Piano and Music Videos

This is an interesting question because a lot of times people get into studying instruments because they are enamored with certain pieces of music. It may drive them to a certain instrument and they wish to recreate the sound and music they’ve heard before. But is it a good idea to fill your repertoire with well-known pieces?

There are a few things to keep in mind when learning any new piece. One of the biggest is the familiarity of famous pieces versus lesser known works. When it comes to learning a piece you’ve heard dozens or hundreds of times before it can become a crutch – you know what it sounds like and you will naturally emulate what you’ve heard in the past.

When it comes to pieces you haven’t heard before it may be much harder to learn them on your own. It’s actually quite an accomplishment and something you should definitely undertake in your musical development to learn music you’ve never heard before. Don’t listen to it at all while you are learning it. Simply figure out the music as written and use your knowledge as your guide. Once you feel confident with the piece and can play it well, listen to some recordings of it. You might be pleasantly surprised at different interpretations of the same piece and you will certainly be taken with how much of a unique spin you have put on your own version of the piece!

When it comes to public performances, is it better to play pieces the audience will be familiar with? There is such a wealth of music available and much of it is unknown to a lot of people. After all, Beethoven wrote 32 piano sonatas and only a handful of them are really well known. On the one hand, you might be worried that by playing famous pieces you will be compared to other musicians and you will be expected to perform at a certain level. This is not always the case.

A lot of times choosing a famous piece can be a safe bet for a performer. Orchestras constantly play the same symphonies and concertos over and over again because people really want to continue to hear the music they known. The audiences will show up time and time again to hear these pieces because they are well known and loved – just the thought of hearing them again makes them happy.

One of the best things you can do for your programming is to use famous pieces as a hook to get people interested and generate an audience. Once you have them there, play the famous pieces you promised but also mix in some lesser known works – you will expose them to additional music and they will love you for it. It’s a great idea to pepper your repertoire with famous pieces and lesser known ones as well.

Last week we discussed the importance of sightreading and why it’s a required skill for many musician. This week I will offer some helpful tips and tricks to improve your sightreading!

As a personal note, as a child I progressed to a fairly high level on the piano. By high school I was playing Beethoven Sonatas, Liszt Hungarian Rhapsodies, Chopin Ballades; overall very advanced music. However, even though I progressed to a high level, I always had something holding me back as a musician; I was not a very good sightreader.

My sightreading was on such a low level in high school that when the choir director came to me with a stack of music to accompany his choir when his pianist was unavailable, I had to decline. He probably thought I was being rude. But I simply didn’t possess the skills to get this done – I would have had to memorize all the scores and there simply wasn’t enough time!

So how did I change this? It really came to me in an “Aha!” moment. My father, Morton Estrin was set to perform the Tchaikovsky B-flat minor piano concerto at Carnegie hall and he needed to play the concerto with someone playing the orchestra part at the second piano. He handed me the score – which if you’ve ever seen, is a very thick book. I told him I couldn’t read it and I would end up missing half the notes.

I opened up the score to face a swarm of black notes splattered all over the pages; it was going to be a challenge for sure. I realized immediately that if I looked away from the page I would definitely get lost. So I decided to put my fingers at the starting keys and simply play what I could but never look away from the score. I counted like crazy staying with the party as best I could. We went through the entire concerto, all three movements, and I never got lost! Although I missed tons of notes, to my surprise it didn’t seem to matter. All my father needed was to run the concerto and that we did.

I learned something incredibly valuable that day. Keeping your eyes on the music and keeping the music flowing in time is critical to your sightreading success. But even more important is playing with other musicians and sight reading with them is essential for developing your reading. It will greatly improve your sightreading capabilities to perform as a group. Sure, you can practice every day by yourself (and you should) but it’s not until you actually start playing with other musicians that you will be forced to keep the music flowing.

With complex music sometimes it’s necessary to approach the score like a skeleton and flesh out the music. As your sightreading develops, you will realize more substantial elements of the score over time.

What’s more important than actually playing all the notes when sightreading is to keep the general character of the music going, keep the nuances of expression and timing; all of this is much more important than just playing all the notes. Especially when you are in a group setting, it’s more important to have a coherent, unified sound.

The short answer is sure; why not? However, you really need to ask yourself what your intentions and expectations are. You should also be aware of the style of music that you would primarily want to play.

For example: if you want to play some blues or honky-tonk piano or maybe you want to play some pieces you make up or sing too, you might be just fine on your own. You might be able to find some good online resources and develop as a pianist and musician on your own.

When it comes to classical music, however, you will be at a severe disadvantage without the help of a teacher. The complexities of reading a score, the traditions developed over hundreds of years, advanced techniques, there are a number of roadblocks that would be incredibly difficult to overcome on your own. Even if you are a genius, you will progress at a much slower rate than someone who has assistance from an experienced teacher.

If you are interested in other genres of music – jazz, rock, country, etc. – you can try and sit down with other musicians who are better than you and gain a lot of knowledge and experience from these types of “informal lessons”. Some of the greatest musicians in these other styles of music are not traditionally trained.

If you are serious about becoming a musician – really in any style of music – you will greatly benefit from one on one instruction a great teacher can provide.

This question comes from another viewer who asks how to read ahead in music to improve their reading. So how do you achieve this and is it a good technique?

Well the truth is, reading ahead is actually not exactly how it works. Instead, it is a matter of looking at chunks of music instead of reading note by note much like reading text. When you first learn how to read a language, you must sound out each letter forming words. Eventually, you recognize words and even phrases. It is the same with reading music. You begin to recognize chords and progressions instead of just individual notes.

So instead of reading ahead in the music, it’s best to digest your music into chunks. If you break your music into these sections you will be able to absorb them much more easily and you will have an understanding of the structure of what you are playing helping the fluency of your reading.

You can even apply this same technique to sight reading. Instead of just reading all the notes and hoping for the best, the more you begin to break down your music into small chunks you will begin to recognize similar patterns. After a while this will become almost second nature and you will be able to read and digest all your music much more easily.

To put it in simple terms, in a musical context: Allegro means fast; while Moderato means moderately fast. (Actually, the Italian translation of Allegro is actually “happy” and Moderato means “moderate”). But these two terms can be confusing – how do you judge fast? What is moderately fast? And really, the speed really depends on the context of the original score; every piece has different requirements.

You might have even seen some metronomes which indicate Allegro from a certain number to another and other markings such as Andante with a range as well, but this is actually quite ridiculous. Each piece has a certain pulse to it and Allegro can’t be quantified in this way.

The biggest thing to remember is that Fast and Slow are Not Absolutes. The speeds and the markings are simply characters of the piece.

So where exactly to do these terms come from? They are Italian words. This is mostly because Western music has its roots in Western Europe and Italy was a big epicenter for music. Eventually, their terms were adopted by most of the music community.

If you study French or German music, sometimes you will run into a bunch of different terms from their languages. I suggest getting a dictionary, or use online or smartphone resources. Some of the German terms are so long they are almost impossible to pronounce!

This might sound like a silly question but sometimes you have a piece you can play with the music in front of you but you haven’t memorized it yet. You might be able to play the whole piece by barely glancing at the music but you still need it in parts. This can be cumbersome and is something you want to avoid. So how do you fix this?