The Issue of the Ear and Mental Rehearsal

Liszt’s Ballade in B minor S. 171 has been a centerpiece in my repertoire since age 14 when I spent about 8 months learning it. After two years, I brought it back for a run of competitions, and now I have resurrected it for my upcoming time in Europe and a series of five concerts in Germany and Italy. One of the recurring causes of frustration in my pianistic life, and one I have yet to see any other pianists write about on the innumerable blogs I follow, is the issue of cultivating my ear – learning to hear exactly what this ballade could sound like, if I could play it any way I wanted to. In other words, how do I know if I am following the score, and how do I learn to hear, evaluate, and criticize my own interpretation with all the discernment of a great artist? It is through the ear that a pianist becomes a great pianist.  Neuhaus and Gieseking talk at great length on this without ever actually proposing comprehensive solutions. So, we continue to flounder around a bit.  I’ll write more on this.

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.

"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.

Repeat after me: "aahh mooo shaaah raahhh taaah kaaahhh. Foosa, semiminim, counterpoint." There. Problem solved.

If I had a nickel for every time someone asked me how to practice, I could start my own conservatory. How do I answer? "I really don't know." People think this is silly... It probably is. There really are certain guidelines for practice, which I always make sure to mention after my initial answer, but a universal practice theory is a surprisingly well-kept secret; or, perhaps, no one really knows how we learn as musicians and the great pianists are only so by chance.

The people who ask me that question obviously ask it because they believe it can be answered in words. Can it? One who has never heard the cello before can know that a cello is a musical instrument in the string family; that it has four strings tuned to C2, G2, D3, and A3; that it is the instrument closest in range and resonance to the human voice; one may even be able to express the importance of the exact shape of the f-holes and the difference between a snakewood bow and any other kind of bow... What is the difference between that person and the person who, knowing nothing about the cello, enters a concert hall and is captivated by the beautiful sound of Rostropovich playing the Haydn C major Cello Concerto? Which one knows the cello better? Those who understand music understand it by experience only.

When you have practiced well, you have experienced good practice. I feel that trying to put labels on it gives the wrong impression.

When I practice (I have no idea if this is a detrimental strategy or a useful one. You decide), it seems that the task of learning a piece of music is divided into two separate goals: notes and everything else. Learning the notes is the most analytical and in some cases is quite a challenge. It is easier, for example, to learn the notes to the first Mozart piano sonata than to learn the notes to Lemma-Icon-Epigram by Brian Ferneyhough. There are two strategies that I have tried, and both work. One is to learn one page at a time and perfect it before moving on. At the suggestion of a blog by one of Sviataslov Richter's friend, I did this with the middle movement of the Rachmaninoff 2nd piano concerto. It was a challenge to my patience to only learn two pages per day but certainly rewarding once I learnt the last page and could suddenly play an entire movement. The emphasis is on learning everything correctly at the outset to cut down on time spent undoing badly learnt passages later. Artur Rubinstein, on the other hand, recommended learning an entire work all at once and memorizing it as quickly as possible. Why? To get a grasp of the entire work right from the outset. This, I feel is a strategy to adopt later on once a pianist is more mature.

The main obstacle I see in making progress toward understanding something more of the way we should practice is that people need to practice differently at different stages of their musical growth; which means that the only people who have been dealing with this issue long enough to come to a good answer can only answer the question for themselves, at their level of advanced maturity. For the younger pianist, things are more or less uncharted.

A major difference between a mature musician and a novice is the finger technique.... How to play octaves, thirds, scales, arpeggios, awkward chords, use the arm, and everything else contained in Liszt's book of technical exercises. If you have all of that stuff down, the much of the rest is often a piece of cake. Even if it's not easy, it's fun.

Studies show that people who sightread daily learn and memorize music more easily than those who do not. So, the first steps toward a great practice experience is to work through technical exercises such as the Liszt exercises and sightread every day. The most productive sightreading practice I have ever had has been reading through the Well-Tempered Clavier on my own and through the concerto literature with another pianist.

Obviously learning the notes is just the beginning; the daunting and all-inclusive "everything else" yet remains. In the beginning, a young pianist is most aware if the notes. As time progresses, he begins to notice the difference between the so-called "musical" playing and its opposite. There is a slowly increasing awareness of what a "good sound" is and how to create it. Over the years, the "learn the notes" and the "everything else" combine into one single task. As the pianist matures, he automatically plays with a good sound and with more and more ease of expression.

I've been rambling awhile, I know. All this is to set up my theory of practice. Too many people think that if they just learn that one secret practice technique, the pianistic panacea, all their practice will be efficient and effective. Sure, certain techniques can be helpful for learning to play notes evenly or quietly or whatever (I only have one practice technique per se; I will talk about it in another post),but that's certainly not the case. The most important factor in accomplishing what you set out to do at the piano is total focus. Of course the young pianist will think he is focused when he isn't. Once he has experienced that total focus, he will realize with delight that he has been efficient and effective.

To tie this in with my somewhat-enigmatic post title, there is no magic spell that helps you practice. You find a routine that helps you focus; that is all that is important. Focusing well can shave hours and hours off of your necessary amount of practice time to get a piece performance-ready.

Focus is the key factor in understanding the piece you play. The ambiguous "everything else" is all of the phrasing, "structure", quality of sound, and dozens of other aspects of music I have yet to explore. This side of music, sadly starved by many people who can't seem to tap into their intuitive musical expression, is where the real art of pianism lies. You can only get to know someone by spending time with them. You can only get to know a piece of music by studying it, at and away from the piano, pondering on and puzzling over it, letting it astound and continually teach you, letting it speak to you, letting it grow with you. The goal of practice is to make the music become a part of you. When you understand this, practicing comes naturally.

The not-so-romantic-as-one-might-think life of the 21st century pianist.

It's a little after 10pm, and I'm here in one of the practice rooms at UNM playing bits and pieces of the 4th Chopin Ballade under tempo. I keep thinking, "why didn't I ever realize I was supposed to phrase it like this before?" It's amazing what preparing for a competition will do to you. I have learned more about phrasing on this piece in the last 12 hours that I've been here than in the last few months I've spent on the piece.

It's not my first competition, but it's my first international competition. I don't know that there's any real difference (MTNA pays more prize money by far, and it's a national competition) except that the word "international" attracts every little hotshot teenager within a few thousand miles to apply. It's the International Keyboard Odyssiad and Festival in Fort Collins, Colorado. So far it seems to be well-organized and have a lot of community support (this is the first year for the competition). We'll see. I leave tomorrow for Colorado, and I'll have a day and a half to prepare there before I perform on Saturday. That word "international" also causes some sort of unusual stress to rise up in me... It's not like I'm going to be the shame of the piano world if I don't place. But I suppose I just want to connect with the judges. The networking is far more important to me than winning or losing, for which I feel I can hardly compete with the prodigies that also were accepted. I'm sure they are nervous too; they are probably all practicing right now too.

I haven't done much of anything with Ravel the last few days for obvious reasons. More on that Monday, probably. Wish me luck! And pray.

Well, back to practice. Goodnight.