Start With Simple

AUG 20, 2012:  If there's a piece of piano music you would like to learn---but you find it overwhelming because of its length or its difficulty or both---you might want to look at it away from the instrument and identify the easy passages.  Most piano pieces are not uniformly difficult unless you're talking about some sort of study---like the Chopin etudes.  Barring that, there will be stretches of music that any reasonably accomplished player can tackle without putting in too much time or effort.

On the other hand, there may be pieces of piano music that are relatively easy for you to get all the notes and rhythms---except for a few bars of intricate passagework.  Often, those few bars discourage even the most enthusiastic of performers.  In that case, the opposite may work:  learn everything but the intricate passage.  Then, only after you've completely learned the music, minus that passage, start to work out the difficulties of that dreaded tangle of notes. Work it out slowly and you may find it's not nearly as difficult as you thought.

That's true of any piece of music that's new to you.  It almost always seems more difficult at first than it actually is.  Usually the individual gestures are not so hard---so isolating those during your practice session is probably a good thing----but it's putting those gestures together in sequence that's always the tough part. You may have to do gestures 1, 2 and 3 in the space of a single bar, a fast bar to make it even more frustrating.

But you'll notice that after you put the gestures together and can play them without straining your mind, you may be able to play it so effortlessly that you wonder why it was so much trouble to have learned it.

Each piece of music you learn--no matter how ancient the actual date of it is---has some new problems to solve.  Each problem solved can be applied to the next piece.  And the next.