Practice Hacks: Learning a New Piece with Enescu's Cantabile et Presto (Part 1)

In this post, I take a tour through my approach to learning new repertoire. In part two, I show you how I apply this 4-step process to Cantabile et Presto.

My process boils down to 4 essential steps:

1. Find information about the composer and the work itself

2. Break the piece into composite elements

3. Find etudes and exercises to help the preparation

4. Break the piece into practice sections

Step 1: Research Phase

There are a couple of books that I regularly reference when beginning a new work: Kyle Dzapo's Notes for Flutists: A Guide to the Repertoire and Nancy Toff's The Flute Book. Between these two texts, I can usually piece together a relatively comprehensive history of the work I'm performing and gain an idea of the life and style of the composer that wrote the piece. This is an essential step that helps me contextualize my preparation and guides my interpretation. (If the piece I'm working on isn't mentioned in those texts, I hop on google scholar to see if anyone wrote their thesis or dissertation on the work and skim through the relevant sections.)

Step 2: Break the piece into composite elements

In this stage, I look at the score and parse out the essential technique that the piece demands during performance. This is the most generic breakdown I can come up with so that I can practice those elements outside of the context of the piece and then bring them back when I need to apply them. (Stuff like double tonguing at a fast tempo, playing with various tone colors, rapid scales and arpeggios, extended techniques, etc.)

Step 3: Find etudes and exercises to help in the preparation

Over the years, I have found that when I encounter a challenging element of a piece and practice it solely within the context of the piece, I build a mental wall. This wall tells me that I find this section difficult and I have the history in the practice room telling me of all the times I have unsuccessfully attempted that section. So, every time I go to perform the piece, I know it's coming and know I have to scale that wall, and hopefully successfully scale it the first time. So, after years of this happening, I finally decided to practice whatever that element is in things outside of the piece so that when I see it in the piece I can think, "oh! I've seen that before! I've played a figure like that in every major and minor key already!"

In this step, I like to use studies that I'm already familiar with (e.g. Berbiguier, Andersen, Reichert, etc.) so that I can 1. feel successful with what I'm doing and 2. build on prior experiences. This is especially useful if I'm returning to etudes/repertoire/exercises that I haven't seen in a while and were difficult at the time I first learned them. If you've ever gone back to etudes you studied a year before and thought, "huh, I remember this being harder last time," then you have an idea of what I mean. It's important to build this confidence so that in performance you can refer to feeling successful and have a positive mindset, even in the most challenging parts of the work. Remember: repertoire is not the time or place to learn and build technique, it's where you apply the technique you've built by practicing scales, arpeggios, etudes, etc.

Step 4: Break the Piece into Practice Sections

This is one of my favorite things to do when I sit down with any piece. This is where I turn the work into a jigsaw puzzle and then sort the pieces by color. What this means, is that sections of the work that share similar material and ideas get lumped together no matter where in the work they are. So, if you have rapid scales in the andante movement and in the allegro movement then they would get sorted into the same category. Got a lot of arpeggios across the work? They can all go in one category as well. Have a phrase that comes back in various guises across the work? All in one category they go!

You might be wondering why I don't just make practice sections based on the form of the work and I do that too! But that's in a later learning stage when I've already gotten my hands around the basic technique required to execute the piece (i.e. I've learned the notes and rhythms and am working up to performance tempi and honing in on my interpretation.)

Now that you've gotten an idea of the what and why... head to Part 2 of this post to see how I apply those ideas to Cantabile et Presto