Why Must Page Turns Be Practised Too?

Why Must Page Turns Be Practised Too?

Many adult learners treat page turning as a nuisance outside the music: first learn the piece, then deal with the pages later. The problem appears when the piece is finally played without stopping. The turn suddenly demands a hand, the eyes and part of the player’s attention, and the surrounding bars can become less secure than the genuinely difficult passages.

A page turn is really part of the motor sequence. You need to know which hand will be free, when the eyes can leave the old page, where they will land on the new one, and what keeps the music moving while all of that happens. Henle has written explicitly about how impractical page turns can interfere with performance, while ABRSM’s performance-grade rules require candidates to manage page turns without adversely affecting the performance as a whole.

That means the goal is not simply to “turn quickly”. Practise the two or three bars before the turn, the turn itself, and the next two or three bars as one continuous unit. If necessary, briefly omitting a few accompaniment notes is often preferable to breaking the pulse altogether. For adult learners, this is also useful attention training: the page turn forces you to stop treating the current note as the whole task and preserve a longer musical trajectory.

If you already use <a href="https://apps.apple.com/us/app/scoreflow/id6796205656">ScoreFlow</a&gt; alongside your piano practice, the same principle applies: do not practise only the difficult bar; include the continuous transition around the page turn as part of what must become reliable.

https://blog.henle.de/en/2015/06/08/does-it-work-or-doesn%E2%80%99t-it-about-page-turns-in-the-music/
https://www.abrsm.org/sites/default/files/2023-10/performance-grades-qual-spec-piano-2023-2024-230303-v2.pdf


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