Journal · 15 July 2026
Easy parts are hard to learn
The easy parts are the ones most easily neglected. A session that balances challenge, polish and the joins between phrases is how a piece becomes playable from beginning to end.
Most practice sessions begin with the same decision. The difficult bars come first, because they are the ones that make the piece feel unfinished, and they deserve the freshest attention. That instinct is right. Followed without a plan, it produces a familiar result.
Everything else in the piece stands still while the difficulty is being solved. Some of it slips. A passage that was secure a fortnight ago returns unsteady, and the opening page, which nobody believed needed work, develops a small hesitation that was not there before. A piece is a whole surface, and neglect shows up somewhere.
Easy parts are hard to learn because they do not announce themselves. A passage that plays cleanly in isolation appears to need nothing, so it receives nothing, and the session returns to the bars that are visibly fighting back. A second, less comfortable reason also applies. Difficult material is uncomfortable to sit with, and the easy passage offers somewhere to go that feels like practice without the discomfort. Ten minutes of tidying a page that is already playable can hide an hour of avoiding the passage that is difficult.
Easy parts are hard to learn because they do not announce themselves.
Some balance is required, and a workable split is forty, thirty, twenty, ten. Forty per cent goes to the challenges you have diagnosed. Thirty per cent refines the material that is already secure. Twenty per cent goes to playing sections together, from one phrase into the next. The last ten per cent is for warm-ups and drills. The proportions are a starting point, and they shift as a piece matures. The principle underneath them is that every kind of work gets a place in the week.
The twenty per cent is the part most players forget. Working on bars teaches bars. A performer needs something else, which is the ability to move through the piece without stopping, to carry the memory of what comes next, and to let one phrase end in a way that sets up the next. Those skills live at the joins. Practise only in isolated fragments and the joins never get built. That is how a collection of well-learned phrases fails to become a performance.
Practise only in isolated fragments and the joins never get built.
Putting sections together is different from playing the piece from the beginning every day. A daily run-through burns time that the hard bars need, and it teaches the piece in a single, unvarying order. The useful version is smaller and more deliberate. Play the last bars of one section into the first bars of the next. Play a transition at half tempo. Restart from three different points in the same page. The aim is to make every entry into a phrase available, so that a mistake in bar thirty does not force a return to bar one.
The research on practice schedules supports this kind of alternation. In a study with advanced clarinettists, Christine Carter and Jessica Grahn found that alternating between passages produced better playing a day later than working through one passage in a long block. The blocked version feels more productive while it is happening, which is precisely its danger. Robert Bjork's work on desirable difficulties makes the same point from the other direction. The ease felt during practice is a poor guide to what will be remembered, and the conditions that slow learning down often make it stick.
The forty per cent is the part that needs the most diagnosis. A difficult passage is rarely difficult in one way. It might be a fingering problem, a rhythm that is misread, a voicing that needs separating, or a memory with no anchor. Work on one problem at a time. Repetition without a plan reinforces the faults it is meant to remove, and a passage played until it feels better can just as easily have rehearsed the fault as removed it.
Repetition without a plan reinforces the faults it is meant to remove.
The thirty per cent has a quieter job. Secure material still decays, and it carries the line while the hard passages are being rebuilt. A refined easy passage does real work. It is the part of the piece an audience hears as music, and it needs enough attention to stay clean at tempo. Spacing that attention over weeks keeps it there.
The final ten per cent builds the vocabulary the piece draws on. Scales, arpeggios, a rhythm drill, a few minutes of hands separately on a familiar pattern. Treating them as a warm-up ritual to be skipped when time is short costs more than it saves. They are the movements the piece is assembled from, and a pianist who owns them learns new passages faster.
Holding four kinds of work in view at once is where a written plan earns its place. Quaverley keeps every phrase of a piece in the schedule. It gives the diagnosed challenges the most time, returns to secure material before it slips, and builds the joins into the work instead of leaving them to chance. The balance changes from day to day as the piece changes, and the record shows which kind of work has been missing.
A piece is finished when it can be played from the first bar to the last without an unplanned stop. Conquering the hardest bars is one condition of that. The others are the polish on the pages that were never in doubt, and the joins that only exist when the whole thing is played.
Notes
- Bjork, R. A., & Bjork, E. L. (2011). Making things hard on yourself, but in a good way. In Psychology and the real world (pp. 56–64). Worth Publishers.
- Carter, C. E., & Grahn, J. A. (2016). Optimizing music learning: Exploring how blocked and interleaved practice schedules affect advanced performance. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 1251.
