Week 1 - The Opening Pattern and Finding the Melody

Sindre Skarelven Hi Sindre, I love this challenges too. This always pushes me forward. I didn’t play this piece before. I am curious what we have on the watch party. 👍

Sindre Skarelven Exactly the same for me. It wasn’t on my plan at all. But to learn a piece in 4 weeks is seductive. 😅🔥I will start on Monday. The score is nice with all the fingerings in it. 👍

Sindre Skarelven If only that were 99% of the work, lol.

When I start a new piece, I write in copious fingerings. My teacher has started erasing 90% of my fingerings. I find that I don’t need most of them after a week or two of practicing a piece. 

Do most people play with fingerings above each note?

To me, that feels too much like I am playing by number, not by note.

Larry K When I first began learning the piano, I wrote in copious fingerings. Now (3 years later), I write them in only in certain places now.

Michelle R My teacher told me that it  is common for adults to write in too many fingerings. I am coming around to her way of thinking. 

Now, I use a transparency on my music and write copious fingerings with a wet erase pen.
After a week or so, I produce a minimal set of fingerings and transfer those in pencil to the music.

Larry K Depends on both the individual and the type of music. It is more common to write in every finger for something like a Bach prelude and fugue than it is a Mozart sonata where scales and chord patterns may be standard fingering.

As long as a person plans every finger and can legitimately remember their decisions, then whether they write in or not is just a detail. The reality though is many students don’t consider all their fingering carefully and make unintentional changes over time so writing it in at least lets them verify how they originally planned to do something if they have slipped into auto pilot.

I often don’t want to mar an otherwise beautiful score that belongs to my students so I will scan and print a copy to keep detailed fingering planning on and then they can just refer to it while retaining their clean copy.

Dustin Anderson I do agree that Bach often requires copious fingering, but I should be careful not to apply that to every composer, like you said.

I was “yelled” at by my classical guitar instructor for not writing in more fingerings. He pulled out the music for his Bach lute suites, which he studied at Juilliard, and showed me that he had written in every single finger.

I am not worried about marring nice sheet music, as I use a Blackwing Matte pencil which can be erased easily with a Faber-Castell dust free eraser.

I am avoiding a lot of erasing by using a transparency for my initial work on a piece.

I remember that David Chang said that he wrote in every finger for Chopin’s Opus 10 No 1. I wondered if he wrote in every finger no matter the difficulty of the piece or the composer

Sindre Skarelven Dustin Anderson 

I agree that it depends on the person and the piece, and that if you have memorized the physical movements and the fingerings, it doesn’t matter if you wrote them down.

Does “planning every finger” means memorizing every finger after deciding on every finger?

I have heard the argument made to write in every finger so as to be able to start playing at any place. 

By not writing in every note, does that become more difficult? I suppose not if you have memorized every finger, lol.

I will print Dominic’s version, so that if and when I ever get there, I can contemplate his fingerings. I am not working on music outside of what my teacher assigns to me.

As for fingerings and memorization, does anybody else have a few places in a piece where they have to remember something like “here it’s D in the left hand with 4 and B flat in the right hand with 2”?

It seems to me that I learn a piece such that my brain has all of the movement plans and fingerings so that playing the piece does not require conscious control but that at a few places, conscious control intrudes like that.

Conscious control is slower and clumsier than unconscious control, which is why first learning a piece is so difficult.

Now, our brains are always monitoring sensory outputs and matching them to sensory inputs, which is why we can detect wrong notes in performance, but correcting mistakes in performance with conscious control is usually a disaster.

Sindre Skarelven I tend to think of the conscious control as a failing, an intrusion, and something that I’d like to get rid of, if possible. Am I wrong to think that?

It is certainly a worthy goal to be able to visualize the positions of one’s hands and fingers throughout the piece.

It seems like something that is difficult to do in isolation, as I often need a previous hand/finger position to figure out the next hand/finger position.

Are you able to visualize each hand/finger position at every note in the piece without a previous state?

As for repetition, that is what is causing my issue. There is a different section that starts with D in the right hand with 5 and B flat in the left hand with 4, so, mirrored from what I mentioned.

My brain seems to think that these two sections are interchangeable, and, well, they are, but the correct playing of the piece demands playing one version twice and the other version twice, in the correct order.

I may have caused this problem by practicing in sections, lol. Perhaps, I can make the problem disappear by practicing in bigger sections, by including a previous transition for both places, or more firmly anchoring the two sections in their A and B sections.

I thinking using conscious thought to hold some state is inevitable, but that it can be minimized.

Or, perhaps I need to cue by sound, not finger positioning.

Larry K 

Larry K said:
I tend to think of the conscious control as a failing, an intrusion, and something that I’d like to get rid of, if possible. Am I wrong to think that?

Unless I am misunderstanding what you mean by "conscious control," it is not something to get rid of. It is not ideal to exclusively rely on muscle memory. When playing only from muscle memory, if a finger slips, or if the bench is a different height, it is very possible that the muscle memory will fail, and one may have trouble continuing. That is why conscious control over the fingers is necessary. It is also necessary for correcting mistakes. 

Part of memorizing a piece, for me, is to be able to visualize/say/write fingerings consciously, rather than only by muscle memory. My teacher often asks me to start from random parts of random measures, and if played only from muscle memory, without conscious thought, I would not be able to do it. 

Larry K said:

Perhaps, I can make the problem disappear by practicing in bigger sections, by including a previous transition for both places, or more firmly anchoring the two sections in their A and B sections.

When practicing in sections, it is important to also practice the transitions between the sections. If you only practice sections in isolation, you will have trouble putting them together and playing them smoothly. 

Maria “Muscle memory” is one of those terms with which I take exception, for muscles have no memory, they cannot encode movement. 

All encoding of movements takes place in the brain, and is accomplished through forming connections between the motor and auditory cortex, but also involve other parts of the brain, such as the visual cortex and the cerebellum, as well as the basal ganglia for beat perception.

Conscious control is slow, effortful, and serial. It is not what is wanted when you want to play fluidly. It is what is used when sight reading a piece or learning it through repetition.

Some things such as number of repetitions is not stored unconsciously so some amount of conscious control is needed, but it is best minimized.

When I drop into conscious control in a lesson, I start to fall apart.

Larry K I suppose that is true. Which term do you use? Unconscious motor memory?

Maria I prefer “motor memory” or “procedural motor memory” so as to place the activity in the nervous system and not in the muscles.

I have heard pianists say that you should ignore mistakes in performance, and stick to unconscious playing. 

Your brain is monitoring how you play, so you recognize mistakes, but you should not fix them in performance.

Stick to unconscious playing to play smoothly and fix the problems later. 

Larry K You are correct that "motor memory" is more accurate, but regardless of terminology, it is not usually to rely on it without explicit memory and conscious control.

Maria All musicians rely on motor memory to play fluidly. Repetitive practice builds motor memory.

Conscious control is minimized. 

With unconscious playing, the brain executes stored sequences of movements without requiring conscious control or thought. 

We are all striving to minimize conscious control when we perform a piece because we do not play at our best when being conscious of every movement.

This does not mean that the brain is not monitoring our playing, it is, but this monitoring should not knock us out of playing unconsciously.