(3) Starting a Piece
Learn only music that you can perform. The days of "years of exercises and lesson pieces for technical development" are over. Start assembling a repertoire immediately; the list of great music containing technical lessons is effectively infinite, so you don't need anything else! It is never too early to practice performances; it is never too early to make music. One of the most harmful comments I have heard is that youngsters are too young for Chopin. Then there is kiddie music for the youngest: kiddie music exists only in the minds of adults. Children of any age can appreciate good music and perform them; there isn't a single reason why children should be held back.
Of course, beginners need Beginner books, (Humphries, Beyer, Thompson, Faber & Faber, etc.) to learn the necessary conventions and basic music theory. There is no need to go through every page, just pick up those elements that are new to you. With the practice methods of this book, the student can start with performable music that may present challenges, but such challenges are just what is needed to learn how to use these methods. Exercise/lesson books such Hanon, Czerny, Cramer-Bulow, Dohnanyi Exercises, Cortot, etc., are obsolete. There are pianists who were raised on such exercises that still teach them and they are certainly not worthless, but there are better methods. There is plenty of easy starter music that are performable, such as Magdalena's Easy Bach,. Most importantly, choose the music that you like. We shall choose Beethoven's Für Elise ( Sheet Music, ) to illustrate the practice methods because it can be learned very quickly using these methods and contains all the elements needed to illustrate them.
Listen to recordings of pieces you decide to learn. This is the fastest way to learn musicality and improve technique. It is a great way to gather musical ideas, and explore new material. Listen to several recordings of the same piece. Your teacher should be able to play and demonstrate for you; it is better to have teachers who can play your pieces.
Next, analyze the structure of the piece and estimate how long it will take to learn it — these are necessary components of (59) Project Management; advanced pianists become experts in project management. If you can not estimate the completion time, it means that you do not know all the practice methods needed to learn the piece. Of course, the estimate will be wrong, but the exercise of estimating teaches you what practice methods are needed. Without the estimate, there is a chance that you will never finish the piece; however, no music is ever finished, so how do you know you finished it? The performance! Once it is performed successfully, it is finished.
Start analysis by numbering all the bars. There are two versions of Für Elise sheet music differing in the way the repeats are indicated, which changes the bar numbers but does not change the music. I am using the long version with 124 full bars. The short version has (105) bars; the ( ) indicates the bars for the shorter version. The first 4 bars are repeated 15 times, so that by learning 4 bars, you can play 50% of the piece! Another 6 bars are repeated 4 times, so by learning 10 bars, you can play 70% of the piece. This 70% can be memorized in less than 30 minutes because these 10 bars are simple. There are two interruptions among these repetitions that are more difficult for a total of 50 distinct bars to learn. Each of the difficult sections can be memorized in one day, so you can memorize the entire piece in three days. Give yourself two more days to practice (additional instructions are given below), and you should be able to play the piece (with questionable quality) in a week. How long it will take you to polish this piece so that it is performable will depend on your skill level and knowledge of practice methods.