ABF Recital# 16: “Ich ruf’ zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ” (I call on Thee, Lord) BWV 639 – Study Stats

I’ve started recording this piece for the ABF Recital# 16 and it has now entered a “repertoire maintenance and review program”.  So it seems appropriate to post details of the study tasks and time on the  piece up until the 2-day 1-2-4 Memory rule break from it ( the week beginning 11th October).

Here’s an overview

• Total time practiced:  37 hours
• Number of Days practiced: 35
• Total Number of study tasks: 336

A couple of tables and graphs of tasks and time on this piece…

Summary of time on each Task:

Graph of tasks per day:

Some trends:

This came together quicker than the last three pieces.  It took less time and had fewer study tasks.  However, it is shorter in both bars, pages and time.

I felt that this piece did not have the difficulties of that submitted for the  last  ABF Recital (No. 15).

An in depth study of the notes, fingering, sections and hard bars early on saved me a lot of time & days of practicing.   This was inspired by Hugh Sung’s approach in his online tutorial series.

I consciously tried to memorise this piece in sections before trying it as a whole, which seemed to work well.   A ‘rule of thumb’ for me with the ten sections in this piece, was that if it took  5 to 10 minutes to practice a section with the score, then to  memorise it (once it could be played) took one or two practice sessions but each being around 4x as long (20 to 40 minutes or more).  This could then be halfed on subsequent days, down to  levels much less than practicing with the score (down to 2minutes).

I do wonder, whether I should try to memorise the sections immediately after the initial detailed study sessions of the whole piece (rather than after two weeks of practicing the sections with the score), but it may have taken much longer to memorise?   It may be worthwhile looking into this at some point.

As explained in other posts, I’m going to use this piece to test the 1-2-4 Memory rule.