Intricate Passages

AUG 8, 2012:  Here's a question:  what do you do when there's a passage so full of detail, where the hands cross or have so many awkward things to do, that you simply can't play it at a slow speed and slowly work it up to tempo?

This has got to be one of the more frustrating things about practicing the piano.  It seems that no matter what you do you'll be working on this passage for weeks if not months and with minimal results.  So, first of all, it might be good to step back a bit and see what's actually going on in the music, isolating the different lines, looking at the score closely for the main melody and the sub-melodies, or the bass line if that applies.

I don't think there's anything damaging about going to one specific measure and breaking it down.  Even if you get three notes correctly, you've done something.  And it doesn't matter about tempo; you can deal with the correct tempo later on.

One of the most effective strategies might be to take the hands separately.  If you can play one hand slowly and take it up to tempo, that's a great start.  But supposing you can't.  Then what?  I'd say, simplify the passage yourself.  Go one step further from understanding where the main events are in that bar and actually re-edit or even re-compose the bar keeping it as close to the original idea as possible.  Redistributing the notes so that the left hand takes some of what the right hand was going to do---or the other way around---is an excellent way to achieve simplicity and clarity.  Sometimes composers think orchestrally when they write  piano music.  That's because it's easy to conceive of a piano as a small orchestra.  Unfortunately, they often leave you, the performer, with a lot of grunt work in terms of realizing what they want.  In other words, their directions are not always simple and crystal clear.  Your response might be, "okay, if you're not going to be clear about how this is to be realized, I'll step in and get the passage to work for me."  To put it another way, this is probably not the time for being "faithful" to the score.  Maybe the composer wasn't even sure what being "faithful" to the score was. You don't always know.

Being able to roll with an intricate passage and be willing to work with the details of that passage is a skill unto itself.  And it's a skill worth working on.  Because sometimes, when you get past the details, the general effect is really simple.