Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to tell you about the magic of fractal practicing. Fractals are when one part of something is the same as the whole. No matter how small you go, it’s just a replication of the bigger part. You’ve probably seen pictures that are fractals. No matter how much you zoom in, you keep seeing the same patterns. Your music could be thought of in the same way.
Watch the video to see the demonstration!
I’m going to demonstrate with a little piece of Kabalevsky called Fairy Tale. I’m going to start at the beginning and play a little bit, delineating each phrase for you. Then I’m going to do it again, but this time I’m going to put those two phrases together as one long phrase and see what that sounds like.
You could take a whole section of music and think of it as one big phrase.
Ultimately, the entire piece is one statement. As Rachmaninoff said, “The bigger the phrase, the bigger the musician.” Now, here’s where it gets really interesting. If you’re playing a program with several different pieces, for example, you play a sonata, which has three or four movements. At first, each movement is its own concept, its own large phrase. Eventually, the whole sonata becomes a coherent whole thought—one big phrase. Then half a program can become one musical statement. And then the entire program can be one big phrase.
If you start thinking about these larger units in your music, it becomes true storytelling on a personal level.
It’s not just each little individual phrase; it’s how the phrase is built into a coherent whole that’s greater than the sum of the parts. So go through your score, whether it’s Mozart or Chopin. First, identify the smallest unit that makes sense as a phrase with a nice rise and fall, assuming it’s a melodic piece of music. Then try joining two phrases and making one long phrase out of that. Then maybe even four phrases. Or take an exposition—the whole first section of a sonata movement. See if you can make a coherent whole out of that to figure out where the climax is. Do that with all of your music and find all the different fractals, all the different-sized phrases, and you can have a coherent whole that has all the nuances of these smaller phrases but doesn’t lose sight of the whole. And that’s what makes a great performance! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
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