Six weeks of plateau, and the two changes that ended it
The log is clear about it. From January 12 to February 23 I practiced forty-one of forty-three days, averaging thirty-eight minutes a session, and the piece I was working on, the first movement of the Clementi sonatina in C, Op. 36 No. 1, did not improve. The tempo stayed stuck at 88 for the quarter note when the goal was 120. The same three spots fell apart every day: the left-hand runs in measures 9 and 10, the hand crossing at 23, and the whole of the development where both hands play sixteenths. Some days were worse than the week before. I started dreading the piano, which had never happened.
Frustration at this stage has a particular flavor. It is not the beginner’s frustration of not being able to do anything; it is being able to do a fair amount and discovering that the next step is not a step but a wall, and that effort alone does not get you over it. I was putting in more time than ever and the recording from the end of February sounds like the one from the middle of January.
Two changes, both suggested by other adult learners, both of which I resisted for a week before trying. First, I split the session. Instead of thirty-eight minutes at 6:40 in the morning, I did twenty minutes before work and fifteen after dinner with headphones. The morning session was the hard spots only, slowly, with the metronome. The evening session was anything but the sonatina: old pieces, scales, sight-reading, playing by ear badly. Within a week I stopped dreading the morning, and the evening became something I looked forward to, because it was playing rather than practicing.
Second, I went backward. For ten days the morning sessions were the trouble spots at 60, slower than I had played them in months, hands separately, then together, then at 66, then 72, raising the metronome only after three clean repetitions in a row. This felt like giving up. It was not. On day eleven I played the whole movement at 96 without a stumble, which I had never done, and this morning it went at 104.
The lesson, which I apparently needed to learn in my own hands rather than read about: a plateau is usually a sign that I have been practicing the piece instead of the problem. Practicing the piece feels productive. Practicing the problem is boring and works.