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.