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Monday, August 1, 2011

Learning Literature Quickly

On Saturday evening, I received a frantic text message that a performer scheduled for the following morning had backed out at the last minute.  I was asked to cover the performance.  With little advance notice and nothing in my arsenal at the moment, I was forced to pull something together very quickly.  Fortunately the repertoire wasn't too difficult this time, but we have all faced those stressful situations where we have less than 24 hours to get a piece as polished as possible.  Rarely is this skill taught to our advanced students.  So I began to think.....how WOULD I teach this skill?

The first step is analyzing the harmonic structure.  You can survive a difficult passage that you might fumble through IF you know where you are heading.  This is especially important if there is an unexpected modulation that jumps out at you when you least expect it.  The other culprit (especially in church choral music) is the unexpected shift to a minor mode.

Seek out patterns!  Repetition is one of the foundational aspects of music and helps us learn music more quickly.  Don't just look for exact repeats; sequences and partial repeats can save us a lot of time working out tough passages.  Learn it the first time and see if you can continue to use the same fingering with minor adjustments.

Speaking of fingerings.....WRITE IN YOUR MUSIC!  Mark your score up.  Neatly inserted fingerings, chord symbols, and lines showing the rhythmic structure can be your best friends when you are basically sight-reading on stage.  Depending upon the circumstance, I have used a different color for each type of mark.

What about you?  What do you do right away when you're trying to learn a new piece in a short time frame?  I am always looking for new hints that I can add to my bag of tricks.  Please share your insight in the comments section below.

7 comments:

  1. Those are great tips! I also like to isolate the hard parts, and repeat those (no point in going over and over the easier ones in a time-crunch like that). I usually practice with the metronome at a really slow tempo, whatever I can play cleanly, and then increase gradually with every rep of the section. The first time I did that, I was surprised how much faster I learned the section.

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  2. Hi Kennith,

    Wonderful post!

    What I do first: intro, interludes, postlude, page turns. Translate, mark in singer's most likely breaths. Circle all key changes, meter changes, repeats, etc.

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  3. Excellant Post, I am preparing for Grade 4 and this information is of great use to me.

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  4. Thanks for all the input, gang!

    Small-Church Musician, so glad to see you here. Using a metronome is truly a huge asset! I use it often when I'm working on something long-term, but often forget to use it in those last minute scenarios.

    Gretchen, as always you provide great insight. Page turns.....the bane of every pianists existence!

    Nleric, best of luck on those upcoming exams. Keep me posted on how they go.

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  5. Oh, man... just wrote another comment and sent it to cyberspace.

    I thought of one more thing about page turns. Recently I've been flagging the page to turn back to, if the turn is more than 1 page. I HATE missing that stuff!

    Neon Post-it strips work great. You can see them even when it's practically dark, or the light is glaring, or all the variations in between.

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  6. Great minds think alike, Gretchen. I started flagging those turn backs after a recent recital that had too many turn backs. I hadn't thought of the Neon strips though. Great tip!

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  7. Great post, Kennith. Yes, these last-minutes piano techniques are crucial in order to survive!

    We, piano teachers, need to prep the students to better equip with situations like this. Musical analysis, sight reading techniques, etc all seems to be so practical in this scenario. Thanks for sharing this helpful article!

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