I was wondering approximately how long (in your respective personal experiences) does it take to learn a totally new piece from scratch (say, a 10 minute long showpiece like Introduction and Rondo Capriciosso)?
This is assuming one has (or is nearing) the technical level to play the piece
Thanks in advance, and I'm looking forward your replies!
Tweet
The efficiency of your practise also matters a lot, but it's a lot easier to comment on your habits in hindsight than when first starting a piece.
Three months.
Consider the Queen Elisabeth Competition. There, the finalists have to learn a new show-piece written just for that competition, and they're given a matter of some days -- in seclusion -- to do it. So, for them, in terms of technical readiness, the answer is:
Three days.
On the other hand, let's say you're a violin student who's just finished the first movement of the Bruch Concerto. In other words, you have arrived at the fabled "Bruch Level" of violin playing after, say, six years of diligent work with a great teacher. For you, wanting to learn the IRC specifically, I have a different answer:
Three years.
Then, let's say you're at the "Bruch Level" but you just feel like going back to Suzuki Book 6 and learning "La Folia" because your teacher never assigned you that one. In that case my answer is:
Three hours.
A while back I posted about levels of mastery in learning a piece, which you can find here: LINK
(Laurie, both that page and the thread that it links to appear to be unfindable using the site's search engine, unfortunately.)
For my son (highly motivated, young teen, super fast memorizer, excellent sightreader): one week to actually learn the piece, one more week to get to the point where he can start playing it musically. By the end of three weeks he is usually at 95-98% polished. Now the last little bit and nailing everything consistently...that can take forever.
For my daughter (not motivated, 10yo, fast memorizer, great ear, not a good sightreader): three weeks to learn the notes, four to six weeks until it is performable. She gets bored at that point and since she mostly just plays for fun we usually move on.
Probably Susan's son will get to conservatoire and there he will have a teacher who knows how to take a violinist who sounds awfully damned good to most of us and make them sound good to the vastly more critical ears of competition judges and orchestral audition panels. And that point on the learning curve is probably very exciting and thrilling and maybe a little scary too. I'll never know, but I certainly wish him the best on that journey.
But I think Bach, and trying to record it will push me to really polish-out the intonation stuff and be rigorous. Those kids that are "naturals" surely had to work hard for it too!
I missed an entrance in a performance once (a solo with orchestra) and I had to crib the conductor's score. Fortunately it was "just" the "warm up" concert for a small audience of seniors but I learned my lesson about studying my entrances. In the main performance I nailed it.
If you learn an orchestral part the time you have is from the first rehearsal (ideally some little time before that but in my experience you rarely get your hands on the sheet music before the first rehearsal) to the performance and you have to make the learning happen in that time no matter how short it is.
For a private string quartet session you may sight-read without any learning. Or you can agree beforehand on the pieces to be played and you'll have a couple of days to raise the level from sight-reading to prepared sight-reading. It depends on the group.
If you learn a piece as part of your violin lessons you keep learning until your teacher decides that you have learned enough or else that you are unable to lean more about the piece, whichever comes first.
If you learn a piece for yourself without a teacher it is the same thing except that you have to decide yourself. Or you give up because the piece starts to bore you...
The common denominator in all these cases: There is no definite endpoint to the learning; you can always go on improving details, trying different ways to present the music etc.
Of course sometimes you just ask yourself: Did I really choose this fingering (or bowing) a year ago? How stupid I was! But even that helps you improve.
It depends... Principally it depends on you, your ability to focus, practice, study,...
Most of all I have to quote "The Spice Girls" - "Now tell me what you want, what you really, really want..." The reality is that if you "want" to accomplish something, really, really want to accomplish it the amount of time required to accomplish the task will not matter. If, what the goal is something that you don't really want to do or is being imposed on you, you will never completely learn the piece or enjoy the process of learning it.
The one thing I have learned in my seven-plus decades is is that motivation comes from within, or it doesn't come at all.
When I post videos on YouTube, I usually note how many hours of practice have gone into the piece at the time to the video was taken. In many cases, it's under 10 hours at performance time. I don't sound as polished as a young whiz, of course.
For solo repertoire...well I'm on a ~5/6 month slog through a concerto right now, but that's without truly "good" practice. In the past sometimes I would only get 15-20 minutes in. And I am still miles away from memorization/performance.
Right as the quarantine started, I got a new job and was super busy dealing with that, but in the past 2/3 weeks I have been consistently getting above 1 hour of decent practice in per day. Trying to really get up to 2x 1 hour sessions per day if at all possible. I think it would really accelerate my advancement.
In general, one week to get, say, five to ten minutes of appropriate-level but challenging music learned under tempo, and then another to get it to tempo or close to it. That's probably one to three weeks to learn the notes of a concerto movement depending on length, and the full concerto at a student-recital level in maybe three months.
For me, the optimal practice length is 40-minute sessions, multiple times a day. I made excellent progress when I was able to put in 80 minutes a day, time that's just not available to me these days.
And honestly, it could easily take 2-3x that long. I may be overestimating my ability.
I remember reading in a book of interviews of classical pianists ("Great Contemporary Pianists Speak for Themselves", a really terrific book) about a pianist (name escapes me) who taught for a time at Northwestern and couldn't wrap his mind around the idea that someone would call themselves a piano student but couldn't entirely learn two sonatas per week.
It's an interview with MAXIM VENGEROV about his first performance of the Shostakovich Violin Concerto No. 1. In 1994, when he was 19 years old he was invited to perform and record this concerto with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Rostropovich ("Slava"). He had never studied this concerto although he "loved it." He met with Slava to discuss it and started a close friendship that lasted the remaining 17 years of Slava's live. And then he went on to say:
"So then I had to learn the concerto. I think it's the one I spent the least amount of time practising** - I had four days before the first rehearsal with the LSO and I managed to do it in time."
** spelling!! The STRAD is a British publication.
The Medical Home: Locus of Physician Formation -
NCBIwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov › pmc › articles › PMC3776409
... the growing alignment of quality and incentive, has shifted the locus of care from the patient–provider level to the organizational level of the medical practice.
by TP Daaleman - ?2008 - ?Cited by 24 - ?Related articles
This discussion has been archived and is no longer accepting responses.
Violinist.com is made possible by...
Dimitri Musafia, Master Maker of Violin and Viola Cases
Violinist.com Guide to Online Learning
ARIA International Summer Academy
Johnson String Instrument and Carriage House Violins
Discover the best of Violinist.com in these collections of editor Laurie Niles' exclusive interviews.
Violinist.com Interviews Volume 1, with introduction by Hilary Hahn
Violinist.com Interviews Volume 2, with introduction by Rachel Barton Pine