No one denies the importance of practice. Including me. I do quite a lot and I try to keep it varied to reflect the performance I’m doing – I need to keep my folk fiddle in shape as well as my Romantic rich vibrato and projection and my classical cleanness of line. If I was properly dedicated I’d practise with the pickup and an amp, and practise rock soloing over riffs as well as jazz improv over changes. Haven’t quite got there yet, though I do try and do some improvising on a regular basis – whatever you practise at, you improve, and that includes the ability to make it up as you go along! Actually, the freer your compositional structures are, the more you probably need to practise and rehearse individually and together, so that you can produce a good result without having to tie down material note-for-note.

But I digress. Returning to music with more or less fixed notes, there is a great emphasis in most advice about practice and effectiveness on breaking down very small units. Don’t play what you can play, just pick out the bits you can’t; don’t play through whole movements in one go, focus on the eight bars, four bars, whatever that trip you up and work on them slowly and in detail till you’ve mastered them; don’t try to learn a whole piece if it’s hard by your standards, set targets to do bits at a time.

Well, yes. That works. Particularly for getting over very much technical hurdles. But it can leave you buried in a morass of individual notes, four-bar chunks and technical hurdles, having mastered producing the right notes in the right places – but not with any idea of how the whole thing fits together or is art. I would suggest that if the performer doesn’t have an integral artistic overview of what they play, the odds of a listener achieving one are almost nil, and if they do so they will be frustrated with the performer for obstructing it.

So, here’s my B-side to breaking music down for technical practice: yes, do it, do it rigorously, use small units and focus points to untie the bits that leave your fingers (lungs/tongue/whatever you play with (whaay!)) in knots. But both before and alongside doing that, play the whole movement. Even if it’s badly. If you can manage to, play it with the other parts (if it’s not a solo). If you can’t do that, try and find a recording – though don’t be a slave to the style and interpretation of that version.

And shocking as it sounds, you may need to do this quite a lot. You may need to keep coming back to it as you gradually get on top of (whaay!) the difficult passages if at first you can’t see the wood for the trees. You may have to spend weeks, seriously, on getting the hang of what a piece does, where it’s going, its musical outline and character. And it is possible to thoroughly misjudge those things first time round!

Some people like to sit down and make notes, even mark up their copy, concerning themes and who’s leading at what point and what’s tune as opposed to accompanying figuration that happens to be sharing the same instrument … I’ve tried that approach and it tends to leave me more bewildered than I was before. I know a fair amount of theory for someone without a music degree, but in order to grasp, comprehend a piece I usually end up applying it only after having listened and played repeatedly and ‘felt’ what’s going on; then I can go ‘oh yes: introduction; exposition; second subject in the dominant; development; recapitulation’ or whatever it may be, but also have a less theoretical and more ‘gut’ grasp of the flow and narrative of what I’m playing.

I don’t think it matters how you achieve this as long as your method works for you. What I say in all seriousness is that it may be as much effort to learn and master the overall aesthetics and architectonics of a piece as its most technically demanding passages; and there is as little point performing without having succeeded in the one as in the other.