The life of a pianist can be very lonely indeed. For polished performances hours and hours need to be spent at the instrument. Teaching (and for the majority of pianists, this is the most secure career) means rewarding contact with pupils, but what is so often sadly missing is the contact with other pianists, the feeling of camaraderie that comes from knowing we're all in this together. There is also a danger of becoming stale and out of touch, perhaps teaching the same familiar pieces in the same way for some years. We can all use a bit of inspiration from time to time - some new ideas, learning about new trends in piano pedagogy, finding out about new repertoire and other resources you were unaware of.
I advise colleagues to join EPTA – The European Piano Teachers Association, a professional body for piano teachers. Founded in 1978 by Carola Grindea, the aims of EPTA are to promote excellence in piano teaching and performance, to bring teachers and performers together and to raise standards within the profession. There are Associations in almost every European country, and an annual conference. At grass roots level, each area in the UK has a local area representative. In addition to attracting pupils via your entry in the list of teachers, benefits of membership include the many events arranged throughout the year - classes, workshops, presentations as well as the annual piano competition.
I was delighted to be invited to join the staff of principal tutors Read more »
I had an email from a reader asking how he could learn to play by ear, so here are some random thoughts on the subject.
When we play by ear we play an existing piece heard before, without using the notes. Mozart is reported to have learned Allegri's Miserere from one hearing, after which he wrote it out from memory. I am sure there are other similar stories from prodigious musical figures throughout history, but mere mortals can certainly develop the skills to improve our ear and at the same time our understanding of keyboard geography, musical structure and harmony.
Ear training (or aural training as we tend to call it in the UK) is absolutely vital for any musician and, like harmony and theory, shouldn't be thought of as a separate subject in the context of the weekly lesson. All these areas of music can be integrated into the lesson and during our practice. Examination boards include tests in aural and sight reading for a very good reason – to aid and abet in the process of forming an all-round musician. The more theory you know, the more you appreciate how music is built. You will also be able to decode the information from the printed page more quickly and with deeper understanding, and as a result of this you will have the skills to read at sight, to learn pieces more quickly, efficiently and thoroughly and (not least) to memorise.
I find it sad that many young pianists' experience of piano playing is restricted to sitting one grade exam after the other, sticking Read more »
The other day I opened up a working score of the Frank Bridge Sonata I inherited from one of my teachers, Peter Wallfisch, and was struck by all the markings he had added. Some of these make obvious sense, performance directions such as "rall", "late" and "canto". Another word - "spell" - presumably means either that each note needed a certain clarity or that there was some magical atmosphere he wanted to create. There are copious fingerings, as well as more arcane squiggles in at least three different colour crayons that he obviously needed for personal reasons but which make little sense to the casual observer.
I had to smile, as I suddenly remembered a word Peter had written in the last movement of my score of the Chopin op. 35 Sonata. It was totally illegible to me for many years. Each time I played the sonata I would stare at this word trying to decipher the scrawl, but I could never make out what it was. And then one day - eureka, I finally saw it. "Hallucinatory" was what he had written! My last teacher, Nina Svetlanova, almost never wrote anything in my score. A student of Neuhaus, she had inherited an opposite tradition. If something was important enough it would resonate deeply within you and no markings were necessary.
Fingering
For me, working out a fingering that suits my hand is absolutely essential. I am a stickler for fingering as I know that with regular repetition, the muscular movements become reflex. This bypasses the need for conscious thought Read more »
Vocal accompanists and repetiteurs need to develop the skills to transpose virtually at sight in order to accommodate the different voice types and the vocal ranges of the singers they work with, but transposition is also a valuable practice tool for the solo pianist. We can use transposition to build and test the aural and analytic memory for those pieces we need to memorise, and we can also use it for refining motor control and coordination in difficult passages. I explore both these areas thoroughly in Chapter 7 from Volume 3 of my ebook series, but I wanted to give an example of the benefits of transposing from a lesson I gave this week on Bach's Italian Concerto.
Having taught this piece dozens of times over the years, it comes as no surprise that I might have to help a student with the following bars (I have added my own performance suggestions, please excuse the absence of treble and bass clefs):
This snippet occurs in three different guises in the first movement - the first time ending on the tonic, the second time on the dominant and the last time on the subdominant. Apart from a tied RH thumb and a modified LH in the last example, the notes and fingerings are the same. The RH seems to trip people up until its contents have been digested and the fingers organised, so how do we do this? Since Bach has been meticulous in showing the parts, we can at least do him the service of practising it thus. I especially like omitting the thumb and practising the upper two Read more »
When I was on the selection committee for the 11th Unisa International Piano Competition, we listened to two solid days of audio recordings, one after the other. Our selection of those pianists who would go forward into the competition was made purely by listening - we weren't given their names, ages or any other information about the entrants, they had to make their impression on us solely by the sounds they made.
There are viral performance on YouTube of young pianists playing their exam pieces. Judging by the number of hits and likes they receive, they are (all) destined to be the next Horowitz. I wonder if the wow factor has anything to do with the antics they have been taught to do, such as swaying around and flailing their bodies across the keyboard? This may look impressive to the layman, but I would invite you to experience such a performance in two ways. Mute the sound and just watch. Now for the acid test, replay the clip but turn the screen off and just listen. Doing this experiment, I have been struck by the disparity between the way the playing has been packaged to look and the actual quality in terms of skill - musical comprehension and technique. There's something of a gulf here.
In my adjudication work I notice constantly how excessive physical mannerisms detract from the quality of the playing. It is often the most musically intense who seem to need to do this. In their desire to be expressive, their bodies contort as a substitute for the real thing - having Read more »
I use a three-part process for measuring distances at the keyboard, to make sure all jumps are precise, secure and foolproof. We build in the precise measurements in our practising so that when we play, we don't have to give them any thought. The secret at that stage is to let go, keep loose and allow the music to unfold.
I'll talk more about Quick Cover and Springboarding in future posts, today I would like to say a little about Selective Landing.
Selective Landing
When we have to move from one position and land on a chord, we might select those notes of the chord we wish to land on first, and then fill in the remainder afterwards. This is a particularly useful process when we wish to see (and feel) how an especially awkward chord is built up, or simply to negotiate a new hand position. We can effectively play the chord in stages. Note that you do not have to do this rhythmically, although you may!
Let's take a very short example from Schumann's Fürchtenmachen from Kinderszenen, op. 15, as this has been known to cause a stumble or two. I am speaking of the last two bars of this extract:
Having practised the LH alone using the Quick Cover and Springboarding techniques, we might want to put it hands together in ways like this. Here are but three of several possibilities:
1.
2.
3.
You might also want to practise landing on the middle note of the chord each time, dropping in the outer two afterwards. There are various other permutations, Read more »
I would like to thank you for your support with my ebook series - I am very pleased with the uptake and have had lots of great feedback. It is good to know that the publication is assisting you in your practice! The beta launch period is now over, we have done some minor edits and updates to the publications, and all existing customers will be upgraded automatically to the new versions. The full version of Part 1 is now available at £9.99 for all three volumes. Volume 3 will be available for £2.99 until May 31 as a special offer to existing customers. Please note that you do not need a PayPal account to purchase the publications, simply click on “buy as guest” to use your debit or credit card to make a purchase via the secure gateway. For further information on how the publications work and what devices are supported, please see the FAQ on the Informance website.
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Volume 3 is the final part on the practice tools. There are several more volumes to come - on technique, aspects of performance (memorisation, how to deal with performance anxiety, etc.), style and interpretation, pedalling, and quite a bit more that I'm still formulating.
Here is Read more »
When I was a postgraduate student at the Manhattan School of Music in New York back in the 1980s, I decided to make up some credits for my master’s degree by taking courses in Dalcroze Eurythmics. Fortunately for me the teacher of these courses, Dr. Robert Abramson, was one of the world’s leading exponents on the subject and I learned an enormous amount about how rhythm works.
Rhythm does not exist in the head, but in the body - we have to feel it physically. Playing a musical instrument rhythmically is a totally separate thing from playing by merely spelling out the counts. If music is dead in time, it is just that - dead! I once had an advanced student with a fundamental rhythmic flaw. Barely a bar would go by without some glaring rhythmic inaccuracy, and yet when I got her to count it out, it was clear she had a complete intellectual understanding of the mathematics of the meter. What was missing was the physical aspect, how the rhythm actually felt.
The solution? No amount of metronome practice over the years had helped her one iota to play rhythmically. One term in a Dalcroze Eurythmics class did wonders to complete the circuitry and this made a huge difference to her playing. The whole body interprets musical rhythm enabling the large movements to become internalised. This rhythmic sense can then be executed by smaller parts of the body (namely our playing mechanism).
“Muscles were made for movement, and rhythm is movement. It is impossible to conceive Read more »
There are pieces that contain passages of technical difficulty that require special attention, a type of practising over and above the routine use of the other practice tools. This could also apply to whole pieces, of course - concert studies being a good example. We might need to find creative ways to solve these problems by getting into the habit of making our own exercises based on the material from the piece. These exercises might explore different facets of the difficulty by creating extended or slightly varied versions. This tends to make the passage harder or even more challenging than the original, so that when we go back to the original, we understand it better and it just feels easier.
Meeting the demands of a technical challenge is a bit like capturing a wild animal. If we approach it from one direction, it will run off in another. Therefore, we need a multi-pronged strategy involving very many different approaches to practising. Inventing exercises can be challenging at first, but once we get into the habit it is amazing how creative we can become at dreaming these up as we practise. My scores are littered with my own exercises, and I return to these when I go back to a particular piece, sometimes coming up with a different or better solution. If you explore any one of the study editions of Alfred Cortot, you will find many ideas for such practice exercises. For me, it was Cortot who primed the pump. Here is Chopin's set of Etudes, op. 10 in the Cortot edition, Read more »
