Repetition: The benefits and detriments

Every piano teacher knows that practicing involves lots of repetition.  How many times has a student or a teacher written into a notebook, play this piece x amount of times, or play the right hand x amount of times, play the left hand x amount of times, play this piece hands together x amount of times.  And how many teachers have emphasized that practicing (or repetitions) need to happen every day in order for the student to  learn and comfortably play the piece they have been working on?  There is no doubt that repetitions need to happen in order to learn how to play the piano. 

But where does repetition leave off and obsession begin?  When do we reach the limits of what repetition can actually do? 

When I was a Freshman at the University of Denver, my teacher introduced the "3 times game" to me.  When fixing any of my mistakes be it a wrong note, a wrong rhythm or a wrong fingering, she would tell me to play the passage the correct way 3 times in a row before I could move on to fixing something else.  This put on a limit on my repetitions and gave me an attainable goal in my practice sessions.  It's a strategy that I often use with my students to get them to fix errors.

My current teacher told me a story in which one of her early teachers attempted to fix a passage that contained mistakes by circling the offending measure and writing "1000 times" above it.  1,000 times? Really?  Any piano student forced to play a passage that much would have to start hating the piano.

If repetition is not fixing the problem, the answer is to look deeper.  To me this is what is really at the heart of practicing, my own teaching, and my own learning process.  As Elissa Milne, piano teacher and pedagogue from Australia wrote in a recent blog post, "Practice is fundamentally NOT about repetition and discipline – it’s fundamentally about listening and reflecting and noticing and exploring. Take your thinking away from an accuracy = perfection model. Music isn’t about being right, it’s about being human.

And remember, if you’re not making mistakes you’re not learning anything. Every single time you make a mistake you have the chance to become someone even more fabulous than you’ve ever been before – so celebrate your mistakes; they remind you you’re alive."

I couldn't have said it better myself.