Let Go of Trying to Control Everything

 

When you watch a great pianist, seeing her hands flying all over the keyboard at top speed and having no errors, you may think "Wow, she has great control!" It's easy to think that's the goal -- to achieve complete control over your movements. However, as with many other areas in life, things are not what they seem.

Conventional methods stress many hours of (tedious) exercises to, presumably, help the pianist achieve total "finger control." Unfortunately, these methods also create a very mechanical, stiff sound, and often lead to strain and other physical problems.

When you see a rock or jazz band jamming and/or improvising, you don't get the sense they are trying to control everything that happens. Quite the opposite; they are letting go and focusing on expression (communicating with the audience) and having fun. To do that, they must let go of trying to control everything.

When I have my students play a song by ear, even if they are not terribly good at it, they still seem able to go with the flow and enjoy the process. However, when reading notes from a score is introduced, many get very anxious and concerned about hitting all the right notes. I call it the "tyranny of the page." Consequently they start to do things which will actually make everything harder. In trying to exert control, the student feels he must "think about" every note he plays. Thinking is very slow, actually. If you think about each note, or what finger to use on that note, the playing by necessity will be slow and halting. Again, if you watch the master pianist, you will see there is no way they could be thinking about every note they play, especially if the piece is fast. ("Yeah," you might say, "but they thought about it when they first learned it." Not really. It's very hard to do one thing for years and then suddenly switch to doing something else.) Thinking, in fact, will undermine and counteract everything you are trying to achieve in your practicing.

You may notice that in hundreds or thousands or daily activities (tying your shoelaces, buttoning your shirt, climbing a flight of stairs, to name a few) you do them automatically. You don't need to think about the physical actions at all. And if you do think about it, you will probably mess up. (Think about where to place your foot on the stair and you may trip.) This is because you have developed muscle memory (which is in the brain, not the muscles) having done the same movements so many times. Thank goodness we don't have to focus on how to do these things every time.

The reason we do repetition in our practicing is to develop muscle memory. It lays down the "tracks" which your body will travel on the next time, and the next, and so on. Of course, mindless repetition is not good; it still needs to be focused (see my post on repetition, December 2023). Virtually everyone will develop muscle memory. It will be quicker in some people and slower in others, but it will happen. The body wants to take over and use the muscle memory it has developed. But if you start to think about what you are about to play, it interrupts muscle memory and renders it almost useless. 

In addition to muscle memory, you have the power of the ear. Just like in singing a song you know, the ear tells the body what to do. It's more complex in piano than in singing, but the principle is the same. 

If we didn't have muscle memory and the ear, no one would be able to memorize music, which, of course, people do all the time.

In the case of a few of my students, they are playing pieces for several weeks or months and still feel the need to look carefully at every note on the page to know what to play. By that point, the body should be taking over and relying largely on muscle memory. But the student cannot seem to "let go" and allow that to happen. They want to retain "control" by thinking. As a result, the piece stays stuck in the same stage indefinitely. They certainly won't be able to memorize easily, if at all.

Of course, if you're used to trying to control everything and suddenly you decide to try not to think so much, you may get a fair number of errors because it will feel new and unfamiliar. Then you may think "uh-oh, this doesn't work! I'd better go back to thinking about every note!" Thinking has become your comfort zone and leaving it can be scary. But you mustn't let wrong notes make you want to crawl back into the cave of wanting to be in control. With perseverence, the wrong notes will become less frequent, but the ability to be expressive will stay with you.

The excitement that the musician feels when he/she plays, and the excitement the audience feels, is a result of throwing caution to the wind and riding the wave of your accumulated skills and experience. Few people really enjoy a performance which is tightly controlled.

Everything you do physically affects the sound you produce

Some of you reading this title may think it's obvious. But to many pianists and students of the piano, this is a new concept.

Some people assume that the hammer in the piano is a "blunt instrument." You press the key, the hammer hits the string, the string vibrates which produces the sound, and that's all there is to it, right? You can hit the key harder or lighter to make the sound louder or softer, but that's about all the difference you can make, right? They would say that, unlike the violin where you are in direct contact with the string, on the piano you can't really affect the quality of the sound because you are not in direct contact with the string.

These statements are definitely incorrect. For example, you can get a harsh loud sound with one type of movement (e.g. a wrist "slap"), and a deep resonant loud with a different type of movement (using the whole arm). You can create a sound which decays (fades) quickly, or one that resonates for longer. You can play staccato with only finger action and get one type of sound, but when you bounce with the arm you get a different sound. These are just a few examples.

Every sound you produce will be a function (and result) of the precise coordination of the arm, hand, and fingers.

But it goes far beyond the production of sound of one note. What you do phycially will make or break the whole phrase, and, by extension, the whole piece. As you've read in my previous posts, a technique which employs mostly finger action will be choppy and stilted, what I call "notewise." Only the larger movements of the arm can create the long phrases that we are looking for in order for it to sound "musical." When we listen to music, we are not as aware of the sound of any individual note as we are of the phrase, the musical "thought." You can't just string together a bunch of notes and get a phrase; there must be an "arc" or a shape to it, which must be created by something you actually do physically.

The most important take-away from this is that, contrary to what many believe, you can't just "learn the notes" without regard to the musicality, and then later try to make it more musical at a later point. It just defies logic to think that! If you did specific physical movements when you just "played the notes," you will have to change those when you want to create a better sound and better phrases. If you think it's easy to do that, you are mistaken. The muscle memory for how you played it initially may now be quite established. Essentially you have to unlearn that and learn the piece again with a different set of physical movements. It can be done, but virtually every student who has had to do this will attest to the difficulty of changing your habits at the piano.

The good news is that you are not faced with this challenge on every single new piece of music you take on. The point is that you must change your overall technique to one that employs the whole mechanism (arm, hand, fingers) in a different way, and that becomes "the way you move," and you will automatically play everything that way. The old ideas of technique focused almost exculsively on training and strenthening the fingers, and largely ignored everything else, including how to play musically! Those exercises will have trained you to play un-musically! If you were taught this way, it is possible to learn a new way to play. People such as Abby Whiteside were pioneers in this new approach to how we actually play. (Of course there have been many great pianists who went on to play with suberb technique and fabulous musicality even if their teachers taught by the traditional finger-based technique. They never really played that way, despite the "exercises," due to a great ear and natural physical talent. And, I might add, a strong urge to play musically at all times!)

Students complain that it's just too hard to "learn the notes" and play musically at the same time. Yes it can be challenging. That is why I offer methods such as outlining, that is, playing fewer notes so you can focus on your technique and musicality, then adding more notes back in later. It may be hard to do this but the alternative, learning one way and then having to change it, is much worse.

 

Patterns

When you listen to, or play, a piece of music, you are probaby aware that there are many patterns. What do I mean by patterns? A pattern is a short musical "thought" or idea (sometimes called a motif) that often becomes the basis for that composition, or that section of the composition. It is a sequence of notes (and rhythm, of course) that our minds can grasp. The original idea or pattern is then repeated, altered, embellished, possibly transposed (moved to another key) in a myriad of ways. Yet however much it is altered, it is still recognizable as the pattern, as opposed to being new material. A short piece might actually only have one basic pattern; a longer one would need several to keep it from being too repetitive, and thus, predictable and boring.

When you look at a painting, you see all the relationships of the parts to the whole at one time. Music, on the other hand, unfolds over time, so it is much more challenging to hear the relationships of the parts to each other and to the whole. In fact, we hear in "retrospect;" what we hear at the current moment is compared with not only what came just before, but even several minutes before. It's pretty amazing when you think about it; our brains retain the themes that we previously heard, and can recognize them again, even when altered and embellished. If this weren't so, most music would be impossible to understand, and certainly to remember. It would just sound like one note after another, in an arbitrary way.

Pattern recognition is considered important in many fields. Some form of pattern recognition is a part of many aptitude tests. 

I find a wide range of abilities in pattern recognition among my students. Some see/hear them right away, others do not and need to have them pointed out. I find that people in tech have a greater aptitude for pattern recognition than the general public, which makes sense. 

However, there is a LOT more to the story for a musician. Many people studying the piano might be able to recognize the patterns looking at the notes on the page. However, getting those patterns out of your head and into your hands is a whole other matter. Applying pattern recognition to your physical technique in the right ways will help you learn the piece more quickly, execute it better from a technical standpoint, make it more musical, and memorize more easily. 

Here's an example. 

A student of mine was playing a Bouree by Bach. A Bouree is an old French dance, characterized by a short two- or three-note pattern which correspond to the steps in the dance. In the music, this short pattern can move up or down, can be inverted (turned upside down) and slightly altered in a few other ways. To convey this dance-like quality to the listener, the hand must play them all in basically the same way. If you just concern yourself with "finding the notes" you will likely get a mish-mash which will destroy the subtle phrasing of the dance, and you will possibly have a hard time learning to play it. I had the student block the notes of each group (see my post titled Blocking), and then move the whole hand up or down accordingly. It was important to use the same fingering for each repetition of the pattern! The fingerings marked in many scores are very convoluted, in my opinion, and do not follow the idea of having the hand do it the same way each time. Why learn several ways of playing a short group of notes when you can instead learn ONE way. After blocking it several times, he played it as written and it went much more smoothly -- and musically.

What I want to emphasize here is that intellectual pattern recognition is not enough. The execution of patterns must become a part of your technique. A good teacher should be able to help you with that.

Major and Minor: So Much Confusion!

I have a friend who, as a child, loved to noodle around on the piano (improvisation) and especially liked the sound of just playing on the black keys. She had probably heard a few musical terms tossed around, and came to believe that sound she liked was because the black keys were the "minor" keys. Of course, the important thing is that she was making music and having fun. That should certainly take priority over knowing the correct terminology. However, if you ever hope to communicate with others about music (let's say you want to play in a group of other musicians), it will behoove you to use the correct terms so you can make yourself understood. In addition, operating under a false understanding of what you are doing can limit you from other things you may wish to play in the future. (The black keys are not "minor;" the sound she created was based on a pentatonic  -- 5-tone -- scale because of the 5 black keys, which has a distinct "flavor" because of it's internal relationships.)

Almost every new student who comes to me for lessons has some degree of confusion, or out-and-out misunderstanding, of what major and minor mean in music. It's understandable they'd be confused if they are totally new to playing an instrument. But students with prior experience are also confused, because their teachers never thought to explain these terms correctly. Often, even the teacher doesn't know!

The word "major" means larger and the word "minor" means smaller. Both are originally from Latin. Ursa major is the larger constellation; ursa minor is the smaller one. If you have a major problem, it's a big problem; if you have a minor problem, it's a small one. We often conflate minor with meaning less important, due to being smaller. However, the true meaning is simply smaller. And so it is in music as well. In music, minor is never "less important."

If you've read the previous post, you'll see that major and minor never refer to a single note. A single note can never be large or small. 

Major and minor most frequently are used to describe an interval, that is, the "distance" between two tones. Within our musical scales, there are four intervals that have two "sizes," small and large. They are seconds, thirds, sixths, and sevenths. C to D-flat is a minor second (also referred to as a half step), and C to D is a major second (also called a whole step). C to E-flat is a minor third, C to E a major third. C to A-flat is a minor sixth, C to A a major sixth. C to B-flat is a minor seventh, C to B a major seventh. In all cases, the minor interval is the smaller distance, the major the larger. There are 3 intervals which do not have two sizes: fourths, fifths, and octaves. They are called "perfect." 

A major triad (3-note-chord) is so called because its first interval (starting from the root) is a major third. A minor triad is so called because its first interval is a minor third. It's really that simple. One very common misconception is that major means "happy" and minor means "sad" (or dark, somber, etc.). I would guess that least 90% of non-musicians (and brand-new students) I talk to think this is the case. However, play a major 7th, for example, and you'll find you don't get the "happy sound" you have associated with major. Happy and sad may be the emotional responses we have to those specific sounds, but they are not the meaning of the terms. (Interestingly, it appears to be universal that we experience a major chord to sound happier and a minor chord to sound darker, sadder. No one ever seems to feel the opposite. However, there is no explanation as to why we humans respond this way. It's another cosmic mystery of music!) So you mustn't confuse the actual meaning of the terms with the way we respond to them.

Major and minor can also refer to scales. Major was origianlly called Ionian and minor was originally Aeolian (from Greek). Ionian and Aeolian were two of seven possible scales (that we know of). I have read many articles about this but there doesn't seem to be clear answer as to why the names were changed. However, in Western Classical music, the "major" scale and the "minor" scales became the preferred sounds. The other five scales are now usually referred to as "modes," however, they are scales. See my post titled Modes if you are interested to learn more.

So why was Ionian renamed to major and Aeolian renamed to minor? You can look it up on Google, or use AI, and there are many different reasons given, none of which I find completely satisfactory. Since it happened hundreds of years ago, there doesn't seem to be any documentation as to why this change was made. My theory is this; in a major scale, starting from the tonic (first note) the intervals of seconds, thirds, sixths and seventh, are all "major," that is the "larger" ones. In a minor scale, thirds sixths and sevenths are all "minor," that is the smaller ones. The "perfect" intervals as well as the second remain the same in both.

Again, people hear a major scale and think it sounds happy, and minor scale not-so-happy. But remember, the sound you hear in each scale is a function of its relationships of the tones to each other. In music, the relationship is everything.

A piece of music in a major key is based on a major scale; a piece in minor is based on a minor scale. A piece of any length or complexity will not stay in the same key for the whole piece, but is identified by the scale that the piece begins in, and likely ends in.

Since the terms major and minor are used to descibe four musical entities -- the interval, the chord, the scale, and an entire piece -- it's easy to see why there is so much confusion. I hope this has cleared it up.

Black keys, White keys

 

One of the first things I do with new students, whether beginner or more advanced, is ask "Why do we have black keys and white keys?" Even if the person has played the piano for years, it is something they just don't seem to have ever thought about, because hardly anyone gets the right answer, at least not right away. 

Here are some of the responses I get (all incorrect):

"The black keys are the sharps and flats." My response: yes that's what we call them, but why do we have them? Why not all white keys?"

"We need the black keys so we can have half steps." My response is to point out that between the keys E and F, and B and C, are also half steps, but on white keys.

"The black keys are the minor keys." This is the most off-base answer of all. The terms major and minor, in music, can refer to an interval (distance between keys), a chord, or a scale. Major and minor always refer to a relationship between tones, never to a single note. There is no such thing as a minor note or a major note. More on this in another post.

"To fit all 88 keys in the space. If they were all white keys the keyboard would be too wide." Although this answer has some merit, it is still not correct.

Do you know the answer? See if you do before reading on.

All you need to do is cover up all the black keys and you will immediately see the reason. Without the black keys, you'd have an expanse of white keys, all looking alike, and you'd never to be able to tell -- visually, that is -- which key was which. If you wanted to place you hand on a specific note, it would be pure guesswork to find it quickly. The arrangement of white keys and black keys is a visual map so we can find our place. I always point out to the student that violins, clarinets, trumpets, and virtually every other instrument, does not have white and black keys, and they use the same notes that piano does (or more precisely, a subset of the notes a piano uses). They have other ways for the player to find a specific note, mostly by "feel." But of couse, all those instruments have far fewer notes to cover, so doing it by feel is possible. For the pianist it would not be possible. (I always like to mention that your voice also doesn't have white and black keys.)

Likewise, if the arrangement of keys were white-black-white-black, like stripes, you'd have the same problem of not being able to tell the keys apart. The very ingenious arrangement of a group of two black keys and a group of three black keys makes every note within the octave look unique. Even if the only note you know is middle C, you found it because of its relationship with the nearest black key.

Clearly, many people have played the piano without ever having consciously thought about this. It's just something we take for granted. But for new students -- and even a few who are not so new -- I find it important to understand this. There are so many misconceptions about the black keys. Some people will say the "sound different" than the white keys. (But if I play a key and they are not looking, they can't tell whether it was a white or black key.) However, all you need to do is look inside the piano (if you have an acoustic piano) and see that every string is hit by a hammer, and there is no way to tell which of those strings correspond to a white key vs. a black key. Some beginning students even get a kind of phobia about the black keys, like they are somehow more difficult to play. So I want the student to understand that our piano keyboard arrangement is purely a visual map, and doesn't have some "deeper" meaning about the tones themselves.

My next post will be about the widespread confusion about the terms "major" and "minor."

Do the Hard Work on the Front End

Learning a new piece from a written score is, for most of my students, fairly challenging. There is the challenge of reading itself, coupled with the technical skills to be able to play. Even if you become a good sight-reader, there are still challenges. Of course, you could play easier pieces, but then you won't develop new skills and technique. Ideally, the pieces you and your teacher select should present challenges, in order for you to grow as a pianist and as a musician.

I have many methods I employ to help students approach a new piece initially. One of them is outlining, or playing a "sketch" of the piece, then filling in details as you get more comfortable. See my post on this topic. Another method is blocking, or taking groups of notes (e.g. in the melody) that form a chord, and playing them as a chord. See my recent post on this topic. These are just two examples.

However, many students also find these two methods challenging as well. They often think, "wouldn't it just be easier to read the notes, one by one, hands separately? In a sense, that would be easier. But it wouldn't be better. You would likely need to go very slow, and just finding one note at a time does not inform your hand of where it needs to be next, and how to get there. In addition, it would likely be very choppy and unmusical. Not to mention the challenge of putting hands together after you have practiced them separately. Virtually everyone finds this to be the most challenging aspect. That is why outlining is so beneficial: you are playing hands together always, but just not all the notes. With blocking, you train you eye to take in a group of notes all at once, and translate that group to the "shape" your hand must form to play them.

Learning both these skills does take effort of course. But you will achieve a better long-term result. Just like learning to skim a document and notice the most important words, skipping over every "the" and "to" and "of" etc., outlining and blocking get you playing what is most important right from the start. 

Another challenging skill is learning to play without looking at your hands. I have talked about this in many of my posts. Even though students know that this is what they should be doing, sometimes at home they just give up, and resort to what I call "note-by-note processing," and looking at their hands. Then they come to the lesson and wonder why they aren't progressing more. I don't really have to ask (because I already know from decades of experience) how they are practicing at home, and, invariably they say they got frustrated with the not looking at hands, blocking, etc. Yesterday a student asked why he can seem to make good progress on a given piece one day, but the next day he feels like he is back to square one. When questioned, he admitted he had just gone back to looking at his hands because he thought this way he could at least "get all the notes." But as he experienced, that method often doesn't stick. 

 The moral of this story is: do the hard work on the front end. If you set yourself up for success, the rest of the process will go more smoothly. If you take short cuts, you will pay for it in one or more ways in the end: not playing as musically as you want, not being able to memorize, and simply not progressing.

Expression and Interpretation: are they the same thing?

 

In my previous post I talked about playing with expression. One might ask, "but what about interpretation?" Classical musicians and listeners (and music critics) are always going on about this or that "interpretation" of a given piece by a given artist. What do they mean by that? (It may help to read my post titled Interpretation from February 2015 before continuing here.)

First I want to stress that no musician will play a given piece exactly the same as anyone else. They won't even play it the exact same way they played it yesterday! Yes the notes are the same but the nuances will be different. Since expression comes from the interplay of your ear and your physical movements, this is too subtle to just duplicate at will. Yet, how you move and how you hear will become "your way" of playing, and won't likely change to any significant degree from day to day. It very well may change over the course of a lifetime as you gain more life experience, hear more music, play more music, and delve deeper into yourself.

Interpretation implies some sort of mental construct. People (including some teachers) will tell you that you need to "decide" your interpretation of the piece. I've been playing the piano all my life (almost 70 years) and I have never once tried to decide my interpretation of a piece. I just play from the heart.

As I start learning the piece, usually with an outline and gradually filling in more details, the sound of the piece begins to emerge. Of course, I've probably already heard the piece in recordings and/or concerts, but now I am hearing myself play it, and that is different than anyone else. I respond to what I am hearing and as I gain confidence, I am able to play with even greater expression. It's an "in the moment" thing, not a decision that was made beforehand.

Most composers since Bach have put many markings in the score to give you some idea of how they imagined it should be played. There are dynamic markings (from very soft to very loud), tempo markings, places where you slow down or speed up, phrasing indicators, indicators for touch (e.g. legato and staccato) and much more. But how slow is slow? How loud is loud? All of these have a range from a lot to a little and only you, the player (and listener) can tell what sounds right. You wouldn't play it very loud, for instance, when Chopin indicates it should be soft. You could say "well, I'm going to play it loud because that's my interpretation!" (Believe me, I've had teenage students who do just that.) One could make the argument that since the composer indicates so much of the dynamics, phrasing and touch, there isn't room for that much interpretation anyway. But that would not be right. Again, YOU are going to play it differently than everyone else even while following the composers' markings, because your ear and your body are different from everyone else, and your expressiveness (or lack thereof) will make it your own. 

The only musician who needs to decide on an interpretation is the conductor. Since he/she is not playing an instrument, the process will be different. The members of the orchestra or choir cannot just play their own interpretaion (difference of loud vs. soft, different rates of slowing down or speeding up, etc.) of the piece, because they will not play as a cohesive whole and the whole thing could become cacaphony. As a member of an orchestra, you will be playing the conductor's interpretation. You must still play expressively, however, so every member will be make the most beautiful sound that he or she can make.

I am not saying that there is no mental involvement in learning and playing a new piece. Understanding the complex architecture of a Beethoven Sonata is important. I suppose you could play well without understanding it, but why would you want to? (See my post, Don't be a Dummy.) The more you learn about music your awe will increase. Just don't make intellectual "ideas" about interpretation your starting point. Your "interpretation" will evolve as your musicality evolves and grows.