Making Sense of Dynamics and Other Markings

 

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

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

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

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

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

I have discussed staccato and slurs in previous posts.

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

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

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

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

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

Playing With Eyes Closed

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is it normal to get "rusty" at the piano?

 

Many people will say, if they've been away from the piano and from practicing for a while, that they are "rusty." It is assumed they mean that some of their skills or fluency have slipped backwards a bit. They could mean their physical agility (technique), or mental abilities (such as memory), or both. 

Is this normal? Should we assume this will happen to everyone who doesn't get to practice for a week, a month, a year?

If you have an injury, say a broken leg, and you don't use the leg for several months, the muscles will atrophy somewhat, and you will have to build them back up again. So you could be "rusty" at walking or running. The same would be true of your arms or hands. But short of muscle atrophy, it's hard to think of a scenario where your hands would get rusty, because we use them for so much and in so many ways. Yes, the piano uses them in different ways than other activities, but the muscles are still there. So what is really happening when you feel rusty?

First, we have to consider how long you've been playing the piano. If you're a beginner, and you lay off practicing for a month, you may slip backwards a noticeable amount. This has nothing to do with your actual muscles, but rather with the neural pathways in your motor cortex. The neural pathways, or "wiring," as I like to call it, have not been very well established, so they disappear. Everything that happens -- every skill you develop -- is happening in the brain. See my post titled "It's All (Neuro)Logical." When a new motor skill is performed with some degree of repetition, the pathway for that becomes more solid, more permanent. If you're a beginner, you just haven't had enough time to lay down a lot of wiring yet, so it's not surprising that it seems to disappear. 

If you've been at the piano for a number of years, certain skills or techniques, the ones you've used over and over again, should be pretty well established. So if you were able to play a scale fluently, for example, you shouldn't be losing that skill or getting rusty. 

Pianists who've been playing their whole lives -- decades, that is -- should not really get rusty at all. Our memory of a certain piece may slip if we don't play it often, but the wiring is still there; it just needs to be "woken up." 

There is one big caveat here. If your technique is faulty, that is, you've learned to play in a way which is not natural for the hands and arms, you will get rusty more easily. If you ask your hands to do something which is awkward and causes strain, they will manage to do it, but they won't retain that skill as readily. This may include playing with excess strain and tension, lifting the fingers too high, and many other movements that rely on muscle strength rather than coordination. That is why you'd have to keep practicing that skill over and over, even when you thought you'd mastered it. But unfortunately, if that skill falls off and you have no other skill to replace it, you are left with nothing. 

Many students learn their pieces at a very superficial level. They think if they have developed the muscle memory for the piece, that they "know" it. But to really know the music at a deeper level requires knowing it at the auditory level, meaning you just really know how it sounds. You may think "of course I know how it sounds!" But try transposing it, or even just a snippet of it, or even just the melody, and you will see that your ear doesn't really know it. Constantly working on the ear, through transposing and other means, will enable you to know your music at a much deeper level. Muscle memory is the first "memory" to be acquired, and the first to be lost. Ear memory can last forever.

And last, but certainly not least, you must always play with emotional involvement. Many studies have shown that we learn faster (any subject, not just music) and remember longer when we are emotionally engaged with the material. Having your emotions involved sort of super-charges the brain. If you play mechanically, thinking you just need to "learn the notes," you will find the learning is at a superficial level, and you will not retain it. 

If you find yourself using the excuse that you haven't practiced in a while and are "rusty," you may need to re-evaluate some, or all, your methods of learning.

How's that working out for you? (Your practice methods, I mean)

 

The piano is a challenging instrument to learn to play, and monumentally challenging to learn to master. I admire anyone who takes up the challenge of learning to play the piano. A child may take up the piano but probably doesn't know, or give much thought to, what they are really undertaking. Adults, however, realize (hopefully) that they are in for some serious work ahead. Yes, it will be fun and rewarding (which are the best reasons to do it) if done with the right attitude, but also will take effort.

Naturally, we want to know that our efforts are "paying off." 

Unfortunately, many people quit after trying for a while, because they just feel they aren't "getting anywhere." They struggle to play the simplest of music; they spend many hours at the piano but still make the same "mistakes." They feel maybe they have made a little progress but after a short time away from the piano they are back to square one. And many other such reasons. They often feel they should just quit because, apparently, they just don't have the "talent" for it. (But there are also those who will tell you that talent has little to do with it, but rather, it's just about putting in the hours -- the "ten thousand hours" philosophy.)

Everyone will bring a differing degree of natural ability, talent, if you will, to their endeavors. But I say, if you love music, and have a strong desire to learn to play, forget about talent. And if you are an adult, you cannot plan to spend ten thousand hours at it either. So what's left? It's all about working smart.

If you are trying to play the piano and feel you aren't making progress, I recommend the following:

1. If you are doing it on your own, you really need to get a teacher. But not just any teacher. Interview as many teachers are you can. Describe the exact problems you are having and evaluate their answers. If the answer is just to "practice more" or some vague cliche, keep looking.

2. If you already have a teacher, but you are not satisfied with your progress and your teacher gives you the same answers as above, look for a new teacher.

3. If the previous two options are simply not available to you, I urge you to do the following:

FIRST: Ask yourself whether the music you are attempting to play is too advanced for you. When people work on their own, they don't know what music is suitable for their level. (That's why it's good to have a good teacher.) Quite often people have come to me after having played on their own, and have spent months or even years trying to play something far too difficult. They may think that if they just put in the time, they will eventually get it. Not only is this not true, but you will harm your progress, and even go backwards, trying to play something too difficult. You need to be learning skills, not just pieces. Picking your way, painstakingly slowly, through a long piece, isn't going to really give you skills that you can apply to the next piece, because just "finding the notes" is so overwhelming. And you certainly won't be able to play it with the fluidity and musicality you desire. In addition, you will, without question, find that if you stop practicing the piece for even a short time, it will have evaporated, and you can no longer play it. All that work for nothing.

SECOND: you must REALLY LOOK at how you are practicing. Again, without a good teacher to show you how to practice (sadly, many teachers just don't do this), you probably won't know. But just as with other areas of life, if you are doing the same things over and over, hoping to get a different result... well, you know what they say about that.  

Ask yourself whether you have been trying (knowingly or unknowingly) to find "short cuts." These may include listening to recordings to try and copy what you hear (if your reading is weak), looking at your hands, using a metronome (because your rhythm is weak) and many others. See my earlier post on this subject.

Recently, I was trying to figure out why a student was having so much difficulty reading just four measures of a simple melody. (I should mention this student had terrible teachers previously, so he is struggling.) He said, "well, if I was at home, and I practiced it a bunch of times, then I could eventually play it." I asked him, "what happens the next day? Are you able to play it right off the first time?" He replied that no, he'd have to repeat the same process again the next day. So in other words, I said, the "bunch of times" that you "practice it" don't really do anything, if the next day you're back at square one again. He agreed. (It might be normal and expected to sometimes go a few steps forward and one step back, but if you are going three steps forward and three steps back, every time, then there is something seriously wrong with your approach.) The process he calls "practicing" is not the process I have shown him. He does all the things I warn against: stopping, "fixing," going too slowly, only focusing on notes and ignoring rhythm, looking at his hands, not attempting to play musically, not really listening, and so on. Doing those things does not lead to just being able to sit down and play something, albeit simple, the first time. The processes that many people might think are what constitutes "practicing" are, in fact, just reinforcing habits that you don't really want, and can't really use, when you want to play fluently. In your practicing, do the things that you ultimately want to be the way you play. I realize this may sound simplistic, but it's profoundly true. Everything you do has the potential to become habit. 

I am in NO WAY saying you can learn to play the piano by reading about it or watching someone. I don't include videos in this blog precisely because I do not want my readers to believe that you can learn to play the piano from an online course. But if you are not sure how to change the way you have approached your practicing up to this point, please read my blog from the beginning. Read about ear training, sight-reading, outlining, and all the other topics, and ask yourself how it compares with what you are doing now. Each time you do something in your habitual way, ask yourself "how's that's been working out for you?"

Does it pass the "smell" test?

 

I think you all know what I mean by the "smell test." Does something seem legit, or is there something fishy about it? We use this "test" in many areas of our lives.

As I wrote in my post titled "Who can you believe?" (April 2021), when it comes to playing and learning to play the piano, you will hear many different ideas or opinions regarding how to go about it, expecially regarding technique. For someone attempting to learn on their own (which I don't advise) or even someone who has teacher, it can be difficult to know who and what to believe. So, you must use the "smell test."

I often read blogs, articles, or books on the subject of the piano. Here are some recent ones I've encountered.

In one recent blog, the person said you cannot play loud chords "coming from above" because you will get a harsh sound, and he demonstrated in the video. Yes, he got a harsh sound because he used what I call a "hammer stroke," the way you would hammer in a nail, using your forearm. The reason it works for the hammer and the nail (a sharp movement) is similar to why it sounds harsh on the piano. Instead, he said, you must have your hands right on the keys and then play, giving you a "gorgeous sound," which he demonstrated (he didn't actually get them very loud or gorgeous). However, consider this: when the baseball player or tennis player or golfer wants the ball to go far, they pull their arms way back in order to have the greatest possible momentum when the bat or racket or club contacts the ball. If they want a short shot, such as a putt or bunt, they hold the club or bat right in front of their bodies and move it more slowly, and with only a little momentum. The same is true for piano; if you want it to be loud, the hammers must hit the strings at high speed, and for that you need momentum. It doesn't mean you start from above and crash down on them, but it does mean you need the whole arm, played in a motion coming towards yourself at high speed, which gives volume without harshness. Starting right on the keys and having no momentum just doesn't pass the smell test. 

However, he said that you do want to come from above for staccato playing, but using the wrist. I'm not sure how this would even work, because if you come from above, but then flex the wrist, you negated the movement you started with your arm. But any time someone says to use the wrist, I am immediately suspicious. Overuse or incorrect use of the wrist can lead to pain, fatigue, and even tendinitis and/or carpal tunnel syndrome.

This person recommends lots of exercises where you lift each finger high as you play. He says it will give you precision in your playing. However, he also says that if you want good phrasing and beautiful legato, it is necessary to learn to transfer the weight of the arm to the fingers, with the fingers close to the keys (this is correct). Does it make sense to practice "exercises" one way, when you want to play your actual music in the exact opposite way? No, it doesn't pass the smell test.

In discussing rapid playing, he says "the arms are too heavy and too slow" to accomplish it. Again, we must look at other disciplines. Are the tennis player's arms too slow? Are the ballerina's arms too heavy? I suppose you could say that they train their arms to be fast and light. But of course, so does the pianist. I'm thinking of the very end of the Chopin B-flat minor Scherzo, which has both hands on a chord in the center of the piano, and then rapidly -- as a grace note, which must be quite fast -- both hands jump to notes at the opposite ends of the keyboard. It's obvious that your fingers won't cover these distances. I could give dozens of examples like this. I like to say that "the fingers aren't going anywhere the arm doesn't take them." Arms too heavy and too slow? Nope --- doesn't pass the smell test.

This person's blog was a hodgepodge of different techniques for different types of playing. That's not how it works. Good, or great, technique at the piano, stems from some core principles, which are grounded in the physics of the piano mechanism itself and the working of the arms, hands and fingers, as well as some elements of physics, such as the momentum example, above. You don't have to study anatomy or physics to aquire good technique, but if your teacher shows you specific techniques, he or she needs to understand why they work, and why others don't work, and to be able to put them into practice at the piano. Ideas which seem to defy physics, or just common sense, for that matter, just don't pass the smell test. 

Perfect Pitch vs. Relative Pitch

 

Some people may be confused about the meanings of perfect pitch (also called absolute pitch) and relative pitch.

Having perfect pitch means that the person can identify the exact note just by hearing it, without any context. If you play the note we call A, a person with perfect pitch just knows immediately that is in an A. Perfect pitch is something of a mystery; it seems that each tone has a certain characteristic or "personality," different from other tones, which allows it to identified instantly, just as you would recognize someone's face. It is not simply that the tones were somehow memorized at some point. Clearly, perfect pitch is a high degree of sensitivity to tones and tonal quality. Either you have it or you don't; it can't be developed, or at least, no one has yet found a way to do that.

Relative pitch would mean that you would hear the relationship, but not the absolute. So hearing and A and then an E would be identified as the interval of a fifth. A fifth between two other tones would sound essentially the same.

It is estimated that approximately 1 to 5 people in 10,000 in the general population have perfect pitch . The percentage of musicians with perfect pitch, not surprisingly, is much higher, probably around 10%. It's a higher percentage because it's more likely that someone with a high degree of sensitivity to tone would be drawn to music, not because they developed it in the course of their music practice. Some people assume that all musicians must have it, but that is not the case. And you certainly do not need to have perfect pitch to be a good, or even great musician, and play your instrument well.

Relative pitch is an ability that can be strong or weak and anything in between. A musician needs to have strong relative pitch. (Having perfect pitch is a bonus.) It is essential to hear the relationship of tones to each other, since, in the context of actual music, it is the relationship of the tones that is most important. 

I've encountered many people who do not realize or understand that last statement. If I want to sing Happy Birthday, I can start on any tone and sing the song. There is no one tone that you must start on. If there were, no one except those with perfect pitch could sing it (spontaneously, without help) because, of course, they can't identify one tone from another. Yet the song is still the same regardless of where we start, because the relationships stay the same. If this concept is new to you, please read my earlier post titled "It's All Relative."

If you've been reading this blog, you know that I emphasize the importance of ear training. Ear training would mean strenghtening your relative pitch. (It can also mean strengthening your hearing of rhythm, but that is another subject.)  There are many ways to strengthen your relative pitch such as listening to and then identifying intervals, in other words, drills. But two more musical and interesting ways would be to sing at sight, and to transpose.

To sing written music at sight that is new to you (in other words, that your ear doesn't already know) entails seeing and then singing the intervals. If you are in a high-level choir, for instance, you will need to do this. If you are weak at it, listening to the people near you is a way to "cheat," but sight-singing would be part of your audition for the choir, so you have to be pretty good at it. If you play an instrument, you can transpose your music to other keys. If you transpose using your ear as much as possible (as opposed to reading and calculating the notes), your relative pitch will improve.

I happen to have perfect pitch and am glad I have it. It's fun to hear a piece on the radio and instantly know what key it is in, for example. However, having perfect pitch does not mean I'm done with ear training. I do transposing almost daily to strengthen my relative pitch. Having both is a really unbeatable combo.

Change One Thing, Change Everything

 

As I've written about in my previous posts, the issue of fear and anxiety plays a large role, unfortunately, for many students of the piano. If you are attempting to play music of any complexity, there is likely to be some level of struggle, and this creates stress, or at least, some unease.

However, it doesn't work to just tell someone, "don't worry" or "relax." The body has it's own responses to cues from the subconscious mind, and trying to change that with the "thinking" part of the mind doesn't usually work. In my teaching, I try to find another way "in," and by that, I mean into the subconscious.

With three of my students in particular (all adults), I am discovering ways to help them play better by changing their level of tension. 

With the first, I noticed that whenever he was anxious about an upcoming passage in the piece (which was a lot of the time), he would tighten his mouth, pressing his lips together. So I asked him to play with his mouth just slightly open when he played. Sure enough, when he got to that difficult passage, it went much smoother. Coincidence? No, I don't think so. By changing just one of the body's responses to stress, it changed the total level of stress.

With the second student, his reponse to stress was in his leg. He would tense his leg and lift the heel off the floor. I asked him to become aware of it and see if he could keep his leg resting on the floor. Again, his playing went much easier that way. It's best if the person can feel what they are doing by becoming more aware, and make the change themselves. However, when I gently put my foot on his and prevented it from tensing up, it helped him become aware.

The third student, my most advanced student, is playing Chopin, Schumann, Debussy and so on. She has been with me for 10 years. I've always noticed that when she plays she has a tendency to grimace. Her mouth tenses up in a particular way. To look at her, you would think she was not enjoying her playing much at all! But this is not the case; she loves the piano and the music she is playing, but her subconscious is still quite anxious about it. For a long time I didn't want to mention it, because I was concerned it would make her self-conscious and add to her stress. But recently I decided to give it a try. I've asked her to smile while she plays. At first she felt quite silly with a big grin on her face. Not surprisingly, she can't yet maintain the smile for very long before the grimace returns. It has only been two weeks since we started this, and so for someone like her who has been playing for decades, it may be a while before we see changes. But I am convinced that changing her particular stress response will help her playing, and possible even add to her enjoyment of it.

Traditional methods (and teachers) that concentrate wholly on "learning the notes" will never even notice these manifestations of stress, or think that they matter. But they do matter. You may want to have energy and even intensity when you play, but not stress and tension. Sometimes when you are struggling with something (in life, as well as at the piano), you may need to look at something that at first glance may seem unrelated, but turns out to be the key to unlock the door you have been banging your head against. Sometimes, changing one thing changes everything.