SEP 4, 2012: Is it better to drop everything else when learning a new piece of piano music? Or would it be more practical to segment the amount of time in units of 20 or 30 minutes---or even smaller?
If a new work has to be ready for performance within a month, it might be a good idea to engage in immersion---work on it to the exclusion of everything else. That is, if there are no other obligations. But there's a lot to be said for taking the learning process in units of 15, 20 or 30 minutes. For one thing, if you can get yourself to stop after the alloted time, you can measure how long it may take to get a section learned. When you're in immersion, that kind of objective thinking often gets left by the wayside. You may jump from one section to another during immersion because it all has to get done, so you may think there's no harm in doing the learning in a highly unplanned way.
But immersion has its good points, too. If you're concentrating on one piece of music exclusively, you can develop a sense of continuity that you simply can't by taking the learning process in segments. Oftentimes, a piece of piano music will come together after a certain number of hours---things will suddenly start to fall into place.
Looking at the score without performing the work is just an outstanding idea, I think, because then you know where you're going---regardless of which learning method you use. Just throwing a bunch of time at a new piece of piano music may get frustrating if it's not structured too closely.
Yet another solution is to partially immerse---by practicing, say, three hours a day in addition to the rest of your work at the keyboard. That one would make sense, even if there's a deadline coming up. The main thing is that it needs to make sense to you, the performer. Because if it makes sense to you during the practice time, who knows, it just might make sense to your audience, too.
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