ENTRY FIVE
THE PROBLEM WITH FRONT-LOADING
As a collaborative pianist, the holiday season is a particularly busy time with all the performances that wrap up the year: degree recitals, end-of-semester jury exams, winter recitals for younger students, gigs for religious services during the Advent season, and many others. Occasionally, I’ll get requests to accompany instrumentalists for their performances of pieces I’ve worked on before. The more recently I’ve played it, the more fresh the notes feel within my fingers and the less time I have to spend practicing it. For example, I could easily re-learn Beethoven’s “Spring” Sonata within a few days since I just performed it earlier this year. On the other hand, it would take me longer to “bring back” Brahms’ Second Clarinet Sonata, which I haven’t played in a couple of years. It seems like a lot of work, having to figure out how much time I’ll need to prepare something that I’ve played before; I’d need to consider how difficult the music actually is and also how recently I played it. There’s no exact science to these calculations, but at least I’m dealing with music that I’m familiar with.
Of course, not every piece of music that I get asked to accompany is something in my repertoire list (even though that would be very convenient for me). If that were the case, then it would suck having to play the same pieces every year, limited to a small arsenal of collaborative pieces. After all, there is and will always be more music out there to learn. I spent a fair portion of this past Thanksgiving break at the piano, looking over the pieces that I’ll accompany for a student recital in the middle of December. Even though I’ll be playing for fourteen students — some of whom will be playing two pieces — I quickly discovered during my practice sessions that most of the music is not as daunting as I expected. 95% of it is brand-new to me, but honestly, it is not too bad. I can sight-read some of it. There are, like, five pieces that I will need to spend much more time on. As for the others — I won’t have to spend as much time on.
See, I made all of these discoveries about the difficulty of the music during my first time reading through all of it, but it’s kind of dangerous. I definitely got a head-start by practicing as early as possible, which is great, but now my practice plan is tainted with these thoughts of, “This piece is a lot easier than I thought; it turns out I don’t have to practice this one as much” or something along those lines. You could say that front-loading encourages procrastination, which is funny to think about since the latter is obviously discouraged. How ironic, isn’t it? You become so familiar with your own abilities that you ride dangerously close along the line that divides success and failure. In my case, as a musician, the main remedy to countering these tempting thoughts of neglecting easier pieces is consistency at the piano: Play through all of the music every day, no matter how easy some of it is. Of course the time allotted for each piece should never be equal. Like, don’t spend one hour on Sibelius’ Violin Concerto and one hour on Bach’s Minuet in G. On the other hand, don’t completely neglect the Minuet. The goal is to develop equal fluency with all music in the binder or tablet, but with a special emphasis on the more difficult pieces. Always add to the practice sessions; never subtract from them.