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As a river will seek the route of least resistance, left to our own devices we will do the same. It is much more pleasant to play music which is easy from either being not very challenging or has been previously learned. Trying something new or especially hard requires much more discipline than playing a piece learned many years ago.

This also applies to difficult sections within a piece. A difficult passage may require four, five, ten or a hundred times as much time and effort as the rest of the work. If that extra effort is not made, the passage will never become as easy as the rest of the music. Unless it is attacked early and hard it will always be the weak spot within the larger work. We all know where these problem areas are; if we start with them and work on the “hard stuff first” the piece will progress evenly and quickly without the constant drag of the “hard stuff”.

Andrew Remillard
President
ANRPiano.com



Ask anybody whose job involves a significant amount of problem solving and one of their most important techniques is to look at the problem from as many different perspectives as possible. Sometimes it is only after taking a fresh and different perspective can we find an answer.

In music learning this can take the form of studying melodic development or harmonic patterns, especially if this material had been neglected up until now. It could also mean memorizing a passage backwards, ie, the last measure, then the next to last measure and so on until the passage is learned. This is great for Bach Fugues.

Andrew Remillard
President
ANRPiano.com



As a young piano student my piano teacher insisted I learn each hand individually before I put them together. I found this very frustrating because I never felt the work I did with my hands individually did anything to prepare me for playing with both hands simultaneously.

Learning to play one hand at a time, with the other completely uninvolved, does not prepare you to play both hands simultaneously. All that is accomplished is the illusion that the music has been learned. However the two-handed co-ordination needed to actually play doesn’t develop without two handed work.
Now some single hand study can be useful for working out specific technical problems or developing an understanding of a complex figuration. However the time should be limited and the opposite hand introduced immediately.

Andrew Remillard
President
ANRPiano.com



Cognitive scientists will tell us that interrupting the visual flow if information is a significant determent to learning. Looking from the score to your hands and back to the score breaks up the information flow into your memory, creating a garbled mess. It is critical for the mastery of playing, that the fingers and arms learn to judge distances without the aid of the eyes. Make the mistakes and learn from them, but do not let the eyes become the crutch of the hands.

Andrew Remillard
President
ANRPiano.com



As someone whose eyes have always been larger than my ability or time available, I have had to learn the value of limiting the amount of material I work on at a time. I also discovered through my cognitive psychological research that there are some pretty strong scientific reasons for limiting the amount of material one studies at a time.

There are no hard rules as to how much material can be handled but there are a number of principles which impact this. To start with there is the size of our short term memory (STM), when the STM is full (usually 5 – 7 “chunks” of material it will begin to dump information and unless it is immediately rehearsed it will be lost. The amount of material, or number of notes which can be put into a chunk (the technical term BTW) is influenced by our ability to recognize patterns and group notes by these patterns. Theoretically you could hundreds of notes into a chunk. I would imagine the stories of prodigies such as Mozart reflect his ability to quickly recognize note patterns and identify and store them quickly and efficiently.

I have toyed with writing a book about this whole process, but seem to need to limit my material at this time. This is a long and complex subject, but the key point would be to try working on shorter segments at a time and see if your learning rate doesn’t improve.

Andrew Remillard
President
ANRPiano.com