Put URGENCY In Your Practice for Musical Success

I have talked a lot about the Piano Sonata by Samuel Barber, and how that was my personal stretch piece, and I've gone over many of the reasons why.

It's not because the types of scales and arpeggio patterns are any more difficult than anything else I've played.

Part of it is that I like to memorize all of the music as I'm learning it, and the harmonic and melodic language of this piece is very counterintuitive.

The other part is that the coordination between the hands, from a standpoint of rhythm and also just the particular intervals that go together.

Again, counterintuitive.

Just kind of difficult for me to grasp.

And I find that when I'm playing things well, that this is one of the first pieces I've ever played where I really can't think too hard about what I'm playing in terms of notes.

Not all the time.

I have to think about... relative intervals.

Because honestly, the notes themselves, especially when I'm playing slowly, don't make a whole lot of sense.

And to play this well, I have to get it up to tempo and I have to get to where I'm not thinking too hard about it.

So look, if piano is the main thing you do and you've done it for a long time, like if you're a truly advanced pianist, you might not find it as difficult as I do.

Again, for much of my life, I've been a composer first and a pianist second.

But having kind of recapped why it's difficult for me, this is where I want to tell you that when I first talked about learning this piece four years ago, I'm not sure if that was the second or the third time that I had begun learning it.

Each time that I've begun learning it, I've gotten to a point, even learning some passages quite well, but never practicing the whole thing.

I mean, the entire second half of the first movement, I've never played more than just a few slow readings through, like just sight reading sessions.

But I've never actually practiced the second half of that movement for improvement.

I've never practiced the last two-thirds of the second movement for improvement.

Now, I've done quite a bit with the third movement, that's the slow movement, but I've never polished it before now.

And the fourth movement, I've never done anything with at all.

I believe my first attempt at trying to learn this probably goes back to 2015.

And then again, I think I tried somewhere between that year and 2023 when this podcast began.

I can't quite remember.

And I started working on this in 2023.

I put it away for a while, and then either 2024 or 2025, I worked on it for a bit and I put it away.