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I admit it: I’m a frightful purist and unashamed pedant when it comes to learning new music, preferring a careful, methodical approach, working slowly with a pencil behind my ear. I like to work things out for myself, and only very occasionally will be completely stumped by something in a score, which will either have me searching for some hints on the internet, or arriving at a lesson to consult my teacher, who knows that I prefer to work at problem-solving on my own, and is often happy to point me in the right direction and leave me to get on with it.

In an earlier post, I talked about familiarity with the music, not just the physical sensation and the patterns of the notes under the fingers, but also of seeing the score in front of me, day in day out, so that I begin to recognise the shapes and patterns of the printed music. I try to instill similar habits in my students, but I would be naive if I thought any of them practised as meticulously as I do. There are no budding Kissin’s or Lang Lang’s amongst my students, for which I am relieved as teaching a very talented student would fill me with dread, but there are one or two who show a real affinity for the instrument, and are sufficiently interested to practise regularly. One or two hardly practise at all – I know who they are! And one makes it look easy – ggrrrr!! With an age range of five to mid-forties, my student all have plenty of other things going on in their lives – drama, sport, after school activities, work – and piano practise just has to fit in around everything else. My adult students tend to be more committed and focussed, but that is because they are learning piano for slightly different reasons to the kids and are all self-motivated people.

To help with the learning of new music, I ask a student to read through the score and highlight any signs or markings which they don’t understand. Then we look for recurring patterns, breaking the score down into manageable pieces. Sometimes, being confronted with a whole A4 page of music can be very daunting for an early learner; showing them where the music repeats itself (either a straight repeat, or a repeated pattern or motif) can demystify it, making it simpler to understand. I use quite a lot of visual cues too – words or little drawings to describe the mood, tone or “story” in the music. I also ask my students to imagine the pictures and stories in the music. I like to think all these things combine to make the learning process more enjoyable. We also listen to other music to gain insights into context, both compositional and historical, and to highlight that piano music should not be considered in isolation.

I never been particularly keen on things stuck on the keyboard or behind the keys to help with note-learning, partly because I think such things are a distraction, forcing the eye down to the keys, instead of straight ahead at the score. However, one of my adults regularly uses one of these devices, ‘IMP’s Keyboard Indicator’, which shows not only the layout of the keyboard, but also the notes as they are written on the stave. She has found it invaluable in improving her knowledge of the geography of the keyboard and as a consequence, her confidence has also improved a great deal. My only concern is that she may not be able to cope without it if and when it is removed from the keyboard.

I ordered a Keyboard Indicator to keep in my piano room, and yesterday it arrived from Amazon. Setting it up on my piano (to make sure it fitted properly), I found myself checking some chords in both the Debussy and Gershwin preludes I am learning, where the right hand is taken to the very upper registers of the keyboard, a place I do not visit that often. I must say it was jolly useful to be able to make a quick check, annotate the score and then play the music, but fearing “dependence”, I quickly consigned the indicator to the top drawer of my desk, and carried on with the Debussy in my usual fashion. At the end of the day, only repetitive practise will truly fix those high chords in my head and fingers.

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At the party on Sunday, one of the guests, a friend of mine who is a regular companion at the Wigmore and other concerts, was talking about Alfred Brendel’s habit of protecting his fingertips with sticking plaster. He’s been doing it for years: my mother, who was a bit of a Brendel groupie years ago, remembers seeing his bound fingers at concerts, and I noticed it while watching a tv programme of him playing at the Aldeburgh Festival the other year.

I have always felt that Brendel’s sticking plaster is a virtuoso affectation, and I know I am not alone in this view. I cannot believe that his fingertips are so fragile that five or six hours of daily piano practice can really do that much damage. It’s true I have skinned a fingertip, playing glissandos (incorrectly, as it turns out) in a piece by Debussy, but I have never practiced so much that my fingertips actually bleed. Maybe I am not practising enough?!

What also puzzles me about Brendel’s sticking plaster habit is that so much of piano playing is about touch, particularly through the sensitive tips of the fingers, through which we draw information about weight, tone, quality of sound, transmitting this back to the brain which in turn processes it, enabling minute adjustments in touch to be made all the time. At my lesson last month, my teacher actually made me play the opening of the Poulenc Suite in C with my eyes shut, forcing me to concentrate on touch (and quality of sound). So, if Brendel’s fingers are bound in plaster, how does he collect information from the keyboard? Or is he so supremely confident in his art that he does not need to?

Practising the aforementioned Poulenc this morning (8.30 am, definitely the right time of day for Poulenc!), I was aware of my fingers tingling after I’d been playing for about 40 minutes. It was not unpleasant; rather, it was akin to the sensation in my legs when I have been running for about 10 minutes, a pleasing sense of physical exertion. The sensation remained after I left the piano to get a drink of water, but it had passed by the time I started work on Chopin at 9.30.

The Chopin Etude, however, makes my hands and fingers hurt. I have to be careful with my right hand as I suffer from chronic tenosynovitis, which can flare up at a moment’s notice if I have been playing octaves or not allowing my hand to return to its natural position, and can keep me away from the piano for days or weeks at a time. In the “dreaded sixths” passage, my fingers and hands ache, which makes playing the remainder of the Etude much harder. Sometimes when practising this piece, my hands feel like claws: tense and hard. I have discussed this at length with my teacher, someone with a special interest in hand health and flexibility, and she said I would probably have to live with it. The notes in this Etude do not always lie comfortably under the fingers, probably a deliberate ploy on the composer’s part. It is meant to be a study after all – and one which tests the strength and sensitivity of the fourth and fifth fingers of the right hand throughout.

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“Practise a tricky section five times. If you make a mistake, go back and start again. Play it perfectly five times, and you can consider it “done” and then move onto the next thing….”

This is a mantra oft-repeated to my students, most of whom greet such useful, teacherly advice with much shrugging of shoulders and rolling of eyes. One or two remember it, and so when I ask them how they intend to practise a problem area, they will repeat my mantra back to me. I assure them that I also use the same dictum when I am practising, but they don’t always look convinced!

In reality, I probably practise a tricky section many more than five times at one sitting, but the “five times rule” is helpful in keeping me focussed when a problematic passage is beginning to frustrate. “One more go and you can move on…” I mutter to myself as I repeat that same passage for the nth time and wonder if I will ever permit myself to move on to another section. Sometimes, when I’ve been practising the nasty bits of the Chopin Op 10 no 3 Etude over and over again for nearly an hour, I treat myself – and my neighbours who are probably forced to listen to the tedious repetitions – to a complete play-through of the piece. This is not just self-indulgent wish-fulfilment, where I hope that everything will fall into the right place at the right time; it also serves a practical purpose – to check that what I have been practising really has been taken in by head and hands.

Repetitive practise breeds familiarity, not just with the music open on the rack in front of you, annotated with all sorts of very personal markings, fingerings, reminders and hints which become crucial signposts on the map (pink dots to highlight to remind me to pedal carefully, the words “WATCH IT!!” in bold, gestural strokes, exhorting me to keep focussed in a passage where my attention is liable to wander to check what my hands are doing, causing me to lose my place in the score), but also with the landscape of the keyboard and the physical sensation of the notes under the fingers. Repetition informs muscular memory, enabling the fingers to fall in the right place more often than not, and, eventually, one hopes, every time. Learning the patterns, the feel of a particular passage as well as the sound, all contribute to the overall process. In time, all these ‘learning components” come together, and one can enjoy that special moment when everything seems to slot into place and you play as if standing back from the music momentarily, playing at arm’s length, as it were. I love this sense of disengagement, of watching myself play. I feel it sometimes when I’m swimming, or running – a rare, special synergy. Yet, as my teacher pointed out when we were discussing it once, it is at this point that the mind and body are fully engaged, concentrating fiercely.

Even though I tend to employ the same strategies for learning new work, it never fails to amaze me how an hour of going over the same passage again and again can result in noticeable progress along the sometimes steep learning curve. There are times too, though, when a passage repeated again and again just fails to “go in”. I remember feeling this with a short piece by Delius I tried to learn last winter. It was a gorgeous piece, but full of bear traps to trip up the unwary, and it always felt awkward under my hands. However hard I tried with it, it never felt comfortable, and in the end, I reluctantly had to admit defeat and set it aside. It is rare, these days, for me to give up on a piece of music, but sometimes even the “five times rule” fails to achieve the desired outcome.

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Practising yesterday at the end of the afternoon, when the temperature had cooled a little and it was more comfortable to work in my piano room, it occurred to me that often there is a right time, and a wrong time, to practise certain pieces.

I’m learning a late Haydn Sonata, his penultimate one (Hob. XVI: 51 No. 61, composed in London in the 1790s) in cheerful D major (that’s royal blue, if we are talking ‘synaesthesically’!), with a first movement that is both sprightly and gentle, moving forward from a proud opening voice to a dialogue which alternates between melody and accompaniment. The brief, graceful development section shows some unexpected twists, with a truly Beethovenian climax, and some delightful cantabile passages. It closes surpisingly quietly. The second movement has chorale and fugal qualities, with offbeat dynamic accents, again prefiguring Beethoven. It moves forward with a clear purpose towards an abrupt ending. This is a grandiose sonata, though perhaps not as august as the E-flat major sonata which succeeds it.

I used to play quite a lot of Haydn when I was in my early teens, and then rather forgot about him, favouring Beethoven and Schubert instead. Although the D Major sonata lasts little more than five minutes, there is nothing mere about its content: it is one of those pieces which looks easy – the notes are not difficult and are comfortable under the hand – but has hidden depths, requiring some careful learning. It’s a good compliment to the rest of my current repertoire (Chopin, Gershwin, Debussy and Poulenc). I love the clarity of a Classical sonata, and it has warmth and nobility within its two short movements.

Yesterday, I practised for an hour and a half, Poulenc first, then Chopin Op 10 no 3 (just the tricky bits – the chromatic augmented fourths, the dreaded sixths, the brief cross-rhythms in the last section), before throwing myself, rather too energetically it must be said, at Gershwin’s first Prelude, which I love at the moment (and hope I will continue to love as I have another three pages, and the Third Prelude still to learn!). The Haydn seemed a good piece to round off my practise session, but as soon as I started to play it (badly!), I knew I had come to it at the wrong time of day. My hands and arms felt leaden and tired, my fingers fat and jelly-like, sliding all over the place, smearing notes and muffing easy runs. The octaves dragged, the triplets were uneven, and I ended up feeling very hot and frustrated.

Haydn merits an early start, I think, when one is clear-headed and fresh, and the piano room is cool. The piece deserves care and attention as each note must be heard and valued. It needs to sound unforced, yet elegant, lofty yet unprententious. Today I began my practising with the Haydn and the difference was noticeable: it was a whole lot better –  indeed, it felt like a different piece!

The Poulenc Suite in C is another case in point. This too benefits from early morning practising. Like the Haydn, it needs great clarity, with a pureness of expression which highlights both the naive and the elegant qualities of the melodies.

Debussy, on the other hand, seems to fare better when practised in the afternoon – and the hot days, with a light breeze drifting in through the open French doors, are the perfect backdrop for his ‘Voiles’. I find myself listening to the wind rustling the bamboo trees in my garden, lifting leaves off the ground, swirling little eddies of dust – and sometimes, just sometimes, I find I can recreate the same sensations at the piano.