In this month’s Pianist magazine tips article, I suggest ways to sharpen mental focus, helping to optimise both our attention span and concentration.

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We all know that feeling, don’t we? We are happily traversing our way through a favourite piano piece and then all of a sudden and seemingly out of no-where, we’ve lost our place and have no idea where we are! And in that split second, there appears to be no way back.

It’s hardly surprising that we lose our concentration so easily. Distractions are everywhere in this digitally fuelled age, where social media scrolling is the norm and where nothing much lasts beyond about thirty seconds. Our attention is wrenched in all different directions, and keeping focus can be a challenge during a performance, let alone during practice sessions.  

Pianists need to be able to coordinate a plethora of different physical and mental activities all at once when playing the piano, whilst all the time keeping their ears open to the sound world that they are producing. Therefore, how can we successfully extend our attention spans so that we are completely absorbed in our work and can fully immerse ourselves in our piano practice sessions? Here are some suggestions:

1.

Shut yourself off from the outside world. Well, maybe not quite, but almost! Switch your phone off (and any other distracting screen) – or move it well away from the piano and turn it to silent mode. Sit at the instrument in silence, away from family members, just thinking about what you want to achieve from this particular practice session.

2.

Write a piano ‘practice’ list. Make a note of those elements which demand your attention. Make sure that you cover everything needed within each session and ‘tick them off’ one-by-one when you have practised every aspect adequately. Aim to stay at the piano until you’ve satisfactorily accomplished your listed items.

3.

Only practice when your mind is fresh and receptive. That may be early in the morning, if that is your preferred practice time – but, equally, it may be that you enjoy working in the evening. Set a regular time and try to stick to it.

4.

Practice for short sessions. Perhaps think in terms of a 30-minute session and if you like to work longer than this, come back to the piano later in the day. In order to work sufficiently well, aim to slow down. Our thoughts often race at tremendous speed through our minds, but to think seriously about how to improve our playing, a careful, steady, solid thought process is usually optimal.

5.

Similarly to thinking slowly, moving slowly also has many benefits during practice sessions. My students often comment on how they find using a metronome as a reliable and stress-busting ‘background’ pulse really helpful when they practice. Set a slow beat as you start to play (subdividing the main beat is a good idea), and focus your mind on following that beat, just sitting on the pulse steadily as you play: you need to play really slowly to do this. The metronome can have a surprisingly meditative effect, and, in my experience, is capable of calming us down so that we don’t rush: this can encourage us to achieve far better focus through meditative ‘heightened awareness’, and it can also help us to learn note patterns and fingerings more thoroughly, as well as improving our rhythmic grasp. What’s not to like? Do try it!

www.pianistmagazine.com

Image by Lena Taranenko on Unsplash