An Experiment at the Keyboard

Learning a new piece is a complicated process.  I need to understand the music, how it works, what it has to say, what I want it to say.  I also need to figure out how to play the damned thing, and that means learning the notes, working out fingering, practicing technical passages, etc.  But arriving at musical understanding often depends on being able to execute.  You don’t know what the music is until you perform it, even if you can’t.   And blind under-tempo execution can be devoid of musical intent.  The two areas depend on each other.  Chicken and egg.  Adam’s navel.

I’m a good faker and a good sight-reader.  So I generally take a dual approach.  I spend some time faking through the piece at tempo just to achieve an understanding of how it works and what I want.  (I confess that this betrays a certain impatience.  ‘Let’s just make believe I can play this.  I’d really like to think that I can play this.’) I also spend time working out the technical passages slowly and, I hope, accurately, but sacrificing musical intent. Ideally the two approaches eventually meet.

A version of op76 #1 in Brahms's own hand.

The disadvantage of faking it is that we learn whatever we do.  Every time I fake my way through (to develop understanding, or just for self-deceptive fun) I learn to not execute cleanly.  And that makes it harder to learn to play it well down the road.

So I’m going to try something different.  Lately I've been learning Brahms op.76, a set of eight ‘short’ pieces.  They really are spectacular, and I've never taken the time to study them closely.  But I know some of them well by ear, so I have a pretty good concept of what I want from them.

Op. 76 #1 is a piece I’ve never really learned, but I do (I think) understand it.  So there’s really no need to fake it.  So I’m trying to learn it without EVER faking it.  Just play it ever so slowly.  Never make a mistake.  If I do, I need to go even more slowly.  That means I won’t ever play it up to tempo until I’m ready to do so flawlessly.  No faking.

It’s a little frustrating.  I want to wing it.  But I’m not letting myself do that.  I so hope that playing it slowly over and over will not chip away at the expressive concept that I have for the piece and turn it into drudgery.  I don’t think that will happen.  I’m pretty clear about what I want, and I can imagine it happening, even if I’m playing quite slowly.

Do I have the discipline to stay with this approach?  We’ll see.  I've never attempted it in quite this way.  The best possible outcome would be to arrive at a reliable performance of the piece which says what I want to say and involves minimal technical risk.  On the other hand, I could become frustrated that I never seem to be able to play it cleanly at tempo, and just stop trying.

I’ll keep you posted.