A mañana attitude to learning a piece properly may give us some instant pleasure, but it creates the weakest of foundations, especially if we have any aspirations to perform it at any point in the future. If we allow ourselves repeated read-throughs, guessing at those passages we have not had the patience to work out thoroughly, or glossing over spots where our random fingering is clearly not working, we can expect a shoddy result, no matter how much time we put in later. The concept I call (separately, slowly, sections) comes from the phrase coined by British MP Sir William Curtis, (reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic), in reference to the foundations of education in Victorian era schools. Similarly, are the basic components of the toolbox
