Piano Lessons- Music Theory Lessons

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.

This may seem like an obvious question, but it is a really interesting question in a number of ways that I’ll explain. All vibrating objects produce pitches and those pitches are lower if the object is bigger and they’re higher if the object is smaller. It’s simple physics. With pianos, you notice particularly on concert grand pianos, the very highest treble strings are very short and they get longer and longer throughout the entire scale design until you have the very long bass strings on a nine foot piano. The bass strings are able to produce those low frequencies from their sheer length like the pipes on pipe organs; the large pipes produce low frequencies and the the small pipes produce high frequencies.

It’s the same reason why women and children tend to have higher voices than men because being bigger (including the vocal cords) produces lower pitched voices. Bigger things make lower sounds. Where it gets really interesting is the fact that you can have a baby grand where the strings are pretty much the same length once you get to the middle of the keyboard on down. How do they achieve the low notes out of a smaller piano? They make the strings thicker in the bass to overcome the fact that they’re not getting as long as they need to be.

In fact, even a concert grand piano doesn’t necessarily have the difference in length of strings you would need to double the length of the strings for each octave down on the keyboard. So, you would need strings going twice the length throughout the entire piano for every octave which would produce a longer piano than nine feet depending upon the starting length of the highest treble strings if it were done by the length of the strings alone. It could be difficult to excite the soundboard with such long strings. There are other aspects of piano design and acoustical science that just don’t enable that to happen. It would be an interesting experiment in the virtual world with programs like PianoTeq to create virtual pianos that don’t exist in the real world with incredibly long strings.

Has anyone ever made a backwards piano? Shouldn’t left handed people have a go of it with a piano where the high keys are on the bottom and the low keys are on the top? It seems like a crazy idea but indeed, the Dutch team Poletti and Tuinman built such a piano. I think about the fact that we’ve learned how to play piano as it is, what an arduous task it would be to relearn the piano!

Famously, there are some guitar players such as Jimi Hendrix who played guitar flipped over. Some players even reversed the strings – and that’s interesting enough! But here’s an interesting fact: You can actually try out a backwards piano! How can this be? There is music software available which I first utilized back in the 1990s from Mark of the Unicorn called, Performer. It had a function where you could set the MIDI keyboard controller to play the notes in reverse order from top to bottom. I found it so fascinating to hear pieces played upside down! One of the facts of inverting music is that everything major becomes minor and everything minor becomes major. As a result, you get really interesting music. It’s like hearing an entirely fresh piece with a totally different emotional content that can still work heard upside down!

If you ever get a chance to play an upside down keyboard, which is probably going to be through MIDI because it’s hard to find any actual pianos built that way, you’re going to find that you can play pieces you know and have refreshing new compositions you can play instantly almost like whole new pieces!

The bottom line is this, you need some conventions in the world. For example, in your country, you know what side of the street to drive on. Imagine how haphazard it would be otherwise. It’s the same thing with the piano. To relearn everything would be an arduous task. Indeed, with the piano you have to be ambidextrous anyway because both hands have an equal role to play. But it is certainly fascinating playing such a piano.

I have vast experience with editing recordings, having owned several recording studios over the years and have been present during my father’s recording sessions from a young age. I have produced countless albums as well as demo recordings. Yes, there is editing in Classical recordings and you might wonder how this works. You play a piece, and miss a note. So, can you put the correct note in there? How does it work? With modern technology you almost can! In previous years, not that long ago in the days of tape, it was possible to razorblade edit and you would not believe what was possible even then!

Here’s the key: To be able to get successful edits in music, you have to have a keen understanding of the work. That’s why the producer of a recording and the engineer have to understand music in a deep way. For example, if you were to try to edit a performance to make a perfect recording by playing until you missed something, then started there and continued on to the next place you missed, then going through the whole piece that way, you might get all the notes, but you probably will not get much of a musical performance. Continuity and cohesiveness has to be achieved in the editing process. So what is generally done is to play complete works several times. You choose the best take as the foundation and replace key sections to achieve accuracy.

You don’t just put in missed notes here and there, but you might take the first exposition of a sonata and maybe a development from a different take then perhaps the recapitulation will come back to the first take. If there’s a particularly thorny section of a piece of music that is really difficult to play accurately, it’s important to remember that you cannot edit in anything that you can’t play. You have to be able to play all the notes at some point! If there’s a particularly difficult section, they might have the performer play that section many times so they know it’s covered. In a worst case scenario, it’s possible to cut in before and after that section. It’s critical to know where you’re going to try to cut in later so that you don’t just try to squeeze something in.

If you have total silence, you can always cut in. A strong, decisive chord that punctuates a new section can mask edits as well. So there’s a great deal of editing in recordings, but not the way you may think. It’s not about replacing missed notes even though with digital technology that may be possible. It’s almost at the point where you can do that, but you’ll never get a fluid performance on a high level of expression and continuity trying to edit that way. You’ve got to be able to play the notes, it’s just a matter of saving time. Think how many performances you would have to do in order to get a perfect performance of a work that takes 20 or 30 minutes. You might miss one little thing here or there which may go unnoticed in a live performance, but in a recording you listen to again and again it becomes an annoyance. So, in a best case scenario, editing enables note perfect recordings in the hands of a producer who has the ability to draw out the best performance of an artist.

Do Classical performers play exactly what is written? There’s a lot to this question. Of course, naturally, Classical pianists strive for accuracy. But what is accurate? There is a real challenge with composers who lived hundreds of years ago. If you’ve ever had the opportunity to look at some of the great composers’ scores, Beethoven comes to mind, there are scrawls on the page and sections scribbled out. Trying to decipher what they meant is no easy task.

It takes a lot of scholarly work. That’s why the editions you look at is critical and there are urtext editions which strive to present exactly what the composers wrote. How do they know what the composers wrote? Sometimes there are autographed scores and early editions and there are often discrepancies. Decisions have to be made as to what the composers’ intentions really were. Particularly with composers with sloppy calligraphy, it can be a real task! Ultimately, the performer must have conviction about the notes they play regardless of what is supposedly authoritative. If something seems wrong, you shouldn’t play it even if it is supposed to be authoritative. Maybe somewhere somebody got it wrong! You must have conviction as to what you’re playing.

There’s an entire other side to this question that is perhaps even more significant which is this: the musical score only has notes, rhythm, phrasing and expression. There is a whole lot more to the music than that! Consider this analogy of a play or motion picture. The words are all written out, yet the actor or actress must take those written words and create a character out of it. The words themselves really don’t come to life until the performer creates that character.

Exactly the same thing is true with a musical performance. The notes are just the skeleton of the work and it’s your job as a performer to flesh out the living, breathing work of music. In order to do that, many decisions have to be made that are not in the score. You might wonder what else there is besides the notes, rhythm, phrasing and expression. There are the ups and downs of the expression as well as rubato (the slight speeding up and slowing down in Romantic period music) which gives flavor and emotion to the music.

All of these things and more are left up to the performer. So it’s more than just a matter of accuracy, it’s all the things a performer brings to a performance to turn it into a piece of music. There are only basic directions in the score. So that’s the job of the performer. It’s not just about being accurate and if you want to prove that to yourself, listen to a computer playing a score of Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin or anyone else. You can program in everything and still it’s no music is it?

Some pipe organs can produce frequencies lower than the threshold of human hearing which is around 20 cycles per second. The Bösendorfer Imperial which goes all the way down to the C below the standard low A on other pianos produces notes lower than 20 cycles per second. Part of this phenomenon can be explained by the how you can feel rather than hear those extremely low frequencies. Certainly a massive pipe organ in a cathedral can energize an entire room with sonic energy with low, rumbling frequencies. But there is much more to it than that and it has to do with the overtone series.

I have a video about atonality which touches on the overtone series: