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Hello, this has been something I have been curious about. When does your piano teacher let you move on from a piece if your not being examined on it (i.e. being part of exam repertoire)? This question is mainly aimed at beginners/ intermediate pianists as I suspect it may slight differ for advanced students. Will you have to display that you play it to the correct rhythm, pulse, notes, and expression before your teacher lets you move on. Or is it to a lesser standard but you can perfect in your own time?
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My guess is it depends on the teacher and the student at every level including beginner and intermediate.
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My teacher has me move on when she feels I have learned all I can learn from a piece at that time. Usually the tempo is slower than marked (for fast pieces), and I'm never playing everything right. Most of the time I'm not satisfied with it. But...I can come back to it in ~6 months and do much better, if I choose to. I don't do exams and I rarely perform, so I typically don't spend more than a month on any particular piece for lessons...except for Inventions! After a month I'm still working on getting the notes down.
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My teacher has me move on when she feels I have learned all I can learn from a piece at that time. Usually the tempo is slower than marked (for fast pieces), and I'm never playing everything right. Most of the time I'm not satisfied with it. But...I can come back to it in ~6 months and do much better, if I choose to. I don't do exams and I rarely perform, so I typically don't spend more than a month on any particular piece for lessons...except for Inventions! After a month I'm still working on getting the notes down. Thank you both for your insights! And thank you JB__PW for the brute honesty, I also only have very rarely go it perfect (to me) in my lessons (just twice in 1.5 years ) which was why I was asking this question. I would be interested in seeing if any others rarely play everything right, or conversely must play it perfect before moving on.
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This was discussed previously but I can’t seem to find the thread. I do remember, however, that it is common to move on when your teacher decides you have met the main objective of the piece. Some elements that mean ‘you have perfected it’ may be skills you need to develop later
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As a student, I was never required to perfect any piece before moving on, if it wasn't an exam piece. The whole point is to learn a whole of stuff to do with piano (and there's a lot of stuff) - musical as well as technical (and don't forget pedalling), and good teachers (or at least, my teachers - who selected all the pieces for me) choose the pieces that do the job, including those that are meant to revise previously-learnt skills from different angles. It's more tricky with adults who want to choose what they want to learn....... It stands to reason therefore that 'teaching pieces' (even if they are by the greatest composer that ever existed, i.e. Wolfie ) have done their job when the student has learnt or mastered the skill, not necessarily the piece itself. And the student should move on to new pastures, not stagnate, or expire from boredom. Of course, if that student likes the piece so much that he wants to continue playing it, that's also fine, but the teacher should not be returning to it without good reason: there's just still so much more to learn. Since I've acquired a few students, I've also applied the same principles when teaching. My students never get bored with what they're learning.
If music be the food of love, play on!
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I also only have very rarely go it perfect (to me) in my lessons (just twice in 1.5 years ) Hah! I would say you have me beat. I've been in lessons for 2 years now (not starting from scratch), and I don't think I've perfected a single piece. I've been proud of my progress on many, but even the few I've performed I've never managed to play exactly the way I wanted.
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In adult group class, I get a different experience than those who take private lessons. The first and last thing the teacher does not do is give individual attention to each student. She would play a song through in class. We'd be in front of a DP with our headphones and play along. Anybody with questions would ask the teacher. We all play the same pieces in front of the teacher but the teacher doesn't hear and see what each person is doing.
Right now the class is on summer break and won't be meeting until September in person in class or at home with Zoom. The last book we worked on has Jazz tunes for easy piano. These are easily accessible online so I'd listen to a performance of a song to the tempo and some of the nuances. I'd work on a song for 3 weeks at most and learn the notes and then a quick recording with a phone or a camera to listen for places I can improve and work on these individually like tempo, dynamics, foot pedal, etc. Adult group class is full of retired people who play music as a hobby and they really take their time learning. I can work on 2 pieces per month while the other students are keen on doing 1 piece in 2 months. When people are not pushed with exam or recital deadline, they tend to repeat the same pieces day after day to justify putting in an hour of practice each day. The last piece the teacher asked the class to work on before the summer break was the Gershwin tune "Summertime". I've learned the piece before the break while everybody else is still "working" on it. A piece of music is work in progress. If you leave a piece for a while and come back to it you always find something new.
It's a good idea to finish a song with a recording. Even a bad recording is better than no recording. Personally, a recording is more than just record keeping. It's experimenting with a song to make it sound the way you want. I wouldn't call it perfecting a song. A lot of times there is no right or wrong answer like playing a section louder. It's a personal preference.
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As much as I can for my level. Then I usually let it go.
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Hah! I would say you have me beat. I've been in lessons for 2 years now (not starting from scratch), and I don't think I've perfected a single piece. I've been proud of my progress on many, but even the few I've performed I've never managed to play exactly the way I wanted. I don't think I'll ever play a piece exactly how I want. But I am pretty stubborn and get a lot more pieces further than I should towards a level of finish that doesn't really improve my skills, other than I suppose the skill of getting a piece to a point where someone might actually enjoy listening to it. Since I am not doing exams and doing this for myself, I pretty much accept that this slows my progress in improving, but that I've a collection of pieces I have acceptable recordings of. That helps with my motivation and keeping up motivation is an important part of making progress in this game.
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My teacher has me move on when he is satisfied that I have learned what there was to learn in the piece. Usually, I still make mistakes and rarely play the piece the way I would like but I have mastered the main difficulties. There is little point in continuing to revisit the piece at every lesson until it's perfect as this can take a very long time. It's better to leave it and move on to something else.
Early in my learning this bothered me and I felt a bit overwhelmed as my teacher had me moving very quickly to more advanced repertoire. After a year I was playing RCM 3, after 2 years RCM 6, after 3 years RCM 8, now after 5.5 years my usual pieces are around RCM 10. I never felt like I really mastered the pieces although my teacher assured me that I did.
Then recently I started going back to some earlier pieces and learning new pieces at a much lower level on my own just for fun. I realised I can play these pieces at a much higher standard and I can hear things I wouldn't have thought of earlier in my learning. You wouldn't believe how much musicality you can pull out of a simple level 2-3 piece or how much fun it is to play these pieces insightfully like my teacher would! Now I'm really motivated to continue improving until I can learn more advanced pieces to such a high standard. But it still takes me a few weeks of practice to get them to this level even though I can sight read these pieces decently. The amount of time polishing in proportion to learning the notes is probably 90-95 percent, so I imagine that for pieces at my current learning level it would take way too long to get them really perfect.
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A quote often attributed to Leonardo da Vinci:
"Art is never finished, only abandoned."
That's how I feel about my pieces, even my exam pieces.
bennevis accurately summed up my approach to my students' pieces.
Austin Rogers, PhD, ARSM Music Teacher in Cedar Park, TX Baldwin SD-10 Concert Grand "Kuroneko"
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My own expectations, and what I expect my teacher to expect from me, is that we don’t move on until I’ve demonstrated the best performance that can be expected from my level.
But not necessarily at full tempo. Sometimes quite a lot less. My technique falls apart so much at higher tempos that if I didn’t move on until I reached the indicated tempo then I would never get anywhere. I think that sometimes you have to be pragmatic and accept that you’re going to learn more from something new than endlessly struggling to reach full tempo.
Yamaha U1. Yamaha P-45.
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I would be interested in seeing if any others rarely play everything right, or conversely must play it perfect before moving on. probably for the first four years it bothered me that I could not play pieces to an extent I was happy with. There always seemed a point in the finishing process where my technique just wasn't developed enough. Now with a more developed technique I can attempt much more complex pieces, but the bar is also that much higher and I am still can't say I am 100% happy. This is just the natural order of things as I see it. IMHO, most of us who take piano beyond a mere hobby into something more serious, there is obviously an emotional tug of war between not giving up and admitting defeat. A good teacher's job will be to lead you through this without too much angst.
Surprisingly easy, barely an inconvenience. Kawai K8 & Kawai Novus NV10 13x
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I just wanted to say thank you for this thread. It's always bothered me a bit that some/many songs I just can't get clean or where I'd like them, but then my teacher has me move on because she feels it's good enough. I just assumed that everyone else was able to play songs cleanly and at full tempo before moving on, so I've always felt a bit deficient there, like there was something wrong with me. Glad to know I'm not alone.
Faber Piano Adventures AIO Book 2 Roland FP-30
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My teachers keep moving at a fair pace, well before the piece is perfected. What they have told me is "you can always come back to it".
I'm now at grade 7 classical guitar, and having come back to those earlier pieces, I can see why. I can play them now far more musically and accurately that if I belabored them for a straight year back then.
Also, one can use multiple pieces to attack a certain technique from many different angles and approaches. There aren't that many techniques anyway. Instead of belaboring a technique on the back of just one piece, one can try different approaches by playing many different pieces.
So I'll definitely vote for forward movement at the expense of "perfection" (which IME isn't really possible at one's current level).
Going through Piano Adventures, it surprised me to see regular references that a piece must be perfected at tempo before moving on. This has not been my experience.
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My experience has been similar. Unless a piece is for an exam or performance, my teacher had me move on when the piece was played fluently, but below tempo or with a few errors. This really bugged me, because I felt like I had left the piece unfinished, and somehow failed to do it right. In the last few months I have gone back and relearned some of those pieces on my own and been pleased at how quickly they came together and how much easier they seem. So, it makes sense to leave a piece when you have learned what it can teach you, and then revisit it when your technique improves.
That said, I think there is value in also bringing some pieces to performance level. Polishing a piece is a skill to be learned as well. Depending on your level, this could be a piece a month or four pieces a year or whatever. There is a lot of work to get that last 10%, but then you own it, and can be proud to present it to a quarterly recital, live recital, or playing for friends.
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I recall an interview with an incredibly accomplished concert pianist who was speaking about performing a piece live in concert vs performing for a recording where you may have several takes.
Even at her level of virtuosity she mentioned that when performing live you must have to respect that your playing will not be exactly what you want it to be, and to have the humility to accept that as part of the process.
I have found that to be a very practical approach while studying, especially for amateur pianists. We strive to practice as "well" as possible to get the best results, but we have the humility to realize we will fall quite short. Pianism becomes even more enjoyable acknowledging this.
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A quote often attributed to Leonardo da Vinci:
"Art is never finished, only abandoned." That's a lovely quote, I often allow my paintings to be works in progress without feeling there is any issue with that are return to add details later. I should take the same approach with my pieces. My teacher has me move on when he is satisfied that I have learned what there was to learn in the piece. Usually, I still make mistakes and rarely play the piece the way I would like but I have mastered the main difficulties. There is little point in continuing to revisit the piece at every lesson until it's perfect as this can take a very long time. It's better to leave it and move on to something else.
Early in my learning this bothered me and I felt a bit overwhelmed as my teacher had me moving very quickly to more advanced repertoire. After a year I was playing RCM 3, after 2 years RCM 6, after 3 years RCM 8, now after 5.5 years my usual pieces are around RCM 10. I never felt like I really mastered the pieces although my teacher assured me that I did. Thank you for your input, it gave me insight into what I was feeling that pieces were unpolished was normal and that moving on will likely allow me to master more skills. I just wanted to say thank you for this thread. It's always bothered me a bit that some/many songs I just can't get clean or where I'd like them, but then my teacher has me move on because she feels it's good enough. I just assumed that everyone else was able to play songs cleanly and at full tempo before moving on, so I've always felt a bit deficient there, like there was something wrong with me. Glad to know I'm not alone. It bothered me too but it was very good to have all the experiences of this thread's contributors. Thank you to everyone who contributed in this thread and sharing their experiences.
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This topic is very interesting. Considering the technichal side, I think there are two types of motions at the piano. One I would call elementary motions or general motions, they are used for playing notes and chords in a more detached manner, that is in slow and average tempo, when sight reading, in cases when you have enough time to treat each note and chord. The other type I would called compound motions or specialized motions and they are used to play sequences of notes and chords, whole figures and phrases in one motion, and to produce sound of certain tonal quality in figures and phrases. The latter type is used for playing in fast tempo, when you have no time to treat every note, and also when you need to achieve some special sort of sound.
The point, I think, is that when we play pieces slowly or in medium tempo, when we play pieces in unpolished manner, we utilize more or less the same set of elementary motions for every piece we play. The motions of the second type appear only when we start to polish a piece, that is when we bring it to fast tempo and when we strive to achieve sound of certain refined tonal quality. So at some point when elementary motions are acquired, IMO it becomes more and more important to polish pieces and the task of a pedagogue is not to miss that point. Unfortunately not all pedagogues are very good in that and not all pedagogues want to mess with polishing many pieces, that's another reason why having a good pedagogue is so important. IMHO.
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Piano
by Gino2 - 04/17/24 02:34 PM
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