Why You Never Feel Like You’ve Finished a Piece
Finish
At the very beginning of learning the piano, pieces can somewhat feel “done” because what you classify as done is very different. Let’s say you open a beginner book for the first time. The aim is typically to read the correct notes with the correct note lengths. This is something that you either did correctly or you didn’t, so deciding when to move on is much simpler. However, as you continue learning the piano, there becomes much more nuance. For example, when we introduce the concept of dynamics, the music could say “f”, which means forte (loud), but forte can mean different things in different situations, and now we’ve introduced some ambiguity as to whether you’re doing the right thing.
As you get better and better at the piano, more of these types of things show up until the piece is littered with things that are not wrong but could be more musical. Then there is also the sheer number of things that pile on top of each other. Once again, at the start of learning the piano, your hand stays in one position, for example, with one finger on each key. But as the music gets more difficult, you have to think about the fingering at the same time as the dynamics, the notes, the rhythms, the coordination, the shaping, etc.
Essentially, the better you get, the more things there are to think about, and the more things can go wrong. Not only can things go wrong, but even the things that go right could still be better. This means that you can end up in a situation where a piece never feels finished because you always feel like there is something else that needs to be done to improve it.
Standards
Most pianists will also have experienced the moving goalposts, where you come back to a piece of music that you learned in the past, and suddenly there are loads more things that you notice need improving. This is because, as you get better, more things become obvious to you. When you first learn a piece, you don’t know what you don’t know, but as you learn more music, those things become impossible to ignore.
The first time you learn a piece of music, many players default to just trying to get the notes right, whereas a more experienced musician might be more concerned about the concepts of “balance” and “voicing”, for example, which is essentially where you have a different volume for each of your hands, or in some cases between the fingers within one hand. For an absolute beginner pianist opening a beginner book for the first time, this is not even on their radar. As you get more things under control within your playing, you begin to notice these concepts that really change how the music sounds.
This could mean that every time you solve one layer, another one appears, a little bit like playing whack-a-mole. The finish line keeps moving further and further away. However, this changing of the goalposts shouldn’t be a sign that you are failing to get to the end of the piece. In fact, quite the opposite. It should be a sign that you’re becoming a much better and more comprehensive player.
Absolute beginners tend only to hear absolute beginner problems, such as the notes themselves, whereas those further on with their playing are able to notice much more subtle problems. Being able to hear these more subtle issues is actually a strong sign that you are improving. So, while of course I’m going to give you ways of deciding when you can call a piece “finished”, to judge your level of improvement, instead of measuring whether a piece feels "finished" or not, you could measure whether your definition of "finished" has become more nuanced.
Completion
Ultimately, there isn’t such a thing as a perfectly finished piece. In fact, what you consider finished today might change over time as your perspective changes, your life changes, and what you feel the music should represent changes. There are many pieces that I played back when I was a teenager that I returned to a decade or more later, and my perspective on the piece and the way I felt it should be played had completely changed.
So, in that sense, a piece is never really finished. However, there is a point where a piece has stopped teaching you enough to justify the time that you’re putting into it. There comes a point near the end of learning a piece where learning a new piece with different problems is going to serve you better. So here are some questions to ask yourself to help you work out whether it’s time to move on.
- Can you reliably play all of the notes throughout the entire piece?
- Are the remaining mistakes occasional, or do the same ones keep recurring?
- Are the remaining mistakes technical or musical? (If you are physically struggling to play something, it’s usually worth fixing those technical issues before moving on.)
- Do any remaining mistakes significantly disrupt the flow and continuity of the music?
- Do you understand what the music is trying to communicate, rather than just the notes?
- Are you consistently playing the musical details, such as the dynamics, articulation, phrasing and pedalling, rather than just the correct notes?
- Do you think another week on this piece would be more valuable now, or after you’ve spent six months developing more skills through other repertoire?
Pieces of music rarely feel completely finished because there’s almost always something that could be refined. However, we can work out whether there is still value in continuing to practice them. Finishing a piece also doesn’t have to mean that you’re never going to play it again. It simply becomes a piece that you play rather than one that you practice.
The truth is, the last 5% of learning a piece could take ten times as long as the first 95%. So, it’s often better to take that 95% from this piece and carry it forward to the next one. Of course, if you’re preparing for an exam, a performance or a competition, spending that extra time to boost the percentage a little higher might be exactly the right thing to do. But if your goal is simply becoming a better pianist, don’t ask yourself, “Is this piece perfect?” Instead, ask yourself, “Is this piece still the best use of my practice time?”.
Matt