Here’s an excerpt from an interview I did with classical guitarist Ben Verdery for WorkshopLive:
“…Let's say you're practicing a piece of music that's difficult. You get to a difficult spot and you make a mistake. If you stop at that mistake, that's one of the worst things you can do. What you're doing, psychologically, is setting it up so that each time you get to that spot you're going to stop. You need to decide, "OK, this place is difficult," and then isolate that and work on that. Analyze it so that you understand exactly what it means musically and technically. Understand the fingering.
Generally with something that's hard, if it's two beats, it will probably be three notes that are hard; it won't be those entire two beats. So you practice it in isolation. Then you put it in context - i. e. play a measure before and a measure after.
Now when you do that, it's important that you play through the difficult passage no matter what happens. You play music as if it were only forwards, which of course it is. You don't go back and fix it, you keep going. That way you're really listening all the time, and you're not fixating on moments - you're actually hearing a piece from beginning to end, the way an improviser would.
It's not about 'perfect". It's about getting the big picture, about getting the point of a piece of music across - or "points", plural, because a great piece of music has many different emotions, and emotions are complex.
[TJH]
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