Learning and Re-Learning

JUL 30, 2012:  The main problem about re-learning a piece of piano music is, for me anyway, that I have to own up to something:  the piece needs re-learning.  I don't know why that's such a difficult thing to admit to oneself, but apparently I'm not alone in this dilemma.

Oh sure, you could fake your way through it at a performance and even improvise something functional if need be, but that's getting around the main issue: you don't really know the piece anymore.  There are gaps in your knowledge of this music.

The good news is that if you learned it once not too long ago, the piece comes back with surprising ease once you get past a certain point of renewed contact with it.  I think it's important to know when that point is, because great things start happening once you get there.

More specifically, I take each section at half speed and slowly crawl up to tempo with a metronome---even if I think I know it like the back of my hand.  Every time I catch myself thinking that I already know the section and therefore this is wasted time, I say to myself, "just do the work and worry about the wasted time later."  More often than not, I find that it was time well spent.

After putting the sections together, there's always going to be a little ajustment.  In particular, some details will still need work.  And---this is the tough part---there will be new details you never had problems with before that suddenly give you an unbelievable run for your money.  How do you explain it?  I think it might be because you perceive the piece in a new way, and you might even touch (or "sculpt") the work differently now in your mind and fingers. You might have played it super-legato before, and now you believe that some portamento is called for. Now the mind has to over-adjust, not only to that passage but to the entire section.

I would not advise starting from scratch when re-learning.  It might pay off in the long run, but time is pressing, and you have obligations.  Usually taking the individual sections at half-speed and slowly increasing the speed is sufficient for a second learn.

In fact, there may be some instances when re-learning bar-by-bar the way you learned it the first time will be confusing to you. Have you ever been in a classroom where the material is so familiar and so "easy" that the instructor's words don't even make sense?  The instructor is certainly not going to say, "if you already know the material, you can skip this class." Well, the piece of piano music may do exactly the same thing to you if you try and learn it from the ground up again.

The first learn-through definitely involves bar to bar detail-searching and phrase by phrase accumulation in order to complete the section.  You don't get the hassle---and the same joy of discovery---when you learn it the second time.  But if you can get past the I-know-this-already syndrome, you may find that your technique has gotten slightly or even significantly better since you last touched this piece.  You may hear yourself play it with a smoothness and confidence you never had before.  And then you realize that as good as it was to learn it the first time, it's even better on the re-learn.