Cavaliers and Roundheads: Developing Performance Skills

Published on May 18, 2012. 5 Comments Tags: , , , .

Last night I watched a fascinating documentary on the BBC about how English history was forever changed by the civil war. The characteristics of the two opposing forces (the puritanical, serious-minded, hard-working and religious Roundheads, and the devil-may-care, spontaneous, reckless and flashy Cavaliers) ended up contributing to the make-up of the national psyche, and we have each got a bit of the Roundhead and a bit of the Cavalier in us.

You may be wondering what this has to do with the subject of developing piano performance, but actually there is a lot we can draw from it. “Practise like a Roundhead, perform like a Cavalier” would be my best advice. To practise effectively demands time, energy and discipline, a seriousness of purpose and an almost religious attitude to the work. But if we take this attitude on to the stage with us, we are likely to bore the pants off our audience. We need a sense of daring-do, spontaneity, bravado and display in its place. Perhaps we can leave our trusty Roundhead in the green room, and adopt a cavalier attitude when we walk onstage?

Youngsters generally have no fear about public performance. This tends to be something we learn later, if we learn it at all (there are those who seem undaunted, but they are few and far between). There was one first-year college student I had who came in with new pieces each week, learned and memorised. All his performances were fluent and confident until one week, during a studio class, he had his first major memory slip which he could not recover from, and only then did I need to give him the tools so he could memorise consciously.  As I suggested in the last post, it is mostly fear of memory – of losing one’s way and not being able to find it again – that is at the root of most performance anxiety. The first time this happens (and happen it will), confidence takes a beating and the negative experience can remain in the back of the mind the next time. The trick is to be as over-prepared as possible for any performance – be 200% prepared because as soon as you walk onto the stage, you will lose 100%. Confidence rises with each positive and successful experience, and the secret of really successful performing, where nerves and adrenaline serve a useful purpose, is to be doing it all the time. Then you can really be on a roll.

To use the tightrope analogy from the last post, here are a few scenarios:

  • Practice Room: when you play through a piece in your practice room, the tightrope is so close to the ground that falling off has virtually no consequences. After a while you may not even notice you are doing it.
  • Playing for trusted friends and family: more is at stake here, but not too much. About a meter off the ground?
  • Playing for a supportive teacher: there are consequences, as the teacher knows what they are listening to. If things don’t go according to plan, your sense of having failed yourself as well as possibly disappointing your teacher (although this will be more in your own mind) can be destructive. If I had a pound for each time a student tells me it went much better at home…
  • Playing in a festival: the situation is competitive and you find out how you stack up against your peers. There will be people in the audience who will want to see you fail! I am convinced our antennae pick up on this energy on some level. We may find nerves getting the better of us (shaking, sweaty hands, stiff muscles, etc), but with some positive experiences we can learn to deal with this. About two meters…
  • Examinations: the adrenaline might really kick in here as we know we are going to get a mark, to which our self esteem may be inextricably linked. If things don’t go well, this can seriously affect our confidence.
  • Playing in a masterclass or for a teacher we don’t know: the tightrope is still higher. Falling off might be positively injurious.
  • Carnegie Hall: the Big Top, all safety nets removed, and to make matters worse the ringmaster forgot to lock away the lions.

Like most other things in life, the more we do something the easier and more familiar it becomes. Smart piano teachers have regular student concerts where everyone gets up and plays – they are all in it together. Exams and (more usefully) festivals or eisteddfods are wonderful ways of developing performance skills. You are usually playing in a largeish hall on a grand piano, to a built-in audience and a professional adjudicator. I love my work as adjudicator, because I feel I can really make a difference by supporting and (hopefully) inspiring young performers.

At the conservatory level, there will be many opportunities for performance. Concerts in front of teachers and peers, as well as higher profile events where there will be a public audience. Outside of formal exams, there will be a portfolio of in-house competitions one can enter, and there will be weekly performance classes where you test out your pieces. The very best way to learn performance skills is to perform! Use as many opportunities as are on offer to you, or you can generate.

For myself and my college students, I have a rule whereby a programme needs to be aired three times in safe, smallish situations before it is ready to be presented to a paying audience. This could be an invited audience in a private home, a lunchtime recital in a church, etc., and these run-throughs are themselves prefaced by a week of playing the programme through in its entirety daily as part of the practice regime. Only then is the programme properly seasoned and ready to be taken on the road.

But what about the amateur pianist who wants to perform? There are plenty of adults for whom the piano is essential in their lives, and who want a safe opportunity to perform when they have something ready to play.  I know of a couple of piano circles in London, where players meet on a regular basis in each other’s homes. Recently I learned of a terrific initiative called the London Piano Salon. The group is planning to meet bi-monthly at Steinway Hall in London, no less. There is a scheduled programme of performances on a new Steinway model D and at the end, the opportunity to socialise over a glass of wine. What a great idea!

If you are interested in setting up something like this in your area, why not contact your local piano dealership? They will relish the opportunity to build bridges and develop relationships with pianists in the area, who are, after all, potential customers. It will be a win-win situation for all.

 

© Graham Fitch – 2012

PLEASE CONTACT ME VIA graham@grahamfitch.com FOR LESSON ENQUIRIES. I AM ALSO AVAILABLE FOR MASTERCLASSES AND WORKSHOPS (I OFFER A WORKSHOP ON PRACTISING AND ANOTHER ON MEMORISATION).

 

A Short Essay on the Life of a Pianist

Published on May 12, 2012. 6 Comments Tags: , , , .

After a recent post, I received a request in the form of a comment from a reader, suggesting I might expand on my last paragraph. The last paragraph was as follows:

I wonder how many people embark on serious piano studies because they want to be performers or because they are passionate about music, about the piano and about playing the piano? Public performance is quite a different thing, it’s not for the thin-skinned or the faint-hearted.

The act of performance is an art in itself, distinct from one’s abilities as a musician or as a pianist. It is like any sort of performance art, be it acting, dancing, or walking the tightrope. Actually, walking the tightrope is an analogy I often use for performing solo piano works from memory in public. The only safety nets are the ones we build in during our practising, and I reckon I spend a huge amount of time and energy in my own practice securing the memory. This is basically the equivalent of spending a fortune on insurance policies you hope you never need to use. In his later years, the great pianist Sviatoslav Richter gave up playing from memory and brought his scores, along with a trusted page turner on to the platform with him. He even eschewed the limelight, preferring a muted lamp by the side of the piano. In interviews, he said the time spent memorising or maintaining the memory was no longer worth it, and that he could learn a multitude of new pieces in the time it would have taken him to attend to his memory.

There are those, it seems, who were born to play the piano in public, and I don’t need to go into a list of the greats (past and present) who fulfilled their destinies in this regard. The people who are on the top rung of this particular ladder would need to find playing the instrument, learning and memorising new repertoire and maintaining old repertoire relatively effortless (but not necessarily without a considerable investment of time, like any job). They would also need to be adrenaline junkies to some extent, and to be able to handle travel and spending chunks of time alone. Are the great solo pianists born, and not made?

Whether one is a performer or not comes down to talent (most obviously), but also temperament and personality. The secret of performance is to be able to get out of one’s own way, and to free up the mind so it is not beset by doubts and insecurities (and therefore tensions) during the process of performing. The performer becomes one with the music, one with the instrument. We all know that a memory slip can cause panic. Errors lead to terrors and then to possible paralysis. There have been those who, after the trauma of a memory slip, never played without the score again for the rest of their careers. For others, a memory slip or momentary lapse in concentration can lead to such acute insecurity that another slip ensues, until it is virtually impossible to carry on. It’s all in the mind! Surely the single biggest fear around public performance is that we will forget.

It is perfectly possible to be an amazing pianist without being an amazing musician, and to be a great musician and yet have quite average skills at an instrument. I recall the apocryphal story of the debut of Adele Marcus, one of the most significant and brilliant teachers of piano of the second half of the last century. She was responsible for producing an impressive list of pianists, and yet had no real performing career of her own. It is said that at her debut with the Schumann concerto, so nervous was she that she vomited on the keyboard and left the stage, never to return. This did not mean she was not a PHENOMENAL pianist, able to play with ease the most fiendish pieces in the piano repertoire and to toss off scales in double notes at the drop of a hat. It meant that her vocation was as a teacher of the piano, not a performer. Think of one of the other great teachers of the era, Maria Curcio – not known as a performing pianist, at all. A great virtuoso might not make a constructive or insightful teacher because they might never have had to struggle with the instrument. Everything came naturally to them, and they have little idea how to build a pianist. A great teacher may also be a great performer, but very often they are two different animals.

When I look at the students who have gone through my hands over the years, I have had the gamut. Do I look at the small handful who are now making careers as concert pianists as being better than, or more successful than others who have thriving piano teaching studios or those who decided to pursue more general musical careers, or those who played for a time and then stopped? No, not at all! The elderly person who wants to keep up their piano playing because it brings them joy and keeps their mind active, the lawyer who can’t live without Beethoven sonatas even though he has very limited time to practise – these are just as valid (no more or less so) in the grand (no pun intended) scheme of things than the talented child who absorbs music like a sponge or the tertiary level students about to play their practical exams. Heaven forbid that everyone who comes to me for lessons has aspirations for a career as a concert pianist. Imagine a world overtaken by concert pianists! What a nightmare thought!

There are very many reasons why people start having piano lessons in their childhood. Those who are destined to be pianists will usually (although not always) take to it like a duck to water and race ahead. For those others, many find solace in the act of playing, a channel for self expression, an appreciation of the music, and the deep satisfaction of mastering an instrument. For myself, it was a burning passion to play the piano that, for various reasons, had to wait a bit. I think I was just as smitten with music itself as I was with the piano, and perhaps my yearning to play had its roots in the need (yes, need) to express music through my fingers. Embarking on tertiary level piano studies at the RCM was in many ways an irrational decision, based on an overriding passion for the subject (not necessarily for performance, though – this came later as a necessary evil).

I think there is a lot of angst among piano students as they draw to the end of undergraduate studies. Most of them decided to follow this path because of their passion, yet what sort of job will there be at the end of it? Should I be a performer or a teacher, or a bit of both? How will I support a family, or even pay the rent? This crisis of identity is common, and there are big decisions to be made. As for the “performer” dilemma, it doesn’t matter how much you may enjoy doing it and feel like this is the life for you, if you haven’t excelled in exams and college competitions by your final year, you need to see this as some sort of barometer for how you will stack up against the fierce competition in the professional world. Remember – nobody thinking of booking Vladimir Horowitz ever asked his agent if he had a doctorate…

Unless you love the idea of teaching piano, then the realities of this path may not always be glamorous. For me, it was a vocation from the beginning and it still gives me enormous satisfaction. Yet we don’t need to be so cut-and-dried about things – a portfolio career is absolutely the way of the future for conservatory graduates, and modern institutions are preparing their students for this (along with business management and other tools I wish I had learned back then). Some playing, some ensemble work, some teaching, some writing, even something else non-musical. Why not? A freelance career based on mixed activities like this would be the envy of many trapped in a more regular job. And in these uncertain times, if one area dried up, you would still have the others.

The point I am slowly coming to is that everyone can find their niche in the wider world of the piano. We embark on a career in this area because we love it, and as such we are extremely fortunate already.

© Graham Fitch – 2012

PLEASE CONTACT ME VIA graham@grahamfitch.com FOR LESSON ENQUIRIES. I AM ALSO AVAILABLE FOR MASTERCLASSES AND WORKSHOPS (I OFFER A WORKSHOP ON PRACTISING AND ANOTHER ON MEMORISATION).

 

Top Ten Tips to Maximise your Practising

Published on May 4, 2012. 3 Comments Tags: , , , , .

I have had a lot of requests for this article, which first appeared in Pianist Magazine last year. Here it is!

With the Olympics very much in the news at the moment, I think of the time and energy the athletes have to commit to each day in their training regimes. We pianists have to train also – countless hours of dedication. We had better know what we are doing, though! Here are a few tips, in no particular order, that will help you get the most out of your practice time.

  • A Teacher. Find a qualified, professional piano teacher to help and support you. Use professional bodies such as EPTA or the Incorporated Society of Musicians to locate teachers in your area. There are teachers who specialise in teaching children, others who have more experience with adults. If you are an adult beginner, or a restarter, your teacher will appreciate the courage it takes to come for lessons.
  • Commitment. Keep to a regular daily practice schedule come what may, even if you are tired or don’t feel like practising. It is the commitment and the regularity that matter, not the amount of time you spend. “Little and often” will help you achieve FAR more than overdoing it one day, and then doing nothing for the next few days. You might find it more convenient to put a little time in at the beginning of the day, and again later – whatever works for you.
  • Organisation. Divide up what you have to do into compartments, such as scales and technical work, pieces, sight reading, etc. You may find it helpful to keep a practice diary, and a scale chart is also a good idea. Concentration is the key! Scientists have discovered that we learn most efficiently when the full attention of the mind is present on the task at hand. Free your space of noise, disruption and distraction, remembering to switch off your phone.
  • Craftsmanship. Learn to practise methodically and to make progress one step at a time. Think of practising as saving or investing, and performing as spending. There has to be a balance between the two activities. Even a piece you have perfected will need constant care and attention. I like to use the analogy of a brand new car from the showroom: when you drive it off, it will be gleaming and shiny, the engine finely tuned and all the tanks full. After a short time, you will need to refill with petrol, polish your windscreen and have the engine serviced. So it is with our pieces, they require constant tinkering. If you develop a sense of craftsmanship, you will relish this work and take enormous pride and satisfaction in it.
  • Fingering. Write in a fingering and stick to it. Try out a few possibilities and then choose the fingering that best suits your hand, remembering that the fingerings in printed editions are just suggestions. Keep a pencil by the piano and write the fingerings in your score. If you stick to the same fingering each and every time you practise, you will eventually form muscular habits – reflexes that won’t need any conscious thought. Your fingers will go where they should, automatically!
  • The Three S’s. If I had to recommend one formula for success, it would be this one: “Slowly, Separately, Sections”. Practise at a snail’s pace, if not slower, and start off in small sections which you repeat. Repetition will form habits. I like one bar plus one note, repeated at least three times. Then start from the next bar (from the note you have just ended on) and repeat that three times. As you get more familiar with the notes, you can increase the length of the sections. Practising with each hand alone is also indispensable, especially the left hand. When you work like this, you need to listen intently and constantly evaluate your results as right or wrong, even or uneven, comfortable or uncomfortable, and so on. Learn to be your own teacher.
  • Practising v. Playing Through. Remember that “practice makes permanent” – any wrong notes, bad fingerings, and stumbles you make repeatedly will soon become ingrained and will be next to impossible to correct later. Try to resist the temptation to play through your pieces until you have dug firm foundations. Wait until you have done enough of “The Three S’s” and then alternate playing through your piece with returning to slow, careful practising. Have other pieces you play through – pieces you have already learned, or simpler music you can manage quite easily.
  • Isolate Problem Areas. There are often one or two troublespots in each piece that need special care and attention, and extra practising. Identify these and mark them in your score (I like to use a square bracket). As you master these places, you can erase the markings. I suggest starting your practice session by working on these bars in isolation, before you start from the beginning. Go back to them at various points in your practice session, maybe even making a special trip to the piano just to play these passages (TV commercial breaks are good for this!). Another thing – don’t always start your pieces from the beginning. Divide the music into sections and begin each day’s work from a different section. Otherwise, you will always know beginnings of pieces better than endings, and first movements better than last movements.
  • Set Goals. These might be short-term goals (what you want to achieve in this practice session, what you want to achieve by the end of the week, and so on). You may want to consider working towards an exam (ABRSM, Trinity Guildhall in the UK) or participate in a music festival. It is helpful to set deadlines to perform for other people (this could be your teacher, a friend) or even a date with a tape recorder. Listening to yourself is a real eye- and ear-opener and an extremely useful exercise, once in a while.
  • A Balanced Diet. Choose pieces from different periods and in different styles, also consider pieces in more popular idioms. Exploring unfamiliar territory can be very inspiring, and it is good to challenge ourselves and play music outside of our comfort zone. Playing the piano can be an isolated pursuit – teaming up with someone to play duets can be an extremely rewarding activity.

 

© Graham Fitch – 2012

PLEASE CONTACT ME VIA graham@grahamfitch.com FOR LESSON ENQUIRIES. I AM ALSO AVAILABLE FOR MASTERCLASSES AND WORKSHOPS (I OFFER A WORKSHOP ON PRACTISING AND ANOTHER ON MEMORISATION).

Using The Feedback Loop

Published on April 26, 2012. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Have you ever sat at the piano in your practice time, not feeling really sure about what you are supposed to be doing? Your mind wanders, you end up doodling or doing something half-heartedly and with no real purpose, then you get disillusioned and start looking at the clock?

When I was a student at the RCM all those eons ago, a classmate confessed that he was never quite sure how he was supposed to practise. He started at the beginning of his piece hoping he would make a mistake so it would give him something to correct. He’d then correct it and continue until the next slip. And so on, until he got to the end. OUCH!

If I might step in here and suggest a better way? This will work no matter what school of piano playing you come from – it is called the FEEDBACK LOOP. Using the feedback loop in day-to-day practising is a highly efficient way to maximise time and productivity. It forces the mind to concentrate on the activity at hand, and encourages critical listening and critical thinking. You will also discover and develop your inner teacher – it is probably the single most powerful tool we can draw on.

BOX A

The feedback loop is essentially a three-part process. The first part, represented by BOX A, involves a conscious decision as to WHAT you are going to practise, as well as HOW and WHY. Here are a few examples:

  • I am going to play the first bar, ending on the down beat of bar 2. I will do this very slowly, listening for complete evenness and aiming for a feeling of full control over my fingers.
  • I will play the LH alone for the first section with the pedal, making sure I listen actively to every note, as well as attending to clarity and accuracy of the pedal changes.
  • I will play the section from bar x to bar y, concentrating on keeping my upper arms and shoulders loose and free.
  • My aim is to play the exposition section of my sonata, without stopping. I will stop precisely at the double bar line, and will not wander further, no matter how well (or otherwise) I feel I have done. Afterwards I will evaluate in what ways my performance matched my intentions (the ideal image I hold of how it should have felt and sounded), as well as in what ways it did not (bear in mind that this image will evolve over time…).
  • I need to play through my whole recital programme, and afterwards I will sit and reflect on what went according to plan, and what did not. Thereafter, I will go through each of the troublespots individually until I am satsisfied I have made the necessary corrections and amendments.

BOX B

The adage “Think Ten Times and Play Once” is only practically useful when dealing with small or smallish sections, where you can hold the section in your short term memory, mentally rehearse before playing and then evaluate the results. A bar or a phrase prefaced with acute and repeated inner imaginings of your intended result before playing is a powerful (if not incredibly difficult) exercise in self-discipline. Few of us will manage this at all, let alone repeatedly, yet it is something worth striving towards. The biggest challenge here is spending enough time in BOX A, especially if we think that our practice must constantly be filled with sound.
For all practical purposes, executing BOX B is akin to snapping the shutter on a camera once the subject matter has been composed and focussed. Because you know you will have to account for what you do here, this compels you to listen acutely, and to concentrate on what you are doing.
BOX C
BOX C is effectively a mirror for BOX A. If the results of BOX B equal BOX A, then BOX C is a resounding tick. The perfectionists among us will not readily admit to this match, even if it were so, and yet it is extremely important that we be as objective as possible in this regard. Another maxim I use in my teaching – “Never Let The Good Be The Enemy Of The Better” – carries within it the kernel of never being satisfied with one’s achievements. While this might motivate the stronger parts of ourself, it could equally demoralise. Thus, if we were happy with the result we need to admit to ourselves that we succeeded as far as was humanly possible at the time. From this vantage point, we can climb higher – without sinking lower. There is, of course, the distinct possibility that we might surpass our original intention – let’s also leave room for magic here!
To complete the loop, we will need to feed back the results of BOX C back into a new BOX A, so that our new focus, and new repetition, reflects MOST CONSCIOUSLY what we have learned from our previous endeavour. It is in this way that progress is made.

© Graham Fitch – 2012

PLEASE CONTACT ME VIA graham@grahamfitch.com FOR LESSON ENQUIRIES. I AM ALSO AVAILABLE FOR MASTERCLASSES AND WORKSHOPS (I OFFER A WORKSHOP ON PRACTISING AND ANOTHER ON MEMORISATION).


 

Practising on Tour

Published on April 20, 2012. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

I have been away for the past three weeks on a concert and teaching tour of Singapore and Australia, the focus of my work there was three performances of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. I thought it might be of interest – and hopefully of use – to talk about how I prepared this magnum opus for performance having not played it at all in about a decade, and how I approached the practice time I had while on the tour itself.

Quite early on in the life of this blog I devoted a whole post to how I set about learning the Goldberg Variations in the first place, very much an obsession and a labour of love. Sometime last year, I was engaged by the Kawai Series at the Queensland Conservatorium in Brisbane to play the Goldberg this Easter; a piece eminently suitable in its grandeur and magnificence for such a Festival (especially given Bach’s own strong religious views). I played the Shigeru Kawai, the model EX concert grand, and wonderful it was too!

From this engagement, I was also invited to play at the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music in Singapore, and on the Team of Pianists’ series in Melbourne. In addition to my performances, I gave masterclasses and taught a fair number of individual lessons as well as giving a lecture for the Piano Pedagogy programme at the Queensland Con. I thoroughly enjoyed all of these experiences.

I started to resurrect the Goldberg Variations just before Christmas, figuring that I would need four months to get the piece back into my fingers and into my head. This would also allow enough time for what I can only describe as the Olympian training component – regular play-throughs as part of my practice routine as well as in front of others. I can’t overemphasise the importance of developing the physical and mental stamina in this way: deciding when I would commit to a come-what-may performance in my practice room with absolutely no stopping, going over troublespots or otherwise tinkering with the process I call “practising a performance”. While I would not presume to include myself in such august company as Sviatoslav Richter, even he needed the ears of a few select colleagues before he would take his work from the practice room to the stage, and before my one house concert and two lunchtime recitals in London before I set sail, I did feel the need to play for two colleagues I completely trust. It is absolutely part of the process.

Before I was ready to do this, though, I needed to start back at square one, and I began with the nine canons that form the backbone of the piece. Having learned the work very thoroughly initially, and also having performed it at least 20 or so times (I never counted them up!), it did not take long at all before I had the notes back in my fingers and in my memory. Mind you, I was careful to go through each line of the counterpoint again, as though I were learning the piece from scratch. In order to make sure each line was known independently of muscular memory, I played it from memory with one finger. I also played all combinations of two voices with one finger, or (for variety) in double octaves.

From there, I added the rest of the variations almost on whimsy, starting with the ones I felt would need the most work. Before too long, I had the piece back in my fingers but what I would describe as deliberately plain and bland. I soon noticed that, if each variation could be described as a character in a play, their old costumes were tired and they needed a makeover. I found as soon as I recharacterised one variation, the next one was affected so I found I was recreating the piece in my imagination, my conception had changed and grown over time. Because I have changed, so has the way I approach this music.

Between the Singapore performance and the Brisbane one, I had a few days to practise as many hours as I wanted with very few other distractions. It was during this period that I noticed a small handful of the variations really wanting to assume different characters, and this felt absolutely right. So I went with this and made a few significant changes to how I was going to shape chunks of the work. Because the pedal of the Brisbane Shigeru was impeccably regulated, I was able to create pedal effects that (although I do say so myself) were quite beautiful. Let me interject here that I absolutely use pedal in Bach playing, very discreetly and in a very considered way. I use the right pedal for resonance and colour (piano sound without the pedal is, after a while, horribly boring) and the left pedal as a registration. There are two variations where, on this piano, I decided to keep the left pedal down all the way, not because I wanted it softer but because I wanted the silver quality that the shift pedal offers when it is regulated well. I would add that there were many variations which did not need any pedal whatever, and I rested my feet on the ground during these.

Between the performances of the tour, I absolutely practised daily, from between three to five hours. It was important to me to go through the whole work slowly every day. I hardly ever needed to look at the score – my maxim all along has been to have the score AWAY from the piano and not to do my memorising with the score on the desk. This way, I could develop the proper reflexes from the beginning. It is hard at first, but it gets much easier – with practice! One thing I found myself doing daily was to practise the canons and other variations that are strictly linear by bringing out a selected voice forte while keeping the others pianissimo. Thus, in the canons I practised each repeat three times so that each voice had its moment in the limelight. This enabled me, in performance, to shape the individual lines with extreme control, and to vary the voicing and layering on the repeats. For some reason, I have added five minutes playing time to my performance, which now runs one hour and twenty five minutes without interval! Sorry!

This brings me to the thorny question of what one does on the day of the concert itself, and here I can give no formula because we are all different. I have spoken to many colleagues about this and everybody has their own set of rituals that work for them. For myself, if you’re interested, I avoid caffeine and sugar. I like to go through my programme slowly and calmly in the morning then eat a good meal with some protein. Sweet potatoes are supposed to be a very good thing as they release their energy slowly. By the middle of the afternoon, I am usually starting to feel the anxiety that most performers feel on concert day. It may surprise you to know that many of the world’s best-loved and most successful musicians and actors suffer from stage fright. My experiences have been that I am fine as soon as I walk out onto the stage but the feelings of anxiety and nausea from mid afternoon to the time in the green room just before you have to play are pure torture. I can’t eat anything before I play, for fear that it might end up on the stage.

A final word about performing – I wonder how many people embark on serious piano studies because they want to be performers or because they are passionate about music, about the piano and about playing the piano? Public performance is quite a different thing, it’s not for the thin-skinned or the faint-hearted.

 

© Graham Fitch – 2012

PLEASE CONTACT ME VIA graham@grahamfitch.com FOR LESSON ENQUIRIES. I AM ALSO AVAILABLE FOR MASTERCLASSES AND WORKSHOPS (I OFFER A WORKSHOP ON PRACTISING AND ANOTHER ON MEMORISATION).


Five-a-Side Team Events: Some Thoughts on Chord Playing

Published on March 23, 2012. 3 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .

In my youth I was fortunate enough to have some lessons with Philip Fowke, the first one was on Rachmaninov’s rather overplayed Prelude in C sharp minor. I recall the lesson vividly. He showed me a way of practising the chords in the outer sections whereby, with the chord held down, you select a given finger, pair of fingers or group of fingers to lift back up and repeat. It is a good plan to exhaust all the permutations here. I practised in this way assiduously for the next week and noticed a dramatic improvement in my control of the chordal passages, my ability to voice them in the softer section and to play very fully and yet roundly in the fff section. In a nutshell, this way of practising chords helps them to fit like a glove! For the sake of convenience in my own teaching, I have given this a neat label – I call it “tapping”.

It is fashionable to rail against what is known as “mechanical practice” and yet tapping, while it is concerned with the mechanics of what the playing mechanism has to deliver at the keyboard, needs to be done mindfully in order to be of any value. We need to concentrate on the finger combinations we are using so that we can go through these systematically. We also need to make sure the holding fingers remain at rest at the bottoms of their keys without pressing, and to check in with our arm to make sure there is no tension building up. For me, mechanical practice is that sort of mindless, repetitive drill pianists used to be encouraged to do in the old days, while reading a newspaper, balancing pennies on the back of their hand, that sort of thing. Modern science teaches us that no permanent learning can take place without active concentration and focus of the mind and our critical faculties. And that, of course, includes the ear.

Recently, Erica Worth, the brilliant editor of Pianist Magazine, invited me to write a new series of articles and video demonstrations on aspects of piano technique. Based on requests from the magazine’s readership, advice on chord playing was at the top of this list. In the latest issue (Issue 65, out this week) I talk about the basics of chord playing and in the video (on the magazine’s home page and the YouTube channel) I demonstrate tapping and other exercises to help improve chord playing.

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This blog has now been up and running for a year, and (apart from a week over Christmas), I have posted something every week. However, there will now follow a brief gap while I go on tour to Singapore and Australia to play and teach, so please talk amongst yourselves until I return. My next post will be towards the end of April, when I hope I will return with renewed vigour. Thinking of new directions for this blog in the coming year, I am certainly open to requests from my readers. Feel free to let me know if there is anything you would like me to write about specifically – I’m happy with questions, discussion, suggestions, etc. You can reach me directly at graham@grahamfitch.com.

********* NEWSFLASH *********

I have been invited to teach this coming August at the Hereford Summer School for Pianists. A recent addition to the staff, my biographical information has not yet been added to the website (although I’m assured it will be soon!).

 

© Graham Fitch – 2012

PLEASE CONTACT ME VIA graham@grahamfitch.com FOR LESSON ENQUIRIES. I AM ALSO AVAILABLE FOR MASTERCLASSES AND WORKSHOPS (I OFFER A WORKSHOP ON PRACTISING AND ANOTHER ON MEMORISATION).


A Prima Vista: Some Thoughts on Sight Reading

Published on March 17, 2012. 4 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Sight reading is included in every graded examination. Few seem to excel at it, and many actively dread it. Even the best players are likely to drop marks in this area, and despite the numerous publications available nowadays to assist the learner, exam candidates are often reluctant to practise this much-needed skill.

Thinking about the long-term benefits of taking piano lessons in childhood, surely an ability to read at sight, and learn a piece reasonably fast are equally if not more important than spending a year on three pieces, cosmetically tweaking and refining them parrot-fashion in order to gain a nice mark (and kudos for the teacher)? I firmly believe we should be teaching musical intelligence and comprehension in addition to technical and interpretative skills. There is nothing that infuriates me more than discovering someone supposedly in the higher grades unable to accompany a simple ensemble piece at sight, or play a solo piece half way through the year when they have forgotten their previous exam pieces and yet aren’t quite ready with the new ones.

Expert sight readers are usually expert musicians, who are able to process the information on the page in their short-term memory and reproduce it instantly. This skill has to do with musical comprehension – scanning the page for key pieces of information and, frankly, making educated guesses as to what might be going on in one hand, and snap decisions as to what to leave out. A note-perfect mechanical rendition of a piece of sight reading is often less impressive than one that may have some note errors and omissions and yet which conveys musical character and meaning.

TRIAL BY FIRE

Sight reading was a skill I developed as a postgraduate student in New York when I played for the voice studio of famous Metropolitan Opera tenor Mario Berini. My work there involved not only playing whatever was thrown at me during lessons, but also coaching singers in the interim. When I started, I am sure there were some cack-handed attempts at Zerbinetta’s Aria and other such chromatic minefields from the world of opera, but after a year or so of constantly going through this trial by fire, I got comfortable with pretty much anything put in front of me. My sight reading muscle had been well and truly flexed, and was strong and reliable.

I am convinced that the only way to develop sight reading skills in our students is to have the results witnessed as often as possible. We all know the primary rule is to keep going – never to stop and correct ourselves – and yet it is SO hard to do this, even with the best will in the world, when we are by ourselves.

SOME TIPS

Some sight reading can be done as a natural and integrated part of every lesson, even if it involves reading the first couple of lines of another piece by the same composer whose music the pupil is learning. It doesn’t have to be called sight reading, it is just exploration. Nothing hangs on it, no judgment from the teacher and no comment afterwards is necessary other than what might occur to you to mention regarding the music itself. You can also encourage pupils who are learning a piece from a book to explore some of the other pieces in the book. The brighter ones will do this anyway.

Here is a suggested way of practising sight reading as an exercise for exam preparation:

  • In the few seconds you have to look through the test, try to scan the whole, picking up as much information as possible.
  • If your horror of playing copious wrong notes prevents you from the absolute priority of keeping going regardless, a good interim stage is to play it on the fall board of the piano, or on a table. You won’t play any wrong notes and you’ll be concentrating on rhythm and the general patterns in the music.
  • When playing, keep in mind that an examiner is much more interested in the general gist of the exercise. Getting exactly the right notes at the expense of rhythm and musical meaning will result in a lower mark!
  • Take the bull by the horns and play the test with abandon, aiming to make it sound like music and almost revelling in your wrong notes!
  • Going over the exercise a second time is constructive, but of course you won’t be able to do this in an exam.

QUICK STUDIES

Once the pupil has cleared the nursery slopes it is a GREAT idea to assign them two or three quick studies over the course of a term, whereby they have something a couple of grades below their standard, and only a week or so to do the best they can. Perfection and refinement are not the point here. Incentives such as a mark from you that may count towards a studio prize (or something) can be helpful, if you believe in this sort of thing. In any event, spending a small part of one or two lessons on this before leaving it will encourage speed learning, the skill of absorbing, processing and decoding information from the score. This could also take the form of duets, or even teaming up with an instrumental teacher and having your higher-grade students work with some more elementary string or wind players.

A GREAT NEW APP

Last year I was approached by the developers of a sight reading app for the iPad, asking for my opinions on their product while it was still in the prototype phase. I was very impressed with what I saw, and am happy to say the app, from Wessar, is now available and ready to download from the app store.

The app costs nothing to download and gives one test from each grade so you can test it out for free. You can then purchase the graded tests you require – there are over 1,000 tests available from 6 examination boards and I can see youngsters wanting to use this in their practice. You adjust the speed of the test using the inbuilt metronome, and you can also set the screen to flash. You get 30 seconds preview time after which there is a two-bar countdown. The score disappears from the screen bar by bar as you play, which forces you to look to the right. There’s no way you can stumble or go back, you have to go on! I think it is an excellent idea, and I heartily endorse it. You can view it here.

 

© Graham Fitch – 2012

PLEASE CONTACT ME VIA graham@grahamfitch.com FOR LESSON ENQUIRIES. I AM ALSO AVAILABLE FOR MASTERCLASSES AND WORKSHOPS (I OFFER A WORKSHOP ON PRACTISING AND ANOTHER ON MEMORISATION).


Once Upon a Time…

Published on March 9, 2012. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

We have all heard student performances where the beginning was good – secure, well-known, confident – then after a page or two we notice a decline as skill levels start to dip. Thereafter, there is a gradual diminuendo of accomplishment for the rest of the piece, which often ends in a whimper.

This happens, of course, because the pianist tends always to start practising from the beginning. My suggestion not to do this is hardly going to come as a blinding flash of revelation to anyone – it’s just plain good sense – but I have noticed people are reluctant to divide their pieces up into manageable, logical sections for the purposes of practising. I mentioned in a previous post how the great teacher Rosina Lhevinne would hear last movements before first movements, and codas before introductions. This is an excellent way of supporting students in not starting from the beginning. When giving an assignment, I give sections from the beginning, middle and end to be learned simultaneously.

Unless the piece is short, or unless you are playing a run-through or have decided to play it through at half speed for the purposes of general maintenance, you’re not likely to get through every section of the piece in any given practice session. I think of an analogy with the farmer who might select one, or two or three of his fields to work in on a particular day. He may choose to work in a particular field for two or three days in a row, spending the bulk of the day there, but perhaps visit one or two others for a particular reason (which might not take that much time). He may be allowing another to lie fallow for a while.

Take your score and mark in the different sections and come up with a weekly practice plan. Be creative here: perhaps in week 1, your time with section B will be devoted to memory work whereas section C you are aiming to increase speed, etc.

START ANYWHERE

I’ve heard it said that a good way to settle an argument as to which tourist attraction to visit on a given day is to close your eyes and stick a pin at random in the map. The destination closest to the pin wins! Here’s a good idea for practising – using this random number generator, enter 1 in the first box and the last bar number in the second. Press start and play from the bar that comes up. Not the bar before or after for convenience, but the bar specified, even if it is in the middle of a phrase. If you have divided your piece into several sections like tracks on a CD, you could, of course, use this number generator for that.

QUARANTINING 

Remember – a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Identify those spots in the piece that cause you to stumble and make sure to practise these before, during and after your routine practice. Even outside of your allotted practice time, you might wish to return to these troublespots for the odd minute here and there (while waiting for the kettle to boil, or during that annoying commercial break). For more on this, please see my post on this.

LIKE WITH LIKE

Have you found, while learning a sonata, that as soon as you begin to learn the second subject material in the recapitulation, your playing of it in the exposition is now confused? You could play it perfectly well in the dominant key until the composer scrambled your brain and you now have to play it in the tonic too! It’s a bit like coming to a fork in the road, and you’re not certain which direction to go in. The same is true of themes that return in the same key but with slight differences or variations, or sections that start the same but have different endings.

A good practice plan is to extract these two like sections and practise them in alternation until the differences and similarities are crystal clear in your mind.

© Graham Fitch – 2012

PLEASE CONTACT ME VIA graham@grahamfitch.com FOR LESSON ENQUIRIES. I AM ALSO AVAILABLE FOR MASTERCLASSES AND WORKSHOPS (I OFFER A WORKSHOP ON PRACTISING AND ANOTHER ON MEMORISATION).


Slaying the Dragon

Published on March 3, 2012. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , .

Piano playing can never be an exact science. We will not always be able to say with absolute precision or certainty how we arrived at a particular result in our playing. We may think we know, but in the end it will be a variety of different – and possibly even contradictory – means that bring about a result. Despite fastidious practising, human error and the sheer elusiveness of the act of performance will always play a part. And this is precisely what audiences like, the buzz of the live performance! There is the possibility of something wonderful, inspirational and spontaneous happening, as much as the performer falling flat on his face.

The placebo effect can also enter into this – if you firmly believe you need to do a, b and c to achieve x, then perhaps you do! I am reminded of one of the all-time greats, Shura Cherkassky, who simply couldn’t play unless he went through certain rituals, such as always stepping onto the stage with his right foot first, then counting up to twenty-something before he started. The results were always fascinating. You can hear the audience actually laughing out loud during one of five encores (Shostakovich’s Polka from the Age of Gold) from a Wigmore Hall recital. Then there was the time during a recital in Carnegie Hall in the 1980s when I lifted my eyes to the ceiling realising I was never going to hear piano playing greater than this. Cherkassky was once asked (by a colleague of mine in an interview situation) how he practised on the day of a concert. The response was he played extremely slowly with his eyes closed, aiming to land each finger dead centre of each key. If he felt the crack of the adjacent key under his finger, he would go back to the beginning and do it all over again.

The slightest distraction from the audience, or (more usually) from our own mind can totally throw us. I once heard the most fearful memory slip from one of the twentieth century’s greatest pianists (out of my utmost respect for this artist, I mention no names) who came adrift in a concerto being broadcast to the nation. This titan of the keyboard went cold and after some seconds of complete silence began flailing at the keyboard before regaining command.

The point I am slowly coming to is that, no matter how hard we try, performance is mercurial and fickle. Wouldn’t it be great if we could capture all the necessary ingredients for success, our recipe for a particlar piece, and bottle this? The original purpose of this blog was to attempt to lay down precepts for our day-to-day work at the piano – as far as is possible! I maintain that excellent practising will equip us to play to a certain level below which we will not drop, no matter how nervous we are, how bad the piano, or whether we are jetlagged or sick. If we can then get out of our own way, and rise to the occasion, magic can happen and our performance is elevated.

In my own playing and in my teaching I am of the opinion that facing a pianistic challenge can be compared to slaying the dragon. Approach it from one angle and it will run off in another. We have to practise one way, and then the diametric opposite (fast then slow, legato then staccato, accented then smooth, raised fingers then super-close fingers, etc. -  the list goes on). If we tackle things from as many different angles as possible, we are more likely to achieve success. We will very likely sense which particular ways have been more helpful, so we can retain these and leave the others.

Remember that all the various approaches to practising are only tools though, to be used in the service of realising our vision of the music. To that end, let each time we sit and practise be a voyage of discovery.

© Graham Fitch – 2012

PLEASE CONTACT ME VIA graham@grahamfitch.com FOR LESSON ENQUIRIES. I AM ALSO AVAILABLE FOR MASTERCLASSES AND WORKSHOPS (I OFFER A WORKSHOP ON PRACTISING AND ANOTHER ON MEMORISATION).


Leaps of Faith: On Practising Waltzes

Published on February 25, 2012. 6 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Waltzes demand a fair amount of left hand agility from the pianist – all that hopping back and forth can be quite dizzying. A pre-requisite for mobility across the keyboard is physical ease and looseness, we simply won’t be able to manage waltz accompaniments if we are in any way tense. Take something as difficult as the following excerpt from Schulz-Evler’s fabulous Arabesques on “An der schönen blauen Donau”. Let nerves get the better of you in performance and this lovely waltz suddenly takes on atonal properties – we have “Grande valse catastrophique”.

As is always the case, painstaking and thorough practice will equip us with the skills we need to negotiate the leaps in the left hand. Two processes that are invaluable are what I term Quick Cover and Springboarding.

QUICK COVER

  • Play the first chord and hold it. Like a cat ready to pounce, prepare yourself to move to the next chord.
  • When you are ready, in your own good time, use an ultra-fast (yet free and loose) motion of the arm to move like lightning to the surface of the keys of the next chord. DON’T PLAY IT YET!
  • Before playing, check to see that you arrived directly and dead centre of the keys, that no finger is in the cracks between the keys, no finger hanging half over the edge of a black key. What you are after here is a spot-on millimeter-accurate measurement of the distance involved both across the keyboard and within the hand.
  • If you were 100% accurate, and you got there fast, then go ahead and play the chord.
  • Now sit on this chord, and prepare for the next quick movement. Notice the tempo of the music is DEAD slow (there is no rhythm involved in this process actually), but the motions very fast indeed.
  • If your measurement was not 100% accurate, or if you overshot, undershot or otherwise fumbled then do not play the new event. First learn from your  faulty measurement, so that you can make the necessary adjustments when you try it again. Perhaps the span between the second finger and the thumb wasn’t quite wide enough, so that the second finger was too far to the right? Diagnose where you went wrong before trying it again.

SPRINGBOARDING

Having measured the distances using Quick Cover, Springboarding further refines speed and accuracy of movement in jumps.

  • Place the hand on the surface of the key and when you are ready, use the key as a springboard to the next position. As you play the notes, jump off the keys and land on the next chord.
  • FREEZE! The golden rule is to hold onto whatever you land on, whether this be the correct chord, nearly right or a fistful of clangers. Check to see how accurate your measurement was. If you were totally accurate and dead centre of the keys, release to key surface and use this as your springboard to the next position. If not, your instinct will be to make the necessary corrections immediately but RESIST THIS. Instead, examine what went wrong and learn from it before repeating the process from the previous position.

For the sake of simplicity, and taking into account my minimal skills with Musescore, let’s take a snippet of Chopin’s Waltz in A flat as our example of further ways we can practise passages like these.

To encourage the left hand to arrive at its destination ahead of time, here is a good way of practising it:

And:

We can also practise what I call selective landing, whereby we land on a preselected note (or notes) ahead of the other(s), then fill in the remainder (the following is one example of several different possible landings):

We can also practise in the following ways:

  • Go the extra mile and play the low bass note (first beat) an octave lower than written, so that when we come to the original, the span is that much less.
  • Practise adding an upper octave to the bass note with the thumb, which acts as a gauge for the hand and makes the distances feel much smaller. (NB. I am not suggesting, in the final product, that the hand remain in octave position. Actually, I think this would be contrived and contrary to the general principle of keeping a closed-handed attitude whenever possible. Practising like this, as is so often the case, has a positive residual effect, however.)
  • Now practise omitting the actual (lower) bass note and playing the higher (thumb) octave and the chords that follow.

When we return to the original, we can expect the LH to work reliably (provided we can keep physically loose, at this stage largely mental). These tools apply, of course, to any jump.

Let me leave you with Josef Lhévinne‘s amazing recording of the Schultz-Evler, the performance I grew up with.

© Graham Fitch – 2012

PLEASE CONTACT ME VIA graham@grahamfitch.com FOR LESSON ENQUIRIES. I AM ALSO AVAILABLE FOR MASTERCLASSES AND WORKSHOPS (I OFFER A WORKSHOP ON PRACTISING AND ANOTHER ON MEMORISATION).