Hi, everyone. I am an enthusiastic 51-year-old piano student about to take Grade 4 piano/Grade 5 theory and am sometimes concerned that the pieces seem to take ages to learn. I am inclined to think it is because I am no longer in my 20's, or 30's ... or 40's, for that matter and so am sometimes discouraged at the very long time it takes to really learn a piece but my daughter (14) is doing the same syllabus (she's taking Grade 4 piano in June, like me) and I can see she takes very long, too. I welcome all kinds of comments on this. Bye, everyone.

hey!

it should not be a big deal! different people and different learning rates. i am a slow learner as well! it shouldn't discourage you from continuing and it doesn't mean that the piece will sound worse just because you are learning it slowly! so don't worry, just keep pushing yourself!

It takes me ages to learn a piece properly too

Takes me ages to get the notes in the right order.... and I don't think that anyone I know would say I was a particularly poor reader or playing pieces that are too difficult.

Yeah i think it depends on the person rather than their age.

I also find that it depends on which instrument im playing because for piano i find that i can pick the pieces up relatively quickly but for clarinet it take me much longer.

Just keep practicing and it'll come in the end.

xx

Thanks for the feedback.
Well, I actually meant is ... , well, things do come in the end: I got Dist. in my Grade 3 last year so shouldn't complain but ... I cannot help feeling there could be a 'magical' way to learn pieces a little faster and more confidently.
Another issue is just how long repertoire can remain in one's long-term memory and how to ensure it is there forever. Ambitious, isn't it? Well, I find it particularly irritating to come back to a piece, say, 6 months after I'd completed it to quite a good standard only to find out it takes me some time to get it back to the level it was. I believe this happens to many of us but ... doesn't it get on your nerves? To think you 'possess' the piece and then ...
In search of a magic secret ... any especially enlightening books you know of ?

I'm trying to improve my efficiency with learning pieces. My main attack at the moment is to try to make my practice more efficient.

I also find that going back to things (particularly things that are at or near my level) it can take almost as long to relearn as it did to learn in the first place. Maybe this is why I don't go back to things very often..... or is at case of which comes first, the chicken or the egg?
Besides it takes about as much time and concentraion as I can manage just to keep on top of current learning.

In my experience, the better a ght reader you are, the faster you can learn new music, or at least get the note and rhythm learning out of the way much faster and have more time to "polish" it for performance.

Out of my pupils, the ones who practise their sight reading skills are the ones who don't take ages to learn a new piece. The pupils who don't sight read as well tend to memorise the music bit by bit and take a long time picking over the notes, and as you get more advanced and are required to learn longer pieces, you find these would be the people taking over a year to learn three pieces for an exam I'd firmly believe in keeping your sight reading up to standard by doing as much of it as possible

I learn pieces pretty quickly on the violin, but I take AGES to get a piano piece up to a decent standard or memorise it...(don't think I'm any good at getting the muscle memory right for both hands playing at the same time). Hope this disproves the age thing...

I wouldn't say that taking longer to learn a piece means you can't play it just as well....

It is all about familiarity with the style .. and every period and composer has their own style. I can sight read tolerably well just about anything by Haydn, Mozart, or Beethoven (fugue from the Hammerklavier excepted!), and memorize it fairly quickly. Chopin and LIszt take a bit longer. Prokofiev longer still. Bach fugues take forever. I cannot even sight read Gershwin ... his stuff has to be painfully and slowly worked out ... but I know that by the time I have mastered 3 or 4 Gershwin pieces then any others will be more-or-less sight readable.

There is something else - it is one thing to learn a piece to a level where it is more or less OK - enhancing your understanding of the piece - or to play in part for indulgent friends. It is quite another to get it to recital standard. When I have memorized a piece it can easily take 7 or 8 times the same effort to bring it to a standard that it is worth anyone's time and effort to listen to it, and that I can confidently perform it in public or in an exam.

I tend to learn things on piano very quickly, but i'm a fairly good sight reader. flute takes me a lot longer, because i dont practise as much as piano.
for my piano grade 7 pieces for example, it took me about a week to learn all the notes and basic dynamics, and know my way around the piece (but this was in a summer holiday, so i had a lot more time each day to do it!), but they were far from performance standard. I'd say to learn a piece properly and be able to play it from memory takes me about a month of hard practise, but it usually takes longer than that at the moment, because I have a fair amount of coursework and stuff, and my mum now teaches 23 pupils, so the piano is in use for ages each day!
I think a lot of it is down to how much time you spend on it, and your age and ability. If i was 11ish and was still grade 8ish, i think i would take a lot more time learning pieces, and if i was 30+ i dont think i would learn as fast, and thats partly to do with age, and partly because people of that age are usually so busy with their jobs that they find it difficult to find time to practise, and many people at 30 also have children to look after, and a house to run.

Jacob.

Not sure about forever as I think taste/ability changes with time; why would you want to keep performing, say, grade 3 pieces years down the road - however perfect you can play them - when you would be spoilt for choices at diploma standard anyway).

For a certain period of time, you may want to retain a couple of pieces as "your repertoire" in which case I don't think you have to completely stop playing them once you have them perfected/polished up to a certain standard. I sometimes used "old pieces" as warm up before practising whatever I'm learning now - just play through once (and only one piece so it doesn't eat up my practice time). Or maybe you could devote a day per week to play through all the pieces you want to retain? Just an idea.

Would probably take me a week to get the first 4/8 bars sorted with a lot of things.

I know what you mean Tom. When my Gershwin at the Keyboard book arrived a while ago I was quite surprised.. Some of the pieces don't sound as if they should be so difficult

Very interesting viewpoints ... However, how long a piece remains in one's memory I feel has to do with how slowly you learn it in the first place and how conscious (and conscientious!) your first approach is ... Practising slowly (probably the wisest - and most boring - way to practise) is the answer.

Would probably take me a week to get the first 4/8 bars sorted with a lot of things.
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That is comforting ...

What you are describing sounds completely normal to me, so, frustrating though it might be, I wouldn't worry about it. I find the same thing in most of my students and certainly experience the same in my own playing. I am working towards an LRSM performance on piano and am fully expecting to spend a year or more tackling some of the repertoire from scratch. But then I reckon I will just need to "live" with that repertoire for at least another year or two before attempting to put it all together for an exam recital. Obviously I will be playing other music at the same time, but to really feel on top of a piece takes a lot of time, particularly if you want to retain it in your repertoire after a break.

However, I do have a couple of suggestions;

Check with your teacher that your practise method is truly effective, for example, do you start from the beginning all the time and repeat the whole piece, or do you take it in sections, solving problems as you go. There are all sorts of different ways to practise, some more efficient than others!

Sometimes, inexplicably, I find that if I put a piece down for a couple of days, work on something else, and then pick it up again, many things that were nearly right, have slotted into place on their own!

I wholeheartedly agree with the comments about improving your sightreading, and in addition to this, it may help to analyse the piece a little. This doesn't have to be complicated harmonic analysis, maybe something like spotting recurring patterns, or memorising a tricky ledger line.

Be consistent with your fingerings, as then the mechanical memory aspect of things can help you even if the brain seems slow to respond, (as mine always is ).

Don't worry about it being to do with age. All the piano playing will help to keep your brain sharp for many years to come, and there will always be something new to learn and look forward to.

True ... I think it should begin to sound normal to me, too, as I sometimes blame age falsely in an attempt to mitigate the normal frustration it entails ... (being a teacher, I should know this is a natural component of the learning process).
Fingering: I am very consistent in this respect and deviate only in very few cases.
Pieces: I always start from the very beginning and proceed in order and have never tried any other ways. Should I?
Practice: I am a home worker and lucky enough to be able to practise at least 2 hrs a day (fitting my practice sessions at diff. times of the day ... when my daughter does not need the piano herself), which I do with great discipline. A lot of that time, though, is taken up by scales (major, minor, some contr. motion, some of them by 3rds and by 6ths), arpeggios, some broken chords and some Hanon. I'd be interested to know what your suggestions are for more efficient practice and whether certain things should be dosed differently, etc. I'm also concerned about the speed issue. I'm currently giving the finishing touches to my Grade 4 syllabus (next June) and one of the pieces (an alternative title, 'Dance' by Kabalevsky) is built around an endless succession of parallel thirds with almost no respite throughout which I find very hard. Is the secret slow practice, in this case, too?
Sight-reading: by far my greatest weakness. I am working on that at the moment (one or two short pieces from Joan Last's and Paul Harris's books for Grade 4) and find there is some progress but still, the feeling of anguish when confronted with a piece (esp. when there are double notes or chords) is always there.
Hope to receive tips for efficient practice and, especially, if I should reduce the time devoted to scales/arpeggios in favour of repertoire, for example.
Many thanks to all.
John

Quick reply for now, I hope to come back to this later if I get time.

It does sound like a long time on scales and technical exercises which are possibly far more complex than you need at your current level of playing. You could adjust the amount of time you spend on these, at least for a while. They are important, but no-one ever goes to a concert to hear scales , so perhaps pieces are a more enjoyable focus as your exam approaches.

Practise methods

Try to decide if your difficulty is a case of knowing the notes, or a technical problem. I don't know the Kabalevsky piece, and can't find my copy to look right now, but if the thirds are in one hand, it could be that tension in the hand, wrist and forearm is causing the problem. Or that the fingering, although consistent, is not the most helpful one for your particular hand in that passage. this is where your teacher is invaluable (I am working on the assumption that you have a teacher, if not the best tip I could give you is to get one). Your teacher should be able to spot what the problem is, e.g. if you can play it slowly, what changes when you go faster?


Pieces: I always start from the very beginning and proceed in order and have never tried any other ways. Should I?

Say for example you always go wrong at bar 17 in a piece. First look at bar 17 and sort out what happens in that bar. Then go back to bar 16 and practise the approach to the bit that always go wrong. This is nearly always where the heart of the problem actually is. Then when you can link those two bars together, go back to bar 15 and start from there. This idea of working backwards from the problem, tackles the matters of preparation for a difficulty, and really make you learn the piece from the inside out. As you start from further back from the problem, you are rehearsing the mental preparation required for that bit. You might be thinking of keeping the arm relaxed, or knowing that the chord you need is a D major, or that you need to put the 2nd finger on the lowest note, some sort of specific instruction to yourself to manage that passage.

You could also try starting the piece from the beginning and even in the middle of the various phrases. This again means really having to know it in better detail. If you play from beginning to end each time "mechanical memory" can take over, whereas if you can dot about and come in and out from different places, you will be getting a deeper knowledge of the piece.

Another useful technique is to record yourself playing, and then listen to the recording, noting any areas of problems or stumbles. This allows you to listen more objectively than you can when actually playing, and can make you aware of stumbles or wrong notes you may have glossed over before.


Practice: I am a home worker and lucky enough to be able to practise at least 2 hrs a day (fitting my practice sessions at diff. times of the day

Make sure you take plenty of breaks in your practise, and try not to spend hours on any one bit of work at a time. This can lead to tension, and I find breaking up the work into smaller chunks refreshes my concentration. 40 minutes of a piece is better spent in two lots of 20 minutes with maybe some sight reading in between, or a cup of tea


I think one of the most frustrating aspects of practise is that as musically minded people, we want to hear the piece as a musical experience, especially when we have a rough idea of how it shoud go, but we have to do all the nuts and bolts work on it before being able to produce it satisfactorily. We have to delay our own musical satisfaction from ourselves as our "audience" for a long time, and concentrate on the production of the various demands of the piece. Only as it becomes really competent do we get the musical satisfaction we are looking for.

Good luck with it all, and do talk to your teacher about this. There's no substitute for that one to one attention to swiftly sort out difficulties.

all very interesting, Minuet 3 ... hope to have some more feedback when you've got more time. Thank you.

Be careful with names:

"George Gershwin at the Keyboard" has a black cover and is full of fairly easy arrangements.

"Meet George Gershwin at the Keyboard" has a white cover and is full of difficult arrangements, one of which is currently set at grade 8 and 2 are set for Diploma. No songs appear in both!



Hear hear! The wonderful thing about the road to "learning music" is that it doesn't matter how fast you travel, nor where or when (or whether) you reach any destination: It only matters how much you enjoy the journey.