Welcome to LivingPianos.com! I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to show you a piano exercise that can truly transform your playing. And the best part? You don’t need to learn anything new because this technique takes the music you’re already playing and turns it into an exercise for improvement.
Playing the Hands Together
One of the biggest challenges pianists face is playing the hands together, especially as the music gets more complex. When you’re working with advanced pieces, you’re not just dealing with two voices—there are often multiple lines happening at once, and you need to find a way to make them all distinct.
Think of it like listening to an orchestra: you might want to hear the oboe melody while the strings play a soft accompaniment, or perhaps you want the reverse. On the piano, how do you control the various parts to achieve that kind of control over balance?
A Simple, Effective Technique
The answer lies in a technique that you can apply to any piece of music to bring out the different parts in the score. It’s all about varying your articulation between the hands. This allows you to give more emphasis to some voices and let others recede into the background, much like managing multiple instruments in an orchestra.
How to Turn this into an Exercise
You may have difficulty achieving the desired balance of melody being above the accompaniment. The secret is to play with different articulations. Play the melody legato and strongly while playing accompaniment with a gentle finger staccato. This clearly delineates melody and accompaniment from one another and trains your hand to be able to control the individual parts.
Adjust Articulations for Balance
This technique also works well in pieces where you have more complex textures, such as chordal or contrapuntal passages. By breaking out the different lines within a chord or passage, you can practice emphasizing certain notes (playing legato) while letting others fade into the background (with a gentle finger staccato). This works even when you’re not dealing with traditional melody and accompaniment.
In chord playing, you can isolate individual voices. For example, in four-part chorale-type music, you can play each separate voice, one at a time, legato with all the other voices with gentle finger staccato. This gives you control over all of the voices in counterpoint!
The Key to Control: Quantifiable Articulation
The beauty of this technique is that it offers a more precise method of control than simply adjusting dynamics (loud and soft). Instead, it’s about varying the articulation of each hand and each voice by simply using a gentle, staccato touch for the parts you want to underplay and a more pronounced legato or sustaining touch for the melody or important voices.
By doing this, your hands learn to distinguish between the parts of the music, making it easy to bring out anything you like in your music.
Turning Your Music into Exercises
What makes this technique so powerful is that it’s applicable to any music you’re working on. It doesn’t matter whether you’re dealing with a simple melody and accompaniment or a more intricate texture—by adjusting articulations, you can turn any piece into an exercise that develops your control of balance and expressiveness.
In the end, this simple yet effective exercise can take your playing to the next level. You don’t need to learn new music or complicated exercises; just apply this technique to what you’re already working on, and watch your playing transform.
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