Change One Thing, Change Everything

 

As I've written about in my previous posts, the issue of fear and anxiety plays a large role, unfortunately, for many students of the piano. If you are attempting to play music of any complexity, there is likely to be some level of struggle, and this creates stress, or at least, some unease.

However, it doesn't work to just tell someone, "don't worry" or "relax." The body has it's own responses to cues from the subconscious mind, and trying to change that with the "thinking" part of the mind doesn't usually work. In my teaching, I try to find another way "in," and by that, I mean into the subconscious.

With three of my students in particular (all adults), I am discovering ways to help them play better by changing their level of tension. 

With the first, I noticed that whenever he was anxious about an upcoming passage in the piece (which was a lot of the time), he would tighten his mouth, pressing his lips together. So I asked him to play with his mouth just slightly open when he played. Sure enough, when he got to that difficult passage, it went much smoother. Coincidence? No, I don't think so. By changing just one of the body's responses to stress, it changed the total level of stress.

With the second student, his reponse to stress was in his leg. He would tense his leg and lift the heel off the floor. I asked him to become aware of it and see if he could keep his leg resting on the floor. Again, his playing went much easier that way. It's best if the person can feel what they are doing by becoming more aware, and make the change themselves. However, when I gently put my foot on his and prevented it from tensing up, it helped him become aware.

The third student, my most advanced student, is playing Chopin, Schumann, Debussy and so on. She has been with me for 10 years. I've always noticed that when she plays she has a tendency to grimace. Her mouth tenses up in a particular way. To look at her, you would think she was not enjoying her playing much at all! But this is not the case; she loves the piano and the music she is playing, but her subconscious is still quite anxious about it. For a long time I didn't want to mention it, because I was concerned it would make her self-conscious and add to her stress. But recently I decided to give it a try. I've asked her to smile while she plays. At first she felt quite silly with a big grin on her face. Not surprisingly, she can't yet maintain the smile for very long before the grimace returns. It has only been two weeks since we started this, and so for someone like her who has been playing for decades, it may be a while before we see changes. But I am convinced that changing her particular stress response will help her playing, and possible even add to her enjoyment of it.

Traditional methods (and teachers) that concentrate wholly on "learning the notes" will never even notice these manifestations of stress, or think that they matter. But they do matter. You may want to have energy and even intensity when you play, but not stress and tension. Sometimes when you are struggling with something (in life, as well as at the piano), you may need to look at something that at first glance may seem unrelated, but turns out to be the key to unlock the door you have been banging your head against. Sometimes, changing one thing changes everything.

So You Want to Learn Music Theory....

 

Many people I meet tell me they would like to learn about music theory. I often quip that it's not "theory," it's fact. But theory is what people refer to as the "system" upon which our music is built. (Of course I include theory with my piano students, so I am showing them what I believe is the best way to learn.) 

They ask if they should get a book or go to the internet. The answer is no and no. A textbook is going to be quite dry. More importantly, unless you can apply what you read, it won't be much use. And the best way by far to apply what you learn about theory is to play it on the piano. When I was at Manhattan School of Music, all the non-piano majors were required to take a few semesters of piano because basic piano skills are necessary to learn theory, among other things.

If you want to learn the basics of theory, I recommend the following. It all involves basic piano skills, so if you don't have those yet, you will need to do that first.

Phase I

1. Familiarize yourself with all the major and minor keys. Our music (I am speaking of the Western World) is almost all based on "keys." To be in a given key means to be based on that scale. Therefore, you will need to get familiar with all the major and minor scales. Almost all the music you play will be based on these two types of scale. However, I do not recommend spending hours and hours on this. Even if you play a G# minor scale a hundred times, it doesn't mean you will suddenly find it easy to play a piece in G# minor. Please see my previous post on scales and do them as I suggest, which is in moderation, and not worrying about specific fingering. It does not necessitate that you read music.

2. Learn all the major and minor chords (triads). However, you must do it in a way which really shows you the "system," not just purchase a chord chart that shows you them written out. Again, please see my much earlier post on chords to learn the very specific way I teach them. My method does not require that you read music yet.

3. Get a copy of the Circle of Fifths and begin to memorize it. Keep a copy at your piano so you always have it to refer to. You can even post it on your fridge or somewhere you'll see it all the time. The Circle of Fifths is not just for learning the key signatures of all 12 major and minor keys; it is a picture of how our musical system is organized. The interval of a fifth plays a huge role in our music. When you are playing a piece of music, even a fairly simple one, you will start to notice that music likes to move by fifths. Not always, of course, but a lot. In the course of playing simple music, whether by ear or by reading, you will learn the importance of the I, IV and V chords. These are all related by fifths.

Phase II

1. Learn the other two types of triads, diminished and augmented, and all five kinds of 7th chords. Again, it is important to do this in the right way; otherwise you may never really know them well. See my earlier post.

2. In Phase I you played all the scales. But playing the E-flat minor scale doesn't mean you'll find it easy right away to play a piece in E-flat minor. Reading in a key with 6 flats may be daunting for quite a while. But what you can do to start preparing yourself is to improvise in every key. It doesn't have to be complicated. Just a melody and a few chords that would occur commonly in that key. If you can improvise in a key it means you can "think" in that key. It isn't actually thinking, of course, it's more like speaking. If you learn to speak French, at first you will always translate in your mind from English to French. But if you become fluent in French, you may find you actually start to think in French. So it is with music; you can become "fluent" in all the keys.

You will notice that neither Phase I or Phase II involves reading music. Yes, you can learn all the basics without reading actual music notation. When you learn to read music, it will help drive home some of what you have learned, but it's technically not necessary.

Voila! If you can do all of the above you have probably about 80% of what you need to know about music theory. And hopefully you applied what you learned along the way. The other 20% would involve learning about musical forms, other more complex chords, possibly the other scales that people now refer to as "modes," and a few other items. 

Can Musicality be Taught?

 

We often refer to someone who plays (or sings) very well as "talented." If they play in a way which emotionally affects the listener, which moves them, perhaps, the player or singer may be said to be "musical." What does that actually mean?

A pianist, for example, could be quite accomplished and have impressive technique. But if their playing doesn't affect people emotionally, it might be said that the pianist isn't as "musical" as one would hope. Conversely, someone might not have a big technique, and play mostly simpler pieces, but could still play them in a way which the listeners find moving.

To be "musical" means to have a high degree of sensitivity to, and awareness of, the subtleties and "inner workings" of music. They hear nuances that the average person does not. These nuances affect the person playing very deeply, and, as such, they can also project those nuances so the listener can be made aware of them as well.

We've probably all heard someone who plays without musicality. It just sounds rote, even robotic, and uninteresting. The person is playing "the notes" but doesn not seem to go any deeper than that. Unfortunately, many teachers are happy if their students can just play the notes and rhythm, and don't encourage the student to reach deeper. They might just say that student just isn't "talented" that way.

We often assume that one is just born with that intangible quality of musicality, or not. I agree that people seem to be "born" with differing levels of musical sensitivity, but nevertheless, regardless of how much you have to start out, I believe you can improve in your musicality.

Over the years I have taught hundreds of beginners. While there are a small number who play with a lot of feeling right away, I have found that most do not. They are so absorbed in learning the many skills and the advanced coordination needed to play the piano that the musicality just doesn't happen. Many even believe that it is a good idea to just learn "the notes" first and put "the feeling" in later. Some so-called experts will tell you this is what you need to do. However, I disagree with that. If you don't start right away incorporating musical expression in your playing, you may never actually do it.

I find that the key to getting students to play musically is to make it more physical. That seems like a contradiction, doesn't it? The word emotion has the word motion in it. When you hear beautiful music, you may find you want to move your body to it, even in subtle ways. You probably don't want to sit as stock-still as a soldier! So when you play music, you also need to move. That doesn't mean you have to wave your arms wildly around. You will see some pianists do a lot of movements, which in fact, may not add to the musicality, but have just become a habit for that pianist. But likewise you never see a great pianist who just sits rigidly. I find that as soon as I can get my student to get their torso involved, their playing will be better. There is a feeling of wanting to "lean in" to the music.

For some students, I ask them to imagine how they would dance to the piece they are playing. For others, a visual image may be helpful. (I do not do a lot with visual imagery, because most music is intended to be just "what it is" and not a representation of something visual.) I ask them to imagine they are "speaking" to someone they love through the music. Whatever works, the student usually needs to be reminded to fully engage with the music emotionally. This needs to become the norm for them, not the exception. The more they engage, the more the music will effect them, which in turn will make them more engaged, and so on, in a self-perpetuating cycle. Like anything else, you must actually DO IT, if you want to play more musically. You can't be saving it for some time in the future.

I can't tell you how to respond emotionally to a given piece of music. That is up to you. As a teacher, I can help you develop the tools -- that is, the technique -- to say what you want to say with your music. But you must have something to say. You must bring the whole of your life's experience -- your joys and sorrows, triumphs and heartbreaks -- into your playing. 

It's About Time!

 

You've heard me talk a great deal about rhythm in these posts. I find it to be the aspect of music that students have the most trouble with. (See my earlier posts titled Rhythm, parts I and II, for the reasons for this.)

French composer Claude Debussy wrote that "the music is not in the notes, but in the spaces between them." Rhythm is essentially the space between the notes.

I believe that rhythm should be the first priority when learning new music. I have encountered so many people who, in lessons with previous teachers and/or learning on their own, pretty much ignored the rhythm in order to concentrate on the "notes." Some are aware they are doing that but don't know how to do it differently, but some are not even aware that their rhythm is all off. They have ceased to be able to "hear" rhythm in their own playing.

If you think about it, you can see that music is really all about "time." If you look at a painting, you see everything in the painting all at once. You see the foreground, the background, and you can see what the painting is trying to portray. (I am not saying that you wouldn't see even more if you study the painting, but you get the basic idea even at the first look.)

With music, however, it unfolds and develops over time. When you hear a note, a phrase, or a section of the piece of music, you hear it in relation to the notes, phrases and sections that preceeded it. If you didn't, it would just be "one thing after another" and would make no sense. If it made no sense it probably wouldn't be very enjoyable to listen to. The more familiar you are with the piece you are hearing, and the more familiar you are with that genre of music, the more you will hear the relationship of the parts to the whole. Unfortunately, most teachers don't really know how to teach this listening skill. When you learn about musical forms (such as sonata form, etc.) you are really learning about how the parts relate to each other and to the whole. But it isn't just about intellectually understanding these forms; it's about being able to hear them as they are happening in the music. But I digress....

The music unfolds over time, but not randomly, of course. The time is "divided," if you will, into specific patterns. These patterns are what we would call the rhythm. People have a hard time defining rhythm. When I ask them to define it, they might say it's the beat, or the tempo. It is neither of these. The beat or the tempo are aspects of rhythm, at least as far as music is concerned. (You could say the steady beat of your pulse is its rhythm, but in music it is clearly more complex than that.)

Not only does the music unfold over time, but the time element is one of the key elements, if not the key element. Think of the theme of a famous piece such as Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. The iconic opening of the first movement, the "da-da-da-dum," is the element upon which the whole movement is based. This rhythmic "idea" ties it all together. The rhythmic theme appears throughout on different notes, but you, the listener, recognize it as the theme because of the rhythm.

If you think you can ignore the rhythm when you are learning your pieces and somehow add it in later, you are sorely mistaken. Again, if you do that routinely, you may actually lose your ability to really hear rhythm.

If you ignore rhythm you are effectively ignoring the very core of what music is about. If you were learning to dance, no one would say "let's just do the steps but without the rhythm." If you have been ignoring rhythm, or even making it a low priority, you need to change the whole way you think about music.

Should you listen to recordings of your pieces?

 

In our modern age we can find recordings of almost any piece of music you can name, of any genre, even "beginner" pieces, online on YouTube or other sites. I have had many students and other people I meet tell me that they rountinely listen online to the music they are working on. Is this beneficial?

For new pianists, or some who have been at it for a while but not progressing well, listening to a recording to help you with your pieces is generally a bad idea, in my view. If you want to actually play by ear, start with familiar songs you know very well and just let your ear be your guide. If you need to refresh your memory of the song by listening online, that would be OK. But it could also be confusing, because you may encounter different renditions and interpretations of the song which could confuse your ear. 

When you are learning a piece from the written notation, listening to a recording is detrimental. I find that people do it because they are poor readers and are trying to avoid reading. This especially applies to rhythm. I have encountered so many students who can barely read rhythm, so they copy what they hear online. Naturally, with this approach they will never learn to read and will have to rely on the crutch of listening to recordings forever.

If you are working on developing your ear, just play by ear without jotting down the notes or other such visual aids. Then your ear will get stronger. If you are working on your sight-reading skills, your ear is still working and hopefully improving, of course, but don't try to copy what you hear in a recording, because you won't be really reading, and your reading skills will suffer.

If you are a more advanced player, you might listen to various pieces online to get a feel for them, perhaps, to see if it is a piece you might like to play. If you are a good reader you could play through them yourself (which is, of course, what people did before recordings). But to save time (and the process of having to acquire all those scores), listening online is a great resource. But once you are working on a given piece, I recommend that you cease all listening to others' playing. You will be influenced by that performer's interpretation of the piece, whether you realize it or not. You want to have your own interpretation, not someone else's. 

If you have a good teacher, you don't need to listen to recordings to make sure you have the correct notes and rhythm, because the teacher should, of course, be doing that. If you are working on your own without a teacher, try to listen very openly. If you hear something "suspicious," meaning it just sounds questionable, go back and take another good look at the passage and see if you can discover what was incorrect. It could be something as simple as a missed flat or sharp. If you still are not sure, perhaps a recording will help. But if you are needing to do that a lot, then you may be trying to play pieces which are beyond your current level. If you find you need recordings to get the notes and the rhythm, then you can be sure there are other problems as well. A recording can't help you with the physical technique to be able to play the music, or the understanding of the music. 

Even worse than just audio recordings are videos. I have encountered many people who tried to teach themselves to play the piano and/or learn new pieces by watching videos and watching the pianist's hands. You can see the problem with this. For each new piece you would have to do this, probably many times, over and over, but you wouldn't acquire actual skills to apply to the future pieces. A perfect example of giving you a fish versus teaching you to fish. 

It's easy to see why people would want to listen to recordings or watch videos. They think it will be a shortcut to learning to play, rather than spending time and money on lessons. But it isn't a short cut; it's a dead end.

Horror Stories from the Piano

 

With Halloween coming, I thought I might tell you a few spooky tales from the piano. These are really scary! And to make it worse, they are all true.

The following stories were all related to me by either my own students (about their previous teachers) or other acquaintances.

1.      The teacher who ended the lesson early with a shy and vulnerable teenager saying “You’re wasting my time. Come back when you know the notes.”

2.      The teacher who took the music book of a student (who was in her 70s), tore it up and threw it on the floor, because she used a fingering he didn’t approve of.

3.      The teacher who dealt only with the notes, no rhythm at all. This adult student would sometimes play for his friends, and they would say “your rhythm is all off, man!” When he asked his teacher about it, she just waved it off.

4.      The teacher who would sit by the student (a pre-teen) with his music in her lap (presumably he was playing from memory), but on top of his music she had a magazine which she would read while he was playing.

5.      The teacher who drew a red line horizontally across all the white keys of the piano and instructed the student that her fingers should always be on that line. When the student related this story to me, I asked “what about when you have to play on the black keys?” She replied, “we never talked about that.”

6.      The teacher who had the student work on only one piece for the entire year, so that he could play it perfectly at the end-of-year recital. Naturally, the student quit after the year ended.

7.      The teacher who had the student play scales at the lesson for the first 45 minutes, and her pieces for the last 15 minutes. When she asked if they could spend more time on music, he replied yes, but only if she took a 90-minute lesson.

8.      The teacher who had this adult student set the metronome to tick with the fastest note in the piece. So, for example, if the piece had sixteenth notes, he would set it to the sixteenth note, and if he came to a quarter note in the piece, he would listen for four ticks to go by. If he had a whole note, he would have to count 16 ticks of the metronome!

9.      Teachers who proudly show videos of their student recitals. However, in those recitals, they haven't bothered to adjust the height of the piano bench for each student’s height, and they probably don't at lessons either. Thus, little kids are sitting so low that their arms and hands are falling well below the keyboard. This is a huge risk for physical injury later on.

10.   I met a teacher who admitted her own playing was so below par that she could not play the pieces her students were working on.

11.   Teachers who would hit the hands of students for playing wrong notes, or other types of physical or verbal abuse. In previous centuries this was common practice. But it’s shocking that it still exists.

12. The teacher who encouraged the student to write the letter names above every note in the score. This means you're not actually reading the musical notation itself. This is wrong for so many reasons. The note "C" for example, occurs eight times on the piano, so just seeing "C" doesn't tell you which one. Most important, if you are looking at letters you've written in and not the notation, you probably aren't seeing the rhythm. Why would notation exist at all if just writing letter names worked? It's no surprise that this student never learned to read with any fluency, and couldn't read rhythm at all!

And from my own personal experience:

When I was a student at Manhattan School of Music I had a teacher who had been a famous pianist in his day, but sadly, didn’t really seem to want to teach. He liked to have students who were already so proficient that he could just “coach” them. (See my post on coaching vs. teaching.) But I needed actual teaching to improve my technique, among other things. My playing was a mess. One day at the lesson I was playing a difficult piece, when I became aware he was saying something (almost yelling, actually) and so I stopped and turned around to look at him. (He sat behind us in a comfy chair, smoking his pipe, not beside us, where the teacher should sit.) He had his hands over his ears and said “Please, don’t play so many wrong notes!” I was dumbfounded. He didn’t think I was playing them on purpose, did he? And if not, wasn’t he supposed to be helping me not to play so many wrong notes? The lightbulb went on for me that day, that I needed to find a new teacher. Which, luckily, I did, and everything changed for me.

If those of you reading this have horror stories of your own, I would love to hear about them. You may post them as comments at the end of this post, or email them to me at deborah@pianobrilliance.com. I may include them in a future post, Horror Stories, Part II.

 

Slurs

 

When you see a curved line over (or under) two notes it is called a slur. It's an unfortunate term for this musical effect because it is not at all like when you slur your words, for example, making them indistinct and muddled. A slur in music is not that.

When I ask students who were self-taught or had previous lessons what a slur is, they either don't know, or answer that it means the slurred notes are played legato. Legato is pretty much the "default," that is, it's what you'd assume unless the notes were marked staccato. (See my previous post.) So a slur would not mean the same thing as you would do anyway or it would be meaningless.

A slur is very specific. It is emphasis on the first note and de-emphasis on the second. So yes, they are legato (usually -- see below), but not evenly stressed. Think of how you say most two-syllable words: there is more emphasis on the first syllable than on the second. If you were to emphasize both equally it would probably sound robotic. So a slur is a very natural sound. It is often graceful, as you mind find in music of Mozart, for example. 

If you ask someone how to achieve this effect, they might say just play the first note louder. Technically, the first note would be louder, but if you try to achieve this effect with just fingers, the notes won't likely have the graceful sound that a slur should have. If you had a long quick run of slurred notes and tried to do loud-soft-loud-soft etc. with fingers alone, it would be difficult. Again, this is a technique which requires the arm. The weight of the arm on the first note gives it the desired emphasis, and the "release" on the second note gives it less than the first. You could do this motion many times in a row with consistent evenness, speed, and no strain.

Students sometimes confuse a slur with tied notes or phrase markings. A tie is between two notes that are the same note, and indicate the second note is held but not played. A curved line over a group of notes means they should sound, well, like a group! It is not the same as a slur but people will tell you, incorrectly, that it is. I like to call a grouping of notes a "phraselet" -- a mini phrase -- which would be within a larger phrase. Again, spoken language would have many instances of something like this.

Chords and octaves can also be slurred. The same concept applies: emphasis/de-emphasis.

Can a slur occur on two of the same note? Yes it can, and you'll find many instances of this. It would be essentially the same as with two different notes; the weight of the arm on the first, and the release of the arm on the second. Try doing it with fingers alone and you'll see it's very awkward, but with the arm it becomes quite simple.

I'm currently playing a piece by Ravel entitled Oiseaux Tristes ("Sad Birds"). It is an amazing and haunting piece which beautifully evokes the calls of birds. The primary motif, which opens the piece, is a slur on two of the same note. In addition, both notes are marked staccato (see my previous post for in-depth discussion of this). You might think this is a contradiction, since a slur is normally legato. To play this as Ravel intended, you would have the tiniest of detachment between notes, but it still sounds slurred because the first note is emphasized. Ravel even puts an accent over the first note, but I believe this is redundant, since a slur already has more emphasis on the first note. Throughout the piece, this motif is played ranging from soft (p) to extremely soft (ppp). The action of the arm must be delicate and extremely precise to achieve all of this together. It just can't be achieved with finger action alone. On top of all this, there would be pedal applied. You might think the "staccato" would be lost if it is pedaled, but in fact it is not; you can still hear the tiniest release of the note. As you can see, this situation has multiple layers of nuance. If you listen to a recording of the piece you will see what I mean. I give this example here to emphasize that musical terms such as "slur" are nuanced and can't be defined in an overly-simple way. Slurs require a technique which integrates the fingers, hand and arm.

Legato, Staccato, and everything in between

 

As you are probably aware, legato means smoothly connected without breaks between the notes, and staccato means the notes are detached. However, there is a great deal more to know about this, but most importantly, how to achieve these sounds.

In all likelihood, at your earliest piano lessons, your teacher showed you how to play legato by holding your finger on the key until the next key is played, thus having no gap of silence between them. If you lift your finger off the key, the damper comes down onto the string and the sound stops. So therefore you'd want the second note to be played just as the damper is going to come down on the first note, not too late (creating a gap) or too early (blurring the two notes together). While technically correct, there is a LOT more to playing true legato. You could hold each note until the next one plays, but if you play with exaggerated separate finger actions, or a separate hand/arm action on each note, you get what I call a "note-wise" sound. This note-wise sound is the hallmark of an absolute beginner. It may technically meet the definition of legato, but the music would have no "flow," no phrasing, no forward motion. It would lack "musicality." To create and convey a legato sound in the larger sense, there needs to be connection between the tones which is created by an integrated technique of arm, hand, and fingers. The legato would be heard in the phrase, not just from note to note.

We could say that legato is the default. That is, if the composer has not indicated otherwise, we assume we want a connected sound.

When your teacher taught staccato, she may have said to hop quickly off the note, or use your finger in a plucking motion, or any number of other descriptions as to how to achieve a very short sound, meaning the damper comes down quickly and stops the sound. However, I always like to ask "how staccato is staccato?" It can be very short, moderately short, or only slightly short. The little dot above or below the note doesn't tell you which; it is up to you. It depends on the music. If it is in a very fast piece, it is likely to be quite short. If it is in a slow piece, it may be only slightly detached. Your musical judgement will come into play. I prefer the word "detached" to the word staccato because it implies there is a range, not just one value.

You might assume that to detach the notes you'd need finger action. However, detached (or staccato) is just an absence of holding they key. Is not essentially a different technique than playing legato. If you are "hopping" off the key, or trying to "pluck" it, or doing other extraneous movements with your fingers, you are going to have a choppy sound. And, you are being quite inefficient, and would have trouble doing staccato at a fast tempo.

Even with staccato, we want a feeling of legato underneath it. We still want the music to have the flow and the phrasing mentioned above. We don't want it to sound mechanical just because the notes are detached. In other words, staccato passages must still be beautiful. The fingers, hand and arm are in a coordinated technique just as they are for legato playing; the fingers are not working in isolation.

In my next post, I will discuss slurs, which are widely misunderstood.

The Wrist

 

In previous posts I've discussed issues surrounding pain, and even injury, that can result from using improper techniques at the piano.

Unfortunately, some of those techniques are actively promoted by many other teachers and so-called experts.

I just happened to come across a blog post by someone who teaches (I'm assuming), who talks about the importance of the wrist. Although he is a big proponent of finger-based technique, he does admit that you can't use just fingers for octaves and big chords. He says for this you must use your wrists. He gives an exercise to do to strenghten your wrist. He says you "must not use the arms" and also that the "arm is not fast enough."

After reading his post, I felt compelled to immediately write this post.

Sorry, but there is no way "not to use your arms." I often say your hands are not going anywhere without the arms taking them there. Can you do a jump from the lower register of the piano to the upper without using your arms? Or an ascending or descending broken chord or scale that spans a few octaves? Of course not. (If you want a simple illustration, take one hand and hold your other arm very tightly at the forearm so it cannot move at all; then try to play. There is almost nothing except a simple five-note melody you could play, and even that will be awkward and stiff.)

Your arms are your "power source." The upper arm is not only strong, but efficient. If you want fortissimo chords or octaves, for example, there is simply no way to get them with the wrist alone. You need the power of the arm.

The exercise he gives for the wrist is very dangerous. I cannot stress this enough. The wrist is a somewhat delicate joint. You cannot strengthen a joint! The only thing that can be strengthened is a muscle and that is not going to happen with the exercise he suggests. (I cannot resist adding here that he doesn't seem to understand basic music terminology; he uses the word "diatonic" to mean all the white keys, which is absolutely incorrect. So this makes all his advice suspect, in my opinion.)

Almost everyone probably knows someone who has had carpal tunnel syndrome, or tendinitis in the wrists, or even a broken wrist from a minor fall. People who work at a computer keyboard for hours a day know that they must support their wrists, to prevent them from sinking below the hand, to avoid problems. If it's true for the light touch of the computer keyboard, imagine how much more important it is for the piano.

The wrists needs to be aligned with the forearm, without twisting side to side, close to 100% of the time. In effect you are using the arm and hand as one unit. The wrist needs to be elastic, not rigid, and will definitely have some flexing and extending (so that the hand points up or down from the wrist) to a moderate degree. However, if your hand and forearm are at a 90 degree angle to each other, you are over-flexed. This will cause strain if you do it too much.

I realize that my advice is the complete opposite or what some others may say. This is a conundrum for someone studying the piano. I address this is my previous post titled "Who Can You Believe?" I strongly urge you to read that post now to help put this whole discussion in perspective.

How Do You Measure Your Progress

 

Most people are interested in making progress, whether at the piano or other aspects of their lives. Of course there are many who just enjoy playing the piano and are content to just do things as they have always done them. There is no problem with that. After all, having fun and enjoying your music-making is the best reason to do it.

However, if you are taking lessons, or even if you are not, you may wish to improve your skills, deepen your knowledge, and be able to play progressively more difficult and challenging repertoire. It stands to reason, then, that you will want to assess whether this is happening, and at a rate which is encouraging rather than discouraging.

For classical music, many people assess their progress by the percentage of "right notes" or "wrong notes" they have. (Jazz pianists and others who improvise would probably not have this view.) Fewer wrong notes means you're getting better, right?

Unfortunately, no. I would ask, fewer wrong notes at what cost? If you have to play the piece, or the passage in the piece, dozens or even hundreds of times in a sitting, that is a terrible trade-off. More often what happens is that in the pursuit of 100% correct notes, the musicality of the piece is lost. There is no room for expression -- for nuances of timing, phrasing, and dynamics. There is almost always a lack of real "flow" or continuity. You may feel anxiety over the "notes" and your muscles may be tight, which can lead to other problems. And probably the "fun" aspect is also gone.

Instead, I would offer these metrics for assessing your progress.

1. Continuity. Are you able to play the whole piece (if it is short) or at least a large section of the piece, without stopping, pausing, or back-tracking in order to "fix" notes? Whether or not you are interested in performing, or even playing for friends, surely everyone would agree that this is how the music is meant to be heard. No one enjoys hearing someone play in fits and starts. Playing start to finish may not sound that difficult, but if you have made a habit of stopping and "fixing," you will see that it is not so easy. Focus on changing that habit more than the notes themselves.

2. Musicality. This is that word which can be hard to describe, but you recognize it when you hear it, or when you don't. If your playing sounds stiff, mechanical, even somewhat harsh in tone, then you aren't playing musically. See some of my previous posts for more discussion of this issue. But it is safe to say that if you don't have continuity (see above), it is even harder to play musically. I like to say that no one cares how many right notes you hit if the playing is mechanical and unpleasant to listen to. Focus on always playing with 100% emotional engagement regardless of right or wrong notes. If you feel you cannot play musically until the notes are all correct, you will never play musically. Your habits of playing without it will be too strong to overcome. Love the wrong notes as much as the right ones. That is my mantra.

3. Ability to play more challenging music. If you have a teacher, she/he should be selecting music which continually exposes you to new challenges, and of course, teaches and guides you in developing the physical techniques which enable you to play the music. If you are working on your own without a teacher you may not be sure how to do this. When people come to me for lessons after having worked on their own, they almost always have chosen pieces that are too difficult. Naturally, in the struggle to learn "the notes," everything else gets lost. If it's too much struggle, they may not actually gain the technique they need which would make it easier because they resort to methods which don't work, such as playing too slowly too much of the time, too much time spent hands separately, too many repetitions, and all of the above at once. You may notice when you are struggling for notes, the actual listening takes a back seat or gets almost completely lost. If you are not listening to your own playing, how could you possibly assess your progress?

4. Fun. Last but certainly not least, don't forget the reason you are doing this: fun. Or maybe, more than fun, a deep-level satisfaction. If you don't have continuity, expression, some level of feeling "relaxed," and true, open listening, you probably aren't going to be having fun. You know the saying: "If it ain't fun, you're doing it wrong."

If you make these your priorities, your technique and your ear will improve, and, ironically, you will have a greater percentage of "correct" notes. 

Pain

 

Many pianists ask if it is normal to have pain while playing the piano. The answer is unequivocally NO! If they are asking, chances are they have already experienced some pain. 

Many people might assume that having some pain while playing is to be expected, as it might be when doing an athletic activity or a workout where you are building muscles. They may assume that when their muscles get stronger, the pain will go away.

However, this is far from the truth. As you've read in previous posts, learning to play is NOT about building muscles. If it were, you wouldn't be seeing the amazing young children who are playing Chopin and Rachmaninoff and all the difficult pieces. They simply do not have large muscles. And they can play pieces which last 30, 40 minutes or more, and have no fatigue. If you have pain and fatigue, it is not because your muscles need to get stronger, but because you are over-using certain muscles and using them in the wrong way.

The most common pain pianists get is in the forearm. This is because they are over using the small muscles in the hand and fingers. It is not due to your forearm muscles. Although many people think the fingers are doing all the work, this is not true. You may already have been instructed to do finger exercises to get them stronger. You are probably never going to have highly-muscled fingers, and even if you do, that still would not give you the ability to play much of what the piano requires. If you are working on building muscles in the fingers, you might expect to have pain in the fingers themselves. Yet I've never encountered anyone who gets pain in the fingers themselves, or in the palm. The pain is almost always felt one level "back" up the arm, so to speak. Thus, over-use of fingers is felt in the forearm.

Another place where pain may be felt is in the wrists. Again, it has nothing to do with your wrists not being strong enough. Most likely you are sitting too low (or slouching as you sit) and letting your arms sink below keyboard level, which strains the wrist (and can lead to carpal tunnel syndrome). You could get pain from sitting too high and having your wrists higher than your hand, but I've never actually seen anyone have this issue. You could also be twisting your wrists and pivoting them back and forth, which also is a strain on them. You may have been taught techniques which employ a wrist twist, but these are not good techniques.

If you have pain in your shoulders, you don't have a muscle definiciency. Most likely you are hunching your shoulders up when you play. Consistently reminding yourself to let the shoulders down will remove the pain.

I am not saying that no muscles are used. Of course they are; muscles must move the bones. However, the muscles of your upper arm are already strong enough from your day-to-day activities to play the piano. The technique that I teach relies much more on the upper arm and less on the hand and fingers. The fingers do transfer the power of the upper arm to the keys themselves, but do not initiate the movements. This concept may not be easy to understand just from reading about it. You need to experience it yourself, and you will probably need a teacher who can guide you in order to change to this type of technique.

Please don't subscribe to the "no pain, no gain" philosophy when it comes to the piano. Having pain is the signal to you that something is wrong and needs to be changed.

The Miracle that is Musical Notation

 

I've often marvelled at how musical notation conveys so much information with just a combination of various dots and lines, and wondered how it developed the way it did. I recently read a book on this subject titled Capturing Music by Thomas Forrest Kelly. (Yes, I admit I am a total musical theory geek.) Although it didn't answer all my questions, I did learn a lot.

There is no known written record of music from the Ancient Greeks and Romans and we know very little about it. In the Middle Ages, music was learned by rote, that is, by copying another person. Almost all music was sung at first, and had words, taken from the various liturgical texts in the church. Many scholars were quoted as saying they believed it was impossible to notate music. For centuries, music was simply learned by listening to another person, and the various chants, hymns, songs and so on were passed down generation by generation in this way. 

Eventually they began to use symbols over the words to indicate a vocal embellishment over a given note or notes. This led to other innovations, and dots on lines were used to show the direction of the melody (up or down) and by how much. They still would have had to depend on having heard someone sing it, but perhaps this primitive notation served as a sort of "reminder" of what they had heard. Undoubtedly, someone saw the potential of this, and there began to be notes written on lines which did correspond to actual notes.

The hardest nut to crack was rhythm. When music was sung, the words determined the rhythm, to some degree. And again, you would just copy someone else to get the rhythm as well as the notes. But when notes began to be written, there would have to be something to indicate the rhythm. If someone was singing solo, they would have a lot of leeway to do the rhythm as they saw fit, but if multiple people were singing together, they would need notation so they would all be in sync. The written record shows all sorts of attempts at this. For example, the reason we show eighth notes with a bar across the top is that these "faster" notes were sung over one syllable of a word, so the line connecting them indicated that.

Music was probably a lot more fluid-sounding before rhythmic notation. But of course it also had its limits, especially where multiple people sang or played together. Harmony, which evolved from multiple lines of music sung together, would have been impossible without rhythmic notation. So it was a small price to pay, I think we would all agree!

For years I have wondered why our notes on the staff correspond to the white keys on the piano, or the scale of C Major. Notation preceded the invention of the piano (or harpsichord) by many years, so it wasn't because of the keyboard. If anything, it's the other way around. Although the book I read didn't answer this completely, I speculate that the staff we use today was based on the scale that we call A Minor, which the Greeks called Aeolian. This may have been the primary scale that the early chants were sung in. (Is it just a coincidence that the first note on the piano is an A? Probably.) Later on, there was a need for an occasional "out of scale" tone, and it seems that the flat sign evolved first, and later the sharp sign. It appears that they didn't think of notating in different keys as we do today, and there was no "key signature" as we now use.

When you compare musical notation to our alphabet, it's pretty incredible. Although every novel, poem, treatise, essay or memo is written using just our 26 letters, and once we know the alphabet we can read or write an unlimited amount of material, the alphabet itself doesn't give us any information about inflection, rhythm, speed or other nuances if you speak the words aloud (or even silently in your mind). We need punctuation, and such indicators as italics, underlining, and other methods to convey more specific meaning. Yet music notation, with fewer actual symbols, tells you a tremendous amount, not only what to play, but how to play it, yet still allowing for a great deal of flexibility which is necessary for music to be interpreted differently by individual musicians. (We still need the addition of other symbols and directives, just like the alphabet does, for the composer to indicate qualities as dynamics. I will discuss this in a future post.)

We who play an instrument (or sing) probably take our musical notation for granted. But it's good to appreciate the amazing evolution which enables us to experience and communicate the beauty of music.

Independence

 

Today is July 4th, Independence Day, and I want to talk about the subject of independence of the fingers.

Most traditional (read: "old") methods promote the idea that the fingers must work independently from each other. There are many exercises given to students that involve such things as holding several notes down while playing another note with a different finger. You are probably told to lift the finger as high as possible before it comes down onto the keys. Supposedly this is to increase the strength as well as independence. 

If you think about it for just a moment, you will realize that you already have independence of the fingers. Virtually all of us type on the computer keyboard (and our phones) with a good degree of skill, and probably accuracy and even speed. How could you do this if your fingers didn't work independently? You don't find yourself smooshing down several keys at once because the fingers can't move individually. Place your hand flat on a table; hold three or four fingers down while another finger moves; unless you have arthritis or some other condition in your hands, you can already do it. Playing hours of exercises will not make it appreciably better or easier. These exercises are awkward at best, and painful at worst. There is absolutely no reason why pain is necessary to learn to play the piano!

Some people mistakenly believe that playing the piano is similar to typing, and that typing is good preparatory work for playing the piano. However, this is not the case at all. If it were true, there would be a great number more good pianists out there than there are, since virtually everyone types. Many of my students have jobs where they type at the computer all day long, but they don't start out ahead of the game at all when it comes to learning the piano. Playing the piano involves a tremendous number of skills that don't get developed at all by typing!

If you do exercises to supposedly improve your strength and finger independence, your playing will probably start to sound like an exercise, that is, very clunky and stiff, what I call "note-wise." How can it be otherwise? You can't practice one way and then think you will flip a switch and play beautifully.

In fact, the real skill in piano is learning to have the fingers, hand, arm, and even torso, work in conjunction with each other. The fingers already want to "get in the act" and take over, so to speak, but a dazzlingly fast and smooth arpeggio, for example, involves a lot more than just the fingers each doing their own thing. I often say we need to "tame" the fingers. If they work independently, as mentioned above, the sound you produce will not be as smooth, even, and with good phrasing as if they work together.

As you've heard me say before, we also do not need additional strength in our fingers. Most pianists do not have muscular hands. We need agility and flexibility. All the strength we need comes from the larger muscles of the arm. If this were not true, how would we see so many young prodigies who play all the big and difficult pieces? They simply haven't had time to develop muscles in their tiny hands.

The only endeavor that I can think of that requires finger strength would be rock-climbing. You can see that an experienced rock climber has muscular hands. If you think therefore they would have an advantage when it comes to learning the piano, because they already have finger strength, you would be wrong. They would have a much harder time, in fact, because they have probably lost a great deal of flexibility in the aquiring of those muscles.

The whole issue of strength and independence of the fingers is a moot point anyway. Almost ALL of what goes into learning to play an instrument is neurological. It's happening in the brain. I like to call it the "wiring" in the brain. There is no physical skill you can develop without it first happening in the brain. Every time you practice, it is good to be mindful of that. The brain, in my experience, responds to intelligently designed technical work done in smaller amounts, rather than brute force strength training.

There was a well-known pianist who, after a long career of concertizing, suddenly developed a type of paralysis in his hands. He was diagnosed with dystonia. Doctors and physical therapists tried many different treatments, all to no avail. Not a lot was known about dystonia, apparently. Ultimately it was discovered that it was a "scrambling" of the part of the brain which controlled the hands. No amount of work on his hands was going to change that. Later on, he was able to return to playing, but only if he played pieces that didn't require a lot of "finger-action." Pieces with more chords and more dependence on the arm were possible for him. 

You probably won't develop dystonia, but pianists who force their hands and fingers into unnatural exercises for "independence" do develop tendinitis and other conditions. Please don't be fooled by the old idea that you need independence of the fingers.

The Problem With Piano Lessons

 

I've been teaching private piano lessons for many years. In the past I also taught at a private music school and a community college. I am a very committed teacher, as you must have deduced from reading this blog. I have a degree from one of the best conservatories in the country, Manhattan School of Music. After my degree I had further studies with a masterful teacher, Joseph Prostakoff. I have a website which lists my experience, has testimonials from students, recordings of my playing from concerts I have given, and, of course, I have been writing this blog for 12 years.

When I meet people and they learn that I teach piano, I very often hear "Oh, I took piano lessons when I was a kid." Some of them say they really enjoyed it, and others say they hated it. Almost everyone took private piano lessons from a local teacher.

However, I see a lot of problems with private piano lessons, and also with some schools. Many people who teach privately are simply not qualified to teach. You wouldn't send your child to learn math or science or most subjects to just some person in your neighborhood. In a public or private school, the teachers must be certified and have proven competency in their fields. In addition, they may be required to have continuing education to keep up to date. A private teacher may not have a degree in music, or any kind of certification, and has no proof of their level of expertise that they can show you. Some just teach a few lessons "on the side" to pick up a little extra money. Furthermore, their own education in music may have taken place many years prior, and they may not be up to date on modern theories and practices. You might think, "what could really change in learning to play the piano?" I can assure you that much has changed in our understanding. (Read my post "Are you using 300-year-old ideas?")

Many private piano teachers learned to play when they were kids; maybe they even played reasonably well. But teaching is an art. Just because you played for a few years when you were a kid does not make you automatically qualified to teach others. And most teachers will teach the same way they were taught. If they had a bad teacher, they are probably going to also be a bad teacher. Unfortunately, they may not have even realized they had a bad teacher, so they have no impetus or reason to change how they teach.

Virtually all my adult students who come to me having had lessons previously have some level of bad habits they will need to change if they want to play well, make progress, and really enjoy the journey. I hate to use the word "bad," but there is no point in sugar-coating it. They have learned technique either based wholly on a wrong foundation, or they have not really learned technique at all. Often their abilities in sight-reading are sorely lacking. They really have not learned how to practice effectively. And they sometimes have no idea how to play expressively. Theoretically, it's possible they had a good teacher and just didn't follow the teachers' instructions. But when I question them about their previous lessons, I can tell with a high degree of certainty that the teacher didn't know how to teach, and/or was teaching the wrong things.

You may think I sound quite arrogant, saying that others are wrong in how they teach and I am right. I'm sure most teachers think they are skilled and doing a good job with their students. If the student doesn't do well, they just say the student didn't have enough talent or didn't work hard enough. This seems to be quite a conundrum. There is no absolute "test" that you can apply to ascertain the quality of the teacher. It is not until you've studied with them for a period of time that you may have an inkling. But by then you will regret that you spent all that time, energy, and money on a teacher who didn't help you. I suppose there is simply no substitute for using your own good judgement and honestly assessing your own progress at the piano. (See my post "Who can you believe?")

Finding a small neighborhood music school is also not a solution. I am aware of several chains of music schools who teach a variety of instruments, including piano. However, these places usually hire young teachers, just starting out, and they pay them very poorly. The school takes the rest of your tuition money for overhead, and profit, of course. There is no guarantee that the school has chosen teachers with actual teaching skills. This may a be a good way for a brand new teacher to get some experience under their belt, and I sympathize with them, because everyone has to start somewhere. But you may not want your child, or yourself, to be the guinea pig for a brand new teacher. And don't assume that a teacher who teaches at a piano store is a good choice; the store is simply renting out the space, and make no guarantees as to the quality of the teacher.

When parents decide to send their child for piano lessons, they also may not want to spend too much, thinking that if the child doesn't like it and wants to stop, that they will not have lost too much money. But sadly, if the lessons are "cheap" and the teacher is not good, the child probably won't do well, and will want to stop. On the other hand, people have limited budgets and may not be able to afford a top teacher. A high-priced teacher isn't necessarily a good one either. I have known of many high-priced teachers who are still promoting 300-year-old ideas. It's a real dilemma. I sympathize with parents who are trying to do the best they can.

Unfortunately I don't have a magic answer. If you are exploring the idea of private piano lessons for yourself or your child, ask the teacher a LOT of questions. Ask about their approach to all the many subjects I have discussed in previous posts. Also, you MUST ask them to play something for you and assess how you think it sounded. If they say they can't play because they are "too busy to practice" or some other such excuse, that should be a red flag. See my post "Finding a Teacher."

Playing Through vs. Spot Work

 

The quality of your practice time will largely determine your progress at the piano, or lack of it. Quality is far more important than quantity. Yet people often ask me "How long should I practice" before they ask "How should I practice." Many people still believe that if they just put in the hours, doing endless repetition, that someday it will just all come together and they will play really well. Unfortunately this is never the case. If you are spending many hours at the piano but doing the wrong things, you will certainly not improve, and your frustration level will be so high you will probably lose your desire to play.

With my students, I am always showing them how to practice. There are numerous aspects of practicing, many of which I have discussed in previous posts. The one I want to talk about here is the question of whether you should practice playing through the piece (or at least a large section), start to finish, versus doing what I call "spot work," that is, just practicing a particular measure (or measures) that seem to be more difficult. The answer is that you need both.

Let's say you are a beginner to intermediate-level student. You are starting a brand new piece. What should you do first? I strongly recommend that you outline the piece, start to finish. See my previous posts on outlining for more about this important skill. Essentially you are playing a sketch of the piece, but not all the notes. There is no right or wrong for how much to play and how much to omit; you just do what you are able to do. This way you get "the lay of the land" so to speak, and you hear what the piece sounds like. Continue outlining, gradually putting in more detail. At some point, you will discover that some sections, or particular measures, present more of a challenge, technically. At this point it would be entirely suitable to take those measures and "take them apart." You may need to do some hands separately, or play some of the voices separately, or you may need to do other technical work, to get those measures to improve.

At a recent lesson with a student who came to me having largely taught himself, he played a short piece, and at a measure near the end, he played it suddenly louder and more "aggressively," that is, it just had a different quality of sound than the rest of the piece. I asked him if he was aware of that, and if he knew why. The answer (which I already knew, based on my decades of teaching) was that he had "drilled" that measure because of something in it which he thought he was having trouble with. In his practice at home, he had played that measure over and over, to the point where he had caused it to sound, frankly, somewhat ugly. 

This is the problem with spot work. If you overdo it, that part of the piece may take on a different quality, and you probably won't realize it's happening. It eats up a lot of your practice time which might have been better spent in a different way. It also affects you psychologically, because when playing the piece through you are likely to think "uh-oh, here comes that spot." That will cause further problems because you will likely become tight and tense, which will, in turn, cause you to miss more notes, and create more anxiety about that spot. And so on, in a viscious circle.

I recommend a "gentle" approach to spot work. Do some if you think (or your teacher recommends) you need it, but not too much. See if just a little does the trick. Try to employ more creative problem-solving methods such as those in previous posts, rather than just repetition. Then play the piece through again and see what happens.

If you can play a piece through without doing any spot work, that would be wonderful, because you can focus on the musicality and just enjoy the experience of playing. However, it could indicate that this piece doesn't present enough challenge to you, and by choosing more challenging pieces, your skills would progress faster. On the other hand, if all of the piece is so challenging that you feel almost every measure is a "spot" you need to work on separately, then this piece may be too difficult for you at this stage. If it requires technical skills you simply do not have yet, then, with the guidance of a teacher, you can find pieces that will build up those skills.

It is important to strike a balance between playing through (including outlining) and spot work. This way, you don't ignore "problem areas" which need work, but you don't overdo it to the point where you lose musicality and beauty in your playing.

Do You Hear Voices?

 

When you hear about someone who "hears voices," it might make you a little worried. However, in music is essential to hear voices.

What I am referring to here is the phenomenon that virtually all of our music is made up of several lines, or voices, at least to some degree. The term "voice" comes, of course, from vocal music, which was the earliest music. In the middle ages almost all music was vocal -- largely religious music sung in church. As instrumental music began to be more prevalent, it still imitated vocal music to a great degree. Our music evolved as separate lines woven together. Melody preceeded harmony; harmony grew out of the fact that some tones, when occuring at the same time, were very pleasing, very "harmonious," and began to be viewed as entities in and of themselves. If you are a singer or instrumentalist on a single-line instrument, you will only have one "voice" to play or sing; but if you are a part of a choir or ensemble or symphony, your voice is one part of the greater whole. This is, hopefully, fairly obvious. If you are a pianist, however, you are very rarely just playing a single line melody, that is, one note at a time. You will be playing the whole gamut of melody and harmony. That is the beauty and the brilliance of piano.

When a new student comes to me who has studied with other teachers or is self-taught, I am still amazed that they don't seem to have any awareness of the concept of voices. They learned simply to "play the notes" that they see on the page. But piano music is never just monolithic. Let's consider a simple example. If you are playing a Bach two-part invention, you have two separate but complementary lines, one in right hand and one in left. One is not more important than the other. Yet I hear some people play it as if right hand has the melody and left hand has an accompaniment. This is not at all correct; instead it needs to be played as a dialogue between the two voices. Of course the same thing goes for a three-part invention. When you have a four-part piece, it could be a fugue (but not necessarily). You can't possible play a fugue well if you don't have understanding and awareness of the voices. Your practice should include playing each voice separately, so you can hear it clearly and "trace its path." Then play different combinations of two, and then three voices, and finally all four. Now you will more clearly hear the interweaving of these lines, and you will hopefully know which one(s) to bring out at any given point. If you can't hear each voice clearly, your listener will certainly not be able to either.

We call these voices soprano, alto, tenor and bass, just like actual voices in a choir.

How can you tell which voice is which? For one thing, the music is written in a way to indicate the voices very clearly. If it is a four-voice fugue, you may have two voices in the right hand and two in the left, although there may very well be a few spots where this isn't the case. On the treble clef, the soprano voice will mostly have the note stems (on quarter notes, eighth notes, etc.) pointing up, and the alto voice will have them pointing down. In the bass clef, tenor voice will be up, and bass voice down. Be aware that the voices can cross, with the alto being higher than the soprano, for example, at some point, just like in an actual choir. But regardless, the stem direction always identifies one voice versus another. In a piece such as a fugue, which is 100% polyphonic (multiple voices), this should be pretty clear. 

After the Baroque era, music became less polyphonic. An early Mozart piece, for example, could consist of a melody (in right hand) with a chord-based left hand. It may or may not be this way the entire piece, but if it is mostly that way we would refer to it as homophonic, not polyphonic. But in the more complex pieces of the Classical era, and most definitely by Beethoven, piano music is more often than not a combination of both. Take two examples of pieces by Beethoven that piano students love to play: the first movement of the so-called Moonlight Sonata (Beethoven did not name it this), and the second movement of the Pathetique sonata. In both cases there is a top-line melody, an inner voice of broken chords, and a bass line of single notes or octaves. In Moonlight, the broken C-sharp minor chord (the triplet) begins the piece, and the melody starting on G-sharp comes in a few measures later. In the Pathetique, the top melody is in quarter notes, with the middle voice in sixteenths. Together they make a complete chord, but they are still intended to be heard as two entities. In both cases, the stems of the top voice point up, and in the middle voice they point down. More to the point, the two voices have different rhythmic values, so they are clearly two things happening simultaneously. In both cases, if the notes of the top voice are not held for their full value, the middle voice will interrupt and will be indistinguishable from the main melody. Similarly, if you play both voices at the same dynamic level, the middle voice will compete with the top melody; the middle voice must be softer, more subdued. Another great example that students love to play (often before they are ready, in my opinion) is Traumerei by Schumann. This is essentially a four-voice composition, though in a few spots the alto and tenor split in two, making six voices. I recommend you make several copies of this piece, and in each copy, use a colored highlighter to trace the path of each voice. Sometimes the alto and tenor go from one hand to the other, so you have to look closely. After you've played each voice, play them in combinations of two, such as soprano and bass, then alto and tenor, and so on. I guarantee you will hear the piece differently than if you don't do this.

You would be hard-pressed to find any piece of Chopin, Schumann, Rachmaninoff, Debussy, Ravel, and just about any composer in the last 300 years or so, that isn't multi-dimensional. I've actually had many people tell me they had no idea these pieces had separate voices. If I hear someone play these compositions, I can tell immediately whether he/she is even aware that these are multi-layered compositions.

If you just play all the notes without this awareness, you essentially have a one-dimensional picture rather than a three-dimentional (or more) picture. It would have no "depth." Or, I make the analogy that you have a beautiful gourmet dinner on your plate, with several items, each with distinct taste and texture, and you take your fork and mush it all together. Theoretically you still have all the same flavors, but you can no longer taste each one, and the mushed-together flavor is very different from tasting each one by itself.

First you must understand that your pieces are multiple voices. Then you must learn to practice in such as way as to hear each voice. Then your technique must be advanced enough to enable you to play at different dynamic levels, even within one hand. If this is new information to you, and/or has never been mentioned or taught by your current teacher, it is imperative that you get a different teacher. If you are trying to learn on your own (not ideal, in my view) and this is new to you, take a fresh look at all the pieces you are working on in this new light. You can also listen to recordings (of professional pianists only) and direct your listening to the differentiated voices to refine your listening in this way.

You want to become one of those people who hears voices -- at least in music!

Progress Over Perfection

 

I recently saw someone wearing a t-shirt with this phrase, and thought it perfectly expressed my philosophy about learning to play the piano.

In my almost four decades of teaching piano, I have had many students, ranging from total beginner to intermediate to advanced. I would say that in almost 100% of students, the goal of playing "all the right notes" is their highest priority, at least when they start lessons with me. But over time, hopefully, I enable them to see that having this as your top priority (sometimes even their only priority), will be detrimental to both short and long term progress.

Some students who have come to me having had some lessons previously or having tried to teach themselves, focus so exclusively on "the notes" that the rhythm is totally ignored. Somehow they think they will "add the rhythm later." This is preposterous; the rhythm and the notes are inextricably enmeshed to make the particular music what it is. You cannot just take out the rhythm and try to add it back later. In focusing only on the notes, they ignore phrasing and dynamics and all the other nuances which make music beautiful. Again, they think they can add these later, but by the time they have "learned the notes," their habit of playing without these nuances is deeply entrenched and is almost impossible to change.

Students who come to me from other teachers and/or self-taught also tell me that they spent many months learning one piece, with great difficulty and a fair amount of drudgery. Then, I assume, they enjoyed playing it for a while, but if they stopped playing it for a short period, they could no longer play it. Then they would start the next piece and go through that process again. In the end, they really had almost no music they could just sit down and play, despite all the hours and months of work. This is because they learned notes but not skills. The learning was at a superficial level, so with lack of reinforcement (playing every day), it just disappeared. In focusing solely on the notes, they didn't work on developing their physical skills (technique) except for the minimum required by that piece. Nor did they develop their ear. So with the next new piece, which may require some different aspects of technique, they are starting from square one. If it takes you many months to learn a piece, you will only have exposure to very few pieces in the course of, say, a year, and you will not be able to acquire a broad range of technical skills. I might also add that most people who approach it in this way are trying to play pieces far too advanced for their skill level, so they don't have even the foundation of technique to be able to play that piece.

I always tell my students I am teaching skills, not pieces. The pieces are vehicles for learning skills. That doesn't mean that they are to play their pieces as exercises -- in fact the exact opposite. Playing musically, that is, with phrasing, dynamics, nuances of timing and so on -- is part of the skill set they need to acquire. They need to play pieces at the appropriate level of difficulty (which any good teacher must be able to assess), so that they aren't struggling too much, but yet are somewhat challenged. 

Perhaps the most important aspect of this approach is that you must give up on the idea of 100% correct notes 100% of the time. If this is your only metric of progress, you will do just about anything that you think will help you hit the right notes. These include, stopping and "fixing," looking at your hands, writing the note names in the music, listening to the piece on YouTube and trying to imitate, and a host of other things. These will actually take you backwards in your progress. They hamper your sight-reading, your kinesthetic awareness, your ear development, and your confidence. If you do these "cheater" approaches, thinking that one day you will magically play it all correctly, you will be sadly disappointed, to the point where you probably will consider giving up the piano.

In the course of learning to play the piano, or any other instrument, you will play many wrong notes. Get over it! It is part of the learning process. I often think of Olympic ice skaters who do those incredible jumps and leaps without falling. Do you think they never fell when they were learning to do these? Of course not; they fell all the time. If they hadn't been willing to fall, they never could have learned those techniques. It is the same with piano. Not only do you need to accept wrong notes, you need to embrace them. If you have a good teacher and also try to employ a great deal of self-awareness, you will start to see WHY you have the wrong notes. It is almost never random. Only if you know the reason for them can you take steps and practice in such a way to gradually reduce and/or eliminate them. But again, eliminating wrong notes is not the goal in itself. The goal is to have solid technique. If you are making progress in the areas of technique, ear-training, and musical expression, you will probably be quite happy and enjoy the process. 

I often think of this story: the student of a spiritual practice goes to see the Master and says: "Master, how do I keep from making so many mistakes?" The master replies: "Ahh...Experience." The student then asks: "But how do I get experience??" The master replies: "By making mistakes."

I hope you will keep this in mind in your piano practice. Experience, rather than avoiding mistakes, is the goal. Progress over perfection.

What chord am I on?

 

I am a firm believer that we must always try to approach music at the macro rather than the micro level. Unfortunately many beginners and even some more advanced players are so focused on "the notes" that they really do miss the proverbial forest for the trees. Although, yes, we play "the notes," they are always part of some larger entity: chords.

All of the music you are likely to play at the piano will be built of chords in one way or another. The only exceptions might be ultra-modern music and I can't really speak to that. But if you are playing Bach through 20th century music, it is built on chords. Even if you think Bach is polyphonic, meaning a weaving of individual lines, those lines created harmonies, that is, chords.

I ALWAYS know what chord I am on at any moment. It has become so second nature to me that I barely think about it consciously, but I just know at a deep level what the chord is. I never just see or hear it as a bunch of notes. I am referring to chords whether they are blocked, that is, played all at once, or broken, such as an arpeggio.

Here are some of the ways that knowing what chord(s) you are on will help you;

1. Reading. If you are still at the stage in your sight reading where you see several notes and need to identify them one by one, rather than seeing the whole thing (maybe 3,4,5 notes or more) as a chord, then your sight reading will be slow and inefficient. Think of a chord as a word. When you read English, you see the word, not the individual letters. Imagine if you still had to sound out the letters of every word when you read. That would be the equivalent of reading note by note.  If you've read my earlier posts on sight-reading, you know I emphasize reading by interval. If you see a group of notes and you immediately see it as a "shape," meaning its particular intervals, then you are much more likely to recognize it as a chord. That is the first step; the second step is to know which chord. Knowing the chord will always help you, but a situation where you will find it immensely helpful is when the chord is written with what I would call an alternate "spelling." Let's say you encounter the notes C-flat, E-flat, G-flat, B double flat; you might find that hard to read at first. But it is simply a B7 chord, written as a C-flat-7. (This would be the case if you were in a key with flats; it makes more sense musically to spell it in flats rather than sharps.) Once you see that, it becomes so easy, because it's something you are highly familiar with.

2. Memorizing. Although muscle memory is very important in learning to play by memory, it is not the only skill needed. Ear memory is probably the most important (see earlier posts). But sometimes those two skills need a little help, especially if, say, two passages in the piece are slightly different, and one chord progression leads to one place, and the other similar but not identical chord progression leads to another place. Knowing which chords are which will make sure you don't accidentally end up in the wrong place. Many a beginning or intermediate pianist has played, say, at a recital, and found themselves in a loop, or at the wrong place, to great embarrassment, because they just depended on muscle memory and didn't know the chord progressions.

3. Ear. Whether you realize it or not, you already hear chords as chords, because if you are playing, say, three or more notes, you hear the blended sound more than you hear the individual ones. But it is important to tie the auditory to the intellectual knowledge. Fusing the two together will make them both stronger. If your ear is very strong and well-developed, theoretically you wouldn't need to know the chord name. Some self-taught pianists may do this. But why would you want to be in the dark about this? I can assure you that jazz pianists, who play by improvisation and/or a "sketch" of the piece, would absolutely have to know every chord they play. In the moment of playing it goes by too fast to consciously "think" about, but at a very deep level they know all the chords. I believe classical pianists can and absolutely should do this as well.

4.Understanding musical forms and structure. The story of classical music is largely the story of harmony. While other cultures developed in different ways, classical music became more and more rich and varied in its harmonies through the last four centuries or so. The progression of the harmonies cannot by separated from the structure and form of the music. As an example: the sonata form has a first section which changes to a different key, then a middle section which may go through several keys, and a third section which must return to the original key for the ending. All of this modulating (key changes) depends on the harmonies to get it where it wants to go. There is simply no other way.

So how do you get this chord knowledge? If you don't have a teacher who knows it herself and can teach it, you can get a good book on harmony. But absolutely do not buy a chord chart or something which just tells you where to place your fingers for each chord; you will never have deep knowledge that way. You need to understand how chords are built, and then how they function. A textbook can be quite dry. But you need to start somewhere. Then I would encourage you to play songs, such as jazz standards, using a "fake book," where the chords are written as symbols rather than notation. In the course of playing many songs will get more proficient with chords. Then you can go through a classical piece and do what we call chord analysis. You will write (in pencil, please) the chord symbol over each chord. Don't do this with every piece you are working on; just do it now and then and see if your knowledge is progressing. Unless you have an enormous amount of time to spend at the piano, I think actually playing should be the bulk of your practice time. But you can supplement it with chord analysis.

Other instrumentalists do not have the opportunity to learn chords and harmonies as pianists do (with the exceptions or organ, guitar, and possibly harp). If you play a single line instrument, you may be aware of chords very little or even not at all. In the conservatory where I studied, other instrumentalists were required to take a few semesters of piano, for several reasons, but largely in order to understand harmony. In this area, being a pianist was a huge advantage. Chords are our "bread and butter." It is essential to gain this knowledge.

Should we be relaxed when we play?

 

Some people will say you need to be relaxed when you play. Or maybe they will say "relax your wrist." But what does that mean? Surely not relaxed like you are while lying on the couch. What is meant, or should be meant, is that you have no more tension than is necessary. My teacher, Joseph Prostakoff, used to say, "not relaxed like a cat lying in the sun, but like a cat ready to pounce." What we need when we play the piano is to be in a highly physically alert state; not tense, but not relaxed either. Your whole body, especially the arms and hands, feel animated and alert, and also supple and flexible. Like a cat.

To get a sense of this state of alertness, try the following: hold an object (it can be a pencil, a small rock, anything that is not breakable) in your hand with your fist closed, and your hand (palm and fingers) facing down towards the floor. Grip the item as hard as you can and feel the tension. Then, very slowly, loosen your grip, bit by bit, until eventually your grip will be too loose and the item will fall to the floor. The amount of tension you had in the moment before the item fell was just the amount you needed to hold it. You can do the same thing at the piano. Play a chord, and press very hard into the keys. While continuing to hold the keys down, ease up on the tension in your hand until it is so little that you cannot keep the keys depressed. Again, the amount of tension you need was just before that point. At the lesson, I do this this with my own hand, while the student grasps my palm. They can feel the easing of the tension as I do it. Then I have them feel their own palm with their other hand, to see if they can feel when it gets to the point of minimum tension.

With time, and keen awareness into your physical state at the piano, you can learn to feel this point. Sometimes, as you are playing, you may become aware you are "gripping" too hard, and you can then just ease up.

It is not enough for the teacher to say "relax." The teacher must show you how it feels to play with the minimum of tension and have you experience it yourself, as in the examples above. Unfortunately, the same teacher who says to relax may also be assigning you exercises which cause tension and strain. Most "finger exercises" encourage the antithesis of learning to play with minimal tension. They are designed to have you strain your fingers, supposedly to "strengthen" them. They will make your muscles tighter and you will have a harder time learning to play with no excess tension. As you've heard me say before, our piano training is more analogous to yoga than it is to weight-lifting.

Playing with too much tension over time will likely cause pain and strain, and will limit the types of music you can play, as well as speed, delicacy, etc.

What about playing "naturally?" What does this mean? There is nothing really natural about humans playing the piano; it's unlike anything else we would do in the course of our daily lives. The body must be trained to acquire skills, to move in such as way as it might not do "naturally." But we train it to do these things in a way that works with the body, not against it.

Repeated Notes

 

Repeated notes, that is, playing the same note in succession, sounds like it would be easy. And it can be. But once again, there is a lot of misinformation, or "300-year-old ideas," as I call them, on this subject. There is an old idea that, if playing the same note, you must use a different finger each time you play it. I have to assume that this idea came from the technique for harpsichord, which has an very different mechanism than the piano. The "key return," the speed at which the key itself comes back after being depressed, was slower on the harpsichord than on a piano, and certainly slower than our modern piano, assuming it is of good quality. (I am not an expert on the harpsichord, but I feel confident that my information is correct.) Theoretically, the fraction of a second it would take to change to a different finger would be enough for the key to return. But on our modern pianos, I can play a very fast repeated note using the same finger, by starting with a good strong pulse with the arm, and the rest of the notes "bounce" off of that pulse. A drummer does this with the drumstick to achieve rapid iterations. Since the drummer is not using his fingers per se, he has to use the power of the arm. Or think of skipping a stone in the water: after the initial impulse (the throw), the stone hits the water and then bounces several times. I can get quite a few repetitions this way with no change of finger.

However, if I had a great number of repetitions, I would change finger. But that doesn't mean the work is done by the fingers alone. It is necessary to get a good pulse going with the arm. Changing fingers slightly changes the angle of the arm and wrist to the fingers, and prevents the hand from stiffening as it might if playing with the same finger over and over. Take Scarlatti's sonata in D minor, K. 141, which has rapid-fire repeated notes for most of the piece. Since there are six sixteenth notes in the measure, I would do fingers 1 (thumb), then 3 then 2, twice for each measure. When you start the measure with the thumb, the arm does a small pulse and the other notes come from that pulse. In this way you can get speed without fatigue, because the bigger muscles of the arm are doing a lot of the work. Trying to do this with only finger technique would produce pain and fatigue in almost everyone. (Watch the Martha Argerich performance of this piece on YouTube if you want to have your mind totally blown!)

If the repeated notes are slow, and you want them to be legato, just as you would if they were two different notes, then changing fingers will almost certainly ruin your chance of legato. In the moment of changing fingers, the damper would come down on the string and make a fraction of a second gap between the notes. Instead, you must not let the key up all the way before depressing it again. If you look at the white keys from the side, you can see if you have let the key all the way up, or if you have let it come near to the top but not all the way. If you re-depress it before the damper comes down, you will have legato. This is absolutely the effect we should strive for in many instances. When you hear a not-so-good pianist you may notice they never achieve that effect. (If the composer has marked it detached, then obviously you don't need to do this.) 

One of my pet peeves is that when you see fingering marked in the musical score (usually by an editor, not the composer), you will see a change of finger on a repeated note, even when it is a moderate or slow tempo. This is very inefficient and has absolutely no benefit. And, as mentioned, you won't be able to make it legato. This is another example of people clinging to old, out-dated ideas that are not supported by the facts -- the physical properties of the piano itself or of the human body.

Non-standard divisions of the beat (complex rhythms)

 

If you are an intermediate or advanced player, and you play the music of Chopin and the other Romantic composers, as well as a great deal of the music since that time, you will have encountered places where the beat consists not of the usual divisions of two (such as eights or sixteenth notes) or three (triplets), but in what I will call "non-standard" divisions. In Chopin, for example, you will find many beautiful passages in the Nocturnes, Ballades, etc. where there is a run (sometimes written in eights, sometimes in sixteenths) with a number such as 5, or 15, or 17, or just about anything, written over the beat (or beats). This means, of course, you must fit all those notes in the beat as shown. Since it is Romantic music, you have the opportunity to have some nuance of timing, and the 15 notes, say, don't have to be exactly metrically equal. There can, and probably should be, some subtle slowing and/or speeding up within it, to enhance the musical line. But they must fit in the beat; you cannot change the length of the beat (except possibly the tiniest amount -- again, a nuance), and therefore the measure, because that would destroy the integrity of the rhythm.

If the number of notes within the beat is say, 15, it will probably be fairly fast. If it is only 5, then it may not be. But regardless what the number, or whether it is fast or slow, you need to learn how to play these. I cannot emphasize this point enough: if you have depended on "counting" to help you with rhythms, you will find it impossible and will be utterly at a loss as to how to approach it. If you try to break them down into smaller units, such as dividing up 15 in 3 groups of 5, it may seem to work but will probably sound stiff and unmusical. Remember, Chopin didn't mean for you to divide it in three groups of five, or he would have notated it that way. The idea is to make the passage sound flowing, and even improvisatory, not metric.

So how do you learn to do these? You learn by giving yourself a unit of time, and then "filling in." Start by playing (probably in your right hand) the note C and then the note G. The time between these is now your unit. Then you fill in the notes (white keys) in between. That's five notes, but the C is the beginning of the beat, and the G is the beginning of the next beat. It is important to remember that whatever number of notes you are filling in, it ends on the next beat. So if you fill in the notes from C to G (C-D-E-F-G) you will have actually played 4 sixteenth notes, again, ending on the G, which is the beginning of the next beat. Four sixteenths should be very simple and of course we do it all the time. You will find it helpful to pick a moderate to fast speed for this. Then, take the same time unit, but go from C to A and fill in. You will now have filled in 5 notes. Remember, don't even think about trying to divide it up into smaller units, which would defeat the whole purpose. Now do from C to B, filling in 6 notes, etc., continuing to make the unit larger each time, with more notes to fill in. Don't worry about perfect fingering, just do anything that works. We are not working on the physical aspect here, but rather, we are training the ear to hear these units and be able to fill them in. It's all about the ear. 

Later on, you need to do them randomly. In other words, start with filling in 7, say. Then the next time, start with 10. And so on.

The concept is the same as my approach to learning rhythm from the very beginning. The analogy is that you have a "log" and you learn to "chop" it in equal pieces without the benefit of a measuring tape. With an actual log, you "eyeball" it; with a unit of time, as in music, you "earball" it. See my posts on rhythm for more explantaion.

When you get to filling in really larger numbers, say beyond 12, it is really extremely challenging. But try to be able to get to at least 10 or 12.

You can also fill in using the chromatic scale. If you were trying to fill in 12, for example, you could go from C to C with the chromatic scale.

When you start this, you may not be able to tell if you are doing it correctly. If you start to slow down the time unit (the beat) each time, then you are not actually filling in, you are just changing the length of the beat. And remember, in the actual music we are talking about, you can't do that -- it would be a distortion and not at all what the composer intended. You might be tempted to set a metronome to the time unit, and see if you were able to do it correctly. But what would be even better is to be your own metronome. Slap you left hand on your lap, or tap your foot, and see if you can keep it steady on the time unit while your right hand fills in.

When I do this with my students, I play the "outsides" of the unit, in other words, the beat, along with them as they play. So if they didn't end with me, then they didn't keep to the beat. If they went too slow, then they know they just need to go faster. There is no way to "calculate" how much faster, you just keeping adjusting, trying again, adjusting again, until you get it.

Obviously, it it easier to do this when you are just playing a scale -- notes in sequence. The actual notes in a passage in Chopin will be harder, probably, but at least you now have a foundation.

Another reason why learning to hear these divisions of the beat is critical is so that you can do cross rhythms (also called poly-rhythms). I'm thinking of a Rachmaninoff prelude where the left hand has the beat dividing in 5, and the right hand in either 2 or 3, for the whole piece. Each hand has to be sinuoulsy smooth and silky-sounding. You can't try to "calculate" it out mathematically (like some people might tell you to do with two against three). The only way is to train your ear to hear two different rhythms, or more precisely, two different divisions of the beat.

Rhythm is probably the area that students of music have the most trouble with. Some never actually learn to read the rhythmic notation and instead they just go to YouTube to listen to the piece they are playing and try to copy the rhythm. But obviously, that is not a path to mastery. Rhythm CAN be taught, and CAN be learned, including complex rhythms.