Most helpful examples, John. I greatly appreciate you contributing to The Musician’s Way community!

Absolutely spot on. Using my practicing for example, I only used this for note accuracy and once accurate, I moved on towards the proper tempo. As one who can read quickly, the notes part was easy and it was those tricky parts that needed refining.

My teacher was very helpful here too because he’s fastidious about metronome markings, and we set that final speed as the goal.

As you mentioned, one of the pitfalls of working slowly for too long is in fact losing the music as I call it. We lose that forward motion, and in many cases our slow practicing changes our fingering because what works slowly does not always work when the same passage is played at the proper tempo.

This is an issue I ran into with my very first teacher. With her we worked on stuff for ages never passing above an adagio if that in tempo, and my playing, as you said too, became harsh, sterile, and boring.

Outstanding points, John. Thanks for contributing!

Well said, John – thanks for reading and commenting.

Your point about slow practice strikes me as especially apt, but it’s crucial that, when we practice slowly, we do so in ways that support faster execution.

I write more about that issue in my post, A Different Kind of Slow Practice.

Being a pianist, I learned to use a combination of what we call finger voicing and arm weight to balance chords and direct the melodic lines. In addition with the piano, I’m not familiar with other non-keyboard instruments, we can control a lot of things too by using hand positions and specific fingers so shaping phrases can mean a total rewrite of fingering in a piece. In the end this can become interesting in its self as we discover what I call hidden gems within the music.

The other thing, mentioned here, regarding harmonic changes, when there are harmonic changes, as I’ve told my own students, we need to make something of them.

If a phrase is repeated in a different key, such as a relative minor, or a totally different key make something more of it. Stay within the overall dynamics, but play that section a bit firmer, perhaps, or maybe softer all of course subtly and the music comes to life.

There is one thing I read in another book by Berman regarding this. What we don’t want is a roller coaster effect with the music as we sculpt the phrases. (This is paraphrased because It’s been sometime since I read that). It’s not that we can’t do that, but not with every phrase because the music will become wishy-washy, trite, and a bit over the top.

All very true because we end up building in the mistakes rather than getting the notes right and music right on. Another side-effect of this is in the end we end up working the repair into the music so that we will end up forever fixing the mistake as we play that section, and we will anticipate making that error when we get to that spot. I noticed that with stuff I worked on when I was young and have come back to now.

On another note relating to this, which I have learned from my current teacher. If you can’t play something right, you’re playing too fast and too fast too soon. You need to go back and practice slowly, and ever so slowly to get the underpinnings solid before going on to the music. Once that’s solid, we can then move on to the musical stuff because we no longer need to focus on the mechanics.

Thanks for reading and commenting, Mark! Let us know how your new strategy works out.

Bear in mind, too, that recordings can generate many benefits aside from monetary ones. One quick example: to support a local non-profit and bring attention to your group, you might donate some CDs to be used as premiums during fundraisers.