Your choice of music to play in public determines your rate of improvement.
Each summer, as I select music to perform over the next year, I deliberately pick at least one piece that instantly gives me heart palpitations. One year it was Chopin’s Ballade No. 4. Another time, Brahms’s Handel Variations. Last year, it was Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.
The reason: committing to performing a difficult piece in public is the most effective way to guarantee rapid musical improvement.
Deadline + social pressure = results
This recipe works because of two critical ingredients:
1. Deadline
A deadline forces focus and effort. Within the next year is reasonable: it’s not so short as to cause failure-inducing panic, but it’s not so long as to be vague and ungraspable. It motivates you to rise to the challenge and start practicing now.
2. Social pressure
If I’m playing only for myself, I’m tempted to get complacent. But promising to play for other people — a certain piece in a certain place at a certain time — causes me to work harder and bring the music to a higher level. I don’t want to disappoint my audience.
You’ll automatically level up your practice
Tackling a challenging piece like this benefits you in both the short term and the long term:
In the short term, you’ll open your mind to new strategies. Because the piece poses new hurdles, you can’t simply fall back on what you’ve been doing thus far. You’ll become more creative, experiment with new methods, and think of ideas you wouldn’t have considered before.
In the long term, your practice systems will be in better shape. Some of those new ideas will work — and they’ll stick with you. Over time, easy pieces will become easier, and difficult pieces won’t seem quite so daunting.
So pick a piece that excites you, and is perhaps 10% harder than anything you’ve ever played. Set a date and venue. Power through that initial stress and keep the end result in mind, because it’s very much worth it.
Each summer, as I select music to perform over the next year, I deliberately pick at least one piece that instantly gives me heart palpitations. One year it was Chopin’s Ballade No. 4. Another time, Brahms’s Handel Variations. Last year, it was Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.
The reason: committing to performing a difficult piece in public is the most effective way to guarantee rapid musical improvement.
Deadline + social pressure = results
This recipe works because of two critical ingredients:
1. Deadline
A deadline forces focus and effort. Within the next year is reasonable: it’s not so short as to cause failure-inducing panic, but it’s not so long as to be vague and ungraspable. It motivates you to rise to the challenge and start practicing now.
2. Social pressure
If I’m playing only for myself, I’m tempted to get complacent. But promising to play for other people — a certain piece in a certain place at a certain time — causes me to work harder and bring the music to a higher level. I don’t want to disappoint my audience.
You’ll automatically level up your practice
Tackling a challenging piece like this benefits you in both the short term and the long term:
In the short term, you’ll open your mind to new strategies. Because the piece poses new hurdles, you can’t simply fall back on what you’ve been doing thus far. You’ll become more creative, experiment with new methods, and think of ideas you wouldn’t have considered before.
In the long term, your practice systems will be in better shape. Some of those new ideas will work — and they’ll stick with you. Over time, easy pieces will become easier, and difficult pieces won’t seem quite so daunting.
So pick a piece that excites you, and is perhaps 10% harder than anything you’ve ever played. Set a date and venue. Power through that initial stress and keep the end result in mind, because it’s very much worth it.