Work and runs

When researchers observed professional musicians practising, they found a striking pattern. In The Practice of Practising, Chaffin and colleagues studied cellist Tania Lisboa by mapping which bars she practised over time. The result looked nothing like a student’s typical top-to-bottom play-through.

Instead, Lisboa’s practice cycled between two modes: section-by-section work, where she focused intensely on individual passages, and integrative runs, where she connected those passages into larger stretches. The researchers called this pattern “work and runs” (Chaffin et al., 2002).

This wasn’t unique to one cellist. The same alternating pattern has been observed in studies of pianists (Miklasewski, 1989; Williamon et al., 2002) and across case studies of expert practice. Student musicians, by contrast, are much more likely to simply play through the piece from beginning to end (Lisboa, 2008).

A second key finding from the research: experts use the formal structure of the music — sections, phrases, cadences — as a framework for organising practice. They start and stop at structural boundaries. They know the architecture of the piece, and they use it to decide where to direct their attention.

This matters because musical structure mirrors how memory organises information. In How Learning Works, Ambrose et al. explain that well-organised knowledge is easier to retrieve than loosely connected facts. When you break a piece into meaningful sections and subsections, you create a mental map that helps you navigate the music even when muscle memory falters.

Try it below: divide a line into subsections, the same way an expert might carve a piece into workable chunks.

Here’s what the pattern looks like in a real session:

1. Work: Pick a section or subsection that needs attention. Practise it in isolation — slowly, hands-separately, or with a specific technical goal. Spend a few minutes until you’ve made tangible progress.
2. Run: Now play a larger stretch that includes the section you just worked on, plus its neighbours. This integrative pass tests whether the improvement holds in context and practises the transitions between sections.
3. Repeat: Move to another section for focused work, then do another integrative run. The “runs” get progressively longer as sections come together — from a few bars, to a full page, to an entire movement.

Notice how this differs from playing top-to-bottom. In a play-through, the beginning gets the most repetitions and attention, while the middle and transitions coast on momentum. In work-and-runs, every section gets focused, equal attention — and the glue that connects them gets explicit practice, too.

Sections and subsections aren’t busywork. They mirror how memory and motor programs organise complex sequences. When you know the structure of a piece, you can start from any section, recover from a lapse mid-performance, and distribute your attention evenly across the whole work instead of letting one sticky passage consume the entire session.