Stay Focussed Using Desirable Difficulties

Don’t we all love the thrill of playing the piano? There’s the deep satisfaction we get from recreating some of the greatest music ever written, revelling in its beauty and magnificence. A Schubert sonata or a Rachmaninov prelude doesn’t care what’s in the news that day; we immerse ourselves in its many marvels and can forget about life’s trials and tribulations. Add to this the visceral enjoyment we feel in our body, finding the sounds that help us express the emotions the music evokes and it’s little wonder we are so passionate about what we do.  

However, practice often gets a bad rap, with associations of dry exercises, boring old scales and hit-and-miss approaches to learning notes and solving technical challenges.

But it doesn’t have to be like this! 

Why is practice associated with drudgery? Largely because pianists are not taught how to practise. Pianists tend to possess a wealth of knowledge on how to play but often surprisingly little about what to do when practising.  

Addressing this issue has always been the cornerstone of this blog, a subject I got interested in quite early on in my youth, thanks to some amazing lessons with Philip Fowke. I made some remarkable progress in a short space of time, not because of the amount of hours I spent at the piano but because he showed me exactly what to do in my practice.

I take great delight in passing on a set of tried and tested practice tools to my students in private lessons, on piano courses, and in my videos and articles. For me, the journey never ends as I continue to learn and evolve my thinking about all this!

M-I-C-E 

At a recent piano course, one of the participants took some notes from my classes during the week and on the last day kindly offered me a mnemonic from the message he took away about practice: MICE (Thanks, Andy!). Practice can be: 

• Mindful 
• Imaginative
• Creative
• Enjoyable

When we do something mindfully in our practice, we have considered what it is we need or wish to do and pay close attention as we practise. If we become aware we are thinking about something else, we will not be learning anything or making progress. 

Imaginative practice is the opposite of mind-numbing mechanical practice. We avoid formulaic activities that fill up practice time, but which may have little effect. Examples of this include over-reliance on the metronome, doing boring drills on autopilot at the expense of working on repertoire, or playing through pieces we already know rather than improving weak areas or problem spots.  

By being creative in our practising, we think outside the box by coming up with solutions that meet our immediate needs or desires. What is it we want from a practice session? Which practice tools or strategies are we going to draw on? Maybe we experiment a bit, trying this then that, until we hit upon ideas that engage and inspire us.   

Unless we are engaged in what we are doing we are unlikely to get anything out of our practice. How can we make practice enjoyable and productive?  

Introducing “desirable difficulties”  

Research has shown that we learn most when we engage in practice activities that challenge us, presenting us with desirable difficulties. I was practising Bach’s F-Sharp Minor fugue from The Well-Tempered Clavier (Book 2) the other day – a triple fugue in three voices that I know very well. I set myself a few tasks that I knew would be challenging, but not so hard as to be tedious or impossible.

Firstly, I went through the final section three times, emphasising one voice by playing it forte, keeping the other voices pianissimo. Then I mimed the middle voice by touching the surface of the keys without allowing the notes to sound but playing out the soprano and the bass. I needed to do this very slowly at first, paying attention to the body to avoid tension creeping in. This took my full attention and ended up being really absorbing and satisfying (I stopped short of the ultimate challenge – omitting the middle voice but singing it instead of playing it – but I could have done that as well!). 

Creative ideas for finding the right sound

In a recent lesson, my student asked for help finding the right sound in the opening section of Beethoven’s Bagatelle in A, Op. 33 No. 4:

Looking closely at the score, we notice Beethoven’s note stemming. This is very much like a string quartet in four independent voices: stems up for violin 1 and viola, stems down for violin 2 and cello. How could we practise this? 

• One voice at a time, then in combinations of two voices. 
• Use both hands to play the contents of one stave. By doing this, we are thinking in independent lines and can create the ideal sound quite easily.
• Having found our ideal sound using two hands, we reproduce that with one hand. 

Tackling a difficult passage

We might apply other examples of creative and absorbing practice that will yield tangible and results to this scale at the end of Mischa Levitski’s Waltz in A, Op. 2. A student had been stumbling here, not because he was not diligent in his practice or because there was any obvious technical deficiency but because he hadn’t probed deeply enough into the design features of this hybrid scale pattern.

So what would we do at the piano to nail this? Very many things! Let’s do a few things with the RH alone before putting hands together:

After going through these stages, you will most likely find you are able to generate more practice activities, each of which gives you a different experience of the passage.  

Practice tools and toys 

These examples are intended to illustrate a more imaginative approach to practising. Rather than simply hacking away at our pieces, hoping they will eventually yield, we apply a variety of different strategies – call them practice tools or maybe practice toys! With this approach, our time at the piano then becomes totally absorbing as well as productive!

In my upcoming online workshops on 10th May & 7th June, I’ll be exploring and demonstrating further ideas for how you can push yourself beyond your comfort zone and enjoy making progress by varying your practice activities. Click here to sign-up or click here to find out more about this series of interactive workshops!