Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. I’m here today with an interesting question. What are there 2, 3, and 4 of in music? Those of you who are music theory aficionados might want to stop right now and see if you can figure out
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today, I’m going to talk about why balance is easier at faster tempos. What am I talking about with balance? I’m talking about where one hand or one part of your music is louder than another. Why should the speed at which you play have anything to do with making it easier or harder to differentiate volume in your music? I’m going to show you here today. I’m going to use a Heller Étude in C major to demonstrate this.
Why is balance harder at a slow tempo?
I’m going to play this étude at an extraordinarily slow tempo, which will instantly make it apparent why playing slowly makes balancing the volume harder. The reason why it’s harder to achieve balance between parts on the piano, whether it’s between the hands, or parts within a texture that has more than one note in each hand, is because when you play the piano, the notes are fading away. So when you’re paying more slowly, you can’t sustain notes long enough without using a great deal of energy.
Watch the video to hear the demonstration!
I’m going to play a little bit of this Heller étude up to performance tempo. You’ll hear the nice balance that’s achieved. You can hear the beautiful singing melody, and the accompaniment is very hushed. But listen to what happens if I play this dramatically under tempo. The right-hand melody notes, which are slower than the left-hand notes, fade out! The low notes overtake the melody unless you really delineate the melody. At a slow tempo, you have to use tremendous energy to project the melody to get the notes to overtake the left hand. If you were to play with that much differentiation between the melody and accompaniment at a faster tempo, it would produce grotesquely exaggerated playing.
At a slow tempo, you must use more energy to bring out the melody.
The slower you play, the more differentiation between melody and accompaniment you must have in your playing to get the same balance because of the envelope of the sound of the piano where the notes have a strong attack, then a decay, and then a slow sustain that decays further. So when you’re playing very slowly, the held notes are on the very quiet part of the sound after the loud initial attack. You must make up for this by using tremendous energy to project a melody over the accompaniment.
At a faster tempo, balance is much more intuitive.
When you are playing fast, you don’t have to have such an extreme difference between melody and accompaniment. To be cognizant of the envelope of the sound of the piano, try playing some of your pieces on an organ. You’ll be astounded at how loud those long notes are because you’re used to compensating naturally to get the proper balance. It’s an organic part of playing the piano, overcoming this natural limitation of the tone of the piano. It’s a limitation that we have to deal with in order to achieve the illusion of a singing line, and to be able to create balance by adjusting the intensity of the melody depending on how fast the melody is. I hope this is helpful for your piano playing! 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, I’m going to talk about why balance is easier at faster tempos. What am I talking about with balance? I’m talking about where one hand or one part of your music is louder than a
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I was recently featured in Kickin’ It With Kenny on Fox 8 News in our Living Pianos warehouse, just blocks from our showrooms and piano shop in the Waterloo Arts District. It is in the same historic building that was the Slovenian Hall, which n
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The question today is: how can you have a slur over a rest? A slur tells you to connect notes smoothly. A slur on a wind instrument means you don’t use the tongue to articulate the notes. It’s all done with the breath. On the piano, we kind of fake slurs. There’s no way to get the notes between the notes the way a singer can. A true slur is slurring those notes between the notes. On the piano, we overlap notes slightly to give the illusion of a slur. Rests tell you you have silence between notes. So how can you possibly have a slur over rests?
The answer is that it’s an effect.
It’s an idea of phrasing and a musical concept that, even though the rest is slurred, you have this difference in the way the music is executed. I’m going to demonstrate this for you because there’s no way to really explain it without hearing it. (You can listen to the accompanying video.) I’m going to play the last movement of Schumann’s Scenes from Childhood, Kinderszenen, and it is the movement The Poet Speaks. I’m going to play the end of the movement for you, and you’ll see that there are slurs over rests. I’m going to play it how I believe that these rests with slurs should be executed. Then I’ll explain why, and I’ll play it a couple of other different ways so you can hear the difference.
See the video to hear the demonstration!
It’s truly ethereal music, isn’t it? It’s the last movement of a glorious collection of small musical statements, Scenes from Childhood of Schumann. So why would he put rests with slurs? How would this be played if it didn’t have the slurs? It’s a subtle difference. There’s a little bit of energy lost during the rests, but there’s continuity because of the slurs. This is a very abstract concept. There are many different ways to execute this. I encourage you to listen to different performances of this piece. You’ll be astounded at the range of different expressive possibilities this music offers. This is in no small part because of the ambiguity of the contradiction of a slur over rests. I hope this has been interesting for you! Let me know your thoughts on this subject in the comments here at LivingPianos.com and on YouTube! 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: how can you have a slur over a rest? A slur tells you to connect notes smoothly. A slur on a wind instrument means you don’t use the tongue to articulate the notes. It