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So... I find myself losing motivation to practice. In particular, losing motivation to work hard at practicing.

It takes me so long to work on a piece, and I feel like even after months I'm still struggling with playing the right notes in places. My teacher gives me lots of expression things to improve, and I'd like to be able to really concentrate on that, but the whole time I'm working on the piece it's like this nervous high wire act for whether I'll get the notes correctly.

And I keep reading that it's very bad to play any wrong notes at all because it screws up your knowledge for how to play the piece correctly. So I want to play very slowly but my teacher presses me that I need to push the envelope on speed. And then I screw up the notes and I feel bad because I'm thinking that I'm screwing up my chance to ever play the notes consistently correctly.

And I'm overwhelmed at work and having frequent trips and having a really hard time establishing any kind of momentum of daily incremental practice.

And I hate that it takes me so long (months) to learn pieces. Currently I'm working on Beethoven Sonata 1, first movement,, and Bach Invention #13. I've previously worked on Beethoven Sonata Opus 49 #2 and several other Bach Inventions. And a Grieg piece from the Songs Without Words (or is that Mendelssohn, and Grieg is Lyric Pieces?). Anyway it was definitely Greig, from his big collection. Also the first and second movement of a Mozart Sonata (I forget the number; not Rondo Alla Turca). And I was working on a Chopin Nocturne, but I've given it up for now as too hard.

Any advice? How to get myself practicing regularly? How to not overwhelm myself with trying to practice perfectly? How to talk to my teacher about choosing easier pieces for a while (and how would I know what pieces to choose? I feel like my teacher often chooses pieces that are too hard for me -- I am emphatically *not* motivated by stretch pieces).

The Bach Inventions are challenging but I like them and feel like I make progress on them. And I adore Beethoven and Mozart Sonatas (but Jesus am I slow learning them). I hated the Grieg. I kept waiting for it to grow on me but it never did. I hate Chopin waltzes and Mazurkas, I love the Nocturnes but they're all too hard for me right now. I'd love to do the Preludes but I've worked on several of them previously on my own and although I'd love to do them with musical and technique guidance from my teacher, she seems to always steer away from doing pieces with me that I've touched before I started with her.

Do you tell your teacher these things? I had to dump some minor key pieces when my life was difficult because they were just too depressing at that time (my teacher and I both strongly prefer minor keys). She also assigned an easier recital piece. Let your teacher know you're struggling and let the teacher change up your mix of assignments and fewer of them and easier for awhile.

Another thing I do is remind myself piano is a long term skill. A couple bad months isn't a big deal here and there.

Stretch pieces work well for me, but when life is harder than usual, that's not the time! And maybe you are someone who is never comfortable playing over your head. We are all different!

I'll just make this another post. Is it your sight reading or memory or technique or everything that makes these pieces so hard for you? An answer may be found there, perhaps.

Here is a post you made in 2011 ....



I would suggest that switching to memorizing pieces may have been the beginning of the end, unless you are still a good sightreader.

It would seem that you should stay with being a good reader (or sight-reader, if you can) and that might reduce the time needed to maintain a piece of music.

As in a previous post .... this is something to discuss with your teacher.

Also ...

I would try to have a set of pieces that you play very well and play them for fun.

You need to be having fun with this or you will crash and burn.

You've learnt the rudiments. Cut oput the lessons until you're more settled. you can set your own agenda for practice depending on your likes, and time.
You may enjoy the more laid bacl approach for now. you can always get a teacher in the future if needed.
have fun!

How about working on 2 or 3 pieces that are not stretch pieces? These would be pieces that you can learn and play reasonably well within a month or so. Pick pieces that are 1 or 2 pages, or if longer, have repeats. Let your teacher know that you feel overwhelmed by the piece selections and you would like to change course for awhile. I think that this may help you to regain both an interest in practicing and self-confidence.

You need to have a talk with your teacher - that she is giving you pieces that are too hard for you.

With adults, it's usually the other way round - students pick pieces to learn that are far too hard for them, then they get discouraged when they take months but still can't play the pieces properly. Many teachers who teach adults assume that they want to learn hard stuff......

Why not try something new, like Scarlatti sonatas? They are short and appealing, and won't take you so long to learn - have a listen to Kk 9, 27, 87, 322, 380, 466, 531: I never met anyone who didn't like at least one or two of them .

And how about Schubert? His Impromptu in A flat D935/2 for instance, which is easier than Beethoven's Op.49/2:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=en47cW11-UY

Don't memorize. That's just a waste of time and effort.

My teacher isn't having me memorize. I think many of her kids do because who knows may turn out to be a piano major.

Thank you for all the ideas. I'm going to need to take time to reflect on them.

To clear something up quickly: I don't memorize. I've tried over the years to get myself enthused about learning to play from memory, but I find memorization completely repulsively unpleasant for me. So I read, and am reasonably good at it.

I'm not sure why I have difficulty finding the notes in some passages. I wouldn't say it's an issue of either reading or memorization, but it doesn't seem right to say it's an issue of technique. An issue of coordination perhaps? I'll see if I can think of a passage where I can describe the issue.

How would you rate your sense of keyboard topography? In other words, can you find your way around the keyboard, comfortably, without looking?

For myself, this is an area where I still need improvement. Learning Bach has helped a lot. I don't think there is a shortcut--it takes time and experience.

I think your problem may be that you don't have enough fresh minded time to practice for the lessons. That's how it often is for us adult amateurs who have to work and still try to keep up with weekly lessons and progress to more difficult material. The teacher likes to teach new things and thinks you've "got them" when you can somewhat manage them, but there's not enough time to really ingrain it all.

The rare times I am off work for a week or more my learning rate gradually accelerates and memorization seems much easier. It seems it's not really enough to have the weekend off and practice more then because it really should be the time to recover from the week's work.

I second the recommendation of Scarlatti, but I do not agree that memorization is a waste of time. It can be difficult but it gives a different kind of freedom in playing. I assume it's also good for the aging brain...
One just has to pick the pieces to memorize carefully. Those pieces should be significant enought to be played for a long time. Then it does not matter that it takes months. EDIT: Just read you latter post about not memorizing, so you can ignore this part.

I have sometimes noticed that adding easier material actually just makes it worse, because I still want to work on the larger pieces as well so it just increases the work load. I try to find short but interesting and technically demanding pieces to balance the long ones that indeed can take months to learn and polish. And to keep my teacher busy. I know what I really should do is to cut back leassons to once or twice a month, but I am reluctant to do so...

Yes, you definitely need to talk to your teacher about playing things that you can learn quicker and within your level, But there are several other issues in the post. In terms of accuracy of notes, you need to stop and ask yourself if the inconsistency is in the same places over and over If so that means you have not practiced it slowly enough, accurately, and ingrained the correct notes in your fingers and in your brain . Focus on just the measure with the problem note and ask yourself why you are missing them. Identify these to your teacher and discuss solutions. You might need to change the fingering. You certainly would need to make just those measures focused practice. The focus practice may just be the note before the problem note and the one after.

Practice is the place that you want to strive for note perfection. Playing the piece is not the place that you want to be worrying about the notes, because you will have wrong ones. Everyone has wrong notes It is a matter of identifying consistent errors, and working on those as opposed to an very occasional "oops". You need discuss this entire issue with your teacher.

Sometimes it's not easier pieces that are needed, but shorter ones. There are those that are satisfying yet only 2 pages long. That may be the best use of your practice time right now in your life.

Also, perfection kills creativity. I sense this is the source of your problem. First of all, I agree that if you practice wrong notes you will play them, but that does not mean one goes to the extreme of then avoiding all mistakes.

We learn from our mistakes, so if we stop making them by putting ourselves in a box where we feel safe, then we also stop making music. No one goes to a concert to hear right notes, they want to be moved. Safe playing is boring, risk-taking is what gets us going.

So I suspect you have quenched the creative spirit in your learning process in favor accuracy, and have bored yourself with your own playing.

The way out is to allow yourself to play poorly. Play that Beethoven sonata at tempo and laugh off all the wrong notes. Just let them happen and keep going, but play as musical as you can with it. Leave the metronome out of this if you tend to use it. Focus completely on expression. See how you feel after that. There may have been funny mistakes, but I bet you'll feel uplifted too.

Now, those mistakes that you made, they're there to tell you something - maybe you need to work on the fingering in that section, or perhaps you're not quite confident in the note reading, or you felt your wrist/forearms get really tense there. Those are important to note, because they help you narrow in on what really needs practicing. And then when you practice, you just go to those spots.

Maybe you only work on that one spot - with creative practice techniques that address directly what the problem is. But if you get that one section worked out in that entire practice session (or maybe over the course of a few days or a week), then it's time well spent.

But even the above process is creative and not mind-numbing, repetitive, and perfectionistic. It's always a means to an end: you can be free to express if you don't have to worry about X happening.

I agree with morodiene on working on 2-page pieces, at least have one of them in the mix. Just share this recent experience: working on Debussy arabesques 1 and Chopin nocturne op9 no2. Both learning pieces for me, but given the time to really practice, and me working, I wan not progressing much or well at all. my teacher asked me to consider to drop one and we pick up an easier piece, which we ended up with jesu, joy of man's desiring. And we are parking Chopin after Debussy is done. Within 2 weeks, I was progressing so much faster and better...phew. It did take my teacher to go there, but I wished I had raised it earlier.

It is hard for us to raise it, but I learnt that I need to do this faster next time, as I am sure I would loose motivation too!

Based upon what you have said, you are losing motivation because you don't love what you are doing. I doubt some minor tweaks will make difference. I would guess that you are either looking for an entirely different approach or even a vacation from piano practice and possibly look at a new artistic pursuit to add some different dimensions to your artistic life.

I believe that ultimately art is most enjoyable when:

1) it is encouraging and nurturing self-expression, and

2) it is performed in an entirely relaxed manner with little or none self-imposed or externally imposed stress and tension.

So interesting - I think our stretch pieces overlap! I don't think I dug myself as far in as you have, but I certainly got to the point in the last couple of months where I found myself in need of about 6 more hours in each day to deal with work, practicing, other hobbies, and oh yes, family life. The frustration of knowing that you could do a better job than you are actually doing can be sheer torture.

I second the suggestion of finding some smaller pieces that will be interesting enough to be worth doing, but short enough that you can bring them to fruition in a few days (really - start at a few days - averaging that with the months on the other pieces, you'll come out to a nice balance!) I have 2 new "finds" - "Purcell to Mozart", published by Theodore Presser Company, and "Hungarian Dances of Galanta 1803", from Universal Edition (www.universaledition.com_) - and I'm sure the community here can offer a lot more suggestions as well. I am now proficient in "Les Couscous Benevole" by Couperin, and "Les Frifres" by Dandrieu, love them both, and looking forward to more. The Hungarian Dances have the added benefit of sounding reasonably good even at slow tempo.

Also, and speaking from hard-earned experience - if you feel bad about going to a lesson when you don't feel like you made progress during the week, walk in with some questions / technical problems. You did the work to get to the point where you know that measures 15-20 have some quirks. You've probably tried to solve it on your own. You need an outside eye - voila, the teacher as coach to an engaged student.

Stubbie, my keyboard topology is good. On thinking about it more, perhaps my problem in some passages is in fact a reading problem. If the notes are too dense, or the pattern is strangely unlike anything around it, I will have problems reading it at speed.

Ditched all my supposed-to-be practicing stuff today and read through a bunch of Martha Mier's Jazz, Rags, And Blues series. That was fun. I love the sound of blues. (Over time I'd like to learn how to improvise these sounds and rhythms. But that's outside of my lessons, and I need to find some of my own path to it.)

We'll see what I feel like doing tomorrow. I feel like I'd like to keep the Bach invention (2 pages, yay!) but the Beethoven feels more complex and too long -- so many different things to figure out -- and the thrill for now at least is gone. The suggestion of shorter pieces resonates.

I've pulled out Chopin Preludes, Schumann and Tschaikovsky's children's albums, Bastien Literature level 4 (a collection of pieces by various composers), and all the Martha Mier's Jazz Rags And Blues books, to propose to my teacher at my next lesson (Monday). I'll check the pieces bennevis suggested as well.

Still pondering all the suggestions here.

Richrf, I'm especially struck by what you said: " you are losing motivation because you don't love what you are doing." What's weird is that up to, say, a month ago, I did love what I was doing. Or at least thought I did. I don't know what changed. Could watching that video of drawing with gestures have seeped into my worldview and upended everything? Or maybe I just reached a tipping point: I have *always* felt my teacher gives me pieces that are too hard, or at least too hard for the way my own motivation works or doesn't work. I've been reassessing some of my other creative pursuits over the past few or several months; maybe it just finally reached piano?

Not exactly. When you're first starting a piece you need to go slow enough that you can sense when a wrong note is coming and stop yourself. The earlier you are in the learning path of a particular piece the more important it is to get it right. Once you have the right notes and the tempo comes up it's ok to allow an odd one to slip in because a few slow goes through will restore the right notes again.

After a few weeks the wrong notes should be a distant memory - perhaps that's not the best phrase for you - but from your post it sounds like you never got the wrong notes sorted in the first place.

This is from the 40 piece challenge thread. It indicates a bit of a problem to me. Progress on the piano doesn't come from playing but from practising. Enjoyment comes from progress and motivation needs enjoyment. This suggests to me that there's something wrong with your learning process and the structure of your session.

The pieces you're working on are much more advanced than when you started with this teacher - is this the same one?

If you're losing motivation and you're still working the same pieces now as you have been for 'months' I think it might be time to rest them for a little while and tackle something fresh but I'd like more information about how you're currently working before I'm able to offer advice.

How much of the Invention can you play up to tempo, how much of it do you work on each day and what did you do of it yesterday (or today if you practised today)?

Repeat for the Beethoven plus how long, roughly, you've been working on them.

What else are you currently working on and what other pieces have you worked on in the last four weeks? How often do you change the sheets, so to speak?

What are the last four pieces you took to completion (notes, rhythm, phrasing, voicing (bringing out parts or voices), pedalling and tempo) and when?

And finally, as you enjoy playing more than learning, what are your top few pieces to play as finished pieces and how often do you play them?
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Questions for yourself:-
How much progress do you make at each practice session and is it quite clear by the end of the week? Do you work this section seven days a week or have a day or two as a change of material or away from the piano?

If the progress on a daily basis is too small do you reduce the size of the section you work on?

How much time do you spend on a section and are you still as fresh at the end of that time?

Do you leave each piece with something you know you can fix that drives you to get back to it the next day or do you leave it wanting a break from the instrument?

Do you get the notes right before you work on the rhythm or do you let the rhythm or tempo dictate the course of practice before the notes are solid and with sound fingering?

Have you established the phrasing before starting work on each phrase and know what you're aiming for? Do you sing or audiate the phrase before starting work on it to know where the breaths come, how much breath is needed and how much is expended in each part of the phrase? I know you sing, how much use do you make of that?

Do you get what you're aiming for, or close to it, before moving on to the next phrase? When you get it do you practise it to make it repeatable before leaving it?

When you can play the phrase cold, do you still practise it periodically while you're working your way through the rest of the piece or do let it go until the next cycle through?

When there's a lot going on with the music do you separate and isolate melody, bass and accompaniment, perhaps put the accompaniment into block chords, simplify the lines without ornaments or even passing notes to allow you to approach performance tempo before fixing the fingering? Do you work the lines on their own and in combinations?

If a phrase is easier than it's neighbours do you still make sure it's accurate, repeatable and well phrased before you move on?

Do you have something easy to play, even if it's just a scale or two, when you've finished your work on the phrase so that you're not tempted to play through the piece?

Every amateur pianist should have some fun at the piano, every now and then. Maybe even have a day off from practicing and just have fun noodling at the piano. Remember, there are no wrong notes in improv.

When I was a student (for a period of ten years from age ten), I always found time to have fun at the piano. For instance, I'd play a pop tune by ear, and pull it apart and improvise around it, often until it turned into something unrecognizable, then see if I can 'find my way back' to the original tune. Sight-reading sheet music was also enjoyable for me, because I never worried about how many wrong notes I played, or how many notes I left out. Even today, I have a big stack of sheet music dating back several decades that I randomly fish out and just sight-read through for fun - there're all sorts of stuff in there, including Joplin rags, Gershwin song arrangements, Victoriana and sentimental tosh that used to be all the rage (like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxeEbO47QSw - if you've never had a go at this, you haven't lived ) as well as 'high-class' salon music like this juicy morsel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtZUP7HyD3Y

.....which I still trot out occasionally for my recitals, just because it's so much fun to play (and listen to).

Even established classical concert pianists find time to play confections, sometimes of their own invention, like this one, which Hough often plays as an encore:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pih_W62LOVc

....which for him, is pretty easy, of course. It's something he could easily toss off without having to practice.

That's the key - play fun stuff that doesn't stretch you, or just improvise something by ear. Throw in all sorts of technical stuff like scales & arpeggios to liven things up, if you feel up to it. When I was a student, I used to improvise cadenzas for my favourite Mozart concertos, and over time, the best ones became stuck in my memory and I often use them to warm up with, even now. They are nothing much more than bits of scales and arpeggios and passages joined up with tunes from the concertos, but they are fun to play, and easy to vary whenever I felt like it, so even if I played nothing else in a 'practice session', I am still keeping my technique in trim.

The analogy with running is fartlek (Swedish for 'speed play', nothing rude ), when I just want to have fun outdoors instead of interval training with the clock.....