Hands Crossed

If you are at the level where you are playing advanced or moderately advanced classical pieces, you may have encountered passages where one hand crosses over the other. A notable example is the third movement of Beethoven's Sonata Opus 53 ("Waldstein"), where the left hand crosses over the right to play the main melody. It continues this way for quite a few measures, and returns again every time the main theme returns. The right hand is busy with an arpeggiated chord pattern, so it's more practical for the left hand to cross, than it would be to keep switching which hand plays the chord pattern. It sounds much more smooth as well. 

Perhaps the very first time you try this you find it slightly awkward, but soon you will be used to it and will have no problem, assuming the piece is at the right level for your general abilities. The first time I suggest it to my students they think I am kidding --- or crazy. But then they find it is a fun challenge.

Although Beethoven and the other composers probably would not have known this, crossing the midline of your body with your arms has benefits for the brain. You probably know that the left hemisphere of the brain controls the right side of the body, and vice versa. This is an over-simplification (the brain is far more complex than that), but in general it is true. So when the right half of the brain is sending signals to the left hand at the piano, but the left hand is not where it usually is, but in fact is now on the opposite side, the brain has to develop additional pathways to accomplish the task. If you do an internet search on benefits to the brain of crossing hands, you will find numerous scientific articles which confirm this. It's not just a theory but is borne out by many tests and studies. And who doesn't want a bigger, better brain? It benefits every area of your life, and certainly is important for aging well.

The Waldorf School, a private school for children, has all its students learn a string instrument, such as violin or cello. Of course they want the children to experience the joys and benefits of playing music, but they specifically select string instruments because moving the bow over the strings involves crossing the midline of the body, which has the benefits mentioned above. Unfortunately, brass and wind players do not get this opportunity. Nor do singers.

It is now recommended that parents do games and exercises with their babies and young children that involve crossing the midline with their arms (or legs) to advance brain development.

If you find that you rarely, if ever, have a piece which involves crossing the hands, you can still get all the benefits by simply playing with hands crossed on your own. Select a passage from a piece you are working on that is not too technically difficult, and just cross hands, meaning you will play the left hand's part with the right hand, and vice versa. (You would not be playing each hand's own part but just in a higher or lower register. They each have to play the part they are not familiar with.) Of course you can read the music, and of course you can go slowly. Each hand has no muscle memory for the part it is playing, so it feels like learning it from scratch. However, your ear knows the sound of the music, so it will be assisting you. Don't worry about mistakes; you'll have lots of them. Just continue on.

After you have done this, go immediately to playing it in the normal way, and see if it doesn't feel easier. Don't wait for a later time; do it when the new neural pathways are "fresh." 

To take things one step further, use the hands-crossed method on a passage you are having trouble with. If you have tried other forms of creative problem solving (that is, not just playing it over and over) and it still hasn't improved as much as you hoped, play it hands crossed, and then immediately afterwards play it normally.

I can't promise that every technique I talk about in the blog will work for absolutely everyone, 100% of the time. But I do know that they work. Hands crossed is another tool to have in your toolbox. 

Can Pianists Have Nice Nails?

 

You may think this is a trivial subject, but you will see that it is not.

Even if you are male and have no interest in having longer nails, read on.

When I was a young piano student, my teachers always insisted that I keep my nails trimmed very short, almost no visible white part at all. As a teenager, I was envious of my friends who had longer, lovely manicured nails. If I dared to let them grow a bit, I would get a lecture from my teacher. Alas....

But the reason for needing to have your nails very short is a bogus one. It stems from the idea that you must curve your fingers when you play. Some books say to curve your fingers as if holding a tennis ball. With this curvature, you end up playing on the tips of your fingers. If the nails protrude past the finger at all, they will produce a clicking sound on the keys.

This idea of curved fingers is another example of what I call "300-year-old ideas." It originated with the harpsichord. The harpsichord has a completely different action than the piano. Even then, the idea really had no basis in reality, but they believed it was required to achieve the right sound. And so the idea persisted right up until today, where most teachers will still tell you to curve your fingers.

If your fingers are curved, how can you play an octave or larger? Or a large chord with several notes? With fingers curved you simply cannot open your hand enough to play those. Try it and you'll see. When the idea first arose, with the harpsichord, there simply were no pieces that had the big chords of Chopin, Brahms and Rachmaninoff.

Over-curving the fingers also makes the whole hand tighter and less flexible. We want our hands to be supple and elastic, not muscle-bound and tight. (Once again, another 300-year-old idea says you must build the strength of the fingers, which is not true.)

What we should be doing is playing with the natural curvature of our own hands, which varies between individuals. Turn your hand prone (upside down) on your lap in a relaxed way. Then just turn it over and place your hand on the keys; that is your natural curvature. No one has a completely flat hand, and almost no one has a very curved hand. With a natural curvature, you end up playing on the pads of the finger (where your fingerprint is). 

Generally speaking, you can't play well with very flat fingers. This is because they can't transfer the power of the arm to the keys in this position. However, even though I am a petite woman, I can reach a tenth when I let my hand open up naturally, without stretching, and my hand will be practicially flat. But for someone whose hands are that way naturally, that is how they will play. I recommend you watch some videos of the late great Vladimir Horowitz, who was known for his technical prowess. His hands are practically flat. This obviously was his natural curvature. In fact, you'll see that most professional pianists' fingers are not excessively curved. If your teacher insists you curve your fingers, ask him/her how Horowitz managed to have a huge technigue without curving.

Now that you are playing on the pads of the last joint of the finger, there is no problem for the nails to be longer. Of course, there is a limit. If they are like talons, they are going to bump into the keys and the fallboard, and you will end up with a lot of broken nails.

I keep my nails slightly longer, and I get a manicure regularly. My nails don't "click" nor do they chip or break, and I play many difficult pieces.

Once again, beware of 300-year-old ideas. They don't stand up to scrutiny.

Skim or Dive?

 

In many areas of life, especially when learning something new, you may choose to be a skimmer, or you may choose to be a diver. A skimmer would learn the new skill or subject "well enough," but not at a deep level. You might need to give a talk on the subject, so you study it, but you don't intend to become an expert on it. If you're a diver, you want to go deep into the subject and perhaps attain some level of mastery of it. If you're a skimmer, you can expose yourself to a wide range of material, since you'll spend less time on each skill or topic, but if you're a diver, you'll have to be more selective so you can have the time to acquire the mastery.

Regarding the piano, being a skimmer doesn't necessarily mean you learn superficially. However, many people do just that. They start learning a piece, maybe sight-read through it, but then, when it starts to get difficult to conquer the technical challenges, for example, they lose interest and move on to another piece. There could be some valid reasons to do this: perhaps you want to see if you enjoy the sound of the piece enough to actually work on it. If you don't, you can move on. However, virtually every piece of music affords opportunities to improve your skills; if you don't pursue those, you won't get much out of the time you spent on it. And you'll still have to acquire those skills in another piece in the future. Just "learning the notes" is, by definition, skimming. If you don't imbue the music with expression, nuance, and energy, you are just skating on the surface. No one would want to hear such a rendition, and neither should you.

A concert pianist would have to be a diver. They would need to master every piece they perform, not just in terms of notes, but in order to create as much beauty as possible. However, outside the concert hall, they may enjoy skimming from time to time, to explore new music, perhaps.

Those of you reading this blog are probably neither concert pianists nor aspiring concert pianists. That is fine! Piano is a skill that can be enjoyed at any level, any age, any phase of life. It is my belief that people enjoy it more if they improve and make progress as opposed to repeating the same things over and over. So, for the beginning or intermediate level pianist, let's explore how skimming and diving might apply.

I start my students playing by ear, and add reading later. Whether by ear or reading, the pieces I assign necessitate that the student learn some very basic skills, such as just being able to move your hands around the keyboard (not as easy as it sounds, as any beginner will attest). When they basically have it, we move on. It doesn't need to be "perfect." Trying to get each of these very short beginner pieces perfect would mean you will progress far too slowly. Forget about perfection. You've probably heard the phrase "perfect is the enemy of the good." It definitely is true here. (However, having the correct rhythm is non-negotiable. Once you start cutting corners on rhythm, you may never develop a good sense of rhythm.) So, in a sense, they are skimming, but with a purpose.

Once they are out of the beginner books, I assign pieces that hone primarily one main skill in each piece. For example, Bach's C major prelude from the Well Tempered Clavier, Book I, is a piece where every measure has the same technical skill: broken chords split between hands, which need to be played smoothly connected. Just by working on this piece you would get a lot of practice on this one skill. Of course, it's not just a matter of learning the notes: the teacher needs to show and teach the skill of being able to do this in a way which is legato and well-phrased. This would be a piece which I recommend they "dive" into. We would continue to work on it until it had a "long line" (not be choppy), and had meaningful dynamics, and where the student really engages with it emotionally. It would also be memorized. I have found over the years that my students derive a great deal of satisfaction in playing this staple of piano literature really well.

As the student progresses, we select some pieces to semi-skim, that is, to use as vehicles primarily to attain new skills. Of course I still want them to play with emotional engagement and make it lovely to listen to, but they won't spend long enough on the pieces to really master them. We will choose other pieces that we want to take to a deeper level, to really explore the possibilites for nuance and expression. I feel this approach is best for several reasons. Most students have busy lives and need to practice smart, not long hours. This is the most efficient use of practice time. It is also the most enjoyable. You spend less time on the pieces you like but don't love, yet still get valuable benefits from them. And you spend more time on the pieces you really love.

I once had an adult student who told me that when he was young, his teacher had him work on one piece only for the whole year (yes you read that right!) so that he could play it perfectly at the recital. The teacher wanted "perfection" so it would reflect well on her, of course. Do you think the student played "perfectly?" Of course not; he was so bored and sick of the piece it was probably mechanical and dull. She had him do 100% diving and no skimming. He would have acquired a very limited range of skills from just one piece. And of course he hated the lessons and quit right after the recital. 

It's important for the teacher and student to understand the difference between skimming and diving, and when to employ each.

Playing Loud, Playing Soft

 

The range of dynamics is a hugely important aspect of playing the piano with expression, subtlety, and musicality. Only a large pipe organ has a greater range of dynamics than the piano. Even the name of our instrument, originally called the pianoforte, or the fortepiano, means soft/loud (or loud/soft). This was a huge innovation after the harpsichord, which, due to its strings being plucked, not struck, could only achieve one dynamic level. The development of the strings being struck by a hammer changed everything.

The music score, as well as your teacher or coach, may tell you to play a passage loud (f), or very loud (ff). But you may never have been shown or taught how to actually do that. It might seem like it's instinctive -- just play with more force. But it's not quite that simple. You can't really play a loud chord, for example, with just your fingers. Try holding one hand with the other so that it can't move, and try to play with fingers alone: impossible, even if you think you have strengthened your fingers through exercise (which I don't believe in, for reasons described in previous posts). Even if you could, you'd have pain and fatigue in your hands in no time. Now try to hold your upper arm inert and just use your forearm. I call this a hammer-stroke, because it's very much like how you would use a hammer to hit a nail. It works well for the nail, but on the piano it produces a very harsh sound. The only way to get loud without being harsh is to use the whole arm. Using the arm, but still keeping the hand firm but not tight, will produce the sound you want without pain or fatigue.

Think of the baseball player. When he wants to hit the ball out of the park, he brings the bat as far back as he can, using his whole arm, then swings it with as much speed as he can. Yes, he may be strong and he is using his muscles, but it is the speed that is the key. Conversely, when he wants to bunt, he holds the bat right in front of his body and uses mostly his forearm, and has very little momentum, so the ball doesn't travel very far. More speed, more momentum, less speed, less momentum. It's just physics, folks!

To achieve momentum at the piano, your arms must move in, that is, toward the fallboard, and then, using the whole arm as a unit, come towards yourself at high speed as you make contact with the keyboard. The louder you want it, the more momentum you need, which means you move in toward the fallboard as much as possible. Your wrist will need to flex slightly you you don't actually hit the fallboard with your finger tips. Think of Chopin's C minor prelude, which has a loud chord on every beat for the first eight measures. You must use full arm stroke on every chord.

Now the score and/or your teacher tells you to play soft (p) or very soft (pp). Just like the baseball player's bunt, when you want your playing to be very soft, you want less speed and less momentum. Contrary to what a lot of people believe, just using fingers alone doesn't give you a reliable and even softness. Using a full arm stroke but with little momentum gives you a soft sound that is still well-controlled. You've probably experienced those times that you intended to play soft, but instead you got a "ghost" note or notes, that is, no sound at all. That is because the hammer didn't have enough momentum to hit the string at all. If you put your finger on a key and just press, you will almost certainly get no sound, because there was almost no momentum. 

To play extremely soft, your "attack" must be very precise, which requires a lot of alertness. I like my students to use this image: you have a tiny, delicate item that needs to be repaired, and you have a tiny hammer and a tiny nail. You really only have one shot at fixing it, because if you hit it too hard the item will break; if you hit it too lightly, you will have to try again, and increase the risk of destroying it. So you summon all your alertness, and give one quick, precise hit, with enough momentum to get the nail to go in, but not so much as to break it. While not a perfect analogy, it gives you an idea how great pianists achieve the clear and beautiful soft sounds, especially in music such as Debussy and Ravel.

If you try to research how to play loud or soft, you will find a great deal of misleading or incorrect information. When you read something that you think might be correct, ask yourself if the physics support that idea.

Requesting Feedback

 

Over the last few months there has been a large uptick in the number of views I have received on this blog. Just this month there are over 1300 views. There have been approximately 26,000 since I started.

I am requesting your feedback. You can comment on any specific post in the comment box at the bottom of the post. If you have comments about the blog in general, please put your comments in the comment box for this post.

Or, if you have suggestions of subjects you would like to see covered, please leave it as a comment, or, even better, email me at deborah@pianobrilliance.com. That way I can reply to you if I need clarification or if you'd just like a reply.

Thank you.

Deborah Gandolfo

www.PianoBrilliance.com

Must Piano Practice be Boring?

 

You often hear that people hated their piano studies when they were children because it was so boring, so tedious, so dull. Or maybe they never played themselves, but they heard that so often from other people they assumed it to be true and never wanted to try to learn to play.

You also see many, many ads for online classes, books, etc. promoting methods that don't have all the drudgery that traditional methods have. They claim to have the magic answer that will enable you to learn to play in a fraction of the time and work that "traditional" methods require. It's clear that these people advertising these "amazing new methods" surely know that people are expecting drudgery and boredom, so of course they are intrigued when they learn that you can just bypass all that. IF you buy their class or book, of course!

However, you need to know that almost all of those quick courses are not teaching classical music. Just some very simple popular music, which, being simpler, will be faster to learn, They are also easier because they usually have you learning to read only the melody and play chords using chord symbols. I highly recommend learning chords and chord symbols (see my post "Playing from Fake Books"), but you can't learn classical music that way.

A lot has changed in the field of education in the last few centuries. In just about every field, not just music, a strict adherence to rules and specific methods was insisted upon, often with corporal punishment for the student who did not comply and had the audacity to try something different. Thankfully, that is all changed, just about everywhere (hopefully).

Unfortunately, in music studies, it was particularly rigid. Teachers insisted on many hours of scales or arpeggios, or other types of finger exercises. Not very many years ago I had a student who told me her previous teacher ripped up her music and threw it to the floor, right in the middle of her lesson, because she dared to use a different fingering than he had prescribed. Imagine! 

So of course it was going to be boring, possibly intimidating, and definitely far from FUN! If a teacher learned from someone like that, there is a strong possibility they will teach the same way. And so the association with piano and drudgery gets perpetuated.

Of course you know by now I'm going to tell you it doesn't have to be that way. If you find your piano practicing boring, it is because your teacher has made it boring, or you have made it boring, or both. If you are learning without a teacher, then it's on you, but you probably picked up a few things from what other people said, or what you read online, that is making it boring.

The boredom comes from these forms of practice:

1. Too much repetition. People will always say you have to do endless repetition but it's just not true. If you do too much, the brain will just "turn off" and you won't get nearly as much out of it as you think. The mind doesn't want to be bored. If you do a passage of music over and over, soon you will find your mind drifting off to think about what you're going to have for dinner! Instead, just do it a few times, but with focused attention to everything your hands and arms are doing. If you can determine what is the cause of it not coming out how you want, try to assess what the problem is and do it differently. If you find that it starts to go better, I suggest you stop. Let that be the last thing your body remembers. If you do it dozens more times, it will almost certainly get worse before it gets better.

2. Exercises. If you've read some of my previous posts, you know that I recommend you don't do ANY exercises such as Hanon or Czerny. Many teachers who assign those actually want you to do them in a very mechnical way, which only teaches you to be mechanical. Besides not being actually beneficial towards building mastery, they are just not musically interesting. Again, your mind will get bored and will drift.

3. Lack of imagination and experimentation. Although I show my students the best ways to approach technical issues, sight reading, memorization and every other aspect of playing, it doesn't mean you can never try something and experiment on your own. For example, I may show a fingering that I think will work well for them (it's not a one-size-fits-all) after having them try it, but at home they may discover something that seems to work better for them. By all means, try different things and see what comes of it. Of course, including improvising in your practice is a great way to experiement and use your imagination.

4. Playing without emotional engagement. This is the ultimate soul-killing form of practice. You wouldn't want to go to a concert and hear someone play like that, or go to a play and hear the actors deliver their lines robotically, so don't do it yourself. People will tell you that you have to do this just to "learn the notes first," but they are dead wrong. And "dead" is what your playing will be. And boring for you, as well as any listeners you may have.

5. Playing only one kind of music. Even if, say, classical is your main interest, I highly recommend you learn to play some jazz or popular or Broadway tunes, preferably using a "fake book." (See my post on that subject.) It's a great way to loosen up and have fun. The same with improvising. If you're focusing on classical, play from all periods. I've seen many teachers give students a copious amount of Mozart and others from that era because they are easier in some ways for the beginner and early intermediate. But you need to have a varied diet. More modern composers such as Bartok and Kabalevsky, to name just two, wrote pieces for children that are lovely and interesting and these should be explored.

If your teacher is insisting on doing things in the boring and mechanical way, find a new teacher. If you are trying to learn on your own, see if some of these suggestions make your practicing fun again. As that saying goes, "if you're not having fun, you're doing it wrong."

Don't Fall for Gimmicks and Sales Pitches

 

Many people would love to know how to play the piano. I hear it all the time from people I meet: "Oh I wish I had learned to play the piano...." Most people realize it's a lifetime pursuit, that is, if you want to play well and be able to play more than a few songs or pieces. Some people do not realize that, so it's easy to see why it would be so tempting when they see videos, blogs, and books that promise "Learn to play the piano in a week!" or other similar claims. You know the saying, " if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is."

Some videos claim to teach you how to play starting from absolute beginner. Others try to teach specific techniques or specific pieces. If you've read my previous posts on trying to teach yourself and also on shortcuts, you'll know that I do not recommend learning online. You can watch what the teacher is doing with her hands, but she cannot watch what you are doing with yours, which is one of the most critical aspects of what the teacher does. They often resort to saying, in essence, "just do this one thing and you'll be able to play." They have to make it sound simple. If they told you honestly how challenging the piano is, and how many hours and years you will need to spend at it, they wouldn't have many viewers left.

I recently watched a video of a pianist with instruction on one specific piece, Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C-sharp minor (a famous and, for most students, challenging, piece). She said she was going to show you how to "learn and memorize it quickly and easily." She went on to show you some ways you could practice the big chords, octaves and so on. Some of it was just about identifying the chord(s) you are on, which is always a good idea, but it doesn't actually help you play it, physically, and at the speed the piece requires. Another suggestion was playing it slower, which is a pretty obvious one. She even gave one piece of incorrect information, saying the the upward facing stem in the middle ("agitato") section meant that you are supposed to bring that note out. In fact, the stem up indicates it's a quarter note, while the downward facing stems are a triplet (they are considered two separate "voices.") Since you are holding the upper note through the whole beat, it will be heard as the main melody. But her description of its meaning was simply wrong. At one point she said it's best to memorize the ending section because it's "hard to look at the music and your hands at the same time." But what if memorizing is difficult for you? She didn't say how you were supposed to do that, despite promising she was going to show you how to learn and memorize it. Some of her suggestions were reasonable, but in the end, you weren't going to learn to play the piece this way. If you already had the basic skill level and technical ability to play it, you wouldn't need her video. It was simply unethical, in my opinion, to promise "quickly and easily."

Another example I read recently in someone's blog, was that you should play your melody note slightly late, in other words, a fraction of a second later that the bass or other parts. He said it was an "expressive feature" that would make your playing sound more beautiful. He did have to qualify that this only applied to the Romantic period, and that, of course, you couldn't do it all the time or it would become expected and lose it's expressive quality. (It begs the question, then how do I make Baroque, Classical and Impressionist music sound expressive??) So it's basically a gimmick. If your playing was emotionally unengaged and without expression before, you can't just do "this one thing" and have it sound expressive. There are hundreds of elements that go into "expression." And if you were to try to decide which notes to play slightly late, it would sound forced and un-musical. If some of your melody notes came ever so slightly late, it would be because it happened spontaneously, not because you "decided" to do it. Nuances of rhythm are an important part of expression and having your own interpretation. But it's not a gimmick.

In my early teens, my parents decided to look for a new teacher for me. One teacher we met with described his approach to technique, and it was all based on rotation of the arm, that is, where the ulna rotates over the humerus bone. He gave a long sales pitch saying this was the key to good technique. Neither of my parents were pianists, so we didn't really know how to evaluate this claim, but he was so convincing we decided to go with him. He gave me lots of exercises to learn this technique. Now, with six and a half decades of experience playing the piano since then, I can tell you that rotation is not a very useful technique. It is highly inefficient. You may need the slightest bit of rotation in such things as octave tremelos, but very little, and combined with the use of the upper arm. After a year with this teacher, my parents and I agreed I hadn't made much progress, and we decided to look again. Maybe this teacher was looking for something that would make him stand out from the crowd of other teachers, but it was just a gimmick.

I could give you dozens, if not hundreds, more examples. I really feel that the availability of online videos and classes have done people a huge disservice. If you never really learn to play, or to accomplish what they are showing you, there is no accountability for them. They don't have to answer your questions or address your concerns. Some may genuinely want to help people, but in the end, it is the number of views and clicks they get that matters. Sadly, not everyone can afford private lessons. And even then, there is a great difference in teachers. But whether you are looking for help online or with one-on-one private lessons, just don't fall for gimmicks and sales pitches.