If you rush through your piano pieces
If your teacher is constantly telling you to slow down as you play your pieces or writing Don’t rush! in your lesson notes, I have an observation taken from years of teaching (and years of being a rusher myself!) that might help you.
I’ve noticed that the tendency to rush through a piano piece is often caused by a panic response of some kind that’s causing us to try to move through the music as quickly as possible.
The opposite, I’ve found, is to savour the music you’re playing. When you’re savouring your music, you’re in no rush at all, happy to remain in that moment forever.
So how do we get there?
Alleviating the tendency to rush is then just a matter of trying to identify what aspect of the piece is painful to you, so you can address it and settle into your piece more.
In my experience, the pain usually comes down to one of three things.
1. You don’t really know the music
If you’re not certain about which notes to play or if you haven’t built muscle memory in your fingers so that their movement feels fluent, then you will panic while you play about what comes next. That panic will cause an adrenaline rush that will make you play faster than normal.
This is probably one of the most painful feedback loops in all of piano lessons, if you ask me. Rushing because you don’t know your music forces you to face music you don’t know at a faster rate, which will make you panic even more, which will stress you out even harder and make you play even faster…!
Honestly, I know this panic so well from years of not being a very mindful piano learner myself that I’m getting flashbacks! :) So if you’re resonating with this, let’s think about how to let this panic go.
If you don’t know your music, the only way around your panic is to take more time to learn it. But this doesn’t necessarily mean playing it more. Education research suggests that we can benefit from a variety of interactions with our music in order to know it well.
For example, you can get a lot out of just listening to a performance. Comparing YouTube videos of people playing your song could help you to memorize what the song is supposed to sound like, or help you decide how you’d like to perform the song. Just looking at your sheet music without playing it can be informative. If you take time to study the different sections of your piece, patterns and things can pop up that you didn’t notice before. I’ve lost count of how many times I had to stop playing and just look at my music in order for me to figure out what I was missing about it! Usually it came down to a rhythm or fingering I’d misread while I was playing — and I only ever noticed this when I didn’t feel the pressure to play!
If you start to think of your practice as a project, and not just the amount of time spent at your piano bench, you can really start to get creative about how you build your understanding of a song.
2. You’re nervous about making a mistake
Even if you do know your music, sometimes people get so nervous about making a mistake in front of others that it impacts their ability to play. In this case, the fear of failure is what starts the domino effect that leads to rushing — fear of failure, panic, adrenaline rush, elevated heart rate, faster playing.
In my experience, the way through this is to become really mindful about the nature and source of your performance anxiety. Often I notice that we’re not really bothered by the mistake itself, but what that mistake might mean about us or how it might inconvenience someone else. If you feel there might be some truth in this for you, then congratulations! There’s definitely a way through this.
As someone who has dealt with her share of performance anxiety, I had to overcome two main beliefs in order to really find a state of peace in performing for others.
First, I had to overcome my personal tendency to make other people feel good all the time. I had to let go of the responsibility I felt to others and learn to be okay with potentially upsetting people if it meant doing something that was important to me. Recovering people-pleasers may recognize this step as learning to prioritize my own happiness. The way this translated to music is that I recognized I’d shied away from performances because I wasn’t willing to take a chance of potentially upsetting my audience if I made a mistake, regardless of whether I actually wanted to perform or not. My personal expression hadn’t even been part of the equation. But it needed to be.
Once I had learned to prioritize my own happiness, my relationship with my musical ability changed. I began to see how my musical talent was actually a gift for myself, not for others. It’s a gift for me to be able to express myself. No one else has a right to approve of it, or even access it if I don’t want them to. My musical gift is for me. Then I just had to decide what I wanted to do with it! I needed to bless myself first with my performances, rather than only trying to bless others.
This was an important step in learning how to practice unattachment to my musical performances. As long as I was playing my music purposefully and in a way that made me proud, I’d already won, regardless of how my performance turned out! Soon, I stopped even noticing my own mistakes when I played for others. And guess what? Mu audience was so busy enjoying the music, they didn’t notice my mistakes, either :)
3. You don’t like what you’re playing
Sometimes you realize in the middle of a song that you actually hate the song you’re playing. Little by little, you speed up your pace in an attempt to get the song over with as soon as possible. Before you know it, you’re playing so fast that it’s clear to your audience that you’re rushing!
In this case, rushing is a cue that you’re bored or you just wish you weren’t there. Interestingly, piano lessons are an educational setting where students objectively have the greatest range of options in what they can learn, but can feel the least amount of choice if they get locked into an idea of what piano lessons “should” look like. For a variety of reasons, many piano teachers feel obligated to persevere through a particular repertoire of songs and many piano learners feel obligated to learn the songs their teacher gives them. The biggest fear I hear from both sides is the belief that if you can’t play a particular song properly, you must be undisciplined.
I disagree with this. If you’re willing to be honest about not liking what you’re working on, and if you have a friendly enough relationship with your piano teacher to be honest about that, some really neat things can happen. I started offering my students who rushed an opportunity to admit if they didn’t like the song, and if they didn’t we just moved on. Interestingly, once we found music that my students did like, they didn’t rush in playing those songs because they were savouring their music! Doesn’t that sound like a wonderful way to play?? And when they were savouring their music, they actually became motivated to take on more challenging pieces as a result. They had plenty of opportunities to demonstrate their discipline, they just needed to feel like the pay-off was worth it.
Adopting this lighter way of teaching has increased my students’ joy, motivation, and confidence at the piano so much that this is now a permanent piece of my teaching toolkit. I hope sharing this experience gives you some room to be lighter with yourself, too. If you can’t (or don’t want to!) find a way to enjoy your song, your body is giving you a clear sign that it’s time to move on. Your practice is better off if you play something else.
Last thoughts
To summarize, piano lessons are improved by mindfulness, not by pressing through and trying to ignore your natural responses. If you’re rushing through your pieces, take a moment to be mindful about what’s causing you to rush. If your reasons are similar to what I’ve mentioned, I hope these tips have helped you. But your reasons may be different from what I’ve mentioned, and that’s okay, too. Listen to your heart, and be guided by it. It will show you the way! Good luck :)