Piano and Music Videos

Thanks for joining me here at LivingPianos.com. I’m Robert Estrin. The question today is, “Can You Catch a Virus from Your Computer?” You may be thinking of Elon Musk’s company, Neuralink. They are working with brain to computer interface technology. There have already been instances where people have controlled prosthetic limbs with their thoughts. The eventual goal is to create a symbiosis of human and machine – to interface vast amounts of knowledge directly to your brain.

Imagine if you could have all the piano works of Beethoven uploaded directly to your brain!

That would save vast amounts of practice time! Inventor and futurist, Ray Kurzweil talks about the singularity. That is when artificial intelligence exceeds human intelligence. Connection of the human brain to a central computer database should soon follow. He predicts that date will be around 2045. Ray Kurzweil has been correct in his predictions in the past 86% of the time. So, this shouldn’t be taken lightly. But all of that is in the future.

What I am referring to is something that is real right now.

Scientists at the University of Arizona have found that cell phones carry 10 times more bacteria than most toilet seats. But this is only one example of how you can catch a bacterial or viral infection from devices we use every day. Consider when going to the supermarket and paying by credit card – or buying gasoline. How many other people have pressed those same buttons? Or if you are working in a shared environment with appropriate social distancing, is anyone sterilizing the printer or other shared devices? This is serious business we need to be aware of.

So, while catching a virus from your computer sounds far fetched, it’s actually happening all around us every day. It’s not just piano keys that you have to be concerned with.

The New England Journal of Medicine estimates that the Coronavirus can live for up to 3 days on plastic surfaces.

So, be sure to sterilize not just your piano keys, but any computer equipment from keyboards, to mice, as well all the shared electronic devices in your lives. Thanks for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com Your Online Piano Store.

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin with a question from a viewer. Evan asks, “How Do You Compose A Cadenza?” Cadenzas in concertos, solo pieces with orchestra typically, often have sections where the orchestra dramatically stops, and the soloist plays their cadenza. In many concertos, the cadenzas are written. Cadenzas are not just in concertos, they’re also in solo pieces sometimes. For example, in Liszt’s 2nd Hungarian Rhapsody, there’s a part near the end that says ad libitum cadenza. And indeed, many pianists play cadenzas. In concertos, the composers often write cadenzas, but just as often there aren’t cadenzas written by the composers. Sometimes, there are cadenzas that people typically play, for example Beethoven wrote some cadenzas to Mozart concertos! So, there are often choices of cadenzas to choose from. But suppose you want to compose your own cadenza.

You can hear the hands independently from one another when you play scales two octaves apart.

For example, Evan asked specifically about the Liszt 2nd Hungarian Rhapsody. I haven’t played that piece in years, but when I did, I would actually make up cadenzas on the spot! I didn’t write one, I would improvise. I don’t necessarily recommend that. But I like to improvise. So, I would challenge myself. Here’s the key with a piece like that: You want to find techniques that are impressive sounding, but not necessarily something that is hard to play. It’s best to play something that sounds difficult because a cadenza is meant to show off your unique skills. However, I’ve heard cadenzas in concertos that were so far away from the style f the composer of the concerto, that it seemed ridiculous. For example, a Mozart concerto with a cadenza that’s in a 20th century style can be disorienting. Having stylistic integrity is important with cadenzas.

Showcase what you can do.

You don’t have to do the hardest thing in the world. You can do something that sounds hard, that lays into your hands. How would you compose such a thing? Start improvising! Just make something up that is based upon the themes and play around with it. Over time, you’ll find certain riffs that you like. Start building upon those and before you know it, you’ll have a framework. From there you can flesh out a cadenza for something like the Liszt 2nd Hungarian Rhapsody. For a full fledged concerto cadenza, it’s a bit more of a task. If you’re writing a cadenza to a Haydn or a Mozart Concerto, you probably want to play something that sounds like the composer. This is no easy task. Even Beethoven couldn’t do it!

Try to have some stylistic integrity, but do something stylistically that you like.

That is always a good key not just for composing cadenzas, but for all composing. Use what comes naturally to you and you’ll be richly rewarded! I hope this is helpful for you Evan, and everybody else! Keep your questions coming in. There are over one thousand videos at LivingPianos.com. You can search for them with keywords. We’ve got everything covered for you here at LivingPianos, Your Online Piano Store. Subscribe to our videos and join everybody else having a good time here with piano. See you next time.

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Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s question from a viewer is, “Can You Play the Piano While Wearing Gloves?” That sounds like a silly question, but I started thinking about it. I’ve been in practice rooms that were so cold. What can you do about that? Can you play the piano with gloves on? Well, in advance of this video, I went out to my car and sure enough I had a pair of gloves there. I have not tried to play yet with these gloves. So this is going to be an experiment for all of us watching, as well as me. I remember as a kid just walking by the piano when I had my winter gloves on, and I was surprised that I could play! But that was a lot of years ago when I had the hands of a child. Let’s see what happens now! I’m going to play the beginning of Mozart’s famous C major Sonata K. 545 with gloves on. (You can watch the accompanying video performance.)

The answer is yes, you can play the piano while wearing gloves!

Now that’s kind of surprising, isn’t it? I remember the very first time I ever played the piano while wearing gloves. I was shocked that I could do it! The gloves don’t really add that much mass to your fingers in terms of hitting surrounding keys. If you’re somebody with big hands and fat fingers, the gloves might be such that you won’t be able to fit your fingers between the black keys. In fact, I’ve met pianists whose fingers don’t quite fit between the black keys as it is! Certainly on some old pianos where the black keys are thicker, it can be difficult to get your fingers between them if you have particularly large hands. With my modest hands I can play with gloves. So, I’m in good shape if I’m in a cold practice room!

I’m sure many of you want to try this now for yourselves. Tell me how it works out for you!

Please feel free to contact us with any piano related questions for future videos!
I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store. See you next time!

info@LivingPianos.com
949-244-3729

Welcome to LivingPianos.com. I’m Robert Estrin. The question today is, “Is there a standard for piano regulation?” The gut reaction, you’re probably all thinking is, of course, there must be a standard for piano regulation. I know this involves many precise measurements. I’ve got news for you, though. I’ve been around piano technicians my entire life. Some of my best friends are piano technicians! As a matter of fact, many of them, and I certainly depend upon them. Here’s the funny thing. I don’t care how great a piano technician is. Once they get done with a piano, you take another piano technician and they look at the work, how the regulation was performed, and they usually respond something like this, “Oh yeah, this is good, but I would take it down a little bit, and maybe a little bit higher, over here.” Everybody’s got their own ideas!

Is there a standard? Well, yes and no. Here’s the standard.

Yamaha has their specifications, for piano regulation. Steinway has theirs. There are little differences. There are some universals, certainly, but there are nuances of differences. Naturally, different pianos have slightly different geometry from one another. So, you can’t necessarily regulate every piano exactly the same. But perhaps even more significant is:

Every technician has slightly different ideas about regulation.

But I think the real key is this. Some pianos can be taken to a higher level of regulation than others. If things are really precise on a piano, you can take it to the edge of closeness where you know it’s still going to work and get optimal performance. But sometimes compromises are necessary. As a matter of fact, it’s typical that there are going to be some compromises in regulation because there’s no such thing as a perfect piano. You get something that has the best combination of power, speed, repetition fluency, control, and there are different ideas as to how to achieve that.

So, even though there’s a lot that piano technicians will agree upon, they all seem to have their own little nuances and preferences as to how things should be measured. Now, I’m sure I’m going to get a lot of comments on this one because there are technicians out there who may feel differently. I want to hear from you in the comments here in YouTube, and you can always contact us here at LivingPianos.com. Once again, we’re your Online Piano Store, providing good information. That’s why we bring these videos to you! So, if you have suggestions for future videos, keep them coming in and they’ll always be more for you, and you’re welcome to subscribe. Thanks again, Robert Estrin, here at Living Pianos.

info@LivingPianos.com
949-244-3729

Thanks for joining us here at LivingPianos.com. I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is, “How Can A Piano With A Heavy Action Feel Light?” How can that be possible? Believe it or not, we have discovered this to be true! Sometimes we get a piano in and the action feels comfortable and light, but when the technicians weigh it out it’s really heavy. Typically, you want somewhere between 48 – 60 grams of down weight. Of course the lower notes on a piano are harder to push down than the higher notes. The keys are longer and the hammers have more felt. So, the action doesn’t have the same weight throughout the keyboard. But, generally, a piano should be somewhere in that 48 – 60 gram zone. A piano that has 65 – 70 grams of down weight in the middle register is a heavy piano. We have had some pianos with heavy actions that didn’t feel heavy. The flip side is also true. Sometimes a piano feels heavy and it’s not. You feel like you’re working so hard to push down the keys. How can this be?

It comes down to psychoacoustics.

The amount of energy you have to expend to get sound out makes you feel like a piano action is either heavy or light. For example, let’s say you’re playing a 9 foot concert grand piano with bright voicing and a heavy action in a very small, live room. If you play that piano in that room, you will feel like you barely have to touch the keys to get a big sound. The heavy action will feel light to you. The opposite can also be true. Let’s say you’re playing a small piano in a big room that has carpet, drapes, and soft furniture absorbing all the sound. You’re working so hard to get sound out that it feels heavy to you! So, there’s more to action weight than you might think. I will say this: If your piano action is extremely heavy, you could possibly do hand damage. So, you want to avoid actions that are out of that zone. Secondly, if a piano is really light, let’s say in the low 40s, it’s almost impossible to get very fast repetition because you don’t have any weight to overcome the friction of the action. That’s why there’s a certain zone of normal action weight. Within that range, there’s heavy normal and light normal. Psychoacoustics play a role in that as well.

It’s important to match your piano to your room to have the right playing experience.

There’s nothing worse than having a piano that you have to keep closed because it’s too loud. Or conversely, if you have a small grand piano in a school or a church in a big auditorium everyone’s pounding the heck out of it trying to get the sound out. This will wear out the piano quickly, and the piano will produce an ugly, harsh sound. So it’s very important to consider the acoustics in your room, as well as the weight of the action.

I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store.
Please feel free to contact me with any piano related questions for future videos!

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Hi, this is Robert Estrin at LivingPianos.com. Today’s topic is, “Who is the Greatest Composer of All Time?” There are many aspects to this question. First, let’s consider innovative music versus joyful music. If you’ve ever listened to John William’s scores, they are absolutely fantastic – beautifully crafted romantic era style music. There’s wide variety in his scores for different films. It’s great music, yet he’s not necessarily regarded as one of the great composers of all time. Why is that? It’s because he’s writing music that could have been composed a hundred years ago or longer. There’s nothing new in regards to style and innovation.

How important is innovation?

Let’s take for example a late 19th century composer like Brahms, one of my favorite composers of all time. His crafting of music was unparalleled, yet there was nothing really groundbreaking other than the beauty of the actual scores. It could have been written decades earlier. Franz Liszt on the other hand was writing tone poems in the early 1800’s, decades before Wagner and Richard Strauss were composing tone poems, so he was a great innovator.

Aside from innovation, how else can we measure who is the the greatest composer of all time?

Obviously there are composers who are regarded as the greatest. Mozart is on most people’s short list of great composers. Because of the fine crafting of his music, the turning of a phrase that was just so elegant and perfect. But with a composer like Mozart there’s another aspect that’s important to talk about, which is the depth of the compositions. I’m not talking about depth within each piece, but a varied output. Mozart wrote choral works, solo piano works, concertos, flute concertos, string quartets, etc. He wrote for many different types of ensembles. Comparatively, let’s look at the great composer Frederic Chopin. If you take away Chopin’s piano music, you don’t have much music of great consequence in his output. So is Chopin one of the greatest composers of all time? He’s certainly one of the greatest piano composers of all time.

If we are talking about a depth of musical output we must mention Beethoven.

You had Mozart, you had Haydn, two of the great Classical era composers, as well as many great Baroque composers who preceded them. But Beethoven took the music to new places with the expansion of the forms and expansion of the instruments. He worked with instrument builders expanding the instruments. Late Beethoven piano music was written for a very different instrument than early Beethoven, in no small part because of how he worked with instrument builders. He also expanded the orchestra. He used larger orchestras, and also larger forms. Instead of three movement symphonies, four movement works in symphonies, concertos, sonatas and chamber music became much more common in his later works. So I would definitely put Beethoven high on the list of greatest composers of all time, but not because I necessarily prefer his music to some other great composers.

I’m going to get a lot of different opinions here, and they’re all justifiable because ultimately it’s like asking, “Who’s your favorite child?” That’s a really tough question to answer. If you’re like most parents, you love all your kids for what they bring to the family. I feel that way about composers. But if I had to pick intellectually, not emotionally, I would choose Johann Sebastian Bach.

In terms of innovation, output, and range of composition, it’s hard to imagine how Bach was able to achieve so much such a long time ago.

Not only that, but did you know that a good proportion of his music got destroyed and we don’t even know what he wrote? There is an amazing body of work he wrote for keyboard, organ and orchestra, the Brandenburg concertos, his oratorios and masses, the depth and the range of his compositions, and considering anything before him, it’s mind boggling to think of what Johann Sebastian Bach achieved. He also wrote in so many different styles from French, to English, to Italian compositions even though he travelled very little. He made a point of attending concerts of visiting artists who came through where he lived in Germany and wrote great music in so many different styles. So I would have to put Bach on the top of my list of greatest composers of all time. Although there are other composers whose music is no less great.

I welcome your comments, because there are many valid viewpoints. I’m not saying that Bach was absolutely the greatest composer of all time, but he’s arguably one of the greatest composers for the reasons I just articulated. I hope this is interesting for you and thought provoking.
Send your questions to Robert@LivingPianos.com so I can answer them in upcoming videos. See you next time!