Adult pianists can easily stay with four bars, repeating them until one fluent attempt permits them to move on. This blocked practice makes the action increasingly familiar and quickly reduces immediate errors, but fluency can be mistaken for learning. At the next sitting, the old hesitation often returns.
Interleaved practice deliberately alternates between different passages. A player might work for four minutes on passage A, move to B, then return to A. The switch interrupts the action pattern that has just warmed up and requires fingering, rhythm, touch and the intended sound to be retrieved again. Practice may therefore feel less successful. In a study of ten advanced clarinettists, Carter and Grahn found no advantage for interleaving during practice, but better learning on a retention test the following day. The sample was small and the instrument was not the piano, so this supports a practice principle worth testing, not a law for everyone.
The judgement is not that maximum disruption is always best, nor that a passage should be abandoned before it is understood. Several consecutive corrections may still be needed while an action is being worked out. Once success depends mainly on the warmed-up feeling created by repetition, however, switching away and returning gives a more honest test. Practice should not merely make the present ten minutes smooth; it should help the player reconstruct the movement and musical direction tomorrow.
When practising with <a href="https://apps.apple.com/us/app/scoreflow/id6796205656">ScoreFlow</a>, mark the two passages you intend to alternate. Each time you return, recall the sound first, then notice whether the hands can organise themselves again.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01251/full
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4989027/
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