This is the goal of being able to transform the deciphered signs and symbols on the page into the sounds envisaged by the composer. It involves working over time to transform the playing of a piece of music, from the initial, careful, slowly read-through stage, to reliable performance-readiness, by piecing together smaller and longer sections of music onto a solid “scaffold” of the musical beat, always with awareness of speed and rhythmic metre.
This is the ultimate goal of studying music in any cultural tradition since it leads to the ability to perform. The process itself - learning how to practise - involves a tremendous amount of transferable skills and useful habits; problem solving, mindfulness, attentive listening, kind self-criticism, grit, persistence, patience, self-knowledge, prioritising, creating mini-goals, switching tasks.
The earliest goals in this area are fairly basic - learning to repeat the short pieces of music until they sound better, listening out for pauses, thinking ahead, and aiming over the week to create a flowing rendition.
The time it takes to meet these earliest goals depends quite a lot on age - the youngest students are less capable of organising their own time and goals than the older students, so these goals are reached more slowly.
As the pieces get longer and more complex, practice skills needs to develop to meet the challenges in the music. The goals become about learning more sophisticated strategies; becoming cleverer and more efficient with the use of practice time. An Initial Grade piece could potentially be basically learnt in only a few days by a hard-working enthusiastic student with a solid practice habit and good practice skills. Pieces in later grades need much more time to get into the fingers (for all but very rare prodigies). This is why someone who takes an extremely long time to learn their Grade 1 piece(s) shouldn't be moving on to Grade 2 yet.
Vital to learning these skills and reaching these goals is following the teacher’s guidance on not just what to do in practice, but how to do it. My weekly “Practice Guide” contains reminders of the most useful habits as well as specific strategies for the pieces being learned. In the Practice Guide and during lessons I reiterate the principles and strategies again and again. Here are just a few examples:
Break it down
Work more on the bits that need it
Practise it mainly with pauses and no mistakes but regularly test it without pauses
Finish learning the whole piece at a steady pace before trying to "perfect" or speed up the most familiar parts of it
For tricky moments, first tackle it in "slow motion", one perfect “move” at a time
Learn to feel the moves rather than looking at the hands
Always be aware of the beat when needing to work slower on specific sections
If the student takes too long to learn pieces, they will be bored and unmotivated and the difficulty of the music will eventually become too much for them.
If they never quite finish getting their pieces fluent or polished, they will always feel a lack of competence.
If their rhythmic accuracy and fluency are not mastered the student will be unable to perform alongside others in ensemble music.
If they practise without paying good attention to their own beat and speed, they will often introduce incorrect rhythms into their playing. These rhythmic mistakes tend to get "stuck" and are sometimes impossible to fix by guided problem-solving in the lesson (my prefered approach). Sometimes the mistakes get so stuck that they are not even fixable by imitation of the correct version of the rhythm, when the teacher demonstrates it.