Caring

 

Over the years I've heard many stories, from students or other acquaintances, about their past piano teachers, and in some cases those stories included unkindness, and even a degree of cruelty, towards the student on the part of the teacher.

There is absolutely no excuse for this. In earlier times, corporal punishment and verbal cruelty were considered "necessary" for the disciplining of the students. Now we know how utterly harmful this is. Luckily, at least in the U.S., if this were to happen in a public school it would come to someone's attention and the teacher would be fired (or so we hope).

But if it happens in a private lesson, it's different story.

Thankfully, none of my students experienced physical harm during their previous lessons, but many experienced insults, criticism, and a lack of consideration from their teachers. Sometimes the teacher has such a high opinion of themself that they view their students as beneath them, which somehow entitles them to be high-handed in their approach. Besides the fact that it is just wrong, I don't know how anyone could actually learn in that environment. 

The teacher must show care and understanding towards the student. Of course this applies to both children and adults. If you don't like children, or find teaching to be too aggravating, you have no business being a teacher. Yet there are teachers who teach, from financial necessity or other reasons, but who don't really like teaching. 

Not only does your teacher need to be kind, but they should be very personally invested in your learning, your progress, and your enjoyment of the experience of making music. If they are dismissive of your efforts, or tell you that you just aren't talented enough, they are not doing their job.

If you read my post from October 2022 titled Horror Stories from the Piano, you will hear some of these sad tales. In the coming days, in time for Halloween, I will be posting my second annual Horror Stories from the Piano. Stay tuned.

I'm writing this so that any of you reading my blog who might be experiencing mistreatment from your teacher can realize that it isn't normal, and immediately find a new teacher. If you have children who are taking private piano lessons, either sit in on lessons frequently, or ask your child for details about the lessons, or both, so you can make sure your child's teacher is kind and caring towards them, at the very least.

You know the saying, "No one cares how much you know until they know how much you care."

Trills and Tremelos

 

Being able to do a trill or a tremelo is an essential technical skill if you want to play advanced music. Every era of Classical music has them. Having a really fast -- and beautiful -- trill is a worthwhile goal.

A trill is usually between two adjacent tones; a tremelo is between two tones further apart, usually an octave. But the concept is the same. They are always fast, and they are NOT measured, which means they do not fall evenly into sixteenth or thirty-second or sixty-fourth notes and do not line up in an even way with what is going on the other hand, for example; instead they are free-form. It is this free and un-measured quality which gives them their excitement and almost ecstatic quality. They often come at a part of the music that has been building to a climax. (I am referring here to a trill which goes on for several beats, not just a simple turn of three notes. Technically that is not considered a trill.)

There are many other examples in our music which are not intended to be measured, such as grace notes. You, the pianist, have the freedom to make them a little faster or a little slower, depending on the character of the music, but they are not a specific speed. If they were intended to be measured and even, the composer would simply write them that way. The small notes you see used for grace notes, mordents and other ornaments indicates that they are un-measured.

Earlier today I came across someone's blog who said a trill should measured, and needs to work out evenly so that you always have the same note coming on the beat, for example. Nothing could be more wrong! This would make your trill sound amateurish and stiff. I'm thinking of a gorgeous piece by Debussy titled L'isle Joyeuse (Isle of Joy) which opens with a long solo trill lasting half the measure. It beautifully conveys the joy that the piece is about. You don't even get a sense of the beat until the end of the measure. If it were measured it would be a completely different feeling. There is no question that Debussy would have intended it to be free ( he was once quoted as having said "I have no use for German bookkeeping.").

In the same post this person said that to get clarity in the trill, you need to lift your fingers. Again, nothing could be more wrong. If the trill is to be fast, you must be efficient. Lifting your fingers any distance off the keys will cause loss of efficiency. Think of an Olympic skier in the slalom race, where they have to ski around a series of gates. They need to get as close to the gate as possible; even a few inches too wide will cause them to lose a tiny fraction of a second and will make the difference between winning or not. Maximum efficiency means being close to the keys. It's just physics. You don't need to worry that the sound will be blurred; you want to be playing so fast that the listener doesn't really hear the trill as individual notes.

Here is how I teach trills. Take the two notes of the trill and play them blocked, meaning together at the same time. You need to use your whole arm, not just fingers. Then, think of how it feels when you are skip a stone on a lake; you have one impulse (the throw) and then several "bounces." Let there be several bounces (not too many) off the first impulse. When the bounces occur, you need to stay as close to the keys as possible. After all, it just makes sense that if you bounce high off the keys there will be too much time between bounces. After you have the hang of this, just let the notes come out separately, but try to keep it feeling almost identical to how it felt when it was blocked. You'll be tempted to try to do something to get the notes to separate, but just try to keep the feeling of one impulse. When your bounces get really fast, meaning as little time between them as possible, you have the beginnings of a fast trill. 

There are many people who will tell you the trill is done solely with the fingers. There are some who can do this. But for the average person, you will find that soon the small muscles of the fingers tire and even seize up. Using the arm gives you the power to keep going without pain or fatigue.

A tremelo is essentially the same and I recommend the same method. I've heard many people say that a tremelo with an octave requires that you use forearm rotation, which means the radius bone rotates over the ulna. They even say to exaggerate the rotation when you are practicing. However, rotation is extremely inefficient. You are tipping the forearm (and therefore the hand) towards the pinky side and then towards the thumb side, which means almost your whole hand is far away from the keys. Again, there is no way your tremelo can be fast unless you stay close to the keys. 

I want to emphasize again that, while you might want to see a video of what I am describing, I am still not including videos in my posts. I don't want my readers to think you can learn to play the piano online by watching videos. You need to have a teacher by your side who is watching your hands and arms in order to correct and refine your technique. What I present here is hopefully giving you ideas for experimentation, or perhaps to explain why you may feel you are not making progress if you are using methods that you have been taught in the past and which do not work. 

Musical Architecture

 

If you ever had a "Music Appreciation" class, or something similar, in college or elsewhere, your teacher or professor probably talked about musical forms, such as "sonata form." She/he would point out the main sections into which the piece of music is divided, and explain the names we give each section such as exposition, development, etc. Or maybe you read about this in a book on music theory. Interesting, but potentially pretty dry stuff.

Maybe you never had such a class, but if you have been playing an instrument or even just listening to classical music, you sense that there is a structure to the music. Even a very short piece, or a popular song, has a structure. You might liken it to a small simple house. A large piece, such as a symphony, by its very nature must be more complex in its structure. You might liken it to a cathedral. 

I like to call this "musical architecture."

Why does music even need architecture? If you think of a painting, you see all the elements all at once, so you can see how everything relates to everything else. You can see what is in the foreground, what is in the background, what the painter wants you to notice first, perhaps. In music, since it unfolds over time, we must have a way for our brains to tie it all together. This happens by relating what we are hearing now to what we heard earlier. The use of recurring themes, and their development, is one of the ways this happens.

You may ask, "is it necesssary to know about this to play the piano?" I could say that you could get by without knowing a thing about musical architecture. If you play with emotional engagement, and have solid technique, you could play beautifully without knowing anything about how the music you are playing is organized. But why would you?  Hopefully, you would want to know what makes it so beautiful, so fulfilling.

The musical architecture of a piece of music is one of the aspects -- arguably the most important aspect -- that makes the music great. The cathedral may have gorgeous stained glass windows and incredible carved decorations, but it is the architecture itself which makes it inspiring and awe-inducing.

Instead of studying it away from your instrument, why not learn about musical architecture as you play. One of the best ways to do this is by "outlining" the piece as you start to learn it. Essentially, you play a "sketch" of the piece by choosing to play the main elements, and omit all smaller details. 

In our music, the structure is inherently tied to the harmonies. If you play a single-line instrument such as the flute, it will be much harder to hear the harmonies because it would be other instruments (the orchestra, or a piano) who would be supplying most of it. But a pianist will always be playing the harmony. Therefore, to do an outline, you are playing the basic harmonic progressions of the piece. A good way to start, if you are new to this, is to play what comes on the first beat of every measure. You must be playing hands together to hear the full harmony. If you read my post on the measure, you will see that the measure is a meaningful unit. What happens on the first beat of the measure is likely to be an important part of the structure. There are exceptions, of course, but you can assume it's a good way to start. Gradually you add more details. See my earlier post on outlining for more on this powerful tool.

When you play a "sparse" outline, uncluttered, so to speak, by all the details (beautiful though they may be), you can start to hear the main themes that the composer is employing. These themes, as mentioned above, are the way in which the composer ties the whole thing together, makes it sound cohesive and logical, rather than rambling, or stream of consciousness.

But "wait!" you say..... aren't the themes made of the melodies rather than the harmonies? Yes, but all melodies have harmony as their basis. Think of the famous opening of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. In the first four notes, G-G-G-E flat, we hear a C minor chord (the I chord, since C minor is the key of the piece), and in the next four notes, F-F-F-D, we hear a G7 chord (the dominant, or V chord) of the piece. So even with just these few notes, not only has the tonality been established, but the main theme of the piece has been introduced, and this theme will be used and developed in myriad ways throughout. It is this devlopment which builds the forward momentum and fuels the dramatic climaxes that we hear in the music. In fact, it has been said (and I agree) that the particular genius of Beethoven is his architecture.

But I digress. When you start to learn a new piece, make sure you don't overwhelm yourself with so many notes that you can't hear the underlying themes and harmonies. Although I don't believe in "interpretation" as a solely intellectual activity, I do believe that hearing -- and understanding -- the architecture of the piece will influence your interpretation and make you a better musician. 

How Should I Organize My Practice Time?

 

One of the most common questions I get from new students is "how much should I practice?" I reply that the quality of the practice is far more important than the quantity. The amount of time spent would depend on how much you have available, of course, and the quantity and difficulty-level of your pieces. So there is no one answer to that question. 

People rarely ask if they should follow some sort of plan for their practice sessions, but I think it's worth considering. I write detailed notes for all of students at the lessons, not only what they are to practice, but how to practice for the most efficiency and best results. I don't specify any order to follow, because I want them to have the flexibility to adapt their practice sessions to their schedules and their own moods.

When I was young, all my teachers said to do your "exercises" first. Scales, arpeggios, Hanon, Czerny and so on. Supposedly it was to help you "warm up" and prepare for the technical challenges in your pieces. I'm quite certain that many, many teachers still recommend the same thing today.

As you might have guessed, I disagree with that idea altogether. For most students, playing a lot of scales and arpeggios is not necessary. They are skills you need, yes, but from what I see, most students just play them over and over in a mechanical way. Scales and so on are only worth practicing if you are going to really work at doing them better, that is, more smoothly, faster, in different combinations, etc. If you already have the basic skill, you don't need to keep doing it over and over. Plus, you will encounter scales and so on in your pieces, so you will still get ample chances to work on those specific skills.

I really believe most people do not need to "warm up" their hands. We do thousands of manual tasks in our daily lives and do not need to warm up for them. True, piano is much more complex than all of our normal tasks, but if you are playing with the right technique, meaning integration of the arm, hand and fingers, you won't be over-taxing your muscles. If you have arthritis or another medical condition in your hands, you need to be especially mindful of your technique, that is does not rely solely on the small muscles of the fingers. If you are relying more on your larger muscles, the arm, then they are fine without any special type of warm up.

If you really do want some sort of warm up, then those exercises mentioned would be the worst way to do it, especially if you do them in the manner that is often prescribed, with high fingers and lots of articulation and isolation of the small muscles. Those exercises could potentially cause strain, the very thing you are trying to avoid by "warming up!"

In addition, if you do exercises first and then get interrupted and run out of time, you may not get to your actual music, which is the reason you probably want to play the piano in the first place.

Some people will advise you to organize your practice in a very rigid way, even down to the level of detail such as how much time to spend playing with the metronome. I couldn't disagree with this approach more. (On that note, please see my post "Burn Your Metronome.")

Instead, start with the music you are currently working on. You could start with the newest piece, the one you know least well, so you make sure to get to it. Or you could start with the one you know better, maybe one you can play by memory, so you have a nice gentle easing into your practice session. Of course you don't have to do them in the same order every time. 

I usually recommend you play the piece through, then go back and work on "spots" that need extra attention, then end by playing through again. Playing through after spot work will tell you if, and how, your spot work was effective. I know many other teachers would disagree with this and say you need more time for trouble spots. Some even say to only do spot work. I like to emphasize the "wholeness" of the piece, rather than have it end up feeling like a patchwork of "spots." Places that were "spots" yesterday may be better today and no longer need special attention (probably because you worked on them yesterday and made progress!). Playing through first will tell you what needs work today. However, if it's a longer and/or more challenging piece, you could decide to start with spot work, but then still end by playing through.

For longer pieces, you will probably need to break them up into sections. Sometimes I like to start my practice session with the last section of the piece, then work backwards by section. Otherwise, the earlier sections tend to get more practice, so this method makes sure you get to everything more or less equally. In fact, it's a good idea to start at random places in the piece and work from there. If you find you have trouble doing that, it means you don't know the piece as well as you could. 

What if you have trouble getting yourself to the piano to practice? Even if you love it, you may be a procrastinator and put off your practice time. In that case, find a piece, maybe a short one, that you really love, and play that first. Then once you're sitting there, you'll probably be motivated to continue practicing. If you like to improvise, do that first. Improvising is a great "warm up" because there is (ideally) no stress about "wrong notes" and such. If you are playing some popular music or other non-classical that is less demanding, you could do that first to ease yourself into the practice session.

Remember, you are studying piano because you love music and love the experience of creating music. You know the saying, "if you're not having fun, you're doing it wrong." Don't let practice time become a task. Find ways to keep the practicing playful and fun. See my various posts on how to keep it creative. Avoid any advice or methods that smack of rigidity.

The Measure

 

The measure. All the stuff in between those vertical lines on the staff. If you read music, you've seen the measure in everything you've read, but probably don't give it much thought. Why do we have it? Is it necessary? If we took the measure lines (bar lines) away, would the music sound the same? Do they have some kind of meaning?

Our music (in the Western world) is metric, meaning measured. The easiest way to think of "measured" is  that the sounds you hear are grouped in some perceivable and predictable way.  The sounds of traffic outside are random, thus, not measured. Even most sounds in nature are not measured (one notable exception being birdsong). But music, being a human creation, must, by its very nature, be graspable and understandable by human brains. Apparently, we are not good at making sense of a long string of sounds without some kind of grouping of those sounds.

(Perhaps I should mention that very early music, e.g. from the Middle Ages, was not metric. It took the form of chants which were based on the words. It was more like free-form "talking," with tones, than it is like our modern music. When it first began to be written down, there was no notation to indicate the grouping or the rhythm. The chants were learned by listening to others, and the words helped indicate the "rhythm," such as it was.)

In fact, this grouping is called "chunking." In the early days of the telephone, it was found that people had trouble remembering a string of numbers, say, seven numbers. But if you divide the numbers into a group of three and a group of four, they are much easier to remember. This is how our modern phone numbers came to be as they are. 

Let's say you had a piece of music that was just a steady beat or pulse, with no variation (all quarter notes, say). Even after a short amount of time, your brain would not make any sense of the music, even if, for arguement's sake, the pitches themselves were pleasant. It would just be rambling and the brain would lose interest. If, however, the steady pulse were to be grouped in fours, it would make sense; it could even be a march, for example, something you could walk to. How would this grouping happen, if the notes were steady with no variation? There would have to be a slight emphasis, or accent, on the first note of each group of four. Our brains could then identify the beginning of each new group.

Most music, of course, is more complex and is not just a steady drone of quarter notes. All the other variations of sounds -- sounds that occur in time -- form other patterns, other groupings, which is what we call rhythm. All these other rhythmic patterns do not remove the grouping, they exist within it. You could even say they form groups within groups. 

Whether you are composing, and plan to write down your composition, or improvising it on the spot, your brain, if you have some degree of experience and sensitivity to music, will naturally group things without even thinking about it consciously. If you are new to improvising and notice that your improv is somewhat rambling-sounding, there are several reasons, but primarily that there are either no groupings or inconsistent groupings.

Remember, the ideas and inspiration for the music came first, and notation came later. Musical ideas and themes are conceived with their tones and rhythm being inextricably married. It is completely unimaginable that a composer came up with the tones of the melody and somehow added the rhythm later! After the "birth" of the theme(s), the composer would develop them, spinning them into compositions of varying complexity and length. The grouping of the tones of the themes would be built into the fiber of the composition, therefore, not added as an afterthought. 

Regarding the person playing the music, the grouping must be subtle. The forward momentum and "flow" of the music is paramount; you wouldn't want to hear it chopped up by exaggerating the first tone(s) of the groups. In fact, the grouping is so "built in" by the composer, there is nothing you need to do. The hallmark of a beginner would be the "choppy" sound that would result from over-accenting the first beats of the measure (group).

When it comes to notating the composition, it could be said that the groupings are obvious and no futher notation is necessary. However, after the Middle Ages, as mentioned above, especially when music began to break away from words, adding the measure lines, to explicitly show the groupings, was a great aid to those wanting to read the music. It also meant that, should the composer decide to change the groupings in one section of the composition, it could be shown easily, without confusion.

And so the measure was born. Theoretically, you could remove the bar lines, and the music would be played, and would sound, exactly the same. The compoer Erik Satie did just that in a few of his compositions, but you can still hear it group itself into groups of four. 

But there is an inherent problem, potentially, with the bar lines. With beginning students, I've noticed it seems to make their eyes stop at the line. The music is meant to proceed, unhampered by the bar lines, but for some it creates a subtle barrier to the next measure. The bar line itself has no time value and the listener would not be aware of where there were bar lines in the music. It is incumbent upon the teacher to notice when this is happening with the student and train the student to look ahead to the next measure, and to have a solid rhythmic training.

In a future post I will discuss the deeper meaning and purpose of the measure, how it embodies "going away and coming home" and propels the music forward.

Desirable Difficulties

 

I recently read a very good book about music and the brain where the author used the term "desirable difficulties." It seems to encapsulate the concept of many of the techniques I use, and have my students use, that improve one's command of the music one is working on.

As you've heard me say before, nothing happens in the hand, fingers, arms, etc. without first happening in the brain. Not so long ago, people believed "muscle memory" was actually in the muscles themselves; now we know it is primarily in the motor cortex of the brain. See my post "It's All (neuro)logical". We are creating and strengthening the neurons and the neural pathways that enable us to perform the movements required by the music in a somewhat automatic fashion, that is, without literally "thinking" about them.

You might think, as many people do, that the way to develop the "wiring" in the brain, as I like to call it, would be to just play the piece, or the passage, over and over again. Virtually everyone who teaches or talks or writes about learning to play the piano will tell you that copious amounts of repetition are necessary. As it turns out, recent scientific experiments with musicians' brains, as well as people from other disciplines, tell a different story. The brain seeks novelty. After a certain amount of repetition, there are diminishing returns regarding how many more neurons and/or pathways are created. 

To get the brain really working again, you need to create some new challenges or difficulties for it. It will then create new wiring that will strengthen and supplement what you already have. You may be thinking, "It's already hard enough! Why make it harder?" But that is, in fact, what is necessary. If it's hard, you probably will benefit from doing it. (Remember, when I say "hard" I mean mentally. There should never be any physical pain with any of this. Never play through pain.)

Maybe you can eventually get to where you have a solid command of the music with just the ordinary repetition, but creating desirable difficulties will get you there faster. And hopefully it will also be more fun and interesting.

Here are some of my top ways of creating desirable difficulties:

1. Tranpose. Transposing the piece, or even parts of the piece, to different keys, by ear, will challenge your ear more than you ever thought possible. And, as I always say, the ear really runs the show, so it's the first thing to work on. (Again, when I speak of the ear I mean the auditory cortex of the brain.)

2. Play with eyes closed. See my post on this topic.

3. Play with hands crossed. Again, see my post on this topic. 

4. Play the left hand's part doubled with the right, meaning they are both playing the same thing. Of course you can go slowly and possibly skip any large leaps or things you just can't reach. Then do the reverse. This way, your dominant hand helps "teach" the other hand. Ironically, the non-dominant hand also helps the dominant hand, probably because it just feels so awkward and foreign to the brain that is had to work really hard at it.

5. Play one hand's part while singing the other hand's part. This would work well for a two-voice piece such as a Bach Invention. 

There are other means of creating desirable difficulties, Experiment and see if you can come up with some of your own.

Should You Visualize the Score when Playing by Memory?

 

I've heard people say that they try to visualize the written score when playing by memory. And I've heard people advise doing that. I've also heard people say that you should even write out the piece, by memory, to help with visualization (Wow, that would be terribly time-consuming.) I don't believe that this will help with memory in the long term.

It seems like people who have photographic memories would have zero problems with memory slips when performing. I know someone who has a photographic memory, but he still has memory slips just due to nerves. It's possible to lose your place in the score while just visualizing it, and the fear of this causes the slips. More importantly, his playing is not very musical. I suspect that the involvement of the visual cortex of the brain to such a great degree detracts from the auditory and the emotional parts of the brain. 

I would imagine that trying to visualize just parts of the score, versus all of it, would be even worse, because you'd have to remember to jump to doing the visual in just those parts, and if you forgot to do that, you might have no back-up plan. I say I "imagine" because I never ever visualize the score. By the time I'm ready to play in performance, I have been playing by memory for months, and how the actual score looks is long forgotten.

Remember, the score is just a visual representation of the music, not the music itself! Before the composers set the music down in writing, they heard it all in their minds. Music notation is a wonderful thing, giving access to a whole world of music. But the goal should be to go past the notation and fully internalize the music. So how do you do that?

As you've heard me say in previous posts, the development of the ear is the number one job for the musician. The best musicians are the ones with the best ears. Even if you already have a good, or even great ear, there are ways to improve it. I've had students ask me if they should go to the internet for programs which, for example, play intervals and have you identify them. You can do that yourself, at the piano, just by playing two notes (one in each hand, so you can't feel the interval) with your eyes closed. That would just be for beginners who want to improve their ear. For the more advanced player, transposing the pieces you are working on, or simpler pieces if necessary, is the most powerful tool for making your ear work harder and thus get stronger. Transposing means you are moving the music to another place (another key), but keeping all the relationships the same. That is the essense of hearing and knowing a piece, to be able to hear all the relationships.

Remember, the transposing needs to be by ear, not by eye, which would mean just calculating each note's distance from the original one.

Another often-overlooked way to improve your ear is to sight-sing. Choirs often require that their members be able to sight sing. If you can see an interval and sing it, that means your ear knows it. To practice this, you'd need to take music with which you are not familiar, otherwise you'd already just sing it from memory.

Even if you try to visualize the score and are successful at it, you'd have to start again from scratch on every new piece. But if you develop your ear, it is there for you at all times, in everything you play.

So many people just focus on "learning the notes" of what they are playing, and perhaps mastering the physical techniques as well. But if you want to play by memory (which I hope you do), then you need to get the piece into the deep levels of the "wiring" in your brain. This means really knowing how it sounds. You may think, "of course I know how it sounds," but if you can't transpose it to another key, then you don't really know it. I believe ear and memory are essentially the same thing.