I'm learning some grade 3 pieces and am pretty despondent about the speed I am able to play them at. They are:
- Now is the month of maying
- Les Pifferari
- Top Cat

I've only recently started "Top Cat", but I've been playing the other two for several weeks and can only play them at about half the suggested speed. In fact I chose "Now is the month ..." because I thought it looked manageable having mis-read the metronome mark (thinking it was crotchet = 88 not minim = 88 ...!!). My teacher says she thinks the suggested ABRSM speeds are often on the high side, but I think she may be being kind ...

I don't want to have to choose pieces solely on the basis of how slow they are, but maybe that's what I should do ...? Maybe it's an age thing?

Another theory is that I don't learn them off by heart so I am sort of sight-reading them, and it seems like my brain needs time to process what it is seeing. When I originally learnt for about 10 years when I was in my thirties, I tended to learn pieces by heart, looking at my hands rather than the music while I was playing, but then got into difficulties when I lost the thread, as I then couldn't find my place in the music. So this time round I thought I would stick with looking at the music, which I think makes me slower.

Any hints?

PatC

The suggested speeds are sometimes on the high side and I think that musicality is far more important than achieving the metronome mark for the sake of complying.

I have never been able to learn things by heart, although I do find these days that the repetition involved in my practising rubs off and I sometimes find myself playing a section by heart. Unfortunately, I don't have sufficient confidence in myself to let the fingers carry on for too long, my brain takes over and I quickly revert to the written page.

Like many others though, I also find that I don't always look at the music when it is there - it's merely the fact that it is available to look at should I need to remind myself. Take it away though and indecision floods back in.

As for 'getting up to speed', having had lessons now for a year and a half, after a lull of thirty years, the advice from my teacher to work with a metronome has been invaluable. I start well below both the speed I wish to achieve and that which I can comfortably manage and if that feels like a terribly slow plod, then so be it. I try as hard as I can to play three times at that speed before raising the metronome speed by a notch. I was doing this only the other day with a Bach prelude and it took me two hours to go from crotchet = 40 to 69. This final speed was faster than I have ever achieved before and indeed faster than I now intend to take the piece anyway. The muscle memory built up slowly is the key. Well worth doing.

It takes patience but see how you get on.

Speed is paradoxical. It seems that it can't be achieved by aiming for it directly.

I'm with clavicembalo -- musicality is the thing to aim at, and with it will come any necessary speed (in its own good time).

How does one find musicality?

Not by learning and applying any set of rules, however ingenious. It can only be discovered by listening to and enjoying the music one is making, as one is making it, as closely and intimately as possible. Slowness and all.

Good news: this experience can be practiced away from the keyboard -- by listening to other people's music.

Or so it seems to me

Can empathise all too well with your problem!
Trying to force the speed is counterproductive as the result is usually more tension. Patience (or lack of!) is the stumbling block for me; make sure you can play solidly at each level before moving up;
your teacher hopefully is checking that you've got fingerings and arm movements in place that will actually allow you to play fast where necessary;
work with the metronome over shortish sections of the piece building up the speed levels, but not trying to increase too much each day;
playing runs of notes with rhythm variations is marvellous, really helps me, especially swinging the rhythms in a jazzy way makes me relax more and sometimes produces quite startling progress .

I love adagios!!

You don't necessarily need to know things off by heart in order to achieve a good level of fluency but it does sound as though you might not know your pieces quite well enough. Try studying the score away from the piano and analysing the harmonies, working out where the cadences are, looking to find any places where rhythmic or melodic motifs re-appear, etc. Know the score well enough so that when you are playing you use it only as a prompt, but are not having to think for ages about what the next bit is. As you say, at this stage it is taking you a while to process what's on the score and think about playing it, so it's no wonder that your fingers are taking a while too!

Best of luck with your pieces!

It takes years to develop fluent speed. And it helps to know the pieces inside out - to a standard that most people find unimaginably high when they do it for the first time. The right fingering is important too. Keep practicing (mostly slowly) and have patience.

My teacher has a big sign next to the piano which has a Daniel Barenboim quote on it. I cannot remember the words but basically he says that tempo is the last thing to be put into a piece. Get the fingering, dynamics and basic rhythymn rock solid and then and only then pick up speed. There was a good article in the 'Pianist' magazine not so long ago about practicing slowly. It really does pay dividends. Also I think sight reading is an invaluable skill. The better you are at that the better player you will be overall in my opinion. And it is definitely not an age thing!!!!!!! Best of luck.

100% agree. Is your fingering consistent? When you are sigthreading or playing slowly it is possible to susbstitue all sorts of random fingering which will upset you when you try to speed up. Work out your fingering and stick to it.

Also, I find that progress does not come consistently. Sometimes I can work on pieces for weeks and make little discernable progress, then over a couple of days I will seem to make giant leaps forward. I think this has a lot to do with general tension and relaxation, too.

Keep plugging away. You WILL be rewarded!

Mole

I really like this phrase. I do try not to speed up too quickly, but this phrase tells me "don't even go there" and it's now etched on my brain - thanks lostchord!

In searching for the exact phrase, I came across the following thoughts on Daniel Barenboim's web site. Apart from the technical reason for leaving tempo until last, he points out why it makes musical sense to leave the tempo till last as well...

We have become completely slaves of tempo as if the tempo were an independent phenomenon that controlled everything. The tempo doesn’t control anything at all. The only element that tempo controls is how long a piece takes. Does it take 3 minutes or does it take 5 minutes? Basically, this has nothing to do with the content. It gives the possibility for the contents of the music to come to the fore and be audible or not. But this is about all.

It is as if you are going on a trip and you don’t have a suitcase. What do you do? Do you buy a suitcase and see what you can put in it or do you try to imagine what you want to take: how many pairs of shoes, how many books, how many this, how many that and then you find the right size suitcase. The tempo is the suitcase. If the suitcase is too small, everything is completely wrinkled. If the tempo is too fast, everything becomes so scrambled you can’t understand it. And if the suitcase is much too large for what you are taking, all the objects inside swim inside and cannot really stay in place as they are supposed to. If the tempo is too slow for the content, the whole energy of the music dies away and there is no continuation. This is what tempo is. It is very clear that the wrong tempo for the content can be catastrophic. Therefore, it is the last decision to be taken by a performer but in many ways the most important.



Daniel Barenboim, http://www.danielbarenboim.com/journal_sound.htm

Wise advice here...

A variation on this problem is when you are playing in a group. Then you need to find a way of working out how to play "up to speed" pretty quickly.

My teacher has offered two different strategies on learning to play up to speed which on the surface seem quite contradictory:

1) As commented elsewhere, start slowly (as you are doing). Increase the speed gradually so you don't start making mistakes because it's very easy to internalise them. Some teachers are very strict and say NEVER make a mistake, for that reason. Mine is a bit more reasonable and will allow the mistake twice only!

2) If you have a passage of notes that you find difficult, especially at the speed you're supposed to play them, try playing them to a MORE COMPLICATED rhythm. In one of the first pieces I had to play in a wind band there were a few bars of quavers (but in cut-time like yours, so felt like semi-quavers) which defeated me every time I had to play them, even after a couple of weeks of sending my neighbours round the bend with the get-gradually-faster method. When I pleaded desperation, my teacher wrote out some rhythms for me and told me to play the phrase following those rhythms. It was, of course, a complete mess! But you know, after a while of trying I went back to the simpler version as written - and it worked!

There must be something in this exercise that distracts the mind from the psychological barrier of getting through the piece or phrase. After trying something more complicated, the "real thing" seemed easier. Has anyone else tried something like this?

Yes - changing the rhythm is a useful tactic.

If, for example, you change straight quavers to dotted quaver - semiquaver rhythm you are effectively practising half of the finger movements faster. If you then 'swap over the dots' and play semiquaver - dotted quaver rhythm you are practising the other 50% faster. You can invent variations of this idea, placing longer notes in different places, so that the notes get assimilated in groups rather than in one long difficult line.

You will probably find that Top Cat is the most difficult of the three to learn. I have several pupils learning this and they have all benefited from taking it really slowly, counting in quavers a small section at a time, and to start with, leaving out the swung rhythm (at least, this is what I exhort them do in the lesson!) and it seems to be working. Lots of patience is needed to get the rewards you want.

What helpful replies; thank you so much everyone!

Fingering - Yes, that certainly contributes to my problems. There is a place where I keep stumbling in the dreaded Pifferari (not what I call them!) and in fact it only dawned on me yesterday that my fingering is inconsistent at that point. I've now written a really big finger number next to the note in question! (Btw when I play a wrong note, I often struggle to work out what note I actually played with what finger, I think because I automatically / quickly try to correct it.)

Different rhythms - I do that with scales but hadn't thought to do it with pieces. Definitely worth a try, esp with the scale passages of aforementioned Piffs!

Top Cat - I can quite appreciate this will be a tricky one; my teacher did warn me. I was wondering what to do about the counting and the swung rhythm and had actually decided to try it without the swing so I could count more easily, but was worried that might make it difficult to change. Hadn't been able to run that past my teacher as I haven't had a lesson for a couple of weeks over half term.

Studying the score away from the piano - I can understand this should be helpful but I don't really know where to start. I will start a separate thread asking for advice on this.

Once again, many thanks for all the useful advice.

PatC