Today, we communicate some of our thoughts on the merits of slow practice. This is one of the most difficult concepts for us, the instructors, to impart to students. First, we have to define these two terms, because we feel they are commonly misunderstood.
First is “practice”. Admittedly, this is not a very descriptive term for the work that a student needs to perform at the keyboard or on an instrument. In French, they do not even use this word to describe what is done daily in the practice booth. In that country, they use the term répétition. Take out l’accent aigu, and you know exactly what that word means.
Let’s break it down a little more.
During a practice session, the bulk of activity when working on etudes and musical works is to break it down into important fragments and repeat, hopefully using a variety of different techniques (rhythms, accents, hands separate, etc.) to help drill and even-out the passages. Usually, we focus on the hardest parts in the piece.
Repeating a whole piece from beginning to end does not constitute practice! We’ll contrast that activity with the term, playing. As implied, playing the piano or the violin is fun! It certainly serves a purpose, especially during certain phases of learning a difficult piece. However, playing is hardly the same thing as practicing. Naturally, a beginner will get some benefit from playing through a piece or song over and over, because generally, those exercises are already short, and therefore ripe for repeating in its form. Breaking pieces up into their most difficult components is something more intermediate students learn how to do. Still, a beginner should get accustomed to the idea of playing fragments, even if the song is only two lines long.
As a general observation, we see that almost always a student will sit down to practice their instrument and will start at the beginning. The practice session almost becomes a hypnotic, yet mindless activity of starting at the beginning and playing through, struggling with the hard parts (usually slowing in those places that give the most challenge), and playing more sloppily at the end, if they make it that far at all. This is inevitable because, unconsciously, the student is really practicing the beginning! Isn’t it, by definition, repeating, when a student encounters a very difficult passage, gets stuck, and goes back to the beginning? That’s why the beginning gets better and the middle and end are much slower to shape up to good form (if they ever do, until a student changes their habits).
Practice needs to be conscious. I always encourage my students to start not by putting their hands over the keys, but first trying to remember what they did the previous day during their practice session and ask questions. What worked? What didn’t? What did I neglect that may need more time today? How might I approach the hard bits in a different way this time? What are the hardest places in this sonata?
Now that we have defined what practice is, we can move on to the next, more difficult term…
Slow seems like a simple enough term. However, when observing students in lessons (and after being told over fifty times that most of the practice should be SLOW), they can’t seem to play slowly. I ask them, “Okay, not too bad! Now, can you play that section again here slower?”.
Inevitably, the student repeats the passage at the same, mostly fast speed. “Slower!” I repeat. Same speed. I then clap to demonstrate the new speed, which happens to be just slightly over 50% of the original speed the student attempted.
The young pupil looks back at me wide-eyed. “You mean, you want me to play that slow?!”
Yes. Slow means slow. In other words, we mean significantly slower than the original attempt. Usually, the student tries, and somehow plays worse than they did when struggling near performance tempo. How is this possible?
In short, it proves the student did not play at any different speed at home over the week. Always the same speed. Always starting from the beginning. Naturally, progress can still be made, but it will be slower. This creates a curious, but verifiable paradigm.
Fast playing = slow improvement.
Slow practice = faster improvement.
And we, as teachers, struggle to painfully try to correct the many mistakes that have been reinforced from weeks of fast playing from the beginning of the piece. Usually the student has not changed the fingering that we, as teachers, noted on the score during the past four weeks. And why would they change those fingerings anyway? That’s because it’s impossible to make measured improvement while addressing little detailed corrections at near-full speed without first breaking down a passage. First, one must identify the issues requiring correction. Then, the student needs to play a small fragment, slowly, carefully observing the issues.
At this point, we must also be wary of the wrong-wrong-wrong-wrong-right-move on! trap. Reduce the number of incorrect repetitions, and maximize the correct ones. Often doing a tricky passage five times perfect in a row (or more!) is the track to conquering difficult spots.
Furthermore, practicing (sorry, I meant playing, here) only at top, or near-top speed results in physical tension. It is only natural that as we play through a piece with musical intension and commitment, like in a performance, we add more muscular tension each time. Also, if anyone asks anything of a student outside of starting from the beginning, such as, I don’t know, “start in measure 17”, or “play left hand only over here at this slow speed”, or any number of permutations, a student finds it nearly impossible on first attempts to do those things. That’s because these are the things one should be doing at home during a practice session. Then how might we deal with the stress and distraction of live performance in front of an audience? Exercising these practice strategies and repeating in a multitude of ways makes us more flexible and resilient under stress. If something goes slightly wrong on stage and we haven’t practiced that particular passage on its own inside and out slowly, then we are most likely going to do what we’ve been trained to do — go back and start from the beginning. Uh-oh.
Now, what benefit does slow playing do for us? Before we can answer this, we must identify one more thing that slow practice is not — it is not sleepy, inattentive, or altering of the musical ideas. Slow means not only aware, but hyper-awareness of what one does at the instrument. That means everything from monitoring one’s posture, to imitating the musical text accurately with good fingering, to listening more carefully to the sound, and many more concepts. When one drives along the freeway at 75 mph, it’s nearly impossible to see the dime on the side of the road. That’s what is required of the young musician. Often, when we get students to play slow, they might be able to do so, but their playing becomes lethargic or lacks the same musical intensity as when they play fast. The same musical things (articulation, fingerings, dynamics, intensity of attack, etc) need to be there, and the awareness needs to be perhaps even higher than fast playing.
Learning the art of slow, fragmented repetition allows us to more immediately correct the issues we have and to better translate our ideas into music effectively. It allows us to reduce physical tension and play more at ease, because we learn how to analyze and use the minimum tension necessary to execute difficult passages.
Fast-only playing induces stress. Stress is a fight-or-flight mechanism we all have. It may not be intense like an actual life-or-death situation, but it is essentially the same physical response. This physical response promotes physical tension. It reduces higher brain function to allow muscles to take over. Aren’t we all amazed when a young learner suddenly realizes that they can play through a piece without the music? Usually that means that passive memory has set in driven by the same stress mechanism, which is rarely good. That further entrenches the student into a beginning-to-end concrete-like execution that means disaster if there is a momentary derailing. (Active memorization is a topic for another time…)
Most students do not know what it is like to play with the minimum necessary tension, because they only have experienced the elevated stress of going fast. Naturally, this feeling is still fun. That’s why we like roller-coasters and watching high-speed chases in movies. Still, those roller-coasters rely on engineers who carefully measure safety and mechanical tolerances, and those films are highly choreographed and require tedious planning and frame-by-frame manipulation.
When we repeat slowly, we can put greater attention into all the aspects of playing a piece of music. We know the piece far more deeply. We learn how to play with more physical ease, and we also learn how to gain greater confidence, poise, and resilience under pressure. It’s not difficult to find lots of discussion about the merits of slow practice (here is an article).
Progress happens at home. During lessons, we point out the areas that need improvement, and remedies for them, while educating on what practice really is. Parents at home can gently reinforce when their child starts from the beginning and plays through a piece three times and calls it done. “Didn’t your teacher ask you to slow down?”
Yes. Yes, we did.