On Slow Practice

May 7 2021 00:54

Quotations from Charles Cooke’s On Playing Piano ¹

Josef Hofmann once said in conversation: “Few people realize what can be done by playing a difficult piece six times a day, very slowly, for three weeks; then putting it aside for a few days, and repeating the process.”

Let me recommend very slow playing, with the most minute attention to detail" (Teresa Carreño).

The worst possible thing is to start practicing too fast: it invariably leads to bad results and lengthy delays." (Ernest Schelling).

Slow practice should be used as assiduously for practicing pieces as for setting fractures. You will be amazed, I think, at the rapidity of your progress if you bear this in mind.

Josef Hofmann once said in conversation: “Few people realize what can be done by playing a difficult piece six times a day, very slowly, for three weeks; then putting it aside for a few days, and repeating the process.”

You may have been wondering what you should do when, at this point in your work, you play a passage incorrectly. The answer is: don’t merely correct the wrong notes and then go on. Go back and choose a dowel pin at the beginning and another at the end of the passage that went wrong; then practice the passage, with its dowel pins, until it runs accurately and smoothly. Otherwise, you will certainly stumble again at the place the next time you come to it.

I’m going to make the confident assumption that no such flaw can occur at a place which was originally a fracture; for all the original fractures are of course set and are therefore stronger than any other places in the piece. Consequently, flaws can come only at places which are technically not forbidding. Nevertheless, set them like full-fledged fractures, with all the expertness you have acquired, and fit them snugly into their context. Halting to correct merely the wrong notes themselves will form lamentably wrong associations; it’s what Matthay calls, with sublime aptness, Unpractice or Dispractice.