The End Product

When people go to a concert, they listen to the people playing the music with a kind of arrogance, as if they are working for them. Some people go even further and criticize the musician, even though understand a thing about music. A musician can do that, criticize the performers, however a musician will never, ever forget how much effort went into that single performance.

What you listen to at s concert is the tip of the iceberg. Do you think that Martha Argerich just gets up there and plays whatever comes to her, without having to practice? Everyone, no matter how genius they may be, needs to practice.

No matter how much cramming you do the last night before the concert or the night of the concert, your playing won't improve by much. Ok, maybe, by playing it 50 times that night, you can start playing that tricky and hard passage better, but practicing it 5 times for 10 days is surely going to help you more.

You know all of that crazy stuff people play on the piano? The sixteenth notes, one after another? Well, they just don't sit in front of the piano and start playing that passage at full speed until they get it right. Here is a 2-item list of what you do when you face a hard passage like that:

First, you need to figure out the fingerings. If you learn the part with the wrong fingerings (assuming that your wrong fingering is mediocre, that you can actually play the passage), it will be very, very hard for you to fix it. Its for your own good.

After you've learned the fingerings, PRACTICE. With a metronome (the musicians' best friend and mortal enemy), playing it articulated until the tips of your fingers hurt, playing it with different rhythms. Then put it in its place in the piece and see how it sounds.

One of the best feelings of the world for me, is when I practice a piece of music, in very slow tempos and by dividing it up into parts and practicing them separately, and when the time comes, I crank up the speed and as if by magic, the piece flows, and it sounds just like (or close enough) to the recordings I've heard of it.

A piece of music for a musician is like their child. They raise it, with ample amounts of care, gently and carefully. The one you hear at a concert with "a few mistakes", as the critiques of their posh women's society say after a concert just so they can show that they too, can understand music, is the end product of all these processes I described above. Understanding and appreciating music is not only about listening to the pieces and criticizing them, but is also about understanding the musician and the amount of work and time that they've spent on it.