Comments

What an interesting question, Karen. On a cello forum I used to visit, someone wrote that it was a kind of 'spiral': you work on a piece and get it to your personal best at the time. Then you put it aside, improve, and come back to the piece a year or so later, bringing it to another level. And so on.

This makes a lot of sense, it acknowledges that one is never really finished with a piece, but one also doesn't labour at it constantly, perhaps getting bored with it.

My criteria for the sense of being 'temporarily finished' with a piece depend on the circumstances. Sometimes it's a performance, sometimes feeling that I can't play it to my satisfaction yet and need to put it aside and work on technique and easier pieces, sometimes it's a quartet piece that my quartet group gets tired of working on etc.

Simon Fisher in his book 'Practice' suggests that we should spend some time each week playing through core repertoire pieces that we're not officially 'learning', just to familiarise ourselves with them. Then, when we really work on them, they won't be completely foreign territory.

As a keen quartet player, I'm also trying to play through and put fingerings and 'X - difficult spot' markings in all the 1st vln parts for Mozart, Beethoven (not late), Mendelssohn, Brahms and Haydn quartets, to eventually have them all up to a reasonable 'play through' standard, so that quartet sessions become easier and more enjoyable. So my 'temporarily finished' standard for those currently would be getting through without total collapse, with good tone and intonation and some expression. Not a high standard admittedly, but a challenge for me!

Couldn't you have used a better simile? I live like a mile from the I-90 in Upstate NY. lol