Step #1:
Read through the entire score
By “read through the score,” I don’t mean with your instrument. It’s tempting to pick up your instrument and start playing as if you are reading a book.
But at LPM, we do things efficiently. What we need is a plan to learn a piece.
Look:
When you travel to a new city, you first look at a map and understand your route before taking the walk or the ride. So why not read through the score first to understand the piece before playing it with an instrument?
You can either read through the notes carefully from the first note to the last or do several rounds of score reading and pay attention to different things every time.
For example, you can check all structural things, such as key areas, time signatures, double bars, or repeat signs for the first round. Then you can look at dynamic and tempo markings as well as any instructions from the composer. Finally, you can read through the piece closely and try to sound it out in your head.
Somewhere in these steps, you should also look up any foreign words that you are not familiar with and make notes in the score. (Our article on
110 musical terms
might be of help.) A general overview can give you a blueprint of the piece.
Besides the musical contents, it is also important to take a step back and understand the background information about the piece—styles, periods, and composers.
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For example, you might need to add ornamentations for a Baroque piece but follow the composer’s instructions closely if it’s a twentieth-century work. Knowing the composer, or even the composer’s other works can help you better convey the style or the context.
Step # 2:Listen to recordings, Make notes
Some people like to listen to recordings.
Before I learn a saxophone piece, I tend to look up if any of my favorite saxophonists—Arnold Bornkamp or Nobuya Sugawa—had recorded it.
Some people don’t want to be influenced too much and like to figure out their interpretations first. If you decided to listen to others’ renditions, listen to the recordings with the score and jot down anything worth noting. While not everyone follows this step and it is not even mandatory, but it is a very effective way to speed up your learning.
Step # 3:Play through the entire piece once, slowly. Again, make notes.
<p>After you have read through and listened to the piece, it’s now time for to play through it.Before you go all guns blazing, don’t forget the purpose of this step is not to play it as if you are performing it. Rather, you are studying the piece through your instrument.
Try to experience the phrasing, structure, and how the sentences follow or respond to each other. Stop anytime to make notes in the score. Write down fingerings when necessary.
By the time you finish this step, you should have general ideas like its title and form to specific things such as phrase structures, textures, articulations, fingerings, etc.
Also, if the piece is long, play through one big chunk slowly each time.
Step # 4:Break the piece into workable chunks.
Next, it’s time to find some logical breaks in the piece of music you are learning.
You might find it easier to break the piece into two halves, the two halves into two more halves, and then smaller phrases in the four sections. Or you might want to go from the beginning, mark any places where you can take a break, and see how these phrases can be combined into larger sections.
A quick and easy way to find the breaks is to imagine playing music as if you are talking.
When you talk, you take breaths where commas and periods should be in a written passage. It’s more natural for wind players to identify places for breathing, but the analogy is applicable to pianists, guitarists, and drummers.
The exact method varies from piece to piece, player to player. So you just have to find what works best for you. In the case of the Lully piece in the video, the score clearly indicates a three-part structure: ABA. Within each section, the phrases give clues of where the breaks are.
Step # 5: Use various techniques for different passages
Now that you have broken the piece into smaller chunks, you can learn them one by one.
Each section will take different amount of time. Some sections might be straightforward and you only need to make sure that you have followed all the instructions. Some sections might be technically or musically challenging, in which case you want to identify the difficult aspects and find ways to tackle them.
One important point to remember:
When you find one section particularly challenging, take time to learn it and know that this will build your technique. If you do so for each piece you learn, you’ll find that pieces of the same level become easier and you are able to more quickly learn more difficult works.