as do climaxes. If they aren't, where's the music? Anyone who sings or plays a wind instrument, including brass, learns this automatically; string players may be at a disadvantage here. The dynamics are controlled with bodyweight being channelled through the fingers. This is why we keep insisting on beginners starting with pianos that have fully weighted keys instead of keyboards that are un-weighted or semi-weighted.

The music comes first. Skills grow in order to bring out the music.

In what way are strings at a disadvantage? You seem to be saying that dynamics are not brought out in strings (?). Basic dynamics are about the first thing I learned in my first year - speed and "arm weight" are the factors. Is there anything as capable of expression and texture as a violin bow?

In regards to singing, we have at least one teacher on board who specializes in vocal training (singing) to a professional level, starting from scratch to give students their foundation. She teaches very much in the manner I favour: FIRST the student is taught to use his or her voice, and gain control. THEN the musical aspects are brought in, using the control that is there. Yes,the goal is to produce music that is musical. But to do that, you have to know HOW. Otherwise you set a student up for frustration or injury.

It may be that you are not understanding my original point, and that you are arguing against how you understand it rather than what I've been trying to say.

What is "generally controlled touch"?

But first you get control, and that is true on any instrument. Getting any beginning player to play with a good forte sound in one hand while playing piano in the other does not just happen.

Inexperienced teachers don't know how to guide a student through this stage. It is NOT easy for either the teacher or the student.

Just playing the right notes with the right fingers at the right time is a big step for most beginning players. Introducing too many more advanced concepts too soon can destroy more basic skills that are being developed.

Strings aren't; string players MAY be. Singers and wind players need more breath to produce the higher notes. Strings can produce the higher notes without requiring extra force so the requirement is not absorbed as automatically.

Yes, the first thing I was taught was breath control. The piano equivalent would be weight control.

I wasn't arguing. I thought you were. I don't know what your original point was...

I wasn't sure what you were saying here. You started off with "addressing this" which suggested an alternative view but continued with "The beginner student has to be PHYSICALLY ABLE to do these things". You seemed to think I had wanted beginners to 'point notes just so' but I wasn't addressing beginners there and had already amplified sufficiently, I thought, with "our mechanism should be used enough from playing" so I just left it.

But then you asked Heather about "a student who is just learning to coordinate the basic playing of notes with a generally controlled touch". There may have been some confusion over the phrase "coordinate the basic playing" so I amplified my point that a 'generally controlled touch' would perforce require that the fingers were channelling weight already so the student would be physically capable of playing the dynamics appropriately. That's all.

I was also curious about that!

I have no quibble with this but I do wonder if dynamic control is more advanced than playing with hands together.

I'm not a teacher, experienced or otherwise, but my first music lesson, that I can remember, was at primary school, recorder playing and the importance of the first beat of the bar and the conductor's down beat on 'one'. The first thing my piano teacher taught me was how to phrase two notes. In one hand.

I don't have time to write much, but this may clarify a couple of things:

When I read the title and opening post, then in my mind, this thread is about beginners. So yes, I did think you were addressing beginners in your various posts giving advice. This may be the source of any confusion.

The confusion may have begun because zrtf90 was answering my question that I asked earlier in this thread: What is polishing?

I'm satisfied with the answer for myself at a more advanced level. I thought it was an innocent enough question, because "polishing a few of your pieces but not all of them" seems to be advice given here in ABF at all levels. Perhaps we need a different word for whatever-it-is that beginners are advised to do with "a few of your pieces, but not all of them." (*)

For the beginner who is wondering when to drop an old piece, which is what the thread started out as, do you have any thoughts, Richard?


(*) The quotes in the second paragraph are not from any particular person, especially not on this thread; I'm quoting just to set the advice off as advice I have heard here in the ABF, but am not entirely sure I agree with yet.

I replied on the subject three posts down from the OP but there's more been happening since so given the opportunity, thank you, I'll add more.

One of the things I've encouraged my lads to do when they're learning things like piano, chess, drawing or whatever, is to isolate skills and practise them with a clear and singular objective. With regard to piano I've already mentioned in another thread that the session should cover reading, memorising, improvising, picking out melodies by ear, harmonising them, etc.

For the raw beginner this may include learning to count (with accents on the beat), playing while counting, developing arm weight by playing melodies alternating just one (unmoving) finger of each hand, playing a melody over a simple accompaniment of two minims/halves or four crotchets/quarters for each bar, etc.

The bulk of our work is learning new material for it is from this that the greatest benefit to technique comes. Following the Pareto principle we get about 80% of the piece in 20% of the time and the last 20% takes 80% of the time. What is worse is that the last 10% takes 90% of the time and it's here that the greatest improvement to technique comes.

After working a piece every day for a certain period, the development, or polish, if you will, comes much more slowly and daily practise is not, for me, the most efficient way of doing it. At this stage I would advocate finishing each session with a piece that has been dropped from the daily cycle but can still be played easily and accurately and time can be given over to one or two phrases to be polished a little.

So, when all the notes are being played, more often right than wrong, without undue effort and concentration and with the rhythm and dynamics that meet your current standard then this piece can be dropped from your daily bundle and added to your cycle of pieces that are tackled for two or three consecutive days every so often, say five pieces over a fortnight. When your list of pieces being thus cycled is too long to allow all of them to be kept current and all the technical demands of the piece are covered elsewhere then it can be dropped either altogether or added to a longer cycle. I do some pieces two to five days each year or two.

If you're learning two or three new pieces and developing one older piece every day that will give adequate opportunity to practise development. You only need keep the ones that provide enjoyment, satisfaction or interest and drop those that don't offer much benefit. I have sometimes kept pieces that provide an enjoyable challenge even though they may be musically poor.

Many people, especially those with teachers, maintain two or three pieces every day for weeks on end until the piece is 'finished'. My teacher never did that with me. If it was improving from daily practise then I maintained it every day. When it wasn't I practised it two or three consecutive days every week or two and dropped it from the daily grind. She never let me drop a piece completely but would regularly ask to hear pieces that I'd been doing weeks, months and even years earlier and expected them to have improved as well as offering suggestions for further development.

I'm still improving pieces like Für Elise and K.545 that I learnt nearly forty years ago.

Now if you're working through a method book instead of a traditional path of classical repertoire there are greater opportunities and benefits from dropping pieces more regularly and more permanently. So I revert to my original response that if you're adding new pieces regularly then drop old ones as soon as you have the notes, rhythm and dynamics at or above the level of your current pieces but review some of them periodically for further development. It's the further development that builds the higher technical skills and lifts the overall playing ability.

Richard, thanks. I seem to have not been paying enough attention at the start of the thread. I reread your first post, and I also find your recent post helpful. (Plus all the posts in between.)

When you say

do you mean pick one finger on each hand, and then play the notes with every other note using the RH finger and the in-between notes using the LH finger? Or something else? I think this mysterious "arm weight" is what I next want to find how to feel in my playing.

I tried to write while a crisis of sorts was unfolding, so I shot out posts in short bursts - never a good idea because it creates confusion. I have had thoughts and reactions since the beginning of this thread. Originally I tried to keep it general by just writing some of the things I understand about learning (my first post in the thread).

Richard, you wrote recently in responding to Gary.

I'm not a music teacher either: I've had quite a bit of pedagogy by now, but I am not a music teacher. Some of your posts come across (to me) as authoritative and teacherish and that makes me uncomfortable if taken that way, especially if I'm not that sure about some of the ideas being presented. (I'll add that I wouldn't want my writing to be taken as authoritative either.) If we can look at the ideas as ideas, which I think is also your intent, that would be better.

That out of the way, I was ambivalent about some of your first post - some if it also depended on how the idea might be taken. This was the part that gave me pause:

Two concerns I had:

- If this is meant for a beginner, then you are asking for sophisticated things before the person is ready. Learning to play music does not consist of picturing a finished passage in your head, and all the dynamics and nuances flow from your hands. There are actual physical skills with coordination that need to be developed and absorbed into the body. Trying to do such things before being ready can lead to a kind of paralysis and in any case frustration.

Let's take "bringing out the melody above the accompaniment". When I received my retraining, I learned how to make a loud sound without strain, and a quiet sound without strain. In the latter case, strain was caused by holding back. In the next step, I learned to play a RH note loud, and the LH note soft a second afterward. I was not yet ready to bring them together. As my nervous system sorted out those two sensations, I started being able to bring them together. The next stage was to play the RH loud, the LH soft, with exaggerated crude contrast, like a little kid staggering about learning to walk. Eventually I could bring dynamics into the hands.

Taking what I just described, a beginner trying to do all of this at once at a more complete stage, i.e. dynamics and phrasing from the get go, with contrasting hands - I dunno.

2. Other things need to be developed that are not directly physical, such as the ability to read and working with timing. Depending on where the beginner is at, you have note value, counting, and again coordinating the timing of one set of notes against another set of notes. While getting a handle on the most basic aspect of this, a student may not be ready to put in nuances. In fact, even full musicians may reduce a passage into very mechanical, deliberate, mathematical practice to get a handle on the music, before going back into "musical mode". You may already be thinking along these lines. But someone starting out, reading these things, may try to play musically from the very start, not knowing how to break it down.

These are the kinds of things I was thinking of. I also wasn't sure at what stage you were talking about here. Maybe you were thinking of when the student has become fairly advanced.


There are ideas here that I agree with. The last line is important: find out what is holding you up - what is the cause and possible solution - and then work on that thing. Excellent advice, because that same "thing" is likely to hold you up in other pieces too.

I figured out what this is about:

The clue is in an earlier post:

You have established a premise, and then you build on that premise. So your premise is that generally higher notes are played or sung louder, that in singing or playing wind instruments we must use more force or energy for higher notes, and therefore a person who sings will automatically do this "higher note = more energy => louder" thing. I.e. if a phrase goes C,D,E,F,G,F,E,D,C then you expect the phrase to crescendo up to the G and diminuendo back down to C (mp < f > mp, or some such).

This is not a universally held belief, and that is why I could not follow what you were saying in your post of April 26.

It is true that often when melody pitch rises and falls, that there will also be a rise and fall in dynamics - but not always. Also, the melody may be in the bass with the higher notes doing the accompaniment - or particular notes are emphasized. In one choir piece we were to do the opposite of what was expected, with the higher notes being softer, to spectacular effect.

I would say that in singing, it is an effort to control the high notes so that you do NOT sing forte every time it is high, and piano every time it is low. On recorder you have the additional problem that low notes tend to be too flat, high notes tend to be too sharp, and if you try to even it out you get stuck with squeaks and such. In more sophisticated wind instruments there is embouchure, a choice of valves etc.

If there is any "natural" familiarity with using more force for higher pitched sounds, then no musical instrument is required: there is human speech. The ups and downs in volume is something that we do every day in speaking, because nobody speaks like a robot. In that respect, the orator and actor will deliberately make a word quieter, or louder, or crisper - and it may not be a pitch that would "naturally" be louder.

In any case, your premise is that expressive playing in phrasing comes from what wind players and singers do, in using more energy to produce higher notes, and that phrasing has higher notes played louder than lower notes. In that case I understand intellectually what you are saying about wind instruments, but I don't agree with the premise as a whole.

I do agree that ultimately playing should be expressive. For that, we vary dynamics, we use articulation (staccato, legato, portamento etc.), and we use timing ('breathing' a phrase, rubato, ritardando when called for, etc.). I am not convinced that this necessarily comes from how much breath we use to produce pitches.

Back to this:

and the comment about strings players vs. winds players. When you write about accents and climaxes (I will add articulations such as staccato and legato for expressive playing) we are going beyond any automatic tendency such as using more breath for higher notes. We are talking about deliberately producing an effect such as "louder".

I agree on the importance of using these things in our music. They are like the colours on a painter's paintbrush. They are like the textures of smooth and rough, closed and open lines, course and fine bristles that the painter will use for effect.

Consider that on piano, too, we do not need to use "greater breath" or energy for higher notes, and "lesser breath" for lower notes. In this way a strings player coming to the piano has an ADvantage - not disadvantage - because the way to bring out dynamics is similar to piano. There is something like "arm weight" (a misunderstood term for either instrument) and speed. The faster your fingers descend on the piano keys, the louder the sound: the faster your bow travels, the louder the sound, but there also needs a commensurate weight or you are skating. The types of expression, dynamics, and articulations that can be produced on strings by a good player are enormous, and that is why I was astonished to read about the "disadvantage". But now I understand that it is from that initial premise of more energy being needed by the singer to produce a high note, and the things extrapolated from there.