Piano and Music Videos

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to present to you ways of practicing the first movement of Schumann’s wonderful Kinderszenen, or Scenes from Childhood. This is a glorious set of pieces that is accessible to people who are not necessarily on a virtuoso level of technique, and yet it is an absolutely stupendous piece of music! It’s a whole series of small movements, so you don’t have to take months to learn each one, and you don’t have to learn all of them. You can just learn select movements. I’m going to focus today on the very first movement: From Foreign Lands and People. It presents a unique challenge that you’ll find in other pieces. So what I’m going to show you here is not just for this movement. It covers a lot of things you can apply to many pieces of music!

A piece like this can be challenging using my usual practice method.

Any of you who follow me probably already know how I practice and how I teach how to practice, which is to memorize first. After reading the piece maybe 2 or 3 times, I get right to work, taking very small phrases, memorizing the right hand with all the details, memorizing the left hand with all the details, and then putting the hands together, going on to the next section and connecting. A piece like this has challenges when using this approach. First of all, I want to just play it for you so you can hear what the piece is about, and then I’m going to show you what challenges this piece has with the way I’m talking about practicing.

Watch the video to hear the music!

So I usually take two or four measures at a time, learn the hands separately, and then put the hands together. Then I move on to the next phrase. But the problem is, just like with a fugue, you have a middle voice, and it’s divided between the hands. At the beginning, you basically have a melody and a bass part. It’s a nice duet. But then you have a middle part that is divided between the hands. So if you try to learn the hands separately, it doesn’t make much sense. You end up with that middle part being bisected.

It makes much more sense to learn the inner voices as chords.

You really want to learn the melody and the bass, and then the middle part. It’s almost like you have three hands there in those three individual parts. Once you learn the three parts, (melody, bass, and chords), you can play the hands separately. But you want to understand that the three parts are basically a trio. Now I’m going to give you a bonus tip here.

How do you get that middle line to be quiet?

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to tell you the secret of rounded fingers. If you studied piano, you probably had teachers who said you must round your fingers and make them into a ball. But that can be painful! So why am I telling you to use rounded fingers? Well, there are different ways of approaching rounded fingers. I’m going to show you the correct way, which takes zero effort, and I’m going to explain why it’s so important in your piano playing. And I’m going to give you examples of it. The first example I’m going to give is the famous Mozart K 545 C Major Sonata. I’m going to explain where the rounded fingers really come into play and why it’s so important for you.

Using rounded fingers is particularly helpful when playing trills.

Why are rounded fingers necessary to be able to execute trills? Think about this. You have three different finger joints. If you only use one joint, that’s a lot of work for that one joint. But you have two other joints. If you use all your joints, you divide the load among many more joints. It’s much easier than moving a whole finger from just your knuckle. That’s the main reason. But how do you do this without stressing? The idea of holding a ball is a terrible analogy.

You never want to be in a position that takes any effort to maintain.

I’m going to repeat that. Don’t go into a hand position that takes effort to maintain. You might think, well, how can you possibly be in a position that’s rounded like that without any effort? You just drop your limp hands straight down toward the keyboard, and let your hands completely relax on the keys. Your hands will naturally be in a rounded position. And it takes absolutely no effort to maintain because your hands naturally go into that position. Try it on your piano. Without any effort at all, just go down, and you’ll be in that rounded position. Isn’t that remarkable? What are the key places where this is really handy? Well, there are several actually, and I’m going to show you. For one thing, you have a short trill right at the beginning of this Mozart sonata. If you were to try to do that with flat fingers, it would be cumbersome. Your fingers are too big and heavy. It’s much easier with rounded fingers. With flat fingers, it’s all but impossible. By the way, three and one are your strongest trill fingers. I know a lot of you like to use three and two. Those are good too. But three and one are even stronger.

You always must know exactly how many notes you’re playing in a trill.

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s topic is about the power of musical snippets in your practice. What you’re going to learn today is one of the most valuable techniques you could ever use in your piano practice. The amazing thing about it is that you can use this technique with almost all of your music! It’s incredibly valuable, especially for something fast. I’m going to play the beginning of the B minor Scherzo of Chopin. It’s a little rusty, so I can practice it in front of you. You can see for yourself how this technique works in the accompanying video.

The technique of fast playing is sometimes dramatically different from the technique of slow playing.

When you’re working on a fast section like this, you could do the obvious thing and put the metronome on a slow speed and do metronome speeds to work it up. But the problem with that approach is that you might hit a wall where you can’t get any faster. Why is that? Because the technique of fast playing is sometimes dramatically different from the technique of slow playing. This is particularly obvious on a wind instrument because the breaths come in different places. It’s a whole different experience. Even on the piano, fast playing feels different from slow playing. You try to get faster and faster with the metronome, but sometimes you just can’t get any faster.

I’m going to show you a completely different technique using musical snippets.

Just play the smallest possible unit that makes sense to you. Take a tiny number of notes. You can just take the first two notes, then take the next two, and then put them together. Now you might not want to go note by note. You might instead consider note groups that fall under your hands. Some snippets are basically broken chords. You want to get over the next note group as soon as you hit the new hand position; otherwise, you’ll never gain speed. So as you finish one note group, you get your hand in position over the next note group.

You can work through your music this way, gaining confidence and playing with the technique you’re going to eventually use when you play the whole piece.

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about why you must slow down your counting on long notes. You might think that if you do that, it’s going to be out of rhythm. Well, it’s possible that if you take this to heart, you could overcompensate. But the reason why this is so imperative is that there is a natural tendency, when nothing is going on on the piano, to rush your counting.

Watch the video to see the demonstration!

I’m going to give you an example using the last movement of Schumann’s Kinderszenen: Scenes from Childhood: The Poet Speaks. There are these long notes. I’m going to play it with the correct rhythm, and then I’m going to show you the danger of what can happen if you don’t intentionally slow down your counting. If you were playing this and not really elongating the counting on the long notes, you could easily end up rushing the counting on the long notes.

You must feel like you’re elongating the counting.

If you don’t feel like you’re elongating the counting, you’re probably going to end up rushing. I hear it all the time. Not just with students, but even with professional pianists! Sometimes they lose the pulse on the long notes. So you must accentuate the length of the counting so that you can hold the long notes long enough. The difference it makes in the sheer poetry, apropos of this piece of music, is profound.

It’s important to choose the right tempo.

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to tell you about the three essential elements of sight-reading. I know so many of you want to read better, and you’re wondering what the secret is. I’m going to tell you about three different skills that you must have working together in order to be successful at reading music.

Sight-reading is all about what you see, feel, and hear.

Naturally, there’s what you see in the score. You have to really see what you’re reading, which is why you can’t be looking down at your hands while you’re reading. Which leads us to the second thing: You must have a certain feel for the keyboard. So you’re seeing the music, you’re feeling the keys, and the last thing, which is the most important, is what you hear.

All three of these things work together as a system.

You can’t look at your hands. You can occasionally glance for a moment, but you have to keep your eyes on the score. As soon as you’re not looking at the score, you’re not reading anymore! So you have to keep your fingers moving on the keys. If it sounds wrong, you must adjust by feel. You have black keys and white keys, so you can feel where the correct keys are and make the adjustments. If it sounds wrong, go a little higher or lower. You might think that that’s imprecise, but anybody who’s a really good sight-reader knows that you have to make those kinds of adjustments when you’re reading something difficult. Even if you don’t play perfectly, you get the basic idea across.

You have to keep going.

If you are accompanying a soloist, they don’t want you to stop when you miss a note. That’s not going to do it for them. It doesn’t give the satisfaction of understanding what the piece is like with the piano part. So you must keep going and feel your way by listening, watching the score, and recreating what you see based upon what you feel and hear. The best way to do that is by playing with other musicians, because it forces you to keep going. You have to keep going. You must keep your eyes moving. You must keep your hands and fingers moving, and you must keep listening.

The way to develop your reading on the piano is by doing it!

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to show you how to make memorization easier. Memorizing piano in music is one of the most difficult things you’ll ever do mentally. It takes all of your concentration. I’m going to show you how to approach this so that you can make it easier and more effective!

How much music should you learn at a time?

I will use, as an example, the second movement of Beethoven’s Pathetique Sonata. I’m going to play the first phrase, and then I’m going to show you how to approach memorizing it to make it easier. Let’s say you sit down to learn this piece. You figure the first eight measures is a good amount to learn, so you play it over and over again until you kind of get it. But that is far too much material to take at a time! If you were to add up the sheer number of notes, it doesn’t seem like a lot of music. But there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of details when you consider that every note has its own fingering, phrasing, and expression. So there are four details to each note, not to mention the rhythm!

I’ve talked about how to memorize by taking small amounts of music at a time, playing hands separately, and then putting them together. Well, there is more to it than that. I’m going to show you some tips right now. First of all, if you analyze the score right at the beginning, you realize that the right hand is in chords. So learn it in chords first. Now, if I were learning this, I wouldn’t take eight measures at a time. Sometimes you can learn four measures of one hand, but when you put the hands together, chop it in half. Just do two measures when you’re putting the hands together, because:

The hardest part about memorization is putting the hands together.

I would suggest just learning the first two measures. Start with just the first two measures, but give yourself the extra note of the beginning of the third measure as a connection point. That’s plenty of material, believe it or not. How long will it take you to learn that? Not so long. Now, you might have gone through the first eight measures and played it over and over again for 30 minutes or an hour. But you know what? You’ll never quite get it because you don’t give yourself the opportunity to really study the infinitesimally small details that you can master in just a few minutes. Once you get the right hand memorized in chords, then you get the left hand memorized. Then you put hands together in chords. The next step would be to play the right hand alone the way it’s written. And then finally, put the hands together going extremely slowly at first. Then, if you like, you can reward yourself and play with the pedal, which is the last thing you do in your practice.

If you have trouble delineating the melody from the 16th notes in the right hand, you can practice with articulations.

Play with a light finger staccato on the 16th notes to train your hand which notes are accompaniment and which notes are melody. Better yet, put your hands together, and you have a duet between the soprano and the bass with the inner voice playing with a gentle finger staccato.