What is a Tone Poem? Tone poems are programmatic pieces which are based upon stories. They are typically large orchestral works, sometimes approaching an hour or more in length. Richard Strauss, Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life) is one such epic work
3 SECRETS TO PLAYING SLOW MUSIC
This is Robert Estrin at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store. Today, I have three secrets to playing slow music. When you hear instrumentalists, such as pianists, you notice that many have a lot of technical achievement. But when you hear a great artist play a slow movement, magic can happen. It can reach the inner depths of your soul. This is the sign of a great musician. How do you approach slow movements in order to get that quality, to get that beauty and be able to reach people on an emotional level? These are the secrets I’m going to give to you today.
Number one is: Make sure you take the right tempo.
A lot of people play slow movements too slowly. For example, if someone were to perform Debussy, Clair de Lune, you may hear it played very slowly. Now, it might be okay at the beginning, but by the time you get to the middle and compare the tempo they’re playing in the middle of the piece, often, they’re going faster because it gets ponderous after awhile at such a slow tempo.
Another clue for you when you’re taking a tempo that is too slow is that you will find that if there are repeats, you won’t want to take them. They don’t seem to work. So, if you have a piece of music and think, “Mozart didn’t mean all those repeats”. Yes, he did! And if they don’t work, it’s a clue that you are playing too slow a tempo. Another thing related to this is to:
Hold long notes long enough.
There’s nothing worse than robbing long notes. But it’s so easy to rob long notes because you’re just sitting there doing nothing! It’s easy to count to yourself and accelerate your counting in your head. You can lose the pulse.
A lot of performers play very slowly and rob the long notes, such as again, the beginning of Clair de Lune. To me, that is simply playing out of rhythm. But you’d be surprised how many performances you’ll find online of very renowned concert pianists playing this piece and robbing the long notes. Holding all the long notes for their full written value gives the music soul, doesn’t it? You’ve got to take the right tempo and you must hold the long notes long enough. What else is there? The other thing is to:
Think of the long note as the pulse.
This enables you to have a slow pulse with a faster tempo. An example is the second movement of the K. 332 Mozart Sonata in F major. First, you could play it thinking of each sixteenth note as the beat. The left hand has sixteenth notes, and each one of those can be punctuated as the beat. Then, instead of thinking each sixteenth note as the beat, try thinking each eighth note as the beat. It’s already going to be better. Rachmaninoff said,
“The bigger the phrase, the bigger the musician.”
Well, related to this is, the longer note that you feel as the pulse, the more freedom you have with your music. Now try feeling the quarter note as the pulse. This also gives you the benefit of being able to take a faster tempo but still having a relaxed feel to your music. Even with a slightly faster tempo, but with the quarter note as the pulse, it doesn’t feel hurried! Those are three secrets to being able to play slow music.
Make sure to hold long notes long enough, feel the long note as the beat, and choose the right tempo.
Don’t take slow pieces too slowly. If you do those three tips, it will enhance the performance of your slow music. I’d love to hear from all of you and give me your perspective. And if you haven’t subscribed to LivingPianosVideos’ YouTube channel, go for it! You’ll get all the fresh videos. We produce them for you every week.
Thanks for joining me again, Robert Estrin at LivingPianos.com Your Online Piano Store. info@LivingPianos.com 949-244-3729
3 SECRETS TO PLAYING SLOW MUSIC This is Robert Estrin at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store. Today, I have three secrets to playing slow music. When you hear instrumentalists, such as pianists, you notice that many have a lot of technical achi
THE POWER OF INTERLOCKING PHRASES
This is Robert Estrin at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store with a fantastic tip for your memorization, which is the power of interlocking phrases.
Now, what am I talking about here? Well, if you’ve spent time memorizing music, you know that the most efficient way to do it is to take a small section at a time, because after all, there’s a limit to how much you can learn at once. What can really help you is by watching this video and reading the article on how to memorize:
HOW TO PRACTICE THE PIANO PART 1 – MEMORIZING MUSIC
You take each hand separately a small section at a time, mastering each hand and then putting them together and getting that memorized.
But How Do You Get the Phrases Together?
You learn this section, that section, and you’re going to have a whole bunch of random phrases. That’s where the interlocking phrases come in. For example, in the above video, if you are learning a Mozart sonata like the K545, the famous C-major sonata of Mozart, you start with the first phrase to learn. But instead of doing that, go one note further as demonstrated in the accompanying video. That extra note is where you start learning your next phrase. That way, after you learn the first phrase and get that solid, you have a common note between the two phrases. When you finally get the second phrase learned, you go back to the beginning, and you’ll be able to be on the first note of the second phrase.
Interlocking Phrases Is So Helpful!
Beyond that, when you get into more advanced stages of learning your music, you might find that you have all the phrases learned but you can’t get through everything in a fluid manner. Then you can try interlocking at different points. For example, you do the first four measures, and then you try the second measure to the sixth measure. Then you practice off-setting the points at which the phrases connect because one of the biggest challenges with memorizing music is getting everything smoothly put together.
So, that is the power of interlocking phrases in learning music. I hope this tip if helpful for you. Again, I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store. If you haven’t already subscribed to my YouTube channel, go for it, because you’ll get all the fresh videos. Thanks for joining me. Robert@LivingPianos.com 949-244-3729
THE POWER OF INTERLOCKING PHRASES This is Robert Estrin at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store with a fantastic tip for your memorization, which is the power of interlocking phrases. Now, what am I talking about here? Well, if you’ve spen
Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com. Today, three secrets to memorizing music. The three secrets all come down to one thing, and I’ll tell you how they relate to three aspects that will help you in memorizing music. Memorizing music is tough, it’s hard work if you’re doing it correctly. If you just play through a piece over and over in hopes that eventually it will assimilate, that’s not a very efficient way to learn music. You need to be organized, and I have videos on how to approach memorization.
The three secrets come down to memorizing every day.
Why does that give you three benefits? Well first of all, obviously if you’re memorizing every day you’re going to learn more. If you only try to do it once or twice a week, or every other day, you’re limited in how much you’re going to be able to learn by the sheer amount of time.
The second thing about memorizing every day is you get to reinforce your work from the previous day.
Otherwise, you’re going two steps forward, one step backward every day trying to get back what you learned, even the next day is a big challenge. But if you wait a couple of days you will have forgotten a great deal, and so you really are not going to be as productive.
Third reason is that since memorizing is very taxing, there’s only so much you can do at peak performance in one sitting.
If you do it every day, you get your mind when it’s fresh, and that’s a tremendous benefit to you. You can soak up a bunch of music before you get to that point of diminishing returns.
So remember, if you’re serious about memorizing music, get to it every day. There’s so many benefits to that, and you will be rewarded with amassing great amounts of repertoire in your music. Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, your online piano store. Remember to subscribe to the YouTube channel, and you can even hit the bell so you’ll be notified when there’s new videos for you.
See you next time.
949-244-3729 info@LivingPianos.com
Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com. Today, three secrets to memorizing music. The three secrets all come down to one thing, and I’ll tell you how they relate to three aspects that will help you in memorizing music. Memorizing music is tough
How To Practice the Piano 3 Part Series There are 3 separate skills in learning to play the piano: • Memorizing • Sight Reading • Improvising You can become quite proficient in one or two of these skills and be completely deficient in others. I
I’ve had quite a few people recently asking me for tips on how to play trills on the piano. It’s no easy task – or is it? This video and article will provide a few tips and techniques you can use to help master trills.
The first thing to do is make sure you play your trills with minimal arm weight. If you’ve watched some of my other technique videos you know that I emphasize arm weight as a very big component in tone production – especially when it comes to slower melodies. The challenge with trills is playing lightly, almost floating your hand above the keys to allow the notes to flow with minimal effort.
The next thing in playing trills is keeping your fingers very close to the keys. Trills are played so fast that there is not a lot of time for movement, so it’s best to keep your fingers very close to the keys – so close you remain in contact with the keys!
Another thing is to make sure your fingers are rounded. It’s nearly impossible to play fast with outstretched fingers; keeping them rounded will help improve speed dramatically allowing more than just one joint to execute the trill. These are some of the most important aspects when it comes to hand position.
However, there is something fundamental about approaching trills. Even if it sounds like just a bunch of notes, you need to figure out exactly how many notes you are playing as if it’s written out. Learn trills like you would learn any other fast passage in your music working with the metronome increasing one notch at a time as you gain confidence.
Another big question is how to know how many notes to play in a trill. One valuable technique that I use frequently is to play just one note of the trill. For example, if you are playing a trill and starting on the upper note, just play that upper note. You will get an idea of how fast you can play the trill by only playing one note of the trill first, either the top note or the bottom note – whichever one you are starting the trill on.
This brings up an important subject in trills, what note does it start on? This could really be a subject for an entirely separate video but I am going to provide some basic information here. As trills are written, you will usually start on the auxiliary (the note above the written note of the trill; the next note in the scale of that key). For example, if you have a piece in C major and you have a D trill, you would start on E.
Can you start a trill on the note written? For example, if it’s written as a D can you start on a D and move up to E? Yes; it depends on the context. There are different schools of thought on this but generally, I would say a trill is basically a long appoggiatura (a non-chord tone resolving into the harmony). So starting on the auxiliary generally makes musical sense. However, in different period styles and in shorter trills, use your judgment as to what sounds best and what you can execute with confidence.
The last thing I want to address with trills is one of the biggest challenges; how to end them! If you don’t know exactly where you are it can be difficult to end them smoothly. The good news is there is a great practice technique for this.
I always like to play the trill right up to the point before it ends, and then stop in a relaxed manner over the keys. Keep doing that until you have a good grasp on where you will be right before the last notes of the trill. Keep playing that passage over and over and eventually add the last notes of the trill. But don’t play them right away; pause in a relaxed manner before you play the last notes. At first, make the pause as long as you need it; eventually, make the duration of the pause smaller and smaller; until the pause is imperceptible to the listener but guides the ending of the trill for you!
Thanks again for watching and reading. I enjoy bringing these videos to you and am planning more of them for you. So please, send in any questions or suggestions to me, Robert Estrin: Robert@LivingPianos.com (949) 244-3729
I’ve had quite a few people recently asking me for tips on how to play trills on the piano. It’s no easy task – or is it? This video and article will provide a few tips and techniques you can use to help master trills. The first thing t