Piano Lessons- Music Theory Lessons

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about how dynamics are like orchestration in your music. The piano is an amazing instrument because you have all the parts of a whole orchestra right under your fingertips! You want to think of your playing as orchestrating the sound and getting the quality of different sections of an orchestra—the strings, the brass, the percussion, all of it.

Thinking of your playing as different sections of an orchestra will help you play more expressively.

It can be richly rewarding for your audience to hear these kinds of dramatic changes in dynamics and tonal colors. I’m going to demonstrate this by using the beginning of Mozart’s Sonata in C Minor, K 457. This is a really good example because of the stark changes in dynamics. You can imagine the opening statement as a full orchestra with big, booming strings and brass. The next part is much quieter, so maybe you just have woodwinds. Then again, a full orchestra, followed again by delicate winds. Think of your music as orchestrating each section. Get a different tonal color and a different balance in your playing.

Whenever you’re playing, think of orchestrating.

This goes for every composition you play! Some can be more subtle than others. Not all music is going to change this often from one texture, sound, or dynamic to another. However, this also holds true when you’re playing a texture. This isn’t changing orchestrations for each bar or measure, but having a different sound for each strata of music. The treble might be a clarinet; the lower notes could be cellos; and in the middle, it could be violas. So you try to get different sounds on all the different lines you’re playing.

There are two kinds of orchestration.

There’s orchestrating different sections dynamically, and there’s orchestrating which lines of music you’re bringing out. Think of your piano music as being orchestrated, because after all, that’s exactly what the piano offers! That’s what’s so great about the piano—you can play compositions that would take a whole orchestra. Take advantage of that and discover the sounds and sonorities you can achieve in your playing! I hope this is helpful for you! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about balancing work and fun in your practice. I have often said that if you’re practicing correctly, it’s hard work! There are some things that are just really tough in practicing. Things like memorization and refinement—to do these things correctly, you must be present and focused. So what is this idea of having fun in your practice? Practicing can be rewarding, but fun isn’t exactly the right word. However, if you’re so hard on yourself that every time you practice, you may get to a point where just the thought of going to a piano gives you a bad feeling in the pit of your stomach, and you don’t even want to practice anymore; that is where you’ve lost the balance.

You have to have some joy in your practice.

How do you get this joy? By playing! Can playing be considered practicing? Well, not usually, but sometimes it can be. Let’s say you’ve been working on a piece a great deal, and you come to a point where you don’t even know what to do next with it. That is a perfect opportunity to play through it and get a feel for where it’s at. It can be fun to do that. Maybe you’ve been practicing slowly without the pedal and using the metronome. It’s tedious work! To finally just play through it can be fun, and you will have a better understanding of what still needs work.

Improvising can also be fun.

Let’s say you’ve been memorizing, refining, and working on scales. Well, maybe you just want to make some stuff up. Is that practicing? Well, once again, it certainly can be if you’re exploring new chord progressions, textures, and techniques. Maybe you always wanted to do something with a bunch of trills, just to see if you could make something up with a bunch of trills in it. Go for it; just take off and have fun! Do something wild and crazy just for fun. You may discover something that will help your playing if you let yourself go without any preconceived ideas of what you’re doing.

Let yourself have fun periodically to break up your practice and re-energize your mind.

It’s important to find ways to have fun at the piano so your practice doesn’t become drudgery. Then, you can go back fresh. You played through your pieces, you made something up, and you did whatever you wanted to do. Now you can get back to work, and you’ll be energized again because you’ve given yourself a little break. Another benefit is that you won’t feel like every time you practice, every second has to be productive.

Sometimes, productivity can be found in strange places.

For example, you might take a piece you’ve played a million times and try playing it really fast, just for fun. Maybe it’s not an appropriate tempo for that piece, but you may learn something from the experience. So break up your practice and have fun from time to time in appropriate proportions to keep your practice productive and to keep yourself engaged! I hope this is helpful for you! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin

Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today we’re going to talk about the flywheel effect in your piano playing. This is an essential element that you must embrace in your musical performance. Your audience will appreciate it, and so will you!

It’s important to not stop your performance in the middle.

In a play, occasionally, one of the actors will forget a line. It can happen. If the performer just wings it and improvises a line or two, unless you’re really familiar with the play, you won’t even notice. But just imagine what would happen if they missed their line and then went back a line so that they would get it. It would be obvious to everyone in the audience that they had made a mistake. Now suddenly, instead of absorbing the story, you’re thinking about the performer. It takes you away from the magic. Well, it’s exactly the same with your musical performance!

You must think of your performance as a train. A train keeps going!

Let’s say a train gets slightly derailed for a moment. It could be a complete disaster! But imagine if it just got off for a moment and then bounced right back on track. It wouldn’t be a big deal, would it? It’s the same exact thing with your piano playing! Your performance should be like a train that keeps going. Imagine you’re performing, you have a momentary glitch, and you correct it by stopping and restarting the phrase. The flow of the music is interrupted. It’s like a trainwreck in your performance! Anyone tapping their foot along is jarred by the experience. They might also start to wonder if you are going to miss something else. They might feel sorry for you. It takes them away from the whole experience.

Push through your mistakes.

The secret is to keep going! Use the flywheel effect so the mistakes come and go as quickly and inconsequentially as possible. Unless somebody is intimately familiar with the score, they probably won’t even notice. It’s just like a play. Most people don’t know all the lines of the play. If the actor just improvises something for a moment, it’s fine for almost everyone in the audience. You must do the same thing with your musical performance.

You don’t want to disrupt the flow of the music.

Ignore the mistakes! (That can wait until your next practice session!) Just focus on where you are in the score and let the music keep unfolding. The performance will be fine. It doesn’t have to be perfect; but it must have continuity. The show must go on! I hope this is helpful for you! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin

Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about how all beats are not created equal. This almost sounds like blasphemy, but it’s absolutely true! What am I talking about here? Well, it depends upon the nature of a piece of music, the time signature, the period style, and so many other things.

There are different types of emphasis within a time signature.

Even in 4/4 time, the beats are not always evenly emphasized. Instead of a monotonous sequence of one – two – three – four, the emphasis can shift and create rhythmic diversity. Oftentimes, the “1” is the strongest beat, the “3” is the second strongest beat, and the “4” is the weakest beat. By playing with emphasis on the “1” and “3,” you get a more elegant sound.

There are many dance forms in music, and they are a great way to demonstrate this concept.

What better way to show how beats are not equal than in a dance movement? When people are moving to music, they’re making different motions depending upon what beat is playing. A waltz, for example, Chopin’s B minor Waltz, is in 3/4 time as all waltzes are. The “1” is the strongest beat, and the “3” is the second strongest beat. Just imagine a ballroom filled with people dancing the waltz. The “1” is the big motion, and the “3” is the second biggest motion, bringing it back to the “1.” This can help you intrinsically understand the idea that not all beats are created equal watching the motion of dancers. Some beats involve more movement than others.

Interestingly, other pieces in 3/4 time have different emphasis.

For example, in the famous Mozart C Major Sonata K545, the second movement is in 3/4 time. There is a little bit of emphasis on the one, but not like a waltz. Another example of this is the last movement of Mozart’s C Minor Sonata K457. This one is faster, like the Chopin waltz, but with a completely different emphasis of beats. It’s really two-measure phrases with emphasis on the first beat of every two measures! So beats aren’t created equal, not just in emphasis, but even in the amount of time they get, to some extent.

There’s a certain style to dance movements in particular that creates energy and emotion.

This is true of just about all music. It’s very unusual to have a piece where all the beats are exactly the same. It’s a rare quality in music. It’s akin to your speech. When you’re speaking, your intonation isn’t the same for all words. You have natural emphasis for some words. It’s the same with music. So start thinking about where the strong beats are in your music. Usually “1” is the strongest beat in most music, but even that is not always true. You will discover this as you experiment with your music trying to feel where the strong beats are!

Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin

Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The question today is about why you should play your melody notes slightly late. What am I talking about? You have to play in rhythm, don’t you? What I’m talking about is something extremely subtle. It’s an expressive element utilized mostly in Romantic period music. It used to be much more popular in the early part of the 20th century.

In this video, I exaggerate by playing every single melody note late in the famous E-flat Nocturne of Chopin.

First I play it straight, where the notes are played exactly together, then I play all the melody notes slightly after the bass notes. You can hear the difference between the two examples in the video. Of course, delaying every melody note is excessive, but there is a certain beauty to it. And there is actually a physical reason why this makes some sense, if done in a very subtle manner.

The sound waves of low notes are slower than the sound waves of high notes.

Because of this, the high notes will reach your ears just a fraction of a second sooner than the low notes when they’re played precisely together. It takes a little time for the low notes to swell. If you listen to the sound of one low note alone, it takes a moment for it to reach full volume. But high notes are at full volume right away. But there’s more to it than that.

This technique adds expressiveness to your playing.

When every melody note is delayed, it’s excessive. It’s a mannerism that becomes predictable, and it’s distracting from the music. But if you just do it occasionally on certain notes to add an expressive element, you can end up with something quite beautiful. It’s like seasoning your food. A little spice in a dish can go a long way, but if you use too much, you can’t appreciate all the subtle flavors of the meal. It’s the same thing with an expressive device like this. Listen to some early 20th-century great pianists, and you will hear that this expressive technique was certainly overused by today’s standards. But pianists today still utilize this technique in performance. The only time it becomes offensive is when it’s predictable. If it’s done right, you don’t even notice it’s happening!

Try it out for yourself and see how it works!

I’m very interested in what all of you think about this. Let me know how this technique works for you in the comments! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today, we are going to discuss how much music you should keep in shape. This is a really delicate subject because you want to learn new music, but you always want to have something you can play. The challenge is that the time it takes to keep your music in shape can take away from the time you have to learn more music, and vice versa. So you have to strike some kind of balance.

Any pieces that you’ve learned recently, you should absolutely keep in shape.

It’s a real mistake to get to the point where you can finally play a piece on a high level and then drop it. First of all, you might not realize that you could take that piece to a higher level if you lived with it a little longer. The other problem is that if you’ve just learned it and then you drop it, you’re going to forget it as quickly as you learned it. You need to live with it for a while to have it solidify so that it stays with you and you can still play it weeks or months after you’ve learned it. You can do this simply by playing it on a regular basis and solidifying it from time to time with slow practice. By doing this, you can bring it back without much effort later on. But how much music should you keep in shape?

I generally say you should keep the last three or four pieces you’ve learned in shape.

It’s good to keep the three or four most recent pieces you’ve learned in shape, depending on what the pieces are. If you have, for example, a sonata with three movements, that’s almost like three pieces in itself! So that and maybe one other piece, in addition to the piece you’re working on, may be plenty of repertoire to keep in shape.

You should always have music that you can play at a high level.

It’s best to always have music you can perform in case somebody wants to hear you play. Isn’t it sad if you’ve been playing the piano for years but don’t have anything you can play? You put in all that effort learning your pieces, so you want to be able to play them for people. Imagine someone finds out you play piano and asks you to play for them, but you haven’t finished learning your current piece and you’ve forgotten the previous ones! You want to always have something you can play. People will appreciate hearing you. If they visit your home and see a piano, they might want to hear you play something.

Always have a go-to piece.

You should have something that you can always play and that you’ve played a million times. Certainly, you want to be able to play a piece you love and that you’ve worked hard to learn. So keep the most recent pieces you’ve learned in shape, along with any piece that you really love. You may also want to have something you can play that other people will really enjoy hearing. Maybe the piece that you really want to keep in shape is not appropriate to play for most people because it’s too subtle or because it’s a musical style that is not as popular with the general public.

The most recent pieces, pieces that people will like, and music that you really love are the three areas of music you should keep in shape. But you don’t want to be overwhelmed with so many review pieces that you don’t have time to learn new repertoire for yourself. I hope this is helpful for you! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin

Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about memorizing piano music. I’m going to give you strategies and techniques for long-term retention. This is a really important subject. Have you ever learned a piece and gotten it to a high level, but after some time you don’t remember it? You put in all that work, and now you can’t remember how to play the piece! Now what do you do? You can go back to the score and play it slowly. That might help you rekindle the music. But today, we’re talking about how to keep pieces in shape.

How many pieces can you keep in shape?

There are only so many pieces you can keep in shape. If you spend too much time with your review pieces, you don’t have time to learn new music. So you have to prioritize which pieces you’re going to keep in shape.

How do you keep pieces in shape after you learn them?

The most obvious thing of all is to simply play them on a regular basis. If you don’t play the pieces you learned before, they’re going to elude you after a while. So play them on a regular basis. If they’re short pieces, play them every day! People do all kinds of exercises just to keep their fingers in shape. Instead, you can use the pieces you’ve learned as good physical exercise for your hands. That way, you get the added benefit of keeping them in your memory.

Is playing through your pieces regularly enough to keep them in shape?

Sadly, just playing through your pieces regularly is not enough to keep them in shape. Did you ever play the game Telephone as a kid? You whisper a message to somebody next to you; they whisper to the person next to them, and it goes on and on. By the end of the class, you end up with a whole different message! The same thing could happen with your music. If every time you play it, it’s slightly different and you don’t realize it, you can end up with a whole new piece!

You have to refer back to the score.

The best thing you can do is get out the score, take your foot off the pedal, and play slowly, delineating everything in a very deliberate manner. You may also want to work with the metronome. For example, let’s say you’re working on the third movement of Mozart’s K. 545 C Major Sonata. You want to practice that piece slowly, exaggerating the staccatos from the wrist and using raised fingers so that the fingers that are up are up, and the fingers that are down are down. By doing this, you’re not just using motor memory. You’re deliberately playing each finger in a relaxed manner. You shouldn’t have any tension playing with raised fingers. It’s just like the stretching of an athlete. If you stretch to warm up before exercising or dancing, it doesn’t add tension. Quite the contrary, it’s a relaxation technique if you do it correctly. Playing very deliberately and slowly, absorbing the score, and solidifying the fingers and the sound is a fantastic way to solidify your review pieces.

You can also just think through your scores!

If you ever have time when you’re waiting in line somewhere or taking a shower, you can play the music in your head! Keep the sound of it, even just the sound of the melody, in your head so that you don’t forget it. Ultimately, the sound is the most important part of your music! Listening to recordings is a great way to keep a piece familiar while expanding your interpretive possibilities. Keep your music fresh by playing it on a regular basis, practicing it, listening to it, and thinking it through. You will be rewarded by having music you can play! What is it all about if you don’t have music you can sit down and play? If you do this enough, and take pieces that you have dropped and re-learn them again and again, then you really will have pieces in your permanent memory! I hope this is helpful for you! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin

Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about why you must exaggerate your playing when practicing slowly. Why would you want to exaggerate? Shouldn’t you try to play exactly the same way slowly as when you speed up? Yes, that’s a valuable technique, but there are many times when you want to exaggerate dynamics and phrasing in your slow playing.

If you don’t exaggerate your slow practice, you may end up with a watered-down performance.

If you’re practicing a piece slowly without exaggerated dynamics, when you play it up to speed, it can sound dull. Since you had so little definition of dynamics and phrasing, it all but disappears when you go faster. You naturally lighten up in order to facilitate speed. Those differences in dynamics and phrasing become diluted. So instead, when practicing slowly, exaggerate all the elements of the music. Then, when you play faster and with ease, your hands know what to do. The fingers are staying closer to the keys. The wrists are not making such exaggerated motions because they are already solidified. It still comes out because you have trained your fingers and wrists to delineate the phrasing and dynamics with such definition that when you speed up, staying closer to the keys, and lightenening up, the dynamics and the phrasing are still there. You can play with ease, and you don’t lose the expressiveness of your playing!

Try that in your practice! Let me know how it works for you in the comments! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin
Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about why you need urtext editions. I received a question from Chris. Chris asks, “I find urtext editions online, but then they say ‘edited by.’ I thought urtext meant they weren’t edited. So how does a fully edited edition differ from an earlier text?” This is a great question!

The original manuscript scores of the great composers can be a nightmare in some cases.

For example, take a look at some of Beethoven’s scores. With all the crossing out and the quick way his calligraphy was executed, it’s all but impossible to tell what he really meant.

So there are scholars who go through early editions – not just the autograph copies, but early editions as well. They compare them to the autograph and try to figure out what is authentic. Another challenge is that many times composers rewrote their scores again and again. Chopin, for example, rewrote many of his compositions. So what is authentic? Is it the first one that he signed, or is it the last one? Is it something in between? So there’s a lot of scholarly work that goes into figuring out what is authentic.

Urtext editions strive to have exactly what the composer intended. However, there are also edited urtext editions.

It sounds like an oxymoron, doesn’t it? Well, not exactly. Here’s how it works: either with footnotes giving alternatives to what is printed or, very often, in a different typeface like gray instead of black, the composer’s markings are augmented with suggestions. For example, in a sonata movement, if during the exposition there are certain phrase markings or dynamic markings, then later in the recapitulation the composer didn’t write those markings, it’s assumed that they should be there. So the editor of the urtext edition will put it in lighter type or some other way to distinguish it from what is in the original manuscript.

Do you really need all of that? Is it important to have an urtext?

If you’re a serious player, you really want to know what the composer wrote and what the editor added. Otherwise, you might not be faithful to the intentions of the composer. However, Bach, for example, rarely wrote any phrasing or dynamics in his keyboard music. But that doesn’t mean it should be played devoid of expression or phrasing. So having some suggestions from the editor can be a godsend. Even Mozart doesn’t have a lot of expression marks. Sometimes having those markings can be incredibly helpful if you’re a beginner or intermediate student. So the ideal, to sum it up, is to have a good scholarly edition that’s an urtext with editors markings and fingering.

Composers didn’t write in fingering!

If you’re a student, you want to have fingering suggestions. Even for a professional, having fingering suggestions can save you vast amounts of time. On websites like IMSLP.org, you can actually get two or three different editions for fingering suggestions. It’s such a wonderful thing. Before the internet, it would have been very costly to compare several editions. Maybe at the library you could do that, but buying several editions wouldn’t be in the cards for most students. This brings up the cost. Many urtexts are very expensive, like Henle Editions, which are really beautifully bound, scholarly editions of many works by Brahms, Schubert, Beethoven, Mozart, etc. But there are others, like Schenker Editions by Dover, which are very well bound, good scholarly editions that are not as expensive. Search out good, fingered, edited urtext editions for yourself! I think you’ll be rewarded with good suggestions and the knowledge of what the composers actually wrote. Great question, Chris! Keep them coming! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin
Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com