Piano Lessons- Music Theory Lessons

We get this question all the time. So many times people call up and have old pianos they think are valuable. The first question isn’t: What’s the brand or what’s the size? It comes down to one thing: condition. Condition is everything with pianos. You’d think that a piano that dates back a hundred years or more would have some antique value. You hear about people who find treasures on Antiques Roadshow and they find out things they own are worth a lot of money. Not so much with pianos.

Now there are some exceptions. First, if for example you had one of the very first Steinway pianos ever made or maybe even another manufacturer, one that’s truly historical in its significance. For example, if Chickering only made half a dozen of a certain model and you had one of the last one’s made in the 1860s, there could be some antique value. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but I would say maybe one out of 10,000 pianos might fit into that criteria. It’s a rare thing to have true antique value. Another example might be a piano that was owned by a famous person. That’s a whole other area, and as a matter of fact, for appraisals you have to find the right appraiser who can take that into account because it is really hard to assess value based upon a piano’s lineage.

Other than that, what other things are there to look for? There are certain brands that have more stature than others. Naturally, Steinway is the most well known brand of any piano. So, older Steinways can retain value even when they need rebuilding. There’s a market for them because used Steinways can command much more money than other pianos because everybody knows the name. Still, the condition is so important because the cost of rebuilding a piano can be very expensive. It can cost $20,000 – $30,000 to rebuild a piano that has been neglected or has seen much use over the years. You have to ask yourself what the piano would be worth after restoration. If the answer is less than the cost of the work that you’re going to put into it, you’ve got a negative net worth which is obviously no value.

This is a really good question. There is a simple answer and I’m going to tell you right up front. Last year there were around 30,000 pianos sold in this country. That might sound like a lot or maybe not particularly. If you consider that over one hundred years ago, when there were less than 100 million people in this country, ten times more people bought pianos. In fact, at the peak, there were some 146,000 pianos with a population less than a third of what it is today!

The piano was as ubiquitous as television is today. Every home had to have them. They were the original home entertainment technology and it was a de facto standard. Player pianos were incredibly popular and you could sing along with them as well as play along with them. Everybody had to have pianos. Not so much today, as I mentioned earlier, only a little over 30,000 pianos were sold in the United States last year.

China has more companies producing pianos than there are piano stores in the United States! The largest piano manufacturer in China is Pearl River. They have several factories and they just put a new factory online over a year ago that has 1.2 million square feet. Can you believe that? They produce hundreds of thousands of pianos (around 130,000 pianos last year). In contrast, last year, there were only about 1,200 pianos built in North America.

Think about this: China buys 15 times as many pianos as Americans do. Well, this isn’t too surprising when you consider that China buys more General Motors cars than Americans do also. But there is more to is. With pianos, their culture values pianos more than contemporary American culture does.

This is reflected not only by the number of pianos produced and sold there but in the enormity of the piano teaching business as well. In the U.S. there are around 6 million piano students. China has over 40 million piano students! You have to go back a hundred years in the United States for any kind of parallel. Back then, there were many hundreds of American companies producing pianos. The population was only around a hundred million compared to the 325 million people living here now. Yet, 10 times as many people bought pianos than they do today.

It seems like an obvious thing. If your piano sounds bad, get it tuned by all means. You might not know how bad or how to know what to even listen for. Maybe you’re new at piano, and you’re afraid maybe you’re going too long, or perhaps you’re throwing away hundreds of dollars unnecessarily. So I’m going to give you some pointers today.

Perhaps you’ve probably heard the term “A440”. A440 is the reference that orchestras tune to often and pianos are tuned to. It’s the A above middle C on the piano, and when you hear A, you’re actually hearing 440 vibration cycles per second. That’s right; your mind is a calculator of frequencies when you recognize pitches! If your piano goes low or possibly even high from the weather, you might not know it since it could be in tune with itself. In this instance, you want to utilize some kind of reference pitch. The easiest thing in this day and age is to find an app you can put right on your phone to check your tuning periodically to make sure “A” is at 440. If it’s at A441 or something like that you’re okay. But if you see it slipping down several points, you want to get your piano tuned because otherwise, the tuning won’t hold very long if you let it get too far gone.

What about if the piano is basically on pitch? You’ve tried different notes that are all about center, some are a little high, and some are a little low. You wonder what are you listening for when notes are out of tune. When you play notes that are in tune on a piano, there’s a purity to the sound. I’m going to let you hear as I detune one of the strings on a G on a piano just a slight amount on the accompanying video. You’re going to hear waves. Why do you hear waves? Well, pitches are simply waves going through the air. “A” is 440 cycles per second and if you have three strings and one of them is going at a slightly slower frequency than the other ones, you get the interference wave of where they start over again. Like if two people are clapping at different speeds, eventually they match up again. It’s the same thing with this, so I’m going to detune this one string very slightly so you can hear the detuned chorus effect which makes the tone thicker like two pianos playing the same note slightly out of tune with one another.

When you go through your piano, and you hear any notes that aren’t pure, those are the notes that are out of tune. So you might go through your piano, and some of the notes will be pure and others might have waves. You want the notes to sound pure, and you don’t want to hear the strings distinct from one another. You want to hear just that one pure pitch. So in a nutshell, you want to make sure your piano’s basic pitch is up to pitch either with a tuning fork or better yet, get an app on your phone. I recommend “PanoTuner”.

Mordents and trills look so similar on the page. You usually find these in Baroque era music of Handel, Bach, Scarlatti and other composers from that time. I want to show you one specific difference that’s very important. The beginning of the Sarabande movement of the 5th French Suite of Bach starts with a mordent. You can hear me play it without the mordent on the accompanying video first. Shortly after, there is a trill so you can discern the difference. You will hear it played first with no ornamentation. Mordents and trills differ from each other in two interesting ways. Bach wrote a mordent on the first note in the right hand which is a “B”. The secret to a mordent is you add the note below and then go back to the note that’s written so when you have a B you’re going to play B-A-B.

So what’s different about trills? Right after that, you have a trill. Trills start on the upper note. Typically trills can have more than one or two notes and this is for freedom of expression. In fact, the whole Baroque era is noted by its ornamentation. And it isn’t just music. Take a look at the architecture and the art of that period. It’s noted for the filigree and all the beautiful fine detail. Ornamentation is an opportunity for the performer to add their own expressive element. That’s why if you listen to different performances of the same exact pieces of Bach, Handel, Telemann, and other Baroque composers, the ornamentation can be quite different. You can listen to how it sounds with the ornamentation.

You have to watch the squiggly lines: the mordant has often has one less than trills and have a vertical line.

It’s kind of like deciphering a code. Interestingly, different performers have different ideas about what these squiggly lines, turns and all this means because we don’t really know what people played hundreds of years ago, do we? There are many books written on this subject and ultimately it’s up to you as a performer to play something you feel passionately about and really feels right to you. Sometimes with French Suites and other pieces that have repeats in all the sections, you can a do different ornamentation the first time compared to the second time around to make it even more interesting.

So that’s some information about mordents versus trills! Trills can be a little more elaborate since they can add more notes. Generally, trills go up and mordents go down. Trills often start on the auxiliary note which is the note above the note that is written and can include a flourishing of notes. There’s a whole world to this and I hope you’ve enjoyed this! Again, I am Robert Estrin at LivingPianos.com 949-244-3729

Here is a really good viewer question about when to drop a piece of music. If you think about it, you study piano for years and years and develop a sizable repertoire. You can’t possibly keep all those pieces current in your repertoire all the time since you would be spending countless hours each day just refreshing old pieces! So at a certain point you have to drop some pieces just so you have the time to work on new repertoire.

So how do you know when to drop a piece? There are a few indications that you should drop a piece. Number one is if you want to study a new piece of music and you just don’t have the time, you’re going to have to let some pieces go. What I suggest is to try to refresh your repertoire from time to time so that you never let things get too far gone where you have to completely relearn pieces since even playing them over occasionally with the score can keep it in your memory somewhat. You’re going to be able to bring pieces back to performance level more easily.

The real challenge with composers who lived hundreds of years ago is determining what is authentic. One piece that comes to mind is the famous Beethoven Ecossaise in G major. There’s one part where you hear a strange chord which is found in many editions. Yet other editions omit this odd chord. Are we correcting Beethoven? That takes a lot of guts! But if you listen to it, you can hear for yourself the altered version compared to the original autographed score. Whether it’s correct or not, did Beethoven make a mistake or did the editors make the mistake? It is really tough to know from so long ago.

A lot of times what is oftentimes correct is what doesn’t sound as good! This is because editors throughout the ages try to make things sound right and take some liberties, some of which can be traced to very early published editions. If you’ve ever seen Beethoven’s calligraphy, you’ll know why deciphering Beethoven’s scores can be such a tough job:

I have another example for you, the Nocturne in E Minor of Chopin which was published posthumously (after his death). It’s got a really strange harmony in one place in some urtext editions (which are supposed to be authoritative) and I want you to listen to it as written so you’ll hear what I’m talking about. Then I’ll play it the way it’s found in many other editions. Which one is authentic? To tell you the truth, I have not researched this beyond these editions. I welcome comments from all of you. In the middle section of the Nocturne there is a strange note that I want you to listen to. You can listen to the video to hear the original urtext compared to the edited version to hear for yourself how the urtext sounds quite strange.

Even though I heard this piece many times growing up, I only studied it for the first time quite recently. I simply took out my urtext score to learn it. One time I was playing it for my sister and she told me that there’s a wrong note in a lot of editions. As soon as she said that, I knew it wasn’t how I remembered hearing it before! So, I ended up playing it the corrected way which sounds better even though it is probably not authentic!

The last example I’m going to bring to your attention is truly an almost epic fail in my opinion. One of the greatest sonatas of all time is the Liszt B Minor Sonata. Essentially it’s all played without pause and it’s about a thirty minute work. It’s absolutely monumental, and interestingly, there is an alternative ending that Liszt wrote first which ended incredibly heroically. Although the piece has incredible climaxes throughout, he pulled out all the stops for the end which has a huge display of technical skills. Clara Schumann (Robert Schumann’s wife) who Liszt was friends with just hated it and encouraged him to rewrite the ending which he did. The ending of the Liszt B minor sonata is what brings the whole work together because the work has all the heights and the depths imaginable, yet ends with solace. I don’t play the alternative ending, but there are recordings of it on YouTube you can listen to. I find it almost laughable because I am intimately familiar with the Liszt B Minor Sonata and to think that he could have ended it with this big, heroic ending with increasing excitement, is antithetical to what this whole piece is about. So I’m going to play just the ending which starts with a huge climax, then solitude that ends this thirty minute work. It’s truly a profound piece of music. If you’ve never heard it, it’s worth a listen. I think we owe it to both Franz Liszt and Clara Schumann for making it one of the milestone compositions in the piano repertoire. I would love your opinion. If you listen to other YouTube performances where they play the alternative ending that Liszt originally wrote, you will be amazed as I was!

A piano for free? It seems like a crazy idea that there could possibly be free pianos, but you would be surprised. In fact there are websites all over the internet with free pianos on them! How can this be? You know that pianos cost thousands of dollars; so why would anybody ever give away a piano? Well if you’ve ever worked in a piano store or know of anyone who has ever worked in a piano store, they will tell you that every single day the phone rings with people offering pianos. While they aren’t all free, many people have reasons to get rid of pianos and many of them get listed on Craigslist and other places. If you type in any major metropolitan area Craigslist search box “Free Piano” you will be amazed.

In fact, there is a whole website devoted to mostly free pianos: PianoAdoption.com. So what’s the deal? Why do you even need piano stores if there are free pianos all over the place? Well, here’s the thing. Pianos are a significant piece of furniture and there are certain styles of furniture that aren’t popular anymore and people don’t want them in their homes. So sometimes you can get a decent piano for free! Many old fashioned American console designs, particularly lighter woods are difficult for people to sell. Think about this: a family has kids and they get a piano. The kids never practice and it just sits there. Kids move out and then they’re downsizing. Then they try to figure out what they will do with the piano. They call all the piano stores and nobody wants it. Then they list the piano online and don’t get anybody interested. So, often times they give it away! If no friends or family want the piano, they list it online for free.

You’ll see them at Goodwill stores and other places as well. Is this a good place to get a piano? Possibly. The thing is, all used pianos offered to us need work. There’s never a piano no matter how recently it has been manufactured that doesn’t require some work. Here’s the challenge: when you go out and play a free piano which might have problems here or there, it’s hard to know if the problems are superficial or fundamental. Maybe some keys don’t work or the pedal squeaks or there are some other issues. If you have a friend who is a piano technician or know of someone who can check out pianos for you, you may be able to find a piano that is worthwhile. However, there are some pianos you are unlikely to find for free, such as high gloss black baby grands in half way decent condition because these instruments are in demand. But if you’re not particularly picky, sometimes big old upright pianos in decent condition can make a serviceable instrument for you. But that’s a big “if” since pianos like that are usually very old. But occasionally they may play well and sound great with minimal work.

So you want to get a piano that has some redeeming qualities. You might encounter a piano piano that has just been neglected. You must have a relationship with a technician to get it serviced for you. Have them look at it before you commit because some problems have no easy fix. You are welcome to contact us for information about free pianos and resources as well as pianos that have already been worked on and play on a high level. I hope this has been interesting for you. It’s pretty amazing that there are so many free pianos out there! Thanks for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com.