Why Learning a New Piece Makes an Old One Better

Diminishing Returns

Many players believe that in order to improve a piece and therefore improve as a player, you have to keep practicing that piece until it’s perfect. However, there are also many players that have had the experience of going back to a piece that they played a while ago and noticing that the piece looks significantly easier than they believed it was at the time, and they are seeing things in the piece of music that they weren’t seeing before.

You may notice chords that you hadn't seen before, some easier fingers that you weren't using, a pattern in the notes or even something like the structure that you hadn't noticed. However, if you haven't been working on the piece, then why is it that things start to pop out to you so easily now?

The interesting thing is that the amount that you can improve a piece isn't consistent throughout the learning process. When you first start learning a piece, there are lots of obvious things to improve. You're learning the notes, figuring out the fingering, coordinating your hands and learning how the different sections fit together. You can make a lot of progress in a relatively short amount of time. But when you get closer to the end of a piece, the improvements get smaller and it becomes much more difficult to make the same kind of progress.

In 30 minutes, when you first start learning a piece, you may learn several bars. You may work out the key, the chords, the fingers and many other things that allow you to start playing. Whereas nearer the end of a piece, you may need to drill four notes repeatedly in a particular way in order to see improvement, or you may need to focus on small movements of the wrist. Of course, it's very important to spend time on those nuances. However, the question becomes: is spending more time on those nuances always the fastest way to develop the ability to play them?

Transfer

For those that have spent any amount of time in the gym training with weights, you may know that when you first start training, from session to session, you can see quick improvements in the amount of weight that you can lift. However, there comes a point where you aren't able to make the same kind of improvement anymore.

This is where you can use a concept called “progressive overload”. In the context of weight training, this means gradually increasing the demands placed on your body by playing with certain variables, whether that's by increasing the weight, the repetitions, or some other aspect of the exercise. For those that reach a plateau where they are stuck being able to only lift the same amount of weight for the same amount of repetitions each time, they will deliberately increase the weight and lower the repetitions in order to progressively overload. This has the effect of making the weight that you could previously lift feel easier. It forces your body to adapt to something more difficult.

The body is quite interesting because not only does this concept apply to physical improvement, such as in weightlifting, but it also applies to cognitive improvement. The way that we learn tends to be by progressively overloading the demands on our brain (and hands/body, in the case of the piano). When heading towards the end of learning a piece, it is very similar to reaching a plateau with a certain amount of weight when weightlifting. You can try harder and harder to make those final few improvements in the piece, or you can increase the difficulty and work through something more challenging slowly.

This is often why, after learning a more difficult piece, returning to an easy piece feels a lot easier. It takes advantage of the same phenomenon as lifting a heavy weight, and therefore a lighter weight feeling a lot lighter.

Value

The reality is that, in music, learning a new piece of music comes with its own set of new challenges, and those new challenges improve you as a player in general. We notice immediate improvements in a piece of music when you learn a new bar and you're able to play it better than you could before. That is something that you can immediately see. However, we tend to ignore the improvements that we generally make as a player. For example, the way that we practice, what we notice in pieces of music, the patterns that we now recognise, our technique and ability to move on the piano, these are all things that improve from piece to piece without noticing them.

When we return to a piece of music that we haven't played for a while, we aren't coming back to that piece of music as the player that we were at the time, when that was a piece at the edge of our capabilities. We're returning to that piece as a player with many new skills and a new outlook on the piece of music.

There is a difference between finishing a piece and getting everything you need from a piece. Of course, it’s valuable to spend time getting a piece performance ready for many different reasons. However, sometimes moving on is what allows you to improve not only the piece of music, but also as a player, as you come across new challenges that change the way that you understand music. Sometimes learning a new piece is exactly the thing that makes the old piece better.

Matt