If you've read my first post, you will know that after I received my degree in Piano from Manhattan School of Music, I was not happy with my playing, and sought out another teacher. By a chance conversation with an acquaintance, I learned about a teacher who seemed to have a completely different approach to playing -- especially technique -- and it sounded like he could help with some of my more significant problems, such as pain and fatigue when playing. His name was Joseph Prostakoff. I studied with him for 6 years, until his death in 1980.
He was a masterful teacher. His insights and understanding of our bodies -- our playing mechanism -- and how it interacts with the piano, were incredible. It's not as if he was all about technique, however. He enabled me to vastly improve my ear (even though I already had perfect pitch) and my expression and interpretation. Because without a masterful technique and a superb ear, you can't really "say what you want to say" at the piano.
On top of that, he was a kind and generous human being, who devoted himself without reserve to his students. I think it would be fair to say that I wouldn't be playing and teaching today had it not been for him.
He also had a great sense of humor. He had lots of little quips and sayings that he would use in our lessons. Here are some of my favorites, with explantions.
If you can really hear the rhythm, you don't need to count; if you can't hear it, no amount of counting will help you.
If you've read my posts on rhythm, you'll see that I don't teach "counting." Instead, I employ methods which teach you to really hear units of time, and then to be able to divide those units in two or in three. All our basic rhythms boil down to that. People think of ear training as only pertaining to hearing notes (or, more precisely, intervals), but hearing intervals of time is absolutley just as critical, if not more so. Because people rely on crude tools such as counting and metronomes, they may never really learn to hear units of time with precision. The idea that counting, or assigning numbers or syllables to the beats or parts of the beat will guarantee accurate rhythm is ludicrous. Every teacher has heard their students "counting" but saying the numbers completely out of rhythm! I like to point out that the people who play the most complex rhythms (e.g. Latin or African drummers), didn't learn to play using counting. Counting might work for the absolute simplest of rhythms, but then if it's that simple, you don't need it. We all have a pulse within our bodies 24/7, so I believe we can all hear a steady beat without counting. And since counting doesn't work at all for the most complex situations, such as poly-rhythms, it's not a very good tool.
A nuance isn't a nuance if you do it every time.
We all want to play expressively, or musically (hopefully). What does that mean? Although in Classical music, we play the notes and rhythms as the composer has notated, we still have tremendouse freedom within that to be expressive and to play the piece in a way which will be different from any other person playing it. This expression takes the form of nuances of touch, dynamics, and timing. For example, we don't play the rhythm robotically, but rather, we have an elastic feel to the rhythm; there is something of an ebb and flow. In an expert player, the listener isn't aware of these nuances per se, but the overall effect of the performance is one of great musicality. However, if these nuances become too extreme, or too frequent, they lose their expressive power and just begin to sound like distortions. I remember hearing a woman play the Chopin Nocturne in D-flat Major. The left hand has a pattern which starts on a low bass note and then plays an arpeggiated chord. Before every bass note, she had the slightest of hesitations, not enough to destroy the rhythm, but nevertheless it was noticeable. Had she done it just in certain places, to heighten the drama or the tenderness of the passage, it might have been lovely. But she did it every single time. It became tiresome and even a little annoying, to my ear. She may have thought she was being expressive, but it lost all expressive value because it became expected. A nuance isn't a nuance if you do it every time!
If the auditory image is strong enough, the body finds a way to get there.
This might sound a little confusing but you'll see why it's true. In my teaching I emphasize training the ear, and, when learning a new piece of music, I use methods of getting the student to really absorb how the piece sounds. (Of course I do this in my own practicing as well.) You might think, "well of course I'm absorbing how it sounds," but in fact you probably aren't, not at a deep enough level. I call this "forming an auditory image." The beginning and intermediate students are so absorbed in the physical aspects and just "finding the notes" that the ear is not really working hard to absorb the music. Think of it this way; if your ear absolutely knows how it sounds, you could play it by memory, at least slowly, anyway. Most approaches mostly emphasize gaining muscle memory of the piece, and, to that end, there is a lot of emphasis on fingering. If you do the same fingering every time, muscle memory should work, right? But what happens when you accidentally land on a different finger? If you have only muscle memory, you could get completely scrambled and the whole phrase (or more!) could fall apart. (You've probably already experienced this.) But if you have a strong auditory image, you know what comes next and you can recover. Think about improvisors: if they are truly improvising (playing it differently than any previous time), then they don't actually have the muscle memory for that exact passage or riff. But their ear knows the sound they want, and the body follows.
There are more great quotes to come. Stay tuned for Part II.
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