When Are You Ready to Play a Piece?

The title is a little cringey to me. Being ‘ready’ to play a piece… But I want to address this question. I think it’s a common question to have for people who are learning the cello. My answer is at the very end of this piece of writing.

And the longer story starts here:

When I was taking cello lessons as a child, my teacher gave me music that was way too challenging for me at the time. He gave me the cello concertos that I was listening to on CDs, although most other teachers would have saved those for much later in my development.

What were the consequences of my teacher’s generosity?

Well, I did have to experience being ‘set back’ by the next teacher who gave me not the pieces I wanted to play but the pieces and exercises that would help me develop technically, something that my previous teacher had not done at all.

But, I had experienced the thrill of playing my favorite music, which made me get up early in the mornings so that I could play for a few minutes before school. That feeling of playing the most beautiful music I could think of, made a lasting impression on me which made me want to continue to learn and to play, despite having to go through a phase of catching up technically.

As a cello teacher myself, I’m aware that I’m expected to know when a pupil is ‘ready’ for this or that piece of music. What I find though, is that the right piece of music is determined not just by your abilities, the things that I can observe on the outside, but on your approach to repertoire, what’s going on on the inside.

If you have a tendency to feel inadequate/disillusioned/uninspired/down/stressed when challenges show themselves in the music you’re learning, I should probably give you a piece that you can play fairly well fairly soon. Otherwise, those powerful emotions can become a barrier between you and the joy of cello practice.

But if you see a new piece of music as a new long-term friend, I’ll give you a piece that you can grow with and revisit again and again. When the bar is a little higher, there is also more to discover.

When I was playing on my parents’ piano as a child, I preferred to play the first 4 measures of Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ over and over again, rather than to learn music that was easy enough for me at the time. For me, having just a taste of what it feels like to play my favorite music was way more rewarding than to play music for the sake of my technical development.

Of course, we don’t have to choose either or. In my teaching I try to combine technical development with the music that is inspiring for each and every one. And this means that sometimes we only manage a few bars of a piece. That’s ok! It doesn’t hurt to dip your toe into something in order to get an idea of which technical aspects you need to get more comfortable with before you can play your dream piece with more ease. Put it aside and revisit it later.

At home I have a piece collecting dust on a shelf. It’s a piece that I never played properly, it’s just so technically challenging. Will I ever be ‘ready’ to play that piece? Well, I guess I’m ready on the day that I decide to blow off the dust, lay it on the table and learn the rhythm. Then, placing the music on my music stand, getting my cello out, and starting with the first note.

I think that we easily get overwhelmed by the number of notes and the amount of information on the page. We see a lot of black lines and dots, and it’s too much. We’re forgetting that we’re not actually playing everything on the page at the same time! We play note by note. One at a time.

Will I be able to execute the very first note of the piece? Yes, most likely. Then, how about the first two notes? And thus, I can slowly start to acquaint myself with the piece. Will I play it perfectly? No. But with music, if we wait until we are ‘ready to play something perfectly’… there’s just not much we’ll ever be able to play. The greatest cellists perform and record their Bach Suites over and over again. Do they think that their playing is perfect?

Waiting for ‘perfection’ is unrealistic.

Being ‘ready’ to play a piece has to do with you;

what brings you the most joy - what you are curious about - where your interests lie - what makes sense to you - and what inspires you.