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.

Playing with Expression

I have talked throughout this blog about the importance of playing with full emotional engagement at all times, at all stages of learning and working on your pieces. But how exactly do you do that?

If you think about jazz and rock musicians, you might say they always play with expression. I doubt that the Rolling Stones ever gave a performance where they were just phoning it in. I doubt they phoned it in during rehearsals either. Why is this so? 

First, if they wrote the music they are performing, they probably have a deep connection to the music -- it really means something to them. Second, if they wrote it themselves (and even if they didn't), they didn't learn it from a written score. so they didn't spend time learning "the notes" and then have to add the expression later. If they are improvising, they definitely are not restricting themselves to written notes. Either way, they know the sound they are looking to achieve, and the ear is running the show. The ear directs the body what to do to achieve that sound. 

The process of learning, playing, and performing classical music is so different from rock or jazz that it is difficult to draw parallels. Sorry folks, I know I'm biased, but classical music, played at a very high level, is the most difficult. Playing a Brahms or Rachmaninoff piano concerto lasting 40 minutes is a world away from playing a set of ten 4-minute songs on guitar. The technical challenges alone are vastly different. It may take months, even years, to learn, master and memorize a classical piece. 

For the average amateur or beginning pianist, the process of learning and absorbing the notes of the piece can be quite daunting. It helps to be great sight-reader but there is a lot more to it than that, specifically, the technical aspects. Because of those two challenges -- reading the notes and then training the hands to find and play them -- the musicality tends to fall by the wayside. It doesn't have to be this way, but it ofen is. Sadly, a lot of teachers don't even talk about this. They figure you either "have it" (musical talent) or you don't.

I recently saw a video on You Tube where the teacher, to her credit, did emphasize the importance of always playing with expression. The problem is, she couldn't tell you how to do that. Her only suggestion was to listen to a lot of recordings of great pianists. If only it were that easy. Even if you can tell by listening that the pianist has tremendous musicality and expressiveness, you are not going to be able to identify what exactly they are doing to achieve that. The notes are flying by at hundreds per minute so you couldn't focus on what they are doing on a note-by-note basis even if you wanted to. And if you could (you can't), you'd end up playing like that person; it would not be your own expression, it would be theirs.

The problem is that many people view the "expression" as separate from the notes, like a coat of paint you put on at the end. The expression comes from nuances of touch and timing, phrasing, dynamics, and much more. Everything you do physically affects the sound. Let me say that again: Everything you do physically affects the sound. Not just the sound of each note, but more importantly, the sounds of the notes in relation to each other. In the video mentioned above, she says no two notes of the phrase will have the same dynamic level. Not true, but even so, how would you micro-manage that? Trying to do that note-by-note would give a very stilted and artificial sound. Instead, to create a long phrase (also called a long line) you need the arm to initiate the movements which subsume the individual notes within the phrase. The fluidity of the arm movements will create the arc of the phrase. I realize that just saying this is not going to enable most people to actually do it. It's just an example of how the physical  movements determine the sounds. In my lessons, I have my students place their hands on my hands and arms to feel what I am doing. I also move their hands and arms for them (briefly) just so they can experience the feel of it. You've got to experience it, physically. Just watching someone do it is not enough. After experiencing it, you try to "cultivate" that experience, meaning, do it all the time until it becomes natural for you. You would be learning a whole new way to move. Again, this is why you need a teacher who can help you with this. Sadly, however, many teachers cannot help. Do they play expressively themselves? Even if they do, many pianists (and other instrumentalists) don't really know how they do what they do. It takes someone who has done a deep dive into this subject.

Here is one of the most profound statements my brilliant teacher, Joseph Prostakoff, said: "You play the way you hear, and you hear the way you play." What this means is that if you play in a very note-wise manner, using primarily finger technique, your ear will absorb that sound and impel you to play that way in the future. The more the ear expects that sound, the more you will do it, and so on in an endless loop. Likewise, if you play in a very fluid manner, integrating the arms, hands and fingers into larger movements to create phrases, not just notes, you will hear music that way, and your ear will direct your body to play in that way. Whichever "loop" you are in, you are constantly reinforcing it. You can see why it would be foolish to think it's OK to play without expression some of the time; you are reinforcing the loop you don't want. You'd be learning the piece with one set of physical movements, only to have to replace it with a different set when you want to perform and play "musically." No wonder some people have such a hard time playing expressively; they spend the bulk of their time NOT doing that.

If I could teach you how do play expressively by just telling you. I would do it. Sorry, but it can't be done. I can only give you warnings about what NOT to do, and some hints at what to focus on if you want to change your playing to be more expressive.

Superficial vs. Deep Learning

 

People often tell me that a source of frustration in their playing is that the music they have learned doesn't "stick." They spend weeks or months learning it, and feel they have gotten the piece to a place where it is solid -- they may even feel they played it really well -- but then after not practicing it for a short time, it's just gone -- they can no longer play it. You'd never really be able to develop a repertoire of pieces you can just sit down and play, because it would be terribly time-consuming to try to learn new material while also having to constantly play the music you learned previously, just to keep it from fading away.

I call this "superficial learning." There are, I believe, four main contributors to superficial learning. 

First is an almost total reliance on muscle memory. As you are aware, when you hands/arms/fingers perform the same physical movements over and over, neural pathways in the brain are formed, and the impulses travel down these same pathways every time you play, enabling you to play almost on auto-pilot. However, the brain, finding it no longer needs these pathways when you stop playing that piece for a period of time, will let them dissolve, so to speak. (I realize my language is not very scientific, but I think it describes what's happening.) When the pathways are gone, you can't play the piece, at least not nearly as reliably as you did at one time. Muscle memory is a wonderful thing and we couldn't really play without it. But it's not the only thing.

Second is reliance on "thinking." It's akin to talking yourself through the piece. Your mind is trying to remember specific notes, specific chords, even specific fingering, saying to yourself things like "put 3rd finger on this E." There would be hundreds of these little "thoughts" even in a short piece and you can't possibly remember them all, even when actively practicing, and certainly not if you've taken a break from the piece. I have several posts about "thinking" while playing. It just doesn't work.

Third is trying to rely on visual cues. The keyboard looks the same 100% of the time! No key is going to jump out and say "play me next!" to help you know where to put your fingers. This sounds so silly and so obvious, but people often unconsciously do this. They are staring at the keys as a means of finding their way around, but it's absolutely pointless. If you've learned to play the correct way, which is not looking at your hands as close to 100% of the time as you can manage, then your muscle memory will guide your hands where to go. Looking at the keys will slow you down, at best, and throw a wrench into muscle memory, at worst.

Fourth is not playing with emotional engagement, or with "expression." Many recent studies of the brain have shown that it works differently when the emotions are involved, and not only differently, but better. It stands to reason that you will remember something better if it is meaningful to you. You may love music, but if you play in a perfunctory way, as many do when they think they are just "learning the notes," the music will never become as ingrained in you as it will if you are giving it your all, emotionally.

You can see from these four items that a very important one is missing. That is the ear.

The auditory capabilities of the human brain never cease to amaze me. I believe humans are uniquely "wired" for music. To really know music at a deep level is to know how it sounds. You may say, "of course I know how it sounds!" But if you can't reproduce it, without looking at the written score, then you don't really know how it sounds. It's really as simple as that. Take a piece of music you are working on currently, but don't have memorized yet, and just play the top melody line for a phrase or two, by ear (without reading it). Of course, much music has multiple melody lines, but just take the most prominent one. Can you do it? Does it come easily? If not, you don't know how it sounds. Then you could move on to the bass line and do the same. Put the melody and bass together and do it by ear. Move on to more of the inner voices and/or harmonies. This is hugely challenging for most people but it can be done. The great news is that every time you do this, your ear will improve and you will be better at it the next time. And voila! When you can do it all this way, the piece is memorized! Ear = memory.

I recently had some friends over and played several Christmas carols. I play them all by ear, in interesting arrangments with full harmonies. I can play them in any key. I have never looked at a written score for these. I have been playing them by ear all my life. Since I only play them at Christmas time, I go all year without playing them yet they do not fade at all. So it can't be attributed to muscle memory. The ear informs the hands and fingers where to go. One friend said "how to do remember all those??" I replied "I don't remember them. I just know how they sound." Not being a musician, she may not have understood the difference. I didn't learn from the written score and then commit them to memory. I just heard them enough in my early years that their sound became permanent wiring in my brain. I am fortunate to have been born with a very good ear (absolute pitch), but I have also worked to improve it even more. I am not going to lie and say everyone can learn to do what I do. But the key to making music more permanent in your brain is to drive it into your ear. I have many posts on ways to do this.

The ear needs to be the driving force. If you are mostly doing the four things that keep it at a superficial level and not spending practice time on ear development, you probably will find things don't "stick."

Why I don't have videos

 

While reading some of my posts about aspects of technique, you may have wondered why I don't just include videos to show you instead of just tell you. It's not that I didn't think of it or don't know how to do it.

I don't have videos because I don't want any readers to think that you can learn to play the piano by watching someone else do it, whether in person or by video. If that were true, there would be a lot more good, or even very good, pianists out there. But sorry, it just doesn't happen.

Playing the piano is intensely physical. It may not look that way to the casual observer because great pianists can make it look easy. As with sports, mastery at the piano takes years of training your body to do thousands of different motions that make the whole thing work. You'd probably agree that you can't learn to play golf or tennis by just watching someone else do it, even if they explain what they are doing. You may be able to watch them, but they need to be watching you in order to see and hear what you are doing in order to correct your technique.

The other day I happened to notice some You-tube vidoes pop up on my phone about various subjects related to piano. Most had outlandish claims such as "learn to master all your chords in a few easy steps" or "learn everything you need to know about music theory in 20 minutes" or "the one exercise that will catapult your playing to the next level." You get the idea. They sound too good to be true because they are. I suppose some of these people think they are doing a service to the public, but I suspect that getting you to subscribe, and eventually to sell you some of the materials, has something to do with it.

In this blog I do not purport to teach you how to play. I only wish to give you food for thought if you are either currently trying to learn and experiencing some frustrations, or thinking of starting to learn the piano but don't know what direction to take. Many of the ideas and methods I talk about are VERY different from traditional methods and beliefs about how to play, and I firmly believe that my approach is an enormous improvement over older methods. But I never promise you will "learn all your chords in a few easy steps." (BTW, the woman who had that video just referred to the 12 major and 12 minors. She didn't mention 7th chords. She had all the chords in root position, which is necessary to start with, but unless you also learn inversions of chords, you don't have the knowledge for real-life playing. "All your chords" was 24 chords. In reality there would be hundreds of permutations.)

It is important to learn what really works and what doesn't. That way you won't spend endless hours in drudgery and pointless exercises that don't work. So yes, you can speed up the process of learning, to some extent. But there is no "secret" method that some person on You-tube has discovered that will allow you to bypass the many years people spend to achieve a high level of playing on the piano, or any instrument for that matter.

I'd like to share a funny -- yet also sad! -- story about someone who tried to find a shortcut to learning the piano. His name is Noah Adams and he is a well-known journalist and broadcaster. Some years ago he became interested in the piano and wanted to learn to play a specific piece, Traumerei by Schumann, for his wife. Traumerei is a beautiful little gem. It is only one page, but devilishly tricky to play well. It is NOT a beginner piece. He went to the Steinway store in New York City and bought himself a beautiful baby grand. He soon realized he didn't really know where to start, but didn't feel he had the time for private lessons, or perhaps just didn't want that much commitment. So he found a program online which guided the student through lessons from the very beginning with videos etc. Problem was, that for the program to work, you had to have an electronic keyboard attached so the computer program could hear what you were playing. There he was, playing on a dinky little keyboard while the online program buzzed him for every wrong note, while his beautiful Steinway sat, unplayed, in the other room. Eventually he gave up on this approach, no closer to playing Traumerei. Later on, he went to music "camps" where he got some personal instruction, and tried some other approaches. In the end, after several years (if I remember correctly) he did play Traumerei for his wife, though I doubt he played it very well. I don't know whether he learned many other pieces or only that one. The moral of the story is that he looked for a "shortcut" but ended up with a long and tortuous path instead. If he had gone to a REALLY GOOD teacher right from the start, he would have achieved much more, both quantity and quality, in that amount of time. You can read his story in his book titled "Piano Lessons."

You'll see that in my blog, I urge my readers to try to find a committed and highly perceptive teacher. No videos, no outlandish promises, nothing I'm trying to sell, just meaningful insights from a lifetime of playing and teaching.

If it Really Worked You'd Already Have it by Now

 

I have many "sayings" that I find myself repeating over and over again to my students. Although all my students are dedicated, and believe in my methods, and do strive to put my instructions into their practice, nevertheless, people tend to fall back on old habits, often without even realizing it.

And sometimes they do realize they are falling back on old habits but somehow still hope they are going to work this time.

Here are the most stubborn habits.

"Correcting" a wrong note immediately. I've written about this in several previous posts. It's so automatic, like a knee-jerk reaction, to want to do this. Let's say you played an F when the note should have been an F-sharp. You may think that immediately playing the F-sharp after the F will solve the problem. But sure enough, the same thing happens the next time. And the next. Your intellect may know that you intend to play the F-sharp from now on, but the "animal" brain has heard and experienced F immediately followed by F-sharp and just "thinks" that 2-note combination is how it's supposed to be, because that is what it heard and what it experienced. Many teachers (and things you will read) tell you that you must "correct" the wrong note immediately because otherwise it will become permanent. However, you'll find that experience doesn't bear that out. It's very difficult for many people to change this habit. Even if they understand that it doesn't work, they still cling to the idea that playing the right note after the wrong note will fix the problem. To which I say "if it really worked, you'd already have it by now." (For how to successfully correct wrong notes, see my post of that title.)

Looking at your hands while reading new music from a written score. Many people would assume they have to look at their hands to "find the notes." However, it is the exact opposite of what you need to do to achieve any meaningful level of mastery. The hands have to learn to find their way. In complex music there would be no way to find all the notes by sight. There is just too much going on with two hands, especially if it is fast. If you look at your hands, you'll bypass kinesthetic skill-building. My students are trying not to look at their hands, but when the going gets tough, sure enough, they start looking at the keyboard. It usually doesn't work at all, because it causes a delay, at which time the other hand has to pause, leading to more problems. So often I see a student look down to find the note(s) and they still miss it. At which point I say "if it really worked, you'd already have it by now."

Playing hands separately. Clearly, the singular challenge of the piano is that two hands must be doing two different things at the same time, and often both hands have complex parts to play. I want my students to be playing hands together 95% of the time. The way to work up to this is to play an outline, or a sketch, of the piece, omitting notes as necessary but attempting to play enough that you can hear the "bones" of the piece, and most importantly, keep going and not stop. (See earlier posts on Outlining.) Then you keep adding more details until you have it all. You still may need to do some "spot work" on more difficult passages. But I have found that when they get frustrated, students tend to fall back on playing hands separately, the idea being if they get each hand really solid, it will be easier to put them together. Guess what -- it isn't!! Playing the hands together is a whole different experience and requires that the brain work differently than one hand at a time. When a student gets frustrated that the piece is not progressing as well as they hoped, they "confess" at the lesson that they did a lot of hands separately at home. But when they do try to play it together, it isn't any better. And of course I say, "if it really worked, you'd already have it by now."

The piano is challenging, and a student still somewhat new to the instrument probably has many misconceptions about how to practice and how to learn. One of the main reasons that trying to teach yourself is usually a dead-end is because nothing teaches you how to practice. That is why you need a skilled and insightful teacher. If you're practicing in a way that you think makes sense but not getting results, you probably can assume it's what you're doing in your practice, not just a lack of ability. When you find yourself doing something over and over, and it's not improving, ask yourself: "If it really worked, wouldn't I have it by now?"

The Ultimate in Anti-Aging

 

Nowadays, many people are interested in -- even obsessed with -- the idea of anti-aging, that is, slowing down the aging process. My generation especially, the baby boomers, spend billions on supplements, creams, treatments and so on, to achieve better health, better looks, and better cognitive performance as we age. Some of those may work to an extent, but most probably don't do much, if anything.

Want to know what REALLY works for anti-aging? You guessed it: being a musician. I should say, a classical musician. (Rock and jazz musicians don't quite appear to have the same longevity as classical musicians for reasons that may have more to do with lifestyle.)

In her blog The Musician's Brain, Lois Svard discusses how frequently conductors and pianists live well into their mid- to late 80s and 90s, and are often still performing in public at that age. The demands on the brain to play or conduct complex music well, and to play by memory, are formidable.

Music's effects on the brain have been studied for years. There is no question that music -- not just listening to it, but playing it -- has profound effects on the brain. For example, the corpus callosum, the part of the brain which sits between the right and left hemispheres and is thought to connect them, is more developed in pianists than anyone else. This is due to the fact that the piano utilizes both hands in complex ways, much more than, say, the clarinet or trumpet.

"Neuroscientists say that making music is the most complex activity in which a human can engage, and they consistently point to music making as a good way to build cognitive reserve." (Lois Svard)  It uses all parts of the brain at once: auditory cortex, motor cortex, visual cortex, and emotional and intellectual areas as well. 

In my teaching I am always gearing the work towards brain development. Most people seem to think the pian is mostly about training and exercising your fingers. This is far from the truth.

You may think you'll get those brain benefits only if you started the piano at an early age. But studies show that even starting in your 70s confers significant benefits.

Is music-making the fountain of youth?

The Power of a Wrong Note

 

When I look back at what I've written on this blog since the beginning in 2010, the one post that has the most views -- approximately twice as many as the next contender -- the is one titled "Wrong Notes." Everyone wants to know how to avoid or correct wrong notes! I recommend you go back and read that early post (January 2011) before continuing here.

Among all the hundreds of students I've taught over the years, playing the "right notes" is their top priority. You might think, "well of course! You have to play all the correct notes, don't you?" Yes, that is one of the goals. But as you know, if you are learning to play, it certainly doesn't always happen and often doesn't come easily. It's not the wrong notes themselves, but how you handle them, that will make or break your progress, and most likely your enjoyment of the process of learning to play. 

Here are some of the things NOT to do about wrong notes (even though most teachers and many things you'll read or hear from others tell you to do these).

1. When you play a wrong note, immediately correct it before moving on.
2. Stop and play that measure or passage with the correct note(s), as many repetitions as you can, with hands separately and very slowly

That's it! That's the sum total of the advice most people will give you for the problem of wrong notes.

Let's address number 1, above. If you stop and immediately follow the wrong note with the correct note, you understand intellectually which is the wrong one and which is the right one. But your "animal brain" just hears two notes, let's say an F followed by an F-sharp. As far as that part of the brain knows, the F and then F-sharp was intended, because that is what it heard. You may have had the experience of "correcting" it this way, but then the same thing happens again the next time. And the next, and so on. Far from being corrected, the problem of the missed note seems to persist, sometimes for quite a while. In addition to your ear having heard it as a two-note sequence, soon you will also have muscle memory of that as well. Intellectually knowing the right note from the wrong one does almost nothing to correct the problem. If this method worked, we'd all be playing all the right notes by now! But in reality that's not what happens.

Regarding number 2: hands separately, very slowly, and tons of repetition, is the stock answer many people give for a myriad of problems. You may think you have fixed the problem when you just play one hand, but then as soon as you add back the other hand, the wrong notes come back. The physical experience, and the workings of the brain, are quite different when playing with one hand versus two. So until you play it as it is in real life, that is, with both hands, you can't really count on it being "fixed." The same is true for very slowly; it may seem fixed when you play very slowly, but then when you go back to the original tempo, the "fix" doesn't stay. Some repetition will be needed, but it has to be done intelligently. More on that below.

So, what to do instead?

1. Ignore it! Yes, you read that right. The first time you miss a note, just ignore it, and continue playing. Of course, many people find this hard to do, but you CAN cultivate this habit. The "mistake" may turn out to be just a one-time thing. The last thing you want to do is fixate on it and turn it into a bigger problem. Stopping to "fix" it means that the other hand also has to stop, pause, and get back on track even though it had no wrong note. You may even create a problem in the other hand which wasn't there before. One hand sneezes and the other gets the cold. In addition, you've disupted the rhythm. People always seem to be willing to throw the rhythm under the bus for the sake of correcting a wrong note. Remember, your ear heard that disrupted rhythm, and doesn't know that you did it intentionally. After the missed note, you may end up playing several wrong notes. Ignore those too! Instead of "fixing" just try to get yourself back on track. It can become a solid skill, but only if you do it consistently. And just knowing you can get back on track greatly improves your confidence.
2. Learn how to make use of a wrong note. I recently showed a student how, following a wrong note (which I did on purpose, for illustration), I continued to play that passage with all the correct intervals and patterns that followed that note. In other words, I was off for the whole passage, but within the passage, everything had all the right relationships. I got a lot of good practice on that passage because, to the hand, it felt the same, or almost the same, as if I had been on the right notes. And it's even better if you can do it with a light-hearted approach, not just as a bitter pill to swallow. Now that's the power of a wrong note.
3. Try to find the reason you missed it. Trying to fix the symptom without addressing the root cause is pointless. It could be a technical problem. In the example of the F and F-sharp, above, if you were playing too far out at the edges of the keys, you can't comfortably reach the F-sharp, so your hand just did the next best thing, playing the nearest white key. This sounds simplistic, but I see it all the time. Of course there are thousands of reasons for the missed note to be due to inadequate technique. This is what your teacher is supposed to be helping you with. If your teacher is telling you to "fix all the wrong notes" but doesn't tell you how, get a new teacher.
4. Strengthen the auditory image. Your ear will help you play more correct notes as well as help you get back on track when you've had a mishap. See the earlier post on wrong notes for more about this.
5. If the wrong notes persist, you will need to isolate that passage and do some repetition. The reason for the repetition is to create a new neural pathway which includes the intended notes. The old neural pathway with the "wrong" note will still be there, but it will eventually disappear through lack of use. I believe small amounts of repetition done consistenly is better than huge amounts of repetition. 
6. And lastly, when you return to playing the whole piece, you have to see the problem coming. If there were a pothole on your street and day after day you kept driving right into it rather than avoiding it, the answer is simple: you have to see it coming before you drive into it, so you can avoid it. The same is true with a persistent wrong note; you have to be aware it's coming up. When you are reading music, looking ahead is critical. You can, if you want, circle the offending note in the score, as a reminder that it's just ahead. (I have mixed feelings about circling wrong notes.) The trick is to have awareness but not get fixated on it.

If you want to play "right" notes, you need to develop the skills necessary to achieve that. An athlete wouldn't just say "I've got to get the ball into the hole/ over the net/ into the stands..." They would work on their stance, their swing and so on, in order to get the ball where they want it to go. Same with piano. Focus on developing solid skills and the correct notes will follow.

Perhaps most important is to try to lose the fear of wrong notes. Wrong notes can have a lot of power over you, if you let them. They can make your body more stiff and your playing more stilted, possibly ruining some of the enjoyment of playing. Or, they can be opportunities to shift your priorities and focus on the beauty and musicality of what you are playing. 

Don't be a dummy

Most music is complex. A folk tune may be short and simple, and just to play the melody on the piano may be easily accomplished by many people. Add harmony and it's already somewhat more complex. But once you move up to jazz and classical music, there is a LOT going on in the music. If you are reading music, there is a lot to learn and absorb in order to be able to read fluently. If you are playing by ear and/or improvising, you may not need to know how to read music, but there is a great deal you would still need to understand, in order for it to sound like actual music and not just random sounds.

I think most people understand this intuitively. Yet I'm still amazed, after all these years, when I meet people who think they are going to watch a video and learn to play the piano just by copying. You're just skimming the surface that way and you will never be able to take your skills very far.

Another problem I see, even more frequently, are the people who have learned to read music, either on their own or from a teacher, and assume that now they can just play the notes they see and that's all there is to it. One woman I met was a pretty good sight-reader and had learned to play some reasonably complex pieces by Bach and Chopin. But she knew absolutely nothing about what makes the music what it is, how it's constructed, or for instance, what makes Bach and Chopin so different. She told me she really enjoyed playing the music so perhaps I am wrong to say she needs to understand more. After all, isn't enjoyment the main reason why you want to learn to play? Some people even think if you study more and know more, you might spoil the enjoyment. To which I say, if you love the music, wouldn't you WANT to know more about it? Why would you want to be a dummy?

For example, even though this person read music, she didn't have any idea what the key signature meant. As hopefully you know, if you're reading this blog, the key signature is the first thing you see on the printed score. It's telling you what KEY you are in for this piece. The "key" means what scale you are based on. If you see one sharp then you are in G Major or E minor, one flat and you are in F Major or D minor. The whole concept of tonality and keys is the foundation of our music. And yet some people just see the sharp(s) or the flat(s) and know they have to play them but they have no idea why. It must seem awfully random if you don't know the "why." What's even weirder is why they never thought to ask someone or research it. Sadly, many teachers never explain these things either, so the student doesn't even realize the questions they need to be asking. (Those teachers have no business teaching!)

Music in the Western world is highly developed in the area of harmony. Harmony consist of chords, and the chords appear in a myriad of ways. Someone who can read may notice they keep playing similar groupings of notes, but don't understand what these are or why they are important. If you are playing jazz or improvising, you would have to understand chords because they are the building blocks you need. That being said, someone could just show you where to put your fingers for certain chords, and you could still play without understanding them at all. There are even charts you can purchase which show pictures of the keys with red dots where you put your fingers for each chord. However, without any explanation of the system of how they're built, you may have a lot of difficulty memorizing them by their pictures because there would be hundreds of them. 

[All of this -- scales, chords and so on -- are part of what people mean when they refer to "music theory." However, there's nothing theortical about it. These are music facts.]

Being a dummy will absolutely have severe limitations. When people start to experience these limitations they often quit playing out of frustration with their lack of progress. (Of course there are many other reasons as well.) In addition, if you've learned without understanding any of the "whys," you will most likely forget a lot of what you have learned. The "why" is like the glue that holds it all together into one integrated whole.

Blocking

 

A learning tool that I use all the time -- for myself and for my students -- seems so obviously beneficial that I can't believe other teachers and students don't do it. It's called blocking. Whenever the piece, or part of the piece, is comprised of chords, you would intially learn the piece by blocking the chords, meaning playing the notes of the chord all at once.

[Spoiler: everything is made up of chords, even if it's not obvious.]

A prime example of when this makes total sense to do is Bach's Prelude #1 (from Book I of the Well Tempered Clavier) in C major. As you can see, the entire piece is made of arpeggiated ("broken") chords in a repeating pattern. (If you have played this piece or wanted to play it, and didn't realize these were all chords, then you definitely need to learn to use this technique to develop your chord awareness and understaning.) The first five notes of each measure -- 2 notes in the left hand and three in the right -- comprise the chord, and there are no other notes that are not in this chord in the measure. So by playing those notes all at once, blocked, you have played/learned all the notes in the measure. How much more efficient is it to play one thing, the blocked chord, instead of 16 separate notes, most of which are duplicates??? I should add that ideally you would play each chord/measure at a steady pace. And here's your chance to make it beautiful because you are not so busy finding notes. (All of this assumes that you are at a reading level that this piece requires.)

Another example that comes to mind is the last movement of Beethoven's sonata Opus 54 in F major which I was playing earlier today. The last movement is a delightful "romp" in perpetual motion (the entire movement is constant sixteenth notes in both hands). Some measures would have two basic chords, some have up to four. Again, you'd need a basic understanding of chords to see when the chords change and how to block them.  

A type of piece that would be difficult to block would be a Bach fugue, or any other polyphonic (multi-voice) piece. These have multiple melody lines happening simultaneously. However, they still form chords when the notes are heard together. It's impossible for them not to. Blocking is still possible and potentially useful, but you can't really start learning this skill with a polyphonic piece.

There are hundreds if not thousands of examples of pieces where it makes sense to block at least certain sections of the piece. In many Mozart or Haydn sonatas, for example, the left hand has what is called an Alberti bass, which is a broken chord. When you first start learning the piece, just play the chord blocked.

The advantages of doing this are many. First, you will hear what is happening in the piece better. You can hear the hamony more clearly when the chord is played all at once, because tones sounding together is the essence of harmony. Second, blocking will help you with fingering. When you play a three- or four-note chord all at once, there is probably only one fingering, maybe two, that will be comfortable and easy for your hand to manage. In the Bach Prelude, mentioned above, you will likely get better fingering than if you just pick your way through it, note by note. I like to say that blocking informs your hands where they need to be. Third, it is more efficient. It takes less time to play one entity instead of many notes, and yet you are still learning those notes. And fourth, you have the opportunity to focus more on musicality because you are not so busy processing so many notes.

After you have played the piece or the passage blocked and are finding it has become easy and fluid, then you can simply unblock and play as written. You already have the muscle memory of the chord shapes so your hands should, ideally, go right to those notes. 

Many students don't seem to realize that virtually all our music is based on chords. This is true for Classical, jazz, pop, etc. When you listen to a piece of instrumental music, and certainly a song, you are more aware of the melody. The melody is also based on chords! The melody and the harmony aren't just each doing their own thing; they are conceived together by the composer. It is the harmonies that create the structure or architecture of the piece, whether it is a three-minute pop song or an hour-long symphony. You cannot understand music -- any genre -- if you don't understand chords. Yes, if you are a decent sight-reader you can play the piece by just reading the individual notes and you'll get through it. But you won't understand it.

The idea of blocking goes well with the idea of outlining, which I have talked about in many previous posts. With outlining, you initially play a sketch of the piece -- the main "ideas" -- as opposed to all the notes. Blocking chords can and should be a part of the outline. 

Another misconception: curved fingers

 

If you've had piano lessons, you may well have had teachers who told you to "curve your fingers." You may have been told to imagine your fingers curved around a ball, such as a tennis ball. There are beginner books, for both children and adults, which show a picture of how this should look.

The problem is, it's just plain wrong. 

Challenge anyone who tells you to curve and ask them to explain why. There just isn't any good reason. Try playing an octave, or a chord spanning an octave with four notes, and you'll see you can't do it with curved fingers. The hand (the palm, actually) must open up to be able to span that distance. Look at Chopin's first etude in C major; the entire piece consists of arpeggios which span a tenth, and the whole thing is meant to go at lightning speed. There is no way to do it with curved fingers.

If your piece requires loud dramatic chords, of course this has to be accomplished with the arm (despite what some will tell you.) But if you come down hard onto curved fingers, the joints of the finger take all the impact and it can be dangerous for the joints.

Instead, you want to have the natural curvature of your hand. Lay your hand palm up (prone) on your lap, and your hand will form it's natural curvature. Move your hand to the piano without changing anything; this is how you should play. Some people naturally have more curvature, some have less. No one has a completely flat hand, and no one is naturally curved as if over a ball. You may need to flatten (open) your hand even more to play a ninth or tenth. Watch a video of the late Vladimir Horowitz; you'll see he had practically flat fingers, yet he had huge technique.

With curved fingers you contact the keys on the tip of the finger. This is why you'd hear the clicking of your nails unless you keep them extremely short. (See my post "Can Pianists Have Nice Nails?) But if you have more of an open hand, you contact the keys with the pads of your fingers, which, as that term indicates, gives you more padding. It is much more comfortable and better suited to take the impact of loud playing, and you won't hear your nails clicking.

As with many other old ideas about piano technique, curved fingers orginated in the days of the harpsichord and early pianos, which were very different from our modern piano, and the music being composed at the time was also much less demanding. Curved fingers is another example of what I call a "300-year-old idea."

Plateaus

 

If you've been playing the piano for a while, you've probably had the experience of being on a plateau -- just not seeming to improve even though you're still practicing as much as you always did. (This is a phenomenon that other discliplines, such as athletics, deal with as well.) It can be very frustrating. You wonder if you are doing something wrong. You might even have thoughts of giving up.

First of all, know that this is how learning usually works. It is often not a steady climb, as if on a hill, but more like a staircase: you make a movement upwards, then stay at the same level. Then another jump up, and level off again. You can even learn to enjoy the plateaus, knowing that your brain is preparing for the next jump up.

However, if you have a lot of plateaus that last for a long time, you're probably practicing wrong. Just playing the pieces over and over again is the worst thing to do. You can't "white knuckle" your way through a plateau. Instead, you need to find some more creative ways of practicing that challenge your brain, and cause it to form new "wiring" (neural pathways). I've blogged about many of these, but not necessarily as regards plateaus. Here are some things you can do.

Transposing. Playing the whole piece, or at least parts of the piece, in another key is supremely challenging for most people. The challenge is why it works. The goal is to transpose as much as possible by ear, but use the score as necessary. When you use the score, you are mentally calculating the distance (interval) from the original key to the new one. But doing it by ear is where the real benefit happens because it "drives the music into your ear." By that I mean that you ear will really know the music.

Playing hands crossed. Play the right hand's part with the left hand and vice versa. What this does is temporarily destroy muscle memory so the ear has to take over. Like transposing, it strengthens the auditory image of the music, that is, a deep knowledge of how it sounds.

Play with one finger, alternating hands on each note. This will obviously only work for a single line melody. You could do this with the main melody, the bass line, or any individual voice. If you are having trouble memorizing even just the melody, this would be good to do. As above, you can't rely on muscle memory so you have to use the ear.

Playing with eyes closed. You should be doing this a lot of the time anyway, as soon as you know the piece or passage by memory. If you haven't been doing this and you find yourself on a plateau, definitely include this in your practicing.

Practice the piece in sections in reverse order (assuming it is a piece of some length). Practice the last section through, then go to the next-to-last section, practice it and then play them both through to the end. Continue with each previous section until you are playing the whole piece. I can't really explain why this works, other than it is just a fresh perspective, but it does seem to help.

Take a break. Put the piece aside for a few weeks and take up some new pieces. The brain will develop new neural pathways from the new pieces that will, hopefully, assist in everything you play, including the piece you set aside. As mentioned, trying to force your way through a plateau is probably not going to work, and it certainly won't be fun. 

Does Every Good Boy Do Fine, actually?

 

Most of you will probably recognize the phrase in the title of this post. Someone came up with it decades, if not centuries, ago, as a way to learn the notes on lines in the treble clef. "All cows eat grass" was the phrase for the spaces in the bass clef. Theortically, if you know these, every other note would just be one note away from one of these. But in reality, if you see the note at the space above all the lines in the treble clef, you might have to say "every good boy does fine" to find the F on the top line, so you can find the G on the space above it. That would be too slow for real-time playing. Instead, you'd want to just know that top line is F, for example, rather than having to repeat the whole phrase to yourself. (See below for how to do this.)

But the main problem with this method is that it focuses on the absolute note names instead of the intervals, or distances, between them. Navigating by interval is the ONLY way to become proficient at sight reading. Even if you think you learned the E-G-B-D-F method (which you may very well have), your mind eventually figured out the distances between notes and switched to reading by interval.

Another problem with the E-G-B-D-F method is that it is hopeless for reading in ledger lines, the notes that are written above or below the clefs. Almost all of my students who came from other teachers still have trouble reading in the ledger lines, and have to count the notes up (or down) to the one they see, and then they often resort to writing the note name in the score so they won't have to keep counting up to it. If you are playing -- or want to play -- advanced pieces, there will be many notes on ledger lines, so it's imperative that this be just as easy as reading the notes which fall on the staff.

However great reading by interval is, sometimes you need to find a note by its absolute name, such as the first note of the piece. For this purpose I have a set of "landmarks," which are all the Cs, Fs and Gs on each clef. (Middle C is the same for both clefs.) In the treble clef there is middle C, written on a ledger line, then G on the second line (indicated by the "curl" of the treble clef symbol"), then C on the third space up, and F on the top line. In the bass clef you have middle C, then F on the second line going downwards (indicated by the two dots around that line in the clef symbol), the C on the third space down, and lastly G on the lowest line. Looking at it as a mirror image, the Cs correspond, the Fs and Gs flip. This way you are never more than two notes away from any other note, and the same system works for both clefs. With the every-good-boy-does-fine and all-cows-eat-grass, you have different systems for each clef, and they do not match up well (one is on lines, the other on spaces). 

Of course, after a period of playing, these landmarks will become internalized, and in fact, so will all the notes on the staff. You won't have to think about their names at all. And that is the point. Don't think about note names. See my post titled Sight Reading from March 2015 for a fuller discussion of these concepts.

This is Madness

 

I recently saw an article in the magazine Piano Street regarding a new device, basically a robotic hand, which, when attached to the hand, is touted as being able to increase the speed at which the pianist plays. 

Here is the link:

When Practice Stagnates: Robotic Training for Pianists

As you see, the device fits on the hand and the makes the fingers move rapidly. The hand isn't really doing the work, it is just passive. The article shows a pianist before and after using the device, and demonstrates that there is an increase in speed even after the device is removed.

Wow, there is so much that is wrong about this.

First, the device only deals with the fingers. As you've read in this blog, I don't subscribe to the common misconception that piano technique is all about the fingers. It is more about the integration of the arm, hand and fingers (and even the torso). The example shown in the video is a pianist playing "double thirds" (a slow trill on two notes) which essentially stays in one place. This, however, is not real life. All challenging music for the piano will require you to movie up and down the keyboard. Chopin's "double thirds" etude (Opus 25 #6) starts this way but then proceeds to move up and down the piano in scales and other patterns in thirds, which obviously must include the arm. ("The hand isn't going anywhere the arm doesn't take it.")

Second, the article admits that, even though the hand is passive, there is still the possibility of injury with the device. You don't say! Over-use of the small muscles is the main cause of injury and strain for pianists. The author of the original article states: "I'm a pianist, but I injured my hand because of overpracticing. I was suffering from this dilemma, between overpracticing and the prevention of injury, so then I thought, I have to think about some way to improve my skills without practicing." Instead of questioning his whole approach to technique he just looked for a workaround, a way for something else to do the work for him. Learning to use the larger muscles of the arm and less reliance on the fingers would have prevented his injury. The late pianist Leon Fleisher developed dystonia in his hands and had to stop playing altogether. After many attempts to cure it (which didn't work), he discovered he could play if he stuck to pieces that weren't so "finger-y," that is, pieces with big chords, for example, which used more of the arm. As it turns out, dystonia is a "scrambling" in the brain from over-use of the fingers, and not a physical problem with the hand at all. To me, that indicates you could have the same problem even if the robot is causing the movements. It's still affecting the brain.

Third, the playing in the article's video sounds.... well... robotic. Of course it does! The device would not allow for any nuance in the playing. If you've been reading this blog, you know I really reject the idea of practicing without musicality and then hoping you can flick a switch and play musically when you want to. Listen to a great pianist play the Chopin Double Thirds Etude and you'll hear there is a lot of nuance, and can, and should, be played very musically. To play musically, you have to practice playing musically.

One valuable thing that this experiment with the robotic device demonstrates is the power of the brain in everything related to piano technique. The article states: Surprisingly, the untrained hand also showed improved performancee, demonstrating an inter-manual transfer effect. So, in other words, it was something that happened in the brain which caused the other hand -- the one not trained with the device -- to improve as well. Wouldn't it be better to explore how to change our brains everytime we practice, rather than use a cumbersome device with potential for harm? I emphasize this in my teaching. See my posts "It's All (Neuro)logical" of December 2020, and "Practicing to Build Your Brain Power" of August 2020.

I doubt whether this device will come into common usage due to cost and other factors. But if it does, I shudder at the thought of every beginning or intermediate, or even advanced student starting to practice using this device. It is frustrating when you feel you reach a "plateau" in your piano practice and you aren't improving. Some of this is the natural learning curve. But most of it is probably how you're practicing. Some of the things pianists do to try to break through a plateau are useless and some are just plain harmful. In an upcoming post I will discuss what to do about plateaus.

What Are You Thinking?

 

What exactly is the role of "thinking" when playing the piano?

Thinking goes hand in hand with talking to yourself. See my post titled "Talking to Yourself" (December 2023). Most of us have thoughts going on in our heads every waking minute of the day. You'd probably agree that, while some of it may be necessary, much of it is just inner babbling.

Discliplines such as meditation, Tai Chi, yoga, Qigong and others aim to quiet the mind. In meditation, when you become aware of the thoughts going through your mind, the goal is to just observe them and let them go. 

You may notice when you have a lot of thoughts, you are less observant of what is going on around you. If you are having a conversation with someone, the ideal would be to focus on them and what they are communicating, and not be rehearsing your response in your head while they are talking. Sound familiar? We all do it.

Some would say to think about what you are doing as you learn a new piece of music, to "process" it, even analyze it. But is that really desirable? If you are thinking then you are talking to yourself, and if you are talking to yourself, you aren't listening, just like in the case of a conversation with someone.

I recently read an article where the author wrote: Control your thoughts to express emotion in your music. He goes on to say the the process of learning music is a mental one, and when someone is not physically capable of executing some difficult music, the mind can overcome it. This is, he explains, how young prodigies manage to play all the big challenging pieces that adults do. Your common sense tells you this can't possibly be correct. A person's mind can't possibly overcome the difficulty of running the 50-yard dash in under ten seconds, or any other athletic feat. It's all physical! Yes, the mind plays a role in having confidence, overcoming self-doubt and visualizing success while in training. But while they are running the race itself? I'd bet their mind is not full of chatter and thoughts. During the race, their mind is only observing.

How would "controlling your thoughts" translate to playing with more emotion? He doesn't explain. You'll find the more you try to control your thoughts, the more they will fight back, so to speak. The only thing you can do is observe them and let them go. In playing the piano, this means your goal is to focus solely on listening to the music as you play. If you are truly listening, there is no room for thoughts to enter. But if you observe you are having thoughts, just return your mind to listening. 

Playing with or without emotion is determined far more by what you do physically (the word emotion has "motion" in it) than it is by how or what you think. If you feel your playing doesn't have enough emotion or expression, it is probably due to several factors: 1) your technique is faulty and doesn't enable you to play with beautiful phrasing and legato, for two examples; 2) you've spent too much time practicing without emotional involvement (the idea that you "learn the notes first" and add expression later); 3) you've spent too much time doing exercises which train you to play mechanically; and, 4) not really listening.