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Hi,

As the title says: to what point do you keep practicing a piece before you move on to the next one?

When I started on the piano, I already had some grades on the organ. Grades in the Netherlands in the 80's and 90's were a bit weird; I have 4 out of 4 grades in theory, and 2 out of 6 grades on organ. If you'd want to compare, this should put me somewhere around grade 10 ABRSM for theory, and ABRSM grade 4 for playing.

Indeed, I'm now getting to the point where I'm practicing some pieces from ABRSM grade 4-6 that I'd actually put in my repertoire. Think some of the Satie Gymnopédies and Gnossiènnes, Bach preludes and inventions and such.

As I did when I was a kid/teenager, I tend to keep practicing a piece up to the point where I'm confident that it would get me an 8 out of 10, at least, on an exam. Normally I practice two pieces at a time, as I did back then. So even if I can play a piece correctly with the right notes from start to finish (which I can often do in half a day with easier pieces, and a week or so at the limit of my current ability), I'll probably only move on after at a month... or sometimes even longer.

I feel I have to be able to play a piece at performance/recital level on repeat, without mistakes or hesitations, and not occasionally but reliably, before I can mark it as "done" and pick the next one.

When looking through YouTube, there seem to be two camps:
- Play a piece, and as soon as you can play it without mistakes in the notes, move on the next one; polishing it up for performance will come "later", or "with time";
- Keep practicing a piece until it is as perfect as you can possibly get it before you even _think_ of moving on to something else, or you'll _never_ get it to be perfect.

What is your point of view / philosophy?

If it's something I can learn in a couple days or a week, I just practice it for that amount of time until like you say I'd feel like I could perform it. For more advanced pieces often I practice it until I feel frustrated, listen to someone actually good play it, get annoyed and drop the piece, then revisit again when I've improved and then bring it up to at least somewhat performable standard bahaha.

(This is probably not the way to do things I'm not putting this out there as advice).

Depends on the piece.

Most would probably fall into the learn it until it can be performed without mistake and then just maintain that level, but if it's a piece that I'm really invested in and continues to inspire me, then I will practice it until I no longer have to think about what I am doing at all and can can just think about the music and my body does the rest.

I don't think you can perfect every piece you are working on though before moving on to the next. Better to have multiple pieces approaching the no mistakes / maintenance level and then choose which ones to focus on bringing to the next level.

The choice of how long to practice a piece is personal and also depends on if one is going to perform the piece in a recital or for an exam. If one is learning a piece just for one's own pleasure one can stop whenever one wants to. This could even be before one can play the notes up to speed if one finds the piece boring or just too difficult. If one has a teacher, usually the teacher decides when a piece has progressed far enough that work on a different piece should begin.

I think most people are or at least should be starting at least a beginning an interpretation while the notes are being learned. One should be thinking about things like articulation, dynamics, and the composer's score markings while one is learning the notes and rhythms. Since there is more to a piece then playing the notes and rhythms up to speed, I think it makes sense to study a piece at least to the point of being able to include the composer's articulations, dynamics, and other things he has written in the score.

I think what you're doing is good. Just playing the notes is easy and won't really improve your playing. Trying to attain a mythical level of perfection is time inefficient. The only thing I'd say is that you need to adjust the difficulty of the pieces you're working on so that it can be finished to do 8/10 level in a reasonable amount of time.

I move on once I have made a recording of a piece that my teacher is satisfied with. But I play at a much lower level than you do, and I think I learn more when I practise a greater variety of pieces rather than practising each and every piece to repeatable perfection.
But even with your higher level - you are here on the adults beginners forum, which means that you are not a professional pianist, I would not spend that much time on each piece as you do, simply because I play the piano for my own pleasure, and striving for that much perfection would diminish my pleasure considerably. When I send my recording to my teacher, my goal is to feel that on this recording this is the best I can do with this piece, for now. It is fully polished. So it is not like I am satisfied with a very rough version.

If the piece is technically difficult, just playing the notes is certainly not easy.

" I play the piano for my own pleasure, and striving for that much perfection would diminish my pleasure considerably."
Yes, I agree with this one... the emotions you experience during practice, accumulates and determines whether you'd play it happily again and again; or play it once perfectly and never again...

And as long as someone starts singing unconsciously to my playing, i know i am playing good enough,
I'd move on to the next piece...

Well... with regard to level, ABRSM grade 3 is fairly easy for me right now (with some pieces I can get the notes correct while sight-reading), 4-5 needs some practice (1-3 weeks depending on the piece), but on grade 6, I really need a month or so to get a piece to sound good. So to say that my current level would be grade 6 would be a lie. (IMHO.) More like 4 to easy-5 with 6 having the stretch pieces.

Gymnopédie 1 is not a difficult piece, and I could play the right hand basically on sight, but the left hand took quite a bit of time to get down. (And depending on who you ask, that piece is ranked grade 3, 4, 5 or 6...)


I can imagine that going for that kind of perfection can be demotivating. As a kid however, my teacher had a penchant for just grabbing a random piece from my repertoire binder and ask me to play it, and if it wasn't up to exam standard, he'd re-assign it for one or two weeks. He was of the opinion that you should be able to grab _any_ piece from your repertoire at _any_ time and play it up to performance level.

(And to some extent I agree: I dislike it when someone has a piano at home and they start with 6 excuses why they can't, or they can only play the last two pieces they were practicing. I try not to be like that.)

If you want to maintain a rep of pieces that you can always play anytime, anywhere, choose them carefully and keep on working on them and polishing them. Bear in mind that they will start to slip if you leave them for too long.

If you are just learning for yourself and by yourself, choose your battles carefully to suit you. Stagnating on one piece for a long time doesn't do much to advance your technical or musical skills, which is why teachers move students on to new pastures once they have learnt what needed to be learnt from any specific piece that they assigned - even if the piece is still far from performance or exam standard. (Exam pieces, of course, are the exception, but once done, are also discarded......though like any piece that a student learns with his teacher, there's nothing to stop him continuing to play and keep perfecting it on his own if he really likes it and wants to keep it.)

Over the years, I've met adults learning (or more accurately, playing) for their own satisfaction by themselves, and they've ranged from one who has a rep of just four favorite pieces that she learnt as a student, and never let them go, and she has no interest in learning anything else.......all the way to pianists who never bother to 'perfect' any piece but just enjoy sight-reading through lots of new ones, and occasionally playing the ones they'd learnt in the past whenever they felt like it at whatever level of 'finish' they left them.

As for me, I'm no longer a student, but I have a happy medium of maintaining several pieces that I can perform anytime, anywhere, even when upside down (nearly three hours of music at last count); and sight-reading through new pieces for pleasure and occasionally picking out one to learn, maybe even to add to my performing rep; and having a lot of pieces that I can play from the scores at various levels of accomplishment (or lack of) and polish (or lack of) and enjoyment (mine, if not necessarily anyone else's........ ).

Even the greatest pianists have to review or restudy pieces they haven't played in a while if they are going to perform those pieces. Having some reasonable number of pieces in one's ready to perform repertoire is reasonable, but one should not attempt to be able to be ready to play some huge number of pieces. Trying to keep too many pieces in a ready to play state will take too much time away from learning new pieces.

Well, we have different standards of difficulty then because I would consider a piece that takes "only" a month to sound good to be on the easy side. I'm doing the 40 pieces a year challenge (which you can see here) with pieces that are several levels lower than my usual level and they still take me 1-3 weeks to complete.

I can see how you might want to keep a couple of favorite pieces in your always ready repertoire but not every single piece you ever played. That's just silly. It significantly limits your progress by forcing you to constantly review things that are not really progressing your pianistic skills forward whereas if you drop those pieces and progress to more difficult repertoire then in 2 years you'll be able to play at sight any of these pieces that your teacher is forcing you to keep reviewing (provided that you keep improving your reading skills in step with your overall piano skills). The second option is a more efficient use of your time, don't you think?

Thanks for all the replies

As some people mentioned, keeping every piece you ever played in a repertoire is a bit impossible because it would get bigger and bigger. I stick the pieces I know well and like best in the repertoire, and at some point replace them. That was also the case in the past: my repertoire wasn't "all the pieces I ever played"; that is why I had a repertoire binder with a selection of pieces.

For example, I recently replaced the Bach/Petzold minuets with Scarlatti K.32, Bach's Prelude in C, Gymnopédie 1, etc. I'm now starting on Invention 01, so I'm slowly getting back and maybe a bit beyond the level I once had on the organ. (But it did take me several years to relearn, because in the early-2000's I switched to the Hammond and didn't play any classical music for nearly 20 years.)

I hope to build up a repertoire that'll provide me with about an hour of ready-to-go music as a first start. And in the beginning, I'd like some of those pieces to be some reasonably well-known ones too, so other people have something to relate to.

Fortunately I'm now at the point where I can say: "I can play that, with some practice" when looking at a level 5-6 piece, instead of going like "Nope, not even going to try...", which was the case a few years ago.

I work on several pieces at a time, each at a different level of "completion". I belong to two local music groups that get together and play for each other. One is laid back and low key, the other is serious and a bit stressful at times. When I have a piece that is "ready" I will record it for the online recitals here and play it for the music groups. Then I archive it and replace it with something new. Occasionally I will bring back an old piece and do it again (I'm doing that now for an important live recital in September), but usually once I have recorded something and played it live, it is done.

When is a piece "ready"? Depends on the audience and the performer. As my skills have improved over the years I have a higher standard now - or I can more easily recognize the flaws in my performance. I have no problem playing a WIP for the laid-back group - they will understand. I would never play a WIP for the serious group - they expect everything to be polished. For the online recitals I have no problem presenting something with a few bobbles or wrong notes - as long as my heart is in it. This is the ABF after all, and anyone who has listened to my recital performances knows I am far from perfect.

I do not keep a list of old pieces that I can play anytime. If I tried to do that I would never have time for anything new.

Sam

Well, it generally won't improve your playing just to play the notes -- you'll need to try to get at least some level of polish and musicality. A lot of the difficulty is those micro-decisions which you make which affect musicality.

I don't think this is reasonable, generally. If you have not played a piece for 2 weeks after you have learned it, you should be able to play it well. However, you can't just ask someone to play something they learned a year ago with no preparation from memory -- that is unreasonable imo. However, if you have learned it, you should be able to bring it back to performance standard or very close in a few days. Now, it may be possible for some pieces that you have practiced an insane number of times, but it isn't really time effective for the most part while learning, unless you have an incredibly good memory or something. I mean that this kind of thing might make sense if you are preparing to be a concert pianist and can already play advanced repertoire before your teens, but in your situation it just feels like a waste of time.

My comment specifically talked about the technical aspect of playing a piece and said that your statement that "just playing the notes is easy" was false. So quoting my comment in your latest post which talks about something else is not logical.

And your next comment that "it generally won't improve your playing just to play the notes" also seems completely wrong. Being able to play the notes in a technically difficult piece means you've solved the technical problems and the technical aspect of your playing has improved. What has not necessarily improved is the musical aspect of your playing.

I don't think I've ever done that in my life. And now, if I leave it more than a week, I find I can't play it at all. Might be something to do with my septo-brain. But I do remember in my school days, revising for exams. I was like, looking at stuff I'd never seen before, and in my own handwriting. So i guess we all have stories to tell about learning music.

Playing 2 different pieces from different periods. 1 is modern 20th century and the other is Baroque composed in the 1700s. Both are short pieces and repetitive in their own ways.

First learn the notes. Next work on the dynamics (if any), phrasing & other nuances. After doing slow practice, push towards the ideal tempo. Before you're done, check the score for accuracy. Do quick recordings to hear if anything should be done differently.

Some of the time, something that sounds acceptable to the ear may not be what is written such as playing legato when the notes were written as staccato.

No, you haven't solved the technical problems in a piece if you are merely able to play the notes. Dynamics, tempo, phrasing etc. all play into the technical difficulty.

If you have mastered a piece up to a reasonable level and just want to keep it around there for the long-term, one method that works for many is some variety of spaced repetition. It could be that you review the piece once a week for a month or two, then maybe once a month for half a year or a year and then every quarter or half-year by which time you may find that you have learnt it permanently. Having a lot of pieces on "maintenance" like this and keeping track of when each is due for reviewal usually requires some list or calendar. But being smarter about when to review means less time needed per old piece and at least to me it is worth the record-keeping hassle.

The question of what, if any, pieces should be kept at all is very individual and I think nobody else can answer that for us. Is the goal to progress through the equivalent of a method at maximum speed or to primarily become the best sight-reader possible? Or are you forced to learn a particular piece for a specific performance / lesson? Then it probably seems a waste of time to keep "finished" pieces you don't particularly care about in shape. Yet for many, while progress is a big motivator, there are at least some pieces which were chosen because they wanted to play that particular music and it would be nice to be able to just sit down and play it. Not maintaining and enjoying them once the hard work has already been put in and maintenance would be relatively effortless could then be considered the more wasteful option.
Personally, I mix throw-away pieces/exercises and long-term pieces and I can move on from throw-away pieces long before they are anywhere near perfect if I think they have served their immediate purpose and the exposure to something else would be more educational. I think of it as some kind of Pareto principle. Getting a piece to 80 % may take 20 % of the work of getting it perfect. Constantly having some new piano piece(s) on that steeper initial learning curve and only polish a few seems a more efficient way of learning for me personally who is still on the very early stages of piano-playing.