In this month’s Pianist magazine tips article, I suggest ways to sharpen mental focus, helping to optimise both our attention span and concentration.
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!
Image by Lena Taranenko on Unsplash
Hi Melanie, Thank you very much for sharing.
Warm regards
Peter
Thank you, Peter. Glad you found the post of interest. Warm wishes, Melanie
This is a really helpful piece, Melanie. Thank you so much!
I’m so glad that you have found the post useful, Barbara! 🙂
Thank you, Melanie. It’s certainly good to be reminded of this.
Those are some excellent tips!
Best regards,
Martin
Thank you, Martin! 🙂
Excellent advice! Thank you Melanie!
Thank you, Lorraine! 🙂
These are timely insights; people’s lives are so overscheduled and chaotic. Do you have suggestions for working on these skills with elementary students? They seem to fall into two groups: the first group is actually trying to stay focused, and they’re quite tense – shoulders up around their ears, stiff wrists, etc. The second group struggles with focus, and it seems that every 5 seconds I have to remind them to think first, then play, or to stop between reps and decide if they did well or not. Boys especially seem to struggle with this. I believe that helping students learn to practice at a young age is the primary benefit of playing the piano (or other instrument), and since most of the parents aren’t musicians, am sometimes stumped at how to get them to do things the right way at home. Any insights you can share in the future would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for your continued postings and contributions! They’re a continued source of ideas and inspiration!
Hello Tracey. Thank you for your kind comments. I’m glad you found this post of interest. You make some good points. Regarding raised shoulders – this takes time to change and I work a lot on it with students. We do exercises that make them aware of their shoulders so that they become accustomed to the uncomfortable ‘raised’ feeling. We aim to loosen them as they play. Eventually my pupils do not raise their shoulders anymore, but it takes about a year of work, and this is with students who, although are quite young, are of a fairly advanced level. Relaxed/loose wrists go alongside the loosening of the shoulders, and again, I make students aware of this issue over time – wrists require a lot of exaggerated movement using ‘wrist circles’ in order to alleviate the tension, and we do it on certain repertoire. I talk about this in my Play it again: PIANO Books 1 and 2.
To the second point that you raise: stopping everywhere. This is a problem regarding hesitation and, generally, a lack of preparation. For this I encourage my students to set a VERY slow pulse on the metronome and ask them to play through their piece at a snails pace, ‘sitting’ on the metronome beat, so that they don’t rush and then they are able to ‘think’ their way through a piece without errors. They struggle at first, but after a while it becomes second nature. Then you raise the metronome speed accordingly. The issues you describe are pretty universal. I think success rate depends on the willingness of your student. If students aren’t that interested, then nothing you teach will make much difference. On the other hand, highly motivated, committed students can make vast improvements using these methods. Best wishes, Melanie