It is always daunting to start a new piece of music. You can feel the work ahead and want to learn the piece as fast as possible which can translate into "as little practice as possible". This is where many students run into trouble. We should strive to practice a new piece as much as possible and conquer the challenges that always reveal themselves. You can have a goal to learn a piece in a day, a week, or a month, but how much practice is going to be involved? Will it take an hour a day or four hours a day? For most students and their piece, if they truly put in one good hour a day, they could learn it in a week.
I recently worked up Mozart's Sonata K. 312, a modest one movement piece. Fortunately there wasn't a dead line and it took a couple of weeks.
A new piece needs to be practiced in sections. Mozart's Sonata is a great example because of the three sections in most of his sonatas; the exposition, development, and recapitulation. Why not start with the last section and work backwards? It doesn't matter really but you probably know, the first part of the piece usually gets the most practice. So I set a goal to learn the recap first, when it was done I worked on the exposition and finally the development. Most days I would start on the development first, then back to the exposition.
After a couple of weeks, I decided to "finish up" learning this piece which meant a lot of practice on a couple of tricky parts. Having a plan and goals made learning the piece a lot easier. It went something like this...
1. Learn the last page and a half
2. Work on the development and play through the Exposition
3. Finish development
4. Play through the entire piece (with metronome!)
5. Work out any tough spots until they were easy.
On another note, I've about finished learning Bach's Little Fugue in Gm (the one everyone knows). It is six pages long and just goes and goes, always different like a continuous development section. I started at the beginning and worked on two pages at a time. I made sure I could play those two pages well before going forward. Learning the last two pages were a challenge. I would go into church in the afternoons and practice the last page over and over again. My plan (and time)
1. First two pages (2 days)
2. Third page (2 days)
3. Fourth Page (3 days)
4. Fifth Page (1 day)
5. Last Page (5 days)
The time above are only examples. I really wished I started on the last page first now because it seemed to take forever to be able to play through it up-to-speed. Actually, I've been working on this fugue for about six weeks total.
