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I have slowly been making my way through Ravel’s Jeux d’eau. You may know the piece from the 2024 Olympics, when it was played in the opening ceremonies by pianist Alexandre Kantorow on a grand piano in pouring rain.
The picture makes me cringe – what an awful way to treat a beautiful instrument! However, the image of rain falling on the very instrument whose music simulates the movement of water is incredibly effective. My shock and awe at this sight drove me to explore the piece myself a few months later.
Let me start by saying that this is a difficult piece to learn! It is not straightforward like Mozart, where the notes fit neatly into their appointed beats and the melody is often clearly delineated in the right hand. Instead, Ravel seeks to create an impression of the different ways in which water moves.
In the Pacific Northwest, we are very familiar with water, specifically rain! Our rain comes in all shapes and sizes: fine mist that you barely see, steady unrelenting rain lasting weeks on end, quick torrential downpours, light pitter-patter drops that evolve into unexpected hailstorms. And then there are the rivers, lakes, ocean...and the waterfalls that barely drip with water in the summer’s heat but cascade violently during winter storms. Think of the millions of tiny water droplets that make up all these expressions of water and then imagine translating them into ink by giving a toddler a ballpoint pen with the instruction to “cover the paper with dots.” This is what the music looks like. How do you even make sense of it all?! My process with this, and all new pieces of music, tends to look like this:
1. Get an overview – listen with and without the score, muddle through a first reading
2. Analyze sections to identify patterns, work out chunks
3. Practice note by note, taking it apart hands separately, and write out the beats where necessary
Zoom in, zoom out and repeat. Even though I may start this process by going through steps one, two and three consecutively, I am constantly revisiting one or the other of the steps as I work towards mastery. I can never stay in one step exclusively or I hinder my own progress.
When presenting a new piece to a student for the first time, we make choices about how we will teach it: play it first for them; talk through it and analyze what is happening; or let them muddle through without any assistance. All three approaches accomplish different goals, and all three approaches are needed throughout the student’s time of study with us.
When we approach a new piece ourselves, we also make choices about how we will begin learning it. It is important to get an overview of it at some point (some may argue that this is an essential first step), perhaps by listening to a recording or muddling through a first reading. The latter is almost impossible to do in the Ravel, as parts are just not readable at first glance. Nonetheless, it is important to have an idea of how the piece is laid out and what Ravel is trying to communicate.
Analysis can get us a long way, as we study the piece first for an initial theme and begin noting sections that vary from, or repeat, the theme. We look for key changes, tempo changes, and register changes. We might even mark our music before we ever begin playing, identifying an ABA form or writing in names of notes or chords that are difficult to read (multiple ledger lines, for instance, or passages with double sharps!).
Practicing note by note, hands separately, slowly and methodically is also an important strategy, but it can be easy to “miss the forest for the trees.” In other words, we can get too focused in on the minutiae that we lose the whole arc of the piece if we stay in this mode too long.
Our practice must constantly be a process of zooming in and zooming out. Similarly, we need to teach our students to have a sense of the whole (This is usually not a problem, as students like to power through to the end, despite making numerous mistakes, or playing haltingly as they struggle to figure out notes in the midst of “getting through”) and to attend to small sections that need troubleshooting. This is why “play your piece three times a day” or “practice for 30 minutes a day” is not sufficient instruction. We need to spend time during the lesson demonstrating how to look at the big picture and identify sections (zooming out), and then in writing in fingering and practicing short bits in a focused and detailed manner (zooming in) so that our students learn effective ways to practice.
One fun way I like to “zoom out” when students are getting lost in practicing short bits is by taking them to the last four measures of a piece and teaching them the section. We then discuss working backwards as a practice strategy: now that they know the last four bars, they can learn the few bars before those and play to the end, feeling a sense of accomplishment!
If you play for a choir, you know that practicing choral music often demands a quick, efficient approach. This is where analysis is most beneficial to begin with, then muddling through the whole piece (identifying shortcuts), and working note by note only at crucial points. If you are interested in learning more about this approach, you can check out my Open Score reading workshop.
Practicing does not have to be a chore; it can be an enjoyable process of problem-solving and discovery when we learn to zoom in and zoom out, taking advantage of our time and energy by working hard on details in short, focused bursts, and then rewarding ourselves with the chance to play what we know and have already mastered – or listening to the music with our score and taking note of what another pianist does to make it musical.
Which of these three phases of music learning do you enjoy most? Do you tend to spend your time in [teaching or practicing] one phase more than the other two? I didn’t even speak to the topic of memorizing - is that a part of your learning process? Let me know in the comments!
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