In 2005, fresh out of grad school, I moved to San Diego to join the Hyperion Quartet as their violist. Before my time with them, the group had worked extensively with the Miró Quartet, and my quartet gave me a photocopy of the Miró’s "Musical Hourglass" model for approaching a new piece. The Miró had developed this framework while they were in the quartet program and teaching assistants at the Juilliard School. Some of the specific ideas in their model were aimed at learning string quartets, but I have found its broad outline easily adapts to playing ANY repertoire. I've adapted and used my own version of the process for learning new pieces.

Disclaimer: While I had the great fortune to perform with several members of the Miró while I was with the Hyperion Quartet, I never coached under them, so please note this article is based on my interpretation of their model!

So what is the Musical Hourglass? Here's a visual for you:

By way of further explanation:

Big Picture - Working on the composition as a whole
Section Work - Working on sections of the piece
Detail Work - Working on individual phrases or even notes
Section Work - Working on sections of the piece
Big Picture - Working on the composition as a whole

At it's essence, the Musical Hourglass is a whole-part-whole model. It has great appeal to me because it's BALANCED. There is time to focus on the work at both the large, medium, and small scale without losing sight of the end goal, PERFORMANCE!

I've gone through different periods in my life where I would just play through things a lot, play sections of pieces, obsess about details, or do some mixture of all three things, but often without a clear INTENTION or ORGANIZATION to my practice. Clearly, all three of these kinds of work are important, but it's easy to spend too much time on just one of them, or to move haphazardly from one to the other without an overall plan.

The Hourglass gives a structure and flow to the work, so that each perspective is touched on in a manner that is progressive, with each kind of work building organically on the other.

Additionally, there is an organic order of "going in" and "coming out" to the learning that makes intuitive sense to me: you start out with the broad strokes of the piece, move on to examining sections, then focus in on the nitty gritty details, before then reversing course and integrating the work you've just done from a small to large scale.

Naturally, there is some blending of this work, I don't strictly adhere to ONLY working on the big picture when I'm starting out with a piece. And certainly some detail work will continue through the last few steps of the process, but the point is to keep the bulk of my work on the particular stage at hand. Obsessing about details when I'm about to perform will prevent me from feeling the piece as a whole. I get so stuck in the muck of details that you've I can't just PLAY!

This broad outline is also helpful because it's FLEXIBLE - it can be adapted to the time frame I have to learn the piece, whether it's just a week, like in the Violympics, or a few months for a recital or orchestra audition. In the Violympics my process I may only spend part of the first day on Big Picture elements, then move on to the next steps in the same practice session. Since it usually takes a couple days for changes to settle, in the Violympics I would try to make my test recording by Friday so that I could make notes on things to change and have those tweaks worked in by Sunday. Deadlines are an important step for me to staying focussed, as I can tend to excessively ruminate on things (or just procrastinate!).

Those are the broad sketches of my approach to learning new repertoire! In future posts I'll examine this idea of the Musical Hourglass in more detail, looking at each step one by one.

The Hourglass Method for Learning Music: Part 1 - Outline