That Gentle Nudge

I recently ran across piano with nicole, a piano pedagogy-oriented blog written by Wichita pianist and teacher Nicole Dyson-Smith. Among her articles, I particularly enjoyed reading How to encourage your child to practice the piano. An excerpt:

Performances are also motivating to piano students, because none of them want to be embarrassed or unprepared in front of their fellow students and peers. For this reason, I notice a dramatic increase in students’ practice time in the weeks leading up to a recital or some other performance. This is a good thing!

Many piano students are also inspired by hearing the performances of more advanced students. I remember being awed by my teacher’s playing when I was a student, so I try to perform myself for my students at least once a year on a big recital.

Creating motivated students is the holy grail of piano pedagogy--young pianists who are motivated to work hard, enjoy the process, and love to play at any level...

Edward Gates on Slow Practice

An article by Edward Gates in the May 1998 Piano Pedagogy Forum has some worthwhile insights on those interested in the benefits of slow practice. An excerpt:

I understood immediately that the hurrying mind, rushed in its thinking, is the bane of practicing - and of performing as well. When the mind is hurried it does not have time to notice what is really happening. It does not focus well and many of the details of the music go by unnoticed. One has only the feeling, "I got it," but the experience of the music is shallow.

10 Ways To Get A Fresh Start With Summer Practice Assignments

As the summer is almost upon us, now is the time when I give all my students their summer learning assignment and try to give them a solid nudge towards what they can achieve in the next year. Each student invariably gets their own customized assignment, and here some examples:

1. Next level, please. I steer my piano students toward examinations with RCM Examinations (the National Music Certificate Program [updated 7/2/12] the Carnegie Hall Royal Conservatory Achievement Program in the US), and most of them do their exams in June. Their level of preparation reaches a peak in early June, and after their exams are finished I try to give them a head start on the next grade level while they're still hot, rather than wait until September and start from scratch. My RCM-level students traditionally get 3 new pieces, mostly of their choice, to independently learn for September.

2. New style, please. Why work in only one musical style? Learning another can open your musical horizons. In the field of piano alone there are plenty of styles to explore beyond classical, including ragtime, American jazz, Cuban jazz, Brazilian jazz, rock, contemporary, new age, and popular to name only a few. Your journey through a new style can often answer questions and correct problems you might have had in your primary style.

3. Singers--strive for five. Many professional or semi-professional singers work on a large number of arias to build them into their voice. The summer can be an ideal time to perfect those five arias for the coming audition season coming up around the corner.

4. Hit the festival circuit. I'm a big fan of summer music festivals (this summer will be my 14th at the Bowdoin International Music Festival), which combine intensive work with beautiful locales and loads of new friends to create the critical mass for further development.

5. Take a theory course. Learning the fundamentals of musical theory can be a fun and stress-free way to deepen your practice during the year. Knowing how music is put together will go a long way to helping you integrate all aspects of your playing and understand music better.

6. Learn the music of your country. Many of us learn the traditional repertoire without regard to what is being created in our own countries. Take the time to explore the musical output of where you came from and you can go a long way toward finding your identity as well as discovering a lot of interesting music.

7. Learn the music you've been dying to learn all year. Students are often told what is the proper music to learn without regard to what they actually have a desire to learn. Summer is a great time to put your teacher's recommendations aside and do your own exploration for the repertoire that truly resonates for you.

8. Perfect your technique. Without the pressure of upcoming concerts, summer is a fine time to go that extra mile and get a proper handle (Handel?) on your technical facility. Even taking the time to perfect your RCM technical requirements or learn Hanon will show results in the coming season.

9. Learn to sight read. In small doses, take the time to learn how to sight read every single day over the course of several weeks. I recommend Frederick Harris Music's Four Star Sight Reading and Ear Tests by Boris Berlin and Andrew Markow that integrates with the RCM levels. Each week's sight reading is clearly laid out, and leads to mastery of the ear training and sight reading components of each relevant RCM grade level.

10. Recharge your artistic batteries. So you've had a busy year and did a lot of playing, perhaps too much. Now take time to build the complete artist. Read that great novel, go to a gallery, keep a journal, take an acting course, go on a wine-tasting tour, hike in the wilderness, climb a mountain. These are activities that our artistic self needs in order to work at maximum levels of inspiration!

More Practice Resources For Students And Parents

Catherine Schmidt-Jones has written a Guide to Great Home Practice, a Home Music Practice Checklist, as well as a Parent's Guide to Music Lessons that offer some interesting insights, all available on the collaborative educational site Connexions. From the parent's guide:

Probably more students take piano than any other instrument. There are a couple of reasons for this. A beginner can get a good tone and play in tune easily. (But be advised, it takes just as much work to become very accomplished on the piano as it does on French horn or oboe.) Piano is also a wonderful instrument to use to begin learning about music, because the basic theory and practice of music are so easy to see on a keyboard. The student can see very clearly that scales follow certain predictable patterns and that intervals have a certain size. They become familiar with chords and harmonic structure in a way that is not as easily available on other instruments.

Organize Your Practice Time Like a Stage Director

In the last few years, I've played for quite a number of operatic productions. In each of them, one of the first things I notice is the deadline of opening night that looms over the entire rehearsal process (and has tens and often hundreds of thousands of dollars riding upon its success). Everything that happens is geared towards preparing for the opening. So when I arrive on the first day of rehearsal, I nearly always receive a detailed production schedule of the entire show from the first musical rehearsal to closing night.

After several years of working by this type of schedule in the theatre, I began to think--what if one were to schedule practice time in this way, with preparation for the public performance the ultimate guideline for where all the other steps begin from?

Here is a step-by-step, top-down process of how you could schedule your practice time in this way. In the real world, performers have a large number of rotating works and performances to prepare for but for this list we will include only one program for performance (oh, the luxury).

1. Determine all the performance dates for the program. These are the written-in-stone deadlines that will determine everything that happens before.

2. One week before the first performance of the program will be designated "tech week", in which the finishing touches will be applied, remaining problems fixed, and you do the dress rehearsal of the program. In many theatre productions, there is also a preview process--you can do this too by performing the program for a casual audience at least once to test out the program before the real thing. When I was at Eastman, Jean Barr insisted on not one, but three dress rehearsals before each doctoral student's lecture recital. Sure enough, her students excel.

3. Determine how long a time period you will need in order to learn and rehearse the entire program. In professional productions, rehearsals usually start 2-4 weeks before tech week, depending on the level of company and their operating budget. For your program, you should be thinking of starting to learn the music 4-12 months ahead of the first performance in order to adequately prepare.

4. Once you have the performance times and final rehearsals in place, write up a schedule for the steps in the process, ie. memorize 1 month before concert, all pieces learned 3 months before, music chosen 6 months before.

5. Once you have all the steps planned out, now you can allow yourself time to immerse yourself in the process of learning, discovery and exploration that are essential to moving forward artistically in addition to climbing the steps of the recital mountain.

In other words, the quality of the process is as important as the final product--having the steps mapped out can ensure your enjoyment of both getting to the final destination and enjoying the ride there.

Once you're a professional (even before that for collaborative artists), you'll need to be able to map out this type of process dozens of times in a season, with a multitude of overlapping concert dates both for yourself and your students.

Quote of the Day

"The more technical our world becomes, the more essential it is that we see the whole of life as an art form, protecting the creative nature of mankind from an exclusively symbiotic existence with electronics. We need to protect nature's provision for the individual's right to fulfill his own spiritual growth along with his physical development. With the passing of time there may be fewer areas for the rugged individualist to explore...The situation is much different with one's inner space. No sooner is it explored than it wants to yield up new territories potent with new discoveries resulting in ever changing ways of viewing life around us. We find ourselves relating differently to all we know as a result of these journeys within."

from Improvisation: Music From The Inside Out by Mildred Portney Chase

15 Ways To Add 10-minute Practice Blocks To Your Routine

The power of 10

A recent article on LifeDev about getting work done in 10-minute increments got me thinking--can we pianists utilize a quick 10-minute practice session to get things done as well? From the article:

Oh, but 10 minutes… now that’s a tasty number. Not only will ten get you started, you’ll probably be finished too, if you focus. And focus is practically required with 10 minutes. It’s a small, focused amount of time.

And if you’ve got five blocks of 10 minutes lying around in your day, that’s 50 minutes of highly-focused time. Compare that to a larger chunk of 50 minutes. That’s right, more time for procrastination. Small, focused, manageable bursts of productivity are much more effective than those flabby blocks of time.

How to make 10 minute practice blocks work

Here are some ideas I brainstormed on how it might be possible to integrate 10-minute windows into your practice and rehearsal day.

1. Warm up with technical exercises. Hanon, Dohnanyi, scales, arpeggios, chords, etc.
2. Warm up by jumping right to that passage that is making your life miserable.
3. Warm up by playing some piece or passage with the most beautiful sound you can summon. String players are known to do this. It works.
4. Sight read!
5. Review memorization for a piece or passage.
6. Review by ultra slow practicing a difficult passage.
7. Play a difficult passage in as many different ways interpretively as you can imagine.
8. Play a difficult passage with the left hand only.
9. Play a difficult passage with the right hand only.
10. Play a difficult passage in one hand with the other hand shadowing its part on your knee (a technique used by Kissin).
11. Visualize a passage, then play. Repeat.
12. Visualize a passage without doing any playing.
13. Play something in a completely different style from the rest of your repertoire. Known to restore sanity at difficult times of the year.
14. Play through repertoire related to what you're playing. For example, if you're playing Beethoven's Waldstein Sonata, play through the Andante Favori (the original second movement).
15. Do a cool-down. Slow technique, easy sight-reading, or a favorite passage are possibilities.

A few caveats

While I don't recommend practicing for only 10 minutes a day or for that matter in chunks of only 10 minutes, these types of power practice blocks can be very useful when used in conjunction with larger units, ie. 10 minutes + 1 hour + 45 minutes + 10 minutes. And do not under any circumstances use the absolute worst practice system ever, in which practice is only done during the commercials of a hockey game!

Introducing The Collaborative Piano Store

Since my decision to monetize around 6 weeks ago, it's been difficult decision just what formats would be the ideal ones on a niche site such as this. You may have noticed that the AdSense ads weren't totally optimized for this type of site ("Free piano lessons!!! No practicing!!!") Today I finally decided on the course to take--a store that would sell the type of products that collaborative pianists really need for the subjects they care about.

After many hours of building, I am pleased to announce the launch of The Collaborative Piano Store, a place where you can find a wide variety of books on subjects such as practicing, sight reading, piano pedagogy, anthologies, diction, poetry, opera guides, getting organized, as well as some fine audio equipment. The permanent link can be found near the top of the sidebar, just below the bookmark and feed subscription buttons. Enjoy!

The Extreme Piano Guide, or 30+1 Ideas to Improve your Practice Time

Here are some ideas, links and products to inspire and jump-start your practice sessions, presented in no particular order and intended to be read at leisure.


1. Create a list of goals to determine what you need to accomplish and how to go about doing it. Knowing what you desire to accomplish at the piano, whether learning/perfecting repertoire or preparing for festivals, auditions, or exams can help you create a plan of action as early as possible that will help you organize what needs to be done and how to go about doing it.

2. Find the best time of day to practice, then try to utilize that time on a regular basis. Some of us concentrate best in the morning, while others prefer the evening. Going to the piano right after school may an idea to get your practice muscles going before doing other things, such as homework, dinner, and computer time.

3. Find the best place to put your piano. Rooms without television sets or computers provide the most distraction-free environments and mean that there will be less family traffic.

4. Get your piano tuned. A piano in good tune and regulation will sound better and be a lot more inspring than one that isn't tuned.

5. Minimize distractions. Time spent at the piano is your time and you have the right to tell others to leave you alone while you perfect your art. Don't answer time-wasting phone calls--rather, let the machine pick up or have someone take a message. Phone calls are infamous time-eaters.

6. Take a look at your teacher's notes from last lesson. Most teachers will write down in a notebook or progress sheet the pieces covered in each lesson and what to focus on during the week. Paying attention to your teacher's notes can save valuable time spent puttering and steer you toward what needs to get done during the week.

Musician's Practice Planner A Weekly Lesson Planner for Music Students. General Music. Softcover. Size 8.75x11 inches. 80 pages. Published by Molto Music. (311358) See more info...

7. Create a weekly plan. What do you need to get done during the week and what are the steps to get there? Creating a concise list of weekly goals puts your daily session into perspective.

8. Create a long-term practice plan using Remember the Milk. Remember the Milk is a simple yet effective task management system which, although still in beta, is one of the most highly-rated programs of its kind on the internet. One of the features of RTM is that you can also have reminders sent to you via email or SMS.

9. Figure out what you are going to play first. Do you start with technique? A bit of sight-reading? Hanon exercises? Or jump right into your pieces? If so, where do you start, the beginning? Trouble spots? Running the piece? Slow practice? Where you start a practice session can often set the pace of what get accomplished. Find what works best for you.

10. Get into the flow with Steve Pavlina's 7 Rules for Maximizing Your Creative Output.

11. Also from Steve Pavlina's site, read about creativity.

12. Read about Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's ideas on flow and creativity.



13. Read about Flow in Wikipedia.

14. Read Roy Palmer's account of Running in the Zone.

15. Allow yourself time to discover. Piano practice isn't just about work, but also about discovery, creativity, building, finding, digging, uncovering, and polishing. Piano practice isn't about satisfying others' goals for you, but finding what is important to you, going on the journey, and finding it.

16. Write a practice journal. This is the type of journal to be written and read by you alone unless you choose otherwise. You can talk about anything, whether it be your progress, goals, start/end times, thoughts on your time at the piano, inner battles, mental blocks, and breakthroughs.

17. Write a practice comic book. Print out a blank calendar, then draw a short sketch and caption detailing every day that you practice, go to a lesson, or perform. Do this for a while and you will have an illustrated and sometimes humorous record of your progress at the piano.

18. Divide and conquer. Can't concentrate for two hours? Break it up into smaller sessions. There's nothing wrong with going to the piano for shorter practice sessions if that means being more focused. For example: an early intermediate student practicing 30 minutes a day can easily divide that time into two 15 minute sessions. An advanced student practicing 2 hours daily can divide the time up into 1 hour, 40 minute, and 20 minute sessions.

19. Take breaks. Active brains need to take a break sometimes and so do muscles. Try taking a 5 minute break every half hour to recharge yourself.

20. Work on your sight reading skills. Sight reading isn't a cruel form of torture devised by piano teachers. Rather, think of it as a way to improve your looking, listening, and feeling while at the keyboard, as well a way to drastically cut down on the amount of time needed to learn a piece of music. (For even more inspiration, read my previous post on 10 Ways of Improving your Sight Reading Skills)

21. Read The Art of Practicing by Madeline Bruser. This book can offer you a way into observing your approach to practicing, and how to integrate body and mind in order practice with ease.

22. Read Nancy O'Neill Breth's The Piano Student's Guide to Effective Practicing. This six-page folio offers 58 techniques on how to approach practicing, as well as a guide on how to use them in your time at the piano.

Update 04/28/07:

Ms. Breth has recently published a companion volume entitled The Parent's Guide to Effective Practicing.

23. Read Chuan Chang's Fundamentals of Piano Practice.

24. Read Yoke Wong's suggestions on piano practice.

25. Read the eHow article on how to practice piano.

26. Read Charles Moss' comments on required piano practice.

27. Read Martha Beth Lewis' article on suggested practice techniques. Be sure to take a look at the rest of this fine site--it's probably the largest and best compendium of piano-related information on the internet.

28. Read the article on suggested practice techniques on the Piano Education Page. The Piano Education Page is not merely a page, it also has much interesting information for both parents and students.

29. Run at least one piece before the end of the session. It's important not to lose sight of the forest for the trees. After taking things apart, it's always a good barometer of progress to play the entire work at the end of a session to gauge progress. If you still have problems at the end of a session, make note of them and try again at your next session.

30. Experience all that the arts have to offer. Go to the symphony, go to the opera, see a play, visit a gallery, read great novels, read or write poetry, learn to draw, take up dancing, learn to work with clay, learn to live with the arts. Your life will be made better as a result.

I hope these 30 ideas have helped you in your quest for success and fulfillment at the piano. In case all else fails, here is #31...

31. Take a day off. Everybody needs a break, including pianists. Go do something else today and come back to it with a fresh attitude tomorrow.