Piano Lessons- Music Theory Lessons

Hello this is Robert Estrin at LivingPianos.com. The question today is, “Is there muscle memory when playing the piano?” This is a great question and I’m going to ask a question of all of you right now. Tell me if this rings true. Have you ever had a piece you’ve played a million times and you find yourself playing the piece and instead of “spacing out” you find yourself “spacing in”? You realize that you weren’t thinking about what you were playing at all! Maybe you were thinking about what you were going to do later. Yet, your fingers keep going. You wonder how that could possibly happen. Indeed, there is a high degree of tactile memory playing the piano.

If you’ve ever watched a toddler getting up for the first time trying to walk, you’ll see them discovering the whole process. They are concentrating and you can see in their faces that they are focusing on how to stand and put one foot in front of the other. For the next few weeks and months, you’ll see how they get more and more comfortable and acclimated to walking. When you or I go out, we can be thinking about anything when we are walking. We don’t have to think about walking at all. Indeed there is muscle memory at work here! Obviously playing the piano is much more complex than walking, depending upon what music you are playing. Yet, if you play a piece many times:

Your fingers will keep on going all by themselves without you even thinking about it!

Is this a good thing? Yes and no. While on one hand, it is not something you want to rely upon too heavily, without a degree of muscle memory, it would be virtually impossible for a pianist to get through an hour and a half recital playing on a high level if they couldn’t free-wheel some of the time. Being able to allow the music to continue when performing even when there are inevitable distractions is essential. If your fingers wouldn’t keep going and there was silence, it would be a complete disaster!

It is good that we have muscle or tactile memory. However, you can’t depend upon muscle memory entirely. Think about this. Most music you play goes from section to section with repeats of different sections. You must know where you are in the form. You have to have that part of your brain looking down on the rest of you lovingly making sure you don’t take a wrong turn. One of the best ways to accomplish this is by practicing away from the piano where you don’t have the benefit of tactile memory. If you can play your music by just thinking it through in your head, you really know the score well.

Your muscle memory in conjunction with your cognition of the score in depth is invaluable for securing your performance.

Yes, there is muscle memory at work when playing the piano. Thank goodness there is! But remember, you can’t depend upon it all the time. Practice away from the piano. You can practice with your score, going as far as you can, and when you find a hazy part, refer back to the score. You might have to move your fingers when playing away from the keyboard just to be able to do this at first. It is an extremely valuable skill so that you don’t fall into the trap of taking a wrong turn in a sonata (for example) and finding yourself either leaving out 2/3s of the work or going all the way back to the beginning and having no idea how to handle the situation. This is where muscle memory can play tricks on you. You can depend upon it to a certain extent while reinforcing intentional understanding of the music.

Thanks for the great questions! Again, I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store.

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Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store, with a really interesting question. What is the farthest a piano has ever been moved? Here at Living Pianos, we move pianos all the time. So, this question is very close to my heart.

Going across the country is around 3,000 miles from Maine to California. When you go overseas, of course, it is a much greater distance. We had the opportunity to sell a concert grand to the Royal Theater in London. That is almost five and a half thousand miles away! Interestingly, that move was a piece of cake until the last couple of miles. When you get to the inner city of London, it actually cost more for the last couple of miles than the entire rest of the move including crating the piano! This is their way of limiting traffic in the city.

How Far Have We Delivered Pianos?

We also have had opportunities to sell pianos to China. Shenzen is about 7,200 miles away. So, that is certainly far away. We’ve never moved a piano to Australia – at least not yet. If we have the opportunity, it will be over 8,100 miles away. Is that the farthest a piano can be moved? You’d think it would be since it is on the other side of the planet. Actually, no!

We’ve sold pianos to Singapore which is about 8,800 miles away.

That is the farthest we have moved pianos. But what is the theoretical limit a piano could be possibly be moved? Unless you are just taking a piano for a ride around and around the world, which could be endless, half-way around the world at the equator is the greatest distance at about 12,500 miles. So, that is the theoretical limit. Or is it? Did you know:

There is a piano on the International Space Station!

It is actually a digital keyboard. But, it is a piano nonetheless. For the sake of discussion, let’s talk about that. Once again, orbiting the Earth again and again could be many thousands of miles. But you would be just taking a piano for a ride and not actually moving it from point A to point B. The International Space Station is only about 300 miles away, straight up at the point at which it passes over you. So, the final answer is, if you are going halfway around the world at the equator, that would be the farthest you could move a piano which is 12,500 miles.

It’s interesting to wrap your head around what it takes to move pianos and how far they possibly can go. I hope this has been fun for you. Keep those questions coming in and you’ll see them in future articles and videos! Thanks again, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store.

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Hi, I’m Robert Estrin at LivingPianos.com. The question today is, Who Was Billy Joel’s Piano Teacher?

Billy Joel is an institution of American popular music, one of the great songwriters and one of the great popular piano players of the whole century! You might wonder where he learned how to play the piano. If you look on Wikipedia and other online resources, you’re going to discover a very interesting fact:

My father, Morton Estrin, is listed as Billy Joel’s piano teacher!

This is true. Billy Joel went to HIcksville HIgh School the same high school I went to 30 miles from New York City. However, Billy Joel is a bit older than me. So, our time in school never overlapped. In fact, even though he studied piano in the house where I lived, I never ran into him. Of course, it wouldn’t have meant anything since he wasn’t famous as a child!

Billy Joel’s Early Piano Studies

People would often ask my father, “What was Billy Joel like as a student?” And he would reply, “Well, he was a kid!” When you think about it, he was teaching Billy Joel student-level music such as Clementi sonatinas. His mother, like so many mothers back then made him study the piano. At the time, it probably wasn’t the most pivotal thing in Billy Joel’s life. It is very interesting that in more recent decades,

Billy Joel has been composing some substantial classical music.

I don’t know how much of his early musical training rubbed off or if his passion for classical composing is something that developed much later in his life. Through the years both Billy Joel and my father used each other in their bios for obvious reasons. However, I’m not sure how substantial the musical relationship was way back then, because Billy was only a child. Naturally, Billy went in a very different direction with his music.

My father was completely immersed in classical music.

That was his entire world. And of course, Billy Joel went on to become one of the great singer-songwriters of American popular music.

Visiting the House Where Billy Joel had his Piano Lessons.

So, that’s the long and short of it. I thought you’d be interested in that fact because people always ask me about it. It’s an interesting story. I have one small anecdotes you may find interesting. One of the times my sister and I were visiting my father in New York, we decided to go just a couple of miles away to the house in Hicksville where we grew up before we moved to another house in Hicksville. So, we went to the old Levitt house in the Levittown section of Hicksville, and there was the house where we were born! We’re sitting in front of it in the car looking at it thinking, “Do we dare knock on the door?” I don’t know if you’ve ever done anything like that. So, we decided to do it! We knocked on the door and introduced ourselves telling them, “We used to live in this house.” And before we could say one word, the woman living there said,

“Did you know that Billy Joel had his piano lessons right upstairs here?”

I said, “Yes, yes. We know that.” She was very proud of that fact. And so that’s the only anecdote I have to share about this. I wish I had more stories for you, but it is a fact that Billy Joel studied piano with my father, Morton Estrin.

Hope you’ve enjoyed this. Again, I am Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store. See you next time.

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This is Robert Estrin at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store. The question I get all the time from people, and I thought I’d make a video for you about, is how much does it cost to move a piano?

Before I made this video I was curious about what information is on the internet about this. I was shocked to discover that there are really, really low prices listed concerning moving pianos, which may or may not be accurate. You may wonder how can this can be. Well, here is the long and short of it. Number one is,

Piano moves have different costs in different parts of the country.

Since piano moving is such a specialized skill, prices are all over the map. First things first, I would recommend if you ever have a piano to be moved:

Only use movers who specialize in moving nothing but pianos.

If you use a general purpose mover, they don’t know how to do the things that need to be done, particularly on grand pianos since the legs and the pedals need to be removed. They can definitely do damage if they are not skilled in moving pianos. What I’m referring to now is regarding only specialized piano movers.

We move pianos all over the country, so we have a handle on this whole subject. Some areas of the country that are isolated, might not have any piano movers to speak of and they may require extensive travel just to be able to accommodate a piano move. Of course, that’s going to cost you a lot if you’re in a remote area without any piano movers. But there are metropolitan areas that are incredibly expensive to move pianos sometime.

It seems that it’s almost like a consortium. I don’t know if there’s a mafia type of situation or what, but some areas are drastically more expensive than other areas. Reading on the internet, I read that moving uprights costs $100 to $200, and a grand, $150 to $300. This is a best case scenario in most circumstances. As they say, your mileage may vary!

Here in southern California, there indeed is a lot of competition and you can call a number of movers and potentially find a low price to move a piano. However, if you have a really nice piano, you might think twice about using some of the lower priced piano movers who may show up with just a pickup truck and strap your piano without even covering it! You might feel that it’s not a problem since it almost never rains here. But you might not like that whole idea. To have a covered truck with a lift gate, a company that’s insured for $1 million, if God forbid there’s a catastrophe, these can all be things of value regarding a piano move. So, there’s an incredibly wide range.

Another thing is, movers have to deal with unusual challenges like stairs or sharp right angle turns where pianos have to go up on end in a non-standard way. Even elevators can present challenges. Typically, pianos are moved on the long flat side facing down with the pedals and the legs removed. Sometimes a piano may have to go up on the keyboard end, which is not standard, and movers need extra people to accommodate that sort of move. Tight spaces, or sharp turns can also present additional challenges and costs.

There are a wide range of costs for piano moves.

If you realize the intensity of the work and the intelligence required for piano moves, you’ll have a deep respect for your piano movers! I hope this has been helpful for you. I gave you those minimum numbers. You’ll have to check in your local area. It’s not worth skimping if you have a nice piano. Make sure they’re insured and experienced. Check reviews online, and you should be in good shape.

Once again, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com Your Online Piano Store. Thanks for joining me.

Hi, I’m Robert Estrin. This is LivingPianos.com. The question today is, “How Long Does it Take to Rebuild a Piano?”

There’s a very wide range of time, and there are many aspects to this question. Let’s say you have a piano you want to have rebuilt. Perhaps you have a Steinway, you want to have restored and you decide to send it to Steinway to rebuild. You’re probably going to wait over a year to get your piano back. It can take that long! Now, does that mean they’re taking the entire year to rebuild it? Well, yes and no. They might do parts of different pianos simultaneously. However:

It takes at least months to rebuild a piano.

Now, the other aspect of this question is, what does it mean to rebuild a piano? There are different parts of a piano that can be rebuilt. For example, are you replacing the sound board or repairing the old one? Are you creating a new key set, or are you staying with the original keys? There are different parts of a piano that can be utilized in rebuilding in most instances. Unless you have a piano that’s a complete disaster, you’re going to utilize a lot of the existing parts, so it can take different amounts of time depending upon how much work is required.

Let’s say, for example, you have an unusual piano from the late 1800s with a pre-modern action and it’s an art-case with beautiful scroll work, and some of the scroll work is missing. Perhaps other parts of the piano are destroyed as well, such as the music rack or one of the legs. It could take a very long time to match the woods, to hand-carve the beautiful intricate parts to make the piano match the way it was originally manufactured.

It could take longer than a year.

But I would say that any kind of even the most basic rebuilding that keeps the original action and replaces only some action parts, replaces strings, perhaps pin block, refinish the case, re-guild the plate, has got to take an absolute minimum of two to three months, if that’s all they’re working on. It is a big job. Not only that, you don’t want to rush through it because a piano needs to settle in, and a great part of the work of rebuilding a piano comes after the rebuilding in adjusting everything to play on a high level. On top of that, it’s important to make sure everything is stable.

If a piano has just been rebuilt and hasn’t had fine work performed, it will sound horrendous!

It takes tremendous refinement to get a rebuilt piano to play on a high level. It’s best to let the piano sit, play it, and have technicians work on it, and, of course, even over the next year or two, a rebuilt piano, just like a brand-new piano, is not going to be really settled in and stable for at least a year or two. You must play the piano and have it serviced on a very regular basis until it becomes stable.

So it’s all part of the process. I hope this has been helpful for you. If you have a piano you’re thinking of rebuilding and you want any advice, you’re welcome to contact us here at info@livingpianos.com. Thanks again. I’m Robert Estrin. We’ll see you next time.

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I’m Robert Estrin and this is LivingPianos.com. The question today came from a reader who asks, “How do you know when the pedal markings are written by the composer?” So, the fundamental question is, “Do composers write in pedal markings for the piano?” The simple answer is, the vast majority of the time, no. You might wonder why not? Why do they do it sometimes and not all the time? Here’s the long and short of it.

Pedaling on the piano encompasses so many decisions that are made not only from an artistic and personal expression standpoint, but also the acoustics of the room. For example, let’s say you are performing a concert in a church or a chapel that has very live acoustics. It is almost like putting the pedal down with an echoing effect. In a room such as that in order to not get a muddy sound, you would use much less pedal than in a dry room with carpeting and drapes where there is no natural reverberation.

Pianos also differ. When you play a high note like the third E above middle C on a Mason and Hamlin piano, there is a damper which stops the sound as soon as you release the key. The note ends very quickly. The F right above has no damper and rings on even after you let go of the key. Some pianos have dampers all the way to F sharp and G is the first note that rings on after the release of the key. If you were playing a Steinway or a Baldwin, the E has no damper! So, it rings on long after the key is released.

You have to be able to determine where to use pedaling based upon the specific piano and acoustics of the room.

Where do composers write pedal markings in? If there is a place where you wouldn’t expect the pedal to be used, they may write it in to guide you so you’ll understand the composer’s intentions. However, oftentimes you’ll see pedal markings all over the score.

How do you know if pedal markings are written by the composer?

I recommend getting editions that are referred to as “urtext”. Urtext editions are only what the composers wrote. If there are other markings, they usually will have them in a different typeset. They may be in grey or have footnotes telling you what is original and what the editor has added.

Composers almost never wrote fingerings in. Whenever you see fingerings on your score on your piano, those are written in by the editor, not the composer.

Pedal markings and sometimes expression markings can be added by the editor.

You want to know what the composer actually wrote, which is no easy task. This is why you want to have an authoritative edition that goes through all the old autographed editions and early printed scores. This way you can determine what is actually authentic from the composer.

You have to use your own judgment with pedaling. The guides you see are only editorial suggestions the vast majority of the time. It gets even trickier still. For example, Beethoven sometimes wrote pedal markings in. If you have ever had the opportunity to play a Beethoven era piano, you will hear how drastically different they are from modern pianos.

You may not pedal the same on a Beethoven era piano as you would on a modern piano.

You have to take it all with a grain of salt. A good teacher will guide beginners and intermediate students writing in pedal markings so they will understand the nature of how to deal with pedal changes. It is generally where harmonies change, however, it can get much more complicated in music that has different lines and notes you can’t possibly hold with your fingers.

There is an art to pedaling just as there is to fingering and other aspects of playing the piano. A great teacher and good authoritative editions serve you well. Thanks for the great question! We’ll see you next time here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store.

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Robert Estrin here from LivingPianos.com with another great question. When was the golden age of pianos? You may have heard the term, “Golden Era”, particularly referring to American pianos. Did you know,

A hundred years ago there were over a thousand companies manufacturing pianos in the United States!

Even before the Great Depression and the crash of the stock market in 1929 there were still hundreds of piano companies in the U.S. The piano was as ubiquitous in homes as big screen televisions are today and in no small part by the player piano.

The player piano was the first home entertainment system.

In the late 1920’s the piano plummeted as radio and phonograph technologies came about. Of course when the Great Depression hit, the piano industry was heavily impacted. The golden era was really before this time. Yet, you could say it extended to before World War II when there were still hundreds of piano companies in this country.

However, during the 1930’s there was tremendous attrition of the piano market for the reasons I articulated: The Great Depression as well as technologies in audio such as radio and the phonograph dealt a death blow to the piano market. Yet there were still many companies making fine pianos.

Ten times more new pianos were sold in the United States sometime between the turn of the century and before World War I.

Remember, that was when the population was less than ⅓ of what we have today! The piano was extremely popular. That was the golden era.

Today, the piano has a renascence of activity in:

China where there are more companies manufacturing pianos than there are piano stores in the United States!

80% of the world’s piano students are in China today. You’ve got to be thankful that the piano is alive and well, just not in the United States like it used to be.

Of course, there are many of you who love the piano just as I do and they will always be around. Keep the questions coming in, again I’m Robert Estrin from LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store.

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This is Robert Estrin from LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store with the question: What is the future of player piano technology? If you’ve been paying attention in the last couple of decades to what has been going on in this field, it is pretty fantastic. Player pianos have a long, rich history going back to the 19th Century. This was a contraption that went in front of your piano to play it. Soon after was an explosion of the player piano. Every home had to have one, much like how we have big-screen televisions today in just about every home. They were incredibly popular. Three times more pianos were purchased back then than today, with a population less than a third of what it is now. It was really the glory days of the player piano at the turn of the century until the 1920’s when the phonograph and radio came in and wiped out the player piano. However, they made a resurgence in the 1980s with the cassette-based player, floppy disks, CDs, and today we have wireless player pianos.

Wireless Piano Player Technology

Wireless player pianos can both record and play back performances. Yamaha’s Disklavier has been doing that for years on a very high level. Steinway with their Spirio system can now record and playback impeccably. There are other amazing things they can do. For example, the libraries that were created on the piano rolls of the expressive players, which they had at the turn of the century, offers performances of composers and pianists who may have recorded on 78 RPM awful sounding recordings. They recorded on piano rolls which recorded every nuance of their playing and have since been digitized. You can listen to Rachmaninoff or Gershwin play ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ on your modern player piano.

On the Spirio system and the Disklavier, they have their artists come in and make titles. They have other instruments that play through audio in perfect synchronization. You can even have videos of your performers and your piano plays live with the video. These are all things that are happening now. There are other features you may not be aware of. Disklavier can have concerts in multiple cities simultaneously by having their systems set up in concert halls. Auditions are also done this way so that people don’t have to travel so far. They may have a West Coast center and a New York center where people can play at and the judges can be wherever they want to be. The piano will play the same part for them, live.

What is on the horizon with player piano technology?

Are we done? Not by a long shot. One thing that Steinway is doing is taking old audio recordings of Horowitz, Rubinstein, and others and are digitizing them so that your piano plays their actual piano performance, even if they never made piano rolls. That technology may get good enough so that you could do that on your own someday. It isn’t there yet, but it is something to look forward to.

Another thing to look for is the emergence of hybrid pianos. Hybrid pianos use the front end of an acoustic piano, the action, with a digital sound generation. Combine that with player technology and the possibilities are endless. What is in store with player piano technologies? We can only guess. It has been very exciting in the last few years. I look forward myself and have been working on a prototype of a new category of modular concert grand systems that you’ll be hearing more about.

So glad to have you join me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store.

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This is Robert Estrin at livingpianos.com. The question today is, can music be created instantly? Truth be known, nearly all the great composers were phenomenal improvisers. We can only imagine what it must have been like sitting and hearing Liszt make up one of his fantasies, or hearing Mozart improvise theme, variations and sonata movements with good form and beautiful architecture of melodies and harmonies. So, yes, music can be created instantly.
In this video, I’m going to create an improvisation and see what I can create for you on the spot with zero preconceived notions as to what is going to come out. I hope you enjoy!

Is improvisation dead in the world today?

Well, in classical music it’s really just a micron of the entire industry of classical music. But in jazz and other forms of music, improvisation is a vibrant art form, and the crafting of solos by great jazz artists is awe-inspiring.

So, the tradition lives on in other styles of music today. I hope you’ve enjoyed this. Again, I’m Robert Estrin here at livingpianos.com, Your Online Piano Store.
Thanks so much for joining me.

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