Breaking complex things down into simple segments
Today a student was learning a crowded passage of unbroken eighth notes in a difficult key, E♭ minor. The sightreading was going well enough, but it was plodding and stilted because each new note was a surprise to the student. They hadn’t yet begin to see enough patterns to anticipate the necessary hand positions for each phrase.
Fortunately, the student’s notebook had a ruler attached, and with a pencil at the ready on the piano, it was easy to grab both and add some faint vertical lines between each phrase in the passage.
We left the piano for a moment and leaned over the music on a table. With the pencil lines to guide us, we identified the unique passages that repeat and realized there were actually just a few. Not only did they become recognizable, but larger patterns quickly emerged out of those smaller patterns: They repeat in the same A-B-A-B order. I added a horizontal line over the A pattern, and a horizontal curly brace over the B pattern. Suddenly, the phrasing was clear—and so was the matter of where to move the right hand to prepare for it.
Soon the student was moving through the passage more easily, and we were able to move on to counting the rhythm out loud. That step had felt far off just a few minutes before.
We were both satisfied, but I couldn’t help piling on with a bigger lesson:
You know, you can do this with anything complex in life. Break it down into smaller pieces. Projects, code, creativity, reading, chores, whatever. It can always be broken down into a sequence of manageable steps.
Hope this helps.