Playing Loud, Playing Soft

 

The range of dynamics is a hugely important aspect of playing the piano with expression, subtlety, and musicality. Only a large pipe organ has a greater range of dynamics than the piano. Even the name of our instrument, originally called the pianoforte, or the fortepiano, means soft/loud (or loud/soft). This was a huge innovation after the harpsichord, which, due to its strings being plucked, not struck, could only achieve one dynamic level. The development of the strings being struck by a hammer changed everything.

The music score, as well as your teacher or coach, may tell you to play a passage loud (f), or very loud (ff). But you may never have been shown or taught how to actually do that. It might seem like it's instinctive -- just play with more force. But it's not quite that simple. You can't really play a loud chord, for example, with just your fingers. Try holding one hand with the other so that it can't move, and try to play with fingers alone: impossible, even if you think you have strengthened your fingers through exercise (which I don't believe in, for reasons described in previous posts). Even if you could, you'd have pain and fatigue in your hands in no time. Now try to hold your upper arm inert and just use your forearm. I call this a hammer-stroke, because it's very much like how you would use a hammer to hit a nail. It works well for the nail, but on the piano it produces a very harsh sound. The only way to get loud without being harsh is to use the whole arm. Using the arm, but still keeping the hand firm but not tight, will produce the sound you want without pain or fatigue.

Think of the baseball player. When he wants to hit the ball out of the park, he brings the bat as far back as he can, using his whole arm, then swings it with as much speed as he can. Yes, he may be strong and he is using his muscles, but it is the speed that is the key. Conversely, when he wants to bunt, he holds the bat right in front of his body and uses mostly his forearm, and has very little momentum, so the ball doesn't travel very far. More speed, more momentum, less speed, less momentum. It's just physics, folks!

To achieve momentum at the piano, your arms must move in, that is, toward the fallboard, and then, using the whole arm as a unit, come towards yourself at high speed as you make contact with the keyboard. The louder you want it, the more momentum you need, which means you move in toward the fallboard as much as possible. Your wrist will need to flex slightly you you don't actually hit the fallboard with your finger tips. Think of Chopin's C minor prelude, which has a loud chord on every beat for the first eight measures. You must use full arm stroke on every chord.

Now the score and/or your teacher tells you to play soft (p) or very soft (pp). Just like the baseball player's bunt, when you want your playing to be very soft, you want less speed and less momentum. Contrary to what a lot of people believe, just using fingers alone doesn't give you a reliable and even softness. Using a full arm stroke but with little momentum gives you a soft sound that is still well-controlled. You've probably experienced those times that you intended to play soft, but instead you got a "ghost" note or notes, that is, no sound at all. That is because the hammer didn't have enough momentum to hit the string at all. If you put your finger on a key and just press, you will almost certainly get no sound, because there was almost no momentum. 

To play extremely soft, your "attack" must be very precise, which requires a lot of alertness. I like my students to use this image: you have a tiny, delicate item that needs to be repaired, and you have a tiny hammer and a tiny nail. You really only have one shot at fixing it, because if you hit it too hard the item will break; if you hit it too lightly, you will have to try again, and increase the risk of destroying it. So you summon all your alertness, and give one quick, precise hit, with enough momentum to get the nail to go in, but not so much as to break it. While not a perfect analogy, it gives you an idea how great pianists achieve the clear and beautiful soft sounds, especially in music such as Debussy and Ravel.

If you try to research how to play loud or soft, you will find a great deal of misleading or incorrect information. When you read something that you think might be correct, ask yourself if the physics support that idea.

Requesting Feedback

 

Over the last few months there has been a large uptick in the number of views I have received on this blog. Just this month there are over 1300 views. There have been approximately 26,000 since I started.

I am requesting your feedback. You can comment on any specific post in the comment box at the bottom of the post. If you have comments about the blog in general, please put your comments in the comment box for this post.

Or, if you have suggestions of subjects you would like to see covered, please leave it as a comment, or, even better, email me at deborah@pianobrilliance.com. That way I can reply to you if I need clarification or if you'd just like a reply.

Thank you.

Deborah Gandolfo

www.PianoBrilliance.com

Must Piano Practice be Boring?

 

You often hear that people hated their piano studies when they were children because it was so boring, so tedious, so dull. Or maybe they never played themselves, but they heard that so often from other people they assumed it to be true and never wanted to try to learn to play.

You also see many, many ads for online classes, books, etc. promoting methods that don't have all the drudgery that traditional methods have. They claim to have the magic answer that will enable you to learn to play in a fraction of the time and work that "traditional" methods require. It's clear that these people advertising these "amazing new methods" surely know that people are expecting drudgery and boredom, so of course they are intrigued when they learn that you can just bypass all that. IF you buy their class or book, of course!

However, you need to know that almost all of those quick courses are not teaching classical music. Just some very simple popular music, which, being simpler, will be faster to learn, They are also easier because they usually have you learning to read only the melody and play chords using chord symbols. I highly recommend learning chords and chord symbols (see my post "Playing from Fake Books"), but you can't learn classical music that way.

A lot has changed in the field of education in the last few centuries. In just about every field, not just music, a strict adherence to rules and specific methods was insisted upon, often with corporal punishment for the student who did not comply and had the audacity to try something different. Thankfully, that is all changed, just about everywhere (hopefully).

Unfortunately, in music studies, it was particularly rigid. Teachers insisted on many hours of scales or arpeggios, or other types of finger exercises. Not very many years ago I had a student who told me her previous teacher ripped up her music and threw it to the floor, right in the middle of her lesson, because she dared to use a different fingering than he had prescribed. Imagine! 

So of course it was going to be boring, possibly intimidating, and definitely far from FUN! If a teacher learned from someone like that, there is a strong possibility they will teach the same way. And so the association with piano and drudgery gets perpetuated.

Of course you know by now I'm going to tell you it doesn't have to be that way. If you find your piano practicing boring, it is because your teacher has made it boring, or you have made it boring, or both. If you are learning without a teacher, then it's on you, but you probably picked up a few things from what other people said, or what you read online, that is making it boring.

The boredom comes from these forms of practice:

1. Too much repetition. People will always say you have to do endless repetition but it's just not true. If you do too much, the brain will just "turn off" and you won't get nearly as much out of it as you think. The mind doesn't want to be bored. If you do a passage of music over and over, soon you will find your mind drifting off to think about what you're going to have for dinner! Instead, just do it a few times, but with focused attention to everything your hands and arms are doing. If you can determine what is the cause of it not coming out how you want, try to assess what the problem is and do it differently. If you find that it starts to go better, I suggest you stop. Let that be the last thing your body remembers. If you do it dozens more times, it will almost certainly get worse before it gets better.

2. Exercises. If you've read some of my previous posts, you know that I recommend you don't do ANY exercises such as Hanon or Czerny. Many teachers who assign those actually want you to do them in a very mechnical way, which only teaches you to be mechanical. Besides not being actually beneficial towards building mastery, they are just not musically interesting. Again, your mind will get bored and will drift.

3. Lack of imagination and experimentation. Although I show my students the best ways to approach technical issues, sight reading, memorization and every other aspect of playing, it doesn't mean you can never try something and experiment on your own. For example, I may show a fingering that I think will work well for them (it's not a one-size-fits-all) after having them try it, but at home they may discover something that seems to work better for them. By all means, try different things and see what comes of it. Of course, including improvising in your practice is a great way to experiement and use your imagination.

4. Playing without emotional engagement. This is the ultimate soul-killing form of practice. You wouldn't want to go to a concert and hear someone play like that, or go to a play and hear the actors deliver their lines robotically, so don't do it yourself. People will tell you that you have to do this just to "learn the notes first," but they are dead wrong. And "dead" is what your playing will be. And boring for you, as well as any listeners you may have.

5. Playing only one kind of music. Even if, say, classical is your main interest, I highly recommend you learn to play some jazz or popular or Broadway tunes, preferably using a "fake book." (See my post on that subject.) It's a great way to loosen up and have fun. The same with improvising. If you're focusing on classical, play from all periods. I've seen many teachers give students a copious amount of Mozart and others from that era because they are easier in some ways for the beginner and early intermediate. But you need to have a varied diet. More modern composers such as Bartok and Kabalevsky, to name just two, wrote pieces for children that are lovely and interesting and these should be explored.

If your teacher is insisting on doing things in the boring and mechanical way, find a new teacher. If you are trying to learn on your own, see if some of these suggestions make your practicing fun again. As that saying goes, "if you're not having fun, you're doing it wrong."

Don't Fall for Gimmicks and Sales Pitches

 

Many people would love to know how to play the piano. I hear it all the time from people I meet: "Oh I wish I had learned to play the piano...." Most people realize it's a lifetime pursuit, that is, if you want to play well and be able to play more than a few songs or pieces. Some people do not realize that, so it's easy to see why it would be so tempting when they see videos, blogs, and books that promise "Learn to play the piano in a week!" or other similar claims. You know the saying, " if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is."

Some videos claim to teach you how to play starting from absolute beginner. Others try to teach specific techniques or specific pieces. If you've read my previous posts on trying to teach yourself and also on shortcuts, you'll know that I do not recommend learning online. You can watch what the teacher is doing with her hands, but she cannot watch what you are doing with yours, which is one of the most critical aspects of what the teacher does. They often resort to saying, in essence, "just do this one thing and you'll be able to play." They have to make it sound simple. If they told you honestly how challenging the piano is, and how many hours and years you will need to spend at it, they wouldn't have many viewers left.

I recently watched a video of a pianist with instruction on one specific piece, Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C-sharp minor (a famous and, for most students, challenging, piece). She said she was going to show you how to "learn and memorize it quickly and easily." She went on to show you some ways you could practice the big chords, octaves and so on. Some of it was just about identifying the chord(s) you are on, which is always a good idea, but it doesn't actually help you play it, physically, and at the speed the piece requires. Another suggestion was playing it slower, which is a pretty obvious one. She even gave one piece of incorrect information, saying the the upward facing stem in the middle ("agitato") section meant that you are supposed to bring that note out. In fact, the stem up indicates it's a quarter note, while the downward facing stems are a triplet (they are considered two separate "voices.") Since you are holding the upper note through the whole beat, it will be heard as the main melody. But her description of its meaning was simply wrong. At one point she said it's best to memorize the ending section because it's "hard to look at the music and your hands at the same time." But what if memorizing is difficult for you? She didn't say how you were supposed to do that, despite promising she was going to show you how to learn and memorize it. Some of her suggestions were reasonable, but in the end, you weren't going to learn to play the piece this way. If you already had the basic skill level and technical ability to play it, you wouldn't need her video. It was simply unethical, in my opinion, to promise "quickly and easily."

Another example I read recently in someone's blog, was that you should play your melody note slightly late, in other words, a fraction of a second later that the bass or other parts. He said it was an "expressive feature" that would make your playing sound more beautiful. He did have to qualify that this only applied to the Romantic period, and that, of course, you couldn't do it all the time or it would become expected and lose it's expressive quality. (It begs the question, then how do I make Baroque, Classical and Impressionist music sound expressive??) So it's basically a gimmick. If your playing was emotionally unengaged and without expression before, you can't just do "this one thing" and have it sound expressive. There are hundreds of elements that go into "expression." And if you were to try to decide which notes to play slightly late, it would sound forced and un-musical. If some of your melody notes came ever so slightly late, it would be because it happened spontaneously, not because you "decided" to do it. Nuances of rhythm are an important part of expression and having your own interpretation. But it's not a gimmick.

In my early teens, my parents decided to look for a new teacher for me. One teacher we met with described his approach to technique, and it was all based on rotation of the arm, that is, where the ulna rotates over the humerus bone. He gave a long sales pitch saying this was the key to good technique. Neither of my parents were pianists, so we didn't really know how to evaluate this claim, but he was so convincing we decided to go with him. He gave me lots of exercises to learn this technique. Now, with six and a half decades of experience playing the piano since then, I can tell you that rotation is not a very useful technique. It is highly inefficient. You may need the slightest bit of rotation in such things as octave tremelos, but very little, and combined with the use of the upper arm. After a year with this teacher, my parents and I agreed I hadn't made much progress, and we decided to look again. Maybe this teacher was looking for something that would make him stand out from the crowd of other teachers, but it was just a gimmick.

I could give you dozens, if not hundreds, more examples. I really feel that the availability of online videos and classes have done people a huge disservice. If you never really learn to play, or to accomplish what they are showing you, there is no accountability for them. They don't have to answer your questions or address your concerns. Some may genuinely want to help people, but in the end, it is the number of views and clicks they get that matters. Sadly, not everyone can afford private lessons. And even then, there is a great difference in teachers. But whether you are looking for help online or with one-on-one private lessons, just don't fall for gimmicks and sales pitches.

Making Sense of Dynamics and Other Markings

 

In addition to the notation for the notes and the rhythm, most of our musical scores have other markings, intended to help the player understand what the composer wants in terms of "interpretation." When I say most of our scores, that is because in the Baroque era (Bach, Scarlatti, etc.) there were none of these markings added to keyboard music; it was thought to be up to the performer. Since the Classical era (Mozart, Beethoven, etc.) the musical scores always have some of these, generally increasing as the years went on.

The beginning or intermediate student may be unsure what to do about these markings. When you see p for piano, meaning soft, or f for forte, meaning loud, you may ask, how soft? How loud?

Of course, that is the point. It's all relative. There are no absolute values for loud or soft. When you see a staccato mark, how staccato? (Many of my students over the years who have had previous teachers have really been given a wrong impression about staccato.) An accent -- how accented? The answer to all of these is that you have to use your judgement. The more years you play and expose yourself to a variety of music, the better your judgement will be.

If you think maybe you should listen to some recordings of the music you are playing to get a better idea of the markings, you will be quite frustrated, as every performer will do them slightly, or very, differently. And that's the point.

Let's take the example of staccato. In a fast piece, the staccatos may be very crisp, very short. In a slow piece, when the composer indicates staccato, is is more of a slightly detached sound, but not crisp and short. In other words, the mood and tempo of the piece effect how you would interpret the markings. 

I have discussed staccato and slurs in previous posts.

Sometimes the markings seem contradictory. You may see a staccato marking and a tenuto (-), meaning hold the note for it's full value, over the same note. How can you possibly do both? The composer is telling you it's very slightly detached, almost imperceptibly. You will see this kind of notation everywhere in Debussy and Ravel, for example.

The tenuto is a confusing marking anyway. Holding the note for its full value is what you would do if there were no marking, so why is it needed? Often you will see it after a series of notes that were staccato, to alert you that it is no longer staccato.

A crescendo tells you to increase the volume, but doesn't always indicate your starting dynamic level. Likewise for a diminuendo.

The one that I think causes the most confusion is accents (>). Presumably that would mean playing that particular note louder, or more pronounced. But how much? If you overdo it, it will interrupt the legato line, the phrase. It will "jump out" and be distracting. Is it a sharp sound, or more of a "leaning into" the note? Sometimes there will be an accent on the first note of a slur, which is redundant, because the first note of the slur is already more emphasized. Sometimes you'll see the symbol sfz, which stands for sforzando. Is it the same as an accent? Not exactly. And sometimes you'll see this symbol (^) which is also similar to an accent. It is not my purpose in this post to explain every single marking you may encounter, but suffice it to say that there are subtle shades of differences in them. Again, your musical judgement and experience may tell you what to do. In the meantime, I actually tell my students to ignore accents, or at least to take them with a giant grain of salt. It is more important to be able to play a legato line, a beautifully phrased passage, then to slavishly try to do all the accents.

It's all relative (see my post of that title). If there were an absolute way to do all of these markings, then everyone's rendition of the piece would sound pretty much the same. These markings are one of the ways to express your interpretation of the piece. And of course you should experiment with different ways of interpreting the markings to detemine which feel and sound the best to you. It's not a crime to omit or change some here and there -- up to a point! Just strive to play with emotional involvement and many of them will come out naturally.

Playing With Eyes Closed

 

Most piano students don't realize the benefits of playing with eyes closed. Maybe they just never think to do it, or they assume it's too difficult.

If you are learning a new piece from the written score, obviously you can't play with eyes closed. But if you are constantly looking down at your hands, you will hamper your ability to achieve real mastery and security (see my post "Should you look at your hands when you play"). 

If you are having trouble with a particular passage, memorize it and then play with eyes closed. You may eventually want to memorize the whole piece anyway, so start with a particular passage and do it with eyes closed. If really necessary, do this one hand at a time. You might think you should start with the easiest passages. But you will get the most benefit from doing it on the passages that cause you trouble. They may cause you trouble if your hands just don't know where to go, and/or the auditory image is weak. If the auditory image, that is, REALLY knowing how it sounds, is weak, it would be like trying to see something looking through fogged up glasses. Eventually you can do longer passages, and then even the whole piece.

Eliminating the visual input strengthens the kinesthetic skills. Pianists MUST have a highly developed kinesthetic awareness. I like to call it "knowing the geography of the keyboard." You can see how blind pianists have this ability at a very high level; of course, they had no choice but to develop it. Eliminating the input from one of our senses strengthens all the others. So when you play with eyes closed, you will probably listen a lot better and increase you auditory sensitivity. And the auditory is what music is all about, so you want that to be as strong as possible. Always using your eyes to "find the notes" on the keyboard effectively means the kinesthetic and the auditory just don't have to work as hard.

Playing while looking off into space is not the same as eyes closed. You need to completely block the visual input in order to strengthen the other senses. In addition, looking at something else, such as the painting on the wall, can be distracting.

When you first start doing this, you may find you hit quite a few "wrong" notes. Don't immediately open your eyes! Use you ear to tell you where you are, such as too high or too low, and by how much. Then you can try to adjust as you go. If you always stop and look when you hear something wrong, you won't really get the benefits.

The eyes don't really help you as much as you think, except for reading the score, of course. They can't be looking everywhere at once, and are actually too slow to help with music with a fast tempo.

If you play by ear or improvise, you can definitely do this with eyes closed. In fact, your improvising will probably improve if you play with eyes closed. Looking at the keys won't tell you where to place your hands, because true improvisation means that you yourself don't even actually "know" where you are going next. The auditory impulses should be leading you.

In the end, when you have a degree of mastery of the piece and/or you want to perform it, of course you will play with eyes open. The eyes can certainly help with large jumps. They aren't micro-managing every note, but have a high-level overview of everything going on.

Don't shy away from techniques and methods that seem hard. You might think piano is hard enough already! But I often say, if something seems hard at first, you probably need to do it.