The problem with a too-good ear is that you become frustrated
with your own playing, but an ear that is only one step ahead of your playing
or right on the same level with it is one that won’t do you much good either;
you become satisfied with your playing and run out of things to practice.
Although my days of running out of steam on a piece are slowly coming to an end
(at last!), I still find myself constantly swinging back and forth between
total, unhealthy satisfaction (arrogance) and total, unhealthy dissatisfaction
(depression).
Today was one of the dissatisfied days. Having spent most of
last night listening to recordings of great yet still totally unknown pianists really
took its toll on me this morning as I tried to practice and found myself
confronted with more of my own weaknesses than ever before. I remember times
when I used to have to force myself to make up criticisms in order to push myself
to continue practicing, but today the new level of realization was
debilitating. I gave up practicing after about two hours and hopped on the city
bus for a change of scenery. After several hours of clearing my head and
thinking deeply on issues mostly unrelated to music – namely the world
population, God, and ice cream – I pulled out my score of the Liszt Ballade,
which has been sitting untouched in my bag for about a week now, and started to
do some mental practicing.
I was re-exposed to the extraordinary powers of mental
rehearsal the other day by a recent study which showed that people who were
given a piece of music to study away from the piano for two hours made
basically equal progress to the ones who practiced it at the piano. Gieseking was
known to study an entire piece by a composer, run through it a couple of times
at an instrument and then record it – and these aren’t shabby recordings
either! Take a listen to his Debussy Preludes.
There is power in mental practicing. I have learned entire
sections of pieces like Scarbo this way, but lately I had given it up for
whatever reason. Well, picking it up today led me to have to deal with a
principal issue in the beginning of the Liszt Ballade, one which I had always
glossed over: the pedal. I’ll have to go into detail on my thoughts in another
post. The point is, mental practice has the
power to improve your ear.
I sit down, make sure my posture is good and I am relaxed,
just as I do when I practice normally, I breathe in through my nose and out
through my mouth several times, and then I visualize the piano and my hands as
clearly as I can. I often face difficult-to-surmount mental blocks, and I can
only see a few fingers at a time. Over the course of a few minutes, I gradually
broaden my point of focus until I can see my entire hand in detail. I view the
keys from different angles, and finally I set into the challenging and
sensitive opening of the Liszt Ballade. There is no autopilot in mental
practicing; you can’t just let the fingers go! They don’t move until you can
see the key and visualize your finger depressing it; so everything goes slowly.
I work on one hand at a time, I try to hear exactly how the sound of the string
will peak and decay, and exactly how I play the note that comes after it in
order to make them connect perfectly. I do it again and again until it’s
perfect! Then I work through my plan for how I am going to make it perfect,
every time. It’s powerful, and it forces
you to decide note-by-note exactly how you intend to make that note sound. For
me, it is much more useful than sitting at the piano, but it is thus much more
exhausting. There’s no pushing more than half an hour at a time at this method
of practice, but I think you’ll find, as I did, that that half hour on the bus
was more productive by far than the two hours this morning staring at the piano
in the pits of despair.
