The True Confessions of a [Justified] Self-Deprecater

I have always struggled with overly-harsh self-criticism.

I feel that one of the reasons I become so depressed when I perform or record is that I teach myself to ignore certain mistakes when learning the notes to begin with; those rose-colored glasses are then stripped off once I am aware that people are listening critically to me.  Then I run back to the shelter of my practice room and try to play the piece; I am shocked; I hold the fragments of a shattered masterpiece; the optimism is gone; I wonder what happened; all enjoyment found in playing the piece is lost.  I try in vain to correct one problem - if I could only play that one measure right!  But my patience is too short-lived and I leave the practice room to go for a walk.

I have two options at this point to overcome this temporary aural trauma and move on.  First, I can remove or lower my self-determined standards, turn off my ears when I go before an audience or a microphone, and simply play without allowing myself to feel disappointment or disgust at the result: it is what it is.  This option sickens me - it seems contrary to the fundamental principles of art.  The second option is to open my ears still wider in the practice room and expose myself to the painful realities of all my technical and musical shortcomings from the very beginning.  I am not perfect, but I do not allow myself to be content with imperfection; I assess where I am, and I set attainable goals for that day's practice session.

This negative experience happens less and less frequently these days, thankfully.  Partly I'm developing the instincts to predict what will fall apart in performance and how to prevent it, but mostly I'm just focusing on smaller segments of music and playing them precisely from the get-go.  I'm learning that there is a feeling of total control and comfort that fills up the hands when you really get a piece under your fingers; you feel that everything you do is intentional; silly mistakes, fobbles, and wrong notes don't scare you, because you're still in control.  Having gotten a glimpse of what that feels like, I now strive to attain that within the first weeks rather than two years down the line with a piece.

Today is an excellent example.  It was a remarkably productive practice session, despite some rather uncomfortable interruptions.  I spent a little over an hour on the A section of variation 1 of the Goldbergs, just looping it a little under tempo.  It's about a 45 second section.  I find more and more that it doesn't matter how I practice, but rather that I am focused.  I can control the piece well enough that if I fumbled a little or played a wrong not, I kept going and when I got around to the section again, I corrected it.  Each time I played through the section I set a different goal and gradually worked the entire piece up by degrees. About 40 minutes in I experienced the major crash in finger coordination, dreams about which happening on stage wake you up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat!  So I stopped, slowed significantly down, and worked out the finger movements again from about 40 beats per minute all the way back up to about 90.  And now, with minimal upkeep, I can keep that section from ever going haywire again.

After the incident I took up looping that section again until playing it gave me that feeling of total control I desire.  Of course, I only achieved 95% of the feeling I was looking for, but the last 5% will take another few months to settle in. Sadly, that's the way it works.  Now that I know what that feels like, however, I will not perform unless I experience that total relaxation and freedom when I play my program.  It's dangerous to do otherwise; why would I go into the lion's cage not having mastered the whip I'm wielding against the beast?

This seems unrelated, but it's the first step to becoming more confident and overcoming the shock of hearing yourself perform or record in a positive way.

"Let me try this out on you..."

Tonight, on our way to Denny's, I dropped by my practice room to drop off some unnecessaries.  The two young ladies with me, having just learned that I play the piano, wanted me to try something.  Well, the only thing I've been working on seriously solo-wise lately is Scarbo....  why not?  It sounds great when I play it for myself.  So, I set out into it.

As any of us could have predicted, it was a trainwreck.

I've thought more and more lately about why we as humans can play something so well when it's just us around and totally blow it the moment others show up.  It's not always the case, and in fact (I'm only speaking for myself on this one) I observe that the trainwreck is worst on the first run and aligns to what I do alone in the practice room more and more as I play the piece more.

This is all very obvious, still.  Let's get down to some deeper thought here.  Identify the problem and the answer will resolve itself 9 times out of 10.  What exactly happens?

• First, those repeated notes at the beginning were starting to sound like something out of a Dusapin etude... impossibly erratic, never more than 3 out of every 4 notes sounding, as many different dynamics and tone qualities as there were notes.
• It was at least 20% faster than I have practiced it.  Some parts were probably even faster than I intend to ever perform them in concert.
• There were innumerable wrong notes, particularly when the hands are crossed or on top of one another (which is, to my great frustration, more than half of this piece).
• I got lost twice, had to backtrack a measure or two, and keep going.

Much of this was to expected in any case.  You don't perform Scarbo after working half-heartedly on it for a month.  Also, the repeated notes were obviously not together because I hadn't warmed up.

Tempo is a different issue, and its cause is different in different people.  The two main reasons I observe, for example, when my students will bring a piece to their lesson and play it way faster than they have obviously been practicing, are nervousness and pride.  The nervousness comes in both from a feeling of shyness and the "this piece is really hard...gracious sakes I hope I can get through it..." attitude.  If a piece is hard, it gets over faster if you play it faster; also, at least with me, I find that if I don't know a piece of music, it's not going to sound good at any tempo.  So I might as well play it fast.  The pride is not a bad kind of pride; instead, it is that you have worked hard on the piece for a good while and you want to show to your first audience how much progress you've made so far.  This combines with the understanding that it's just a casual run-through, creating the perfect storm.  Sloppiness takes over. Tempo flies off the charts as you try to give your new audience a sense of the piece, and you yourself are incapable of taking it at that tempo... yet. But hey, they all say that if you can play a piece slow you can play it fast as well, right?  Wrong (well, to an extent).

I feel perfectly comfortable playing for myself when it's just me in the room, and sometimes when there are only other pianists there too.  When non-pianist friends drop by to hear my poundings, I somehow lose my mind and end up playing the music the way I played everything four years ago.  Old habits die hard, though.  Especially when the piece is as through-and-through-awesome as Scarbo.

Steps to preventing a repeat offence?  I can't say there's a magical series of cures.  Speaking for myself, I can make some comments.  In my playing, when it's just me who's present, I strive for absolute correctness, clarity of tone and touch, and intelligent structure to the section I'm practicing, regardless of tempo and to a degree regardless of dynamic and other, more polished expression.  There are plenty of times when that alone is my focus - those aspects of music are just as valid as the black dots on the page - it's just that I don't have the mental capacity to critically focus on every aspect of playing at once. So I limit myself somewhat, when I am in the practice room, mostly to just playing the notes well.  Once another person shows up, however, my extreme social nature urges me to focus on communicating.  Well, the mind is like a small plate at a Thanksgiving feast, and so in order to communicate with these fellow human beings, things get pushed off the plate: note accuracy and control/moderation of tempo, first of all.

The important thing this early in the game is to become accustomed to playing well in front of other human beings.  I can communicate naturally, in most circumstances, and I have also learned how to practice that alone.  Maybe I'll post on that someday.  The point is, I need to tell myself that since accuracy and control/moderation of tempo are my greatest difficulties in my art, that these must be my primary focus when I have the opportunity to "try out" a piece on someone early on in the process of learning something.

The ladies left, chuckling to themselves and pointing out how interesting and cool the piece is; they avoided commenting on the execution altogether.

The Doldrums

I have learned enough pieces at a university level (whatever that means) by now that I can recognize a pattern I go through every time I start a big new project like Gaspard, the Goldberg Variations (posts coming soon), or a larger sonata like Waldstein, Rachmaninoff Op. 36, a Schumann sonata, etc.  It always begins with the initial excitement; I pull the piece out of my bag for the first time, open it up to measure 1, set it on the piano.... the thrill!  I start to sightread it, and gradually I'll get the notes under my fingers.  (I may post something later on about learning notes, since that seems to be the single biggest frustration a lot of young pianists face, including myself, up until two or three years ago.)

I learn the notes, and if I'm smart about it (and patient, which isn't frequent), I'll work through the piece at a slower pace but focus not only on the notes but also on developing a good structure, developing a rich sound  that is appropriate to the piece, and resolving technical problems right when I first meet with them.

In a piece like Gaspard, however, the problems I face require me to develop new technique in addition to implementing the skills I have already acquired.  This means I cannot resolve the technical problems in the piece as quickly as I can learn the notes.  And as I am forging through entire oceans full of physical challenges, that is exactly when the engines give out, my excitement at learning the piece leaves me, and I find myself in all-too-familiar doldrums: able to sloppily plow through the majority of a movement at half-tempo with no motivation to do what it takes to play better.

I hit this point with "Scarbo" about a week and a half ago.  I would run through the piece twice and then call it quits, moving on to something new and exciting or something I can already play smoothly.  Last night it came to a head as I resolved to select a couple of specific spots in the 400+ measures I have already learned  and "woodshed" them, as Rombach says.  The first was the fast repeated notes at the beginning of the movement, and the second was the return of one of the themes in mm. 256-312.  I had the time to spend two or three hours on them, at the end of which I felt productive, rewarded, and satisfied.

To be clear about my practice methods, I do not condone pure repetition as a means of acquiring technique and certainly not as a means of learning a piece of music.  Every time I run through a section, when there is no way to learn it except by repetition, no matter if it is five notes or five hundred measures, I intentionally focus on something different each time; it must be interesting.  I also find that sometimes it is helpful to clarify to myself exactly what I am trying to accomplish rather than just telling myself, "it's not right yet. It's not right yet."  So I will write down my goals or simply say them out loud.  It forces the brain to recognize completely what it is I am working out.