Tag Archives: music theory

How Do You Compose A Cadenza?

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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Why Crying is Essential for Your Musicianship

Hi, I’m Robert Estrin. This is LivingPianos.com and today’s subject is, “Why Crying is Essential for Your Musicianship.” You might think I’ve gone off the deep end with this subject. Crying and music? What does crying have to do with music? A lot.

What is music about?

There are a lot of different styles of music. There’s dance music, there’s electronic music, there’s Gregorian chant. There’s a wide range of music, but ultimately I believe music is primarily a way of expressing emotions – emotions that are impossible to express any other way. Let’s say you have had some really tragic experiences in your life. Everyone experiences tragedy in this world. Nobody is sheltered. I know from the outside it looks like some people have that glorious lives of perfection. If you look on social media, everybody’s having a great time doing the greatest things. But the reality is that it’s just a front. Not just on social media, but even in person. Everybody is guarded, keeping their emotions at bay, not revealing too much for fear of getting caught by somebody who has spurious intentions.

Why do you need to cry?

Why can’t you just go through your life and just ignore those tragedies and the pain? Well, if you’re trying to express emotions honestly in your music, but you haven’t even reckoned the emotions you’re feeling, it’s all but impossible to be genuine in your music. You need to feel things in your life, not just the joyful things, but the tragic things as well. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that if you don’t experience pain in your life by crying, at some point it’s going to come out inappropriately and it will also affect the other side.

How can you feel joy if you don’t feel sadness?

You have to feel. So you must work through your emotions so you can honestly express beautiful music, sad music, happy music. This is a lesson for life as well as for music. And if you have repressed emotions, it’s going to be all but impossible to really have the poetry, and the vision, and the experience that you want to share with others.

I encourage all of you to be honest with yourself and others about your pain.

It’s important to feel your emotions and work through them. It could be what you’ve been looking for to be really expressive in your music. I’d love to hear from any of you out there who’ve had this experience and share it in the comments below.

Thanks so much for joining me. I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store. See you next time!

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Technique vs Musicality

Hi, I’m Robert Estrin. This is LivingPianos.com. Today’s topic is “Technique vs Musicality” There will be a lot of opinions about this subject. But truth be known, you can’t really separate technique from musicality completely.

What is technique?

In its most abstract form, you might think of technique as being the physical capabilities, how fast, how loud, the control, trills octaves, etc. But in its essence, technique is being able to produce on the instrument what you hear in your head. Being able to create something in the outer world from your inner world. Ultimately, that is the secret of technique.

Is technique more important than musicality?

Pretend for a moment that somebody out there just wants technique. They don’t care about the musicality. They’re just making it into a sporting event. Can you really achieve something with that? You might think that if somebody could play faster and louder, or slower and more delicately, and every nuance of touch on such a high level, that they would probably have a career because they’d be so phenomenal. But the truth is, having tremendous technique on the piano is very common. Believe it or not. I know most people haven’t met concert pianists, but there are so many concert pianists around the world who you’ve probably never heard of. If you heard them, you’d be astounded thinking that they’re greatest pianists in the world because they can play so well.

Now let’s talk about musicality.

Can you be musical without technique? Well, just imagine if you considered yourself to be a writer. You’ve got great stories, but you can’t really write and you aren’t a good orator either. You have to have a command of language in order to be able to express anything in writing! It’s the same thing with music. You can’t have musicality abstracted from technique. It takes a technique to be able to produce music. Here’s the good news: The repertoire for piano is so vast that someone who is a relative beginner, if they have a natural emotion in their music, if a teacher guides them with appropriate level of music, it’s possible to play musically even with a very basic technique.

Even beginners can play with musicality.

There’s a piece by Cuthbert Harrison from the book, “ABC Manuals” that I loved as a kid and taught countless times. Because I taught this piece so many times, I heard a lot of kids play it and nobody did what I did with it, which was to play it very slowly. Usually with kids, the more they get to know a piece, the faster it goes. But so much can be done with this relatively simple piece of music that doesn’t take very much technique. You can achieve a great deal of musicality just with the voicing of the notes.

Technique and musicality are both necessary for any musician.

So, if you want to explore musical possibilities and total control, the secret is choosing a piece of music that you can have total command over. I know many of you want to play certain pieces of music you’ve heard for your whole life and that you love so much. But you’re doing yourself a disservice if you spend all your time with music that is above the level at which you can play what you hear in your head and achieve it on the instrument. Start with that premise. And you will develop a technique in service of the music, which is what it’s all about! You can’t really separate technique and musicality. You need to have both in order to achieve greatness on your instrument. And that’s the lesson for today!

Thanks so much for joining me. I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store. See you next time!

info@LivingPianos.com
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How Richard Wagner Led To Atonality In Music

Hi, I’m Robert Estrin. This is LivingPianos.com. Today the subject is “How Richard Wagner Led To Atonality In Music.” If you’re familiar with Wagner’s music, you might be thinking of Ride of the Valkyrie, the Meistersingers, and so much more. It’s as tonal as you can get! So what am I talking about? How could Wagner be associated with atonality?

As counterintuitive as it may seem, it’s a fact that the whole trajectory of music in the late 19th century with Wagner and then Richard Strauss into the 20th century, tonality had constantly shifting key centers. It modulated so often that there was total ambiguity as to what the final notes should be. Usually, you hear a piece and you know where it should end! Not so with Wagner. Certainly in later Wagner, like in Tristan and Isolde. Listen to the main theme. You’ll hear how there’s no key center, even though it’s tonal. Listen to this and you’ll see what I’m talking about. The implications that this brings to music are profound. But what do gorgeous, rich harmonies like those have to do with atonality? Well, If you have more and more shifting key centers, eventually you don’t even have a center of pitch anymore. And that’s exactly what happened.

The 12-tone system

Arnold Schoenberg, another great German composer, is credited with inventing the 12-tone system. That’s where instead of basing a composition on major or minor scales and chords, a tone row was created, putting all of the 12 possible notes in a specific order referred to as a, “tone row”. The whole idea of a tone row is to methodically avoid any kind of preference for any one note over any other note. They are all equal. Whereas in tonal music, there is a pull to certain active tones which must resolve to resting tones. The whole idea of tonality is, some tones are resolved and others must be resolved, not so with atonality.

Wagner pushed the boundaries so far that there was nowhere else to go other than the complete disintegration of tonality.

Listen to early Arnold Schoenberg, for example, his First Chamber Symphony, and you’re going to hear rich, lush, late romantic tonal music that is evocative of Wagner or post-Wagner. And so, Schoenberg himself finally broke through and just eliminated tonality from his music and then Berg and Webern followed suit. That led to a whole other style of atonal music, which truth be known, can be extremely difficult to listen to because the harmonies clash instead of blending. It takes a sophisticated listener to be able to decipher what you’re even hearing because the intervals are not very closely related. You know when you play a fifth, those are related in the overtone series. That’s a subject a little bit too deep for me to get into in this video, but the fact of the matter is, when you have a random arrangement of the 12 tones, you’re going to have music that is generally much more harsh. Which is great for certain styles of music. And I particularly like it when composers utilize elements of atonality in their music. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the entire piece has to be atonal. It’s a tool like anything else, and it can be used to craft wonderful music.

I hope this has been interesting for you. I’d love to hear your comments about this! And any of you who have different perspectives on this, I welcome them in the comments and you’re always welcome to contact us at info@livingpianos.com, We really appreciate bringing these to you and there’s lots more to come.

Thanks so much for joining me. I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store. See you next time!

The Man Who Could Sight-Read Anything On the Piano

I’m Robert Estrin. This is LivingPianos.com. Today I’m going to tell you about the man who could sight-read anything on the piano. Now that seems like a bold claim, so let me back up a bit and give you some perspective on this.

My father, Morton Estrin, would sight read anything, anytime, with anyone. For example, I remember once we were visiting my uncle Harvey Estrin. Harvey was a top-line studio musician in New York City, a woodwind man who played on many film scores, commercials, the ABC orchestra, and much more. His wife, Trudy Kane, was the principal flutist in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. We had a social visit, and Trudy handed my father the score of a piece he’d never even heard before. I believe it was the Reinecke Flute Sonata for flute and piano. Indeed, my father and Trudy played this together, and it was a beautiful performance – right at sight! I was amazed at the cohesiveness of the performance, and that he could sight read with that level of musicianship.

However, there are always limits, aren’t there?

I actually majored in both piano and French horn at the Manhattan School of Music. I played French horn from the time I was in fourth grade. My father was kind enough to accompany me whenever I’d ask him. As a matter of fact, I probably pushed that a little harder than I should have in retrospect, because he was very busy between his performing and teaching, but he was so gracious about it.

If any of you pianists out there have ever accompanied concertos, you probably know that many of them are incredibly awkward. For example, the Strauss Second Horn Concerto has so much going on in the orchestral writing, that if you look at the score, the piano reduction is filled with little notes in the orchestra part that you can’t possibly play on the piano. There aren’t enough fingers in the hands!

Sometimes there are other problems. A good example of this is, the Telemann Horn Concerto. Telemann is credited with composing more music than any other composer who ever lived, so this is a rather obscure work, except maybe to French hornists! My father was kind enough to accompany me on this. In fact, I still have the music to that piece, and in looking at the score, I can see that he wrote in fingering. So, he practiced this piece. The orchestra part has repeated 16th notes in the right hand. Repeated notes on the strings is easy. The bow goes back and forth. On the piano, it’s not so easy. You can see why my father wrote in fingerings for this.

The man who could sight-read anything is the great pianist John Ogdon.

John Ogden won the Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition the same year Vladimir Ashkenazy won it. They tied for first place. John Ogdon had an illustrious career. His recordings of the Brahms Concertos, his Liszt recordings (and more) reveal spectacular playing! I was fortunate enough to study with him during my time at Indiana University

It came to our attention, all of us who studied with him at Indiana University, that he could sight-read anything. So, we would come into lessons and put scores in front of him. It seemed like there was nothing he couldn’t read! But, I wondered if maybe he knew the pieces.

One day he invited me to his home and he told me to bring my horn; he’d accompany me.

I couldn’t believe it! I brought a stack of music. And just for fun, I brought that Telemann Concerto with that impossible piano part. What I haven’t told you yet is that as hard as the repeated 16th notes in the right hand are, underneath those were eighth notes in the right hand. So every other note, you’ve got a note underneath it in the tenor line, and that’s just the right hand! My father didn’t even bother trying to play those other notes. And he had practiced to the point of writing in fingerings just to be able to negotiate the repeated notes!

I put the score in front of John Ogdon. He said, “I’ve never seen this.” And I said, “Well, it goes kind of fast.” He sailed into it even faster than I played it and nailed it perfectly. He didn’t leave out any notes! If I hadn’t seen this with my own eyes and heard it with my own ears, I would tell anyone that this is absolutely impossible. But yet, John Ogdon could read anything.

That is my story about John Ogden’s incredible sight-reading ability. I hope that you’ve enjoyed this story – and there’s lots more videos coming your way. Thanks for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store.

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The Secrets of Interlocking Octaves on the Piano

I’m Robert Estrin from LivingPianos.com. Today’s topic is, “The Secrets of Interlocking Octaves on the Piano.” What are interlocking octaves? It’s a great technique that creates a dazzling sound and it’s actually easier than it sounds! It’s always nice to have something that sounds hard but isn’t all that hard to play.

A good example of this is the end of the B-minor scherzo of Chopin. There’s a chromatic scale that goes all the way up the piano. But some people like to play interlocking octaves instead of just a simple chromatic scale. How do you do that? I’m going to show you the trick to it. It’s so easy!

Interlocking octaves are easier to play than the chromatic scale and it sounds very impressive.

Even though Chopin didn’t compose this section in octaves, a lot of pianists play it that way. I like to play it with interlocking octaves. It caps off the finale of this incredibly energetic piece – a final burst of musical energy. So how is this done? First of all, you have to know how to play octaves. I have other videos on that subject. You can click here to check it out:

THE BEST PIANO EXERCISES (PART 4) – OCTAVES

To play a chromatic scale with two hands interlocking, each hand is playing a whole tone scale.

A chromatic scale is every single key on the piano, black and white next to each other, while a whole tone scale is every other key on the piano. So, the left hand plays a whole tone scale and the right hand plays the other notes of the chromatic scale, creating another whole tone scale. That’s the way it works. And when you put them together, indeed your thumbs are playing a chromatic scale. So there’s a chromatic scale with the thumbs. Just add the pinkies and you have interlocking octaves. That’s the secret to interlocking octaves!

If you can play octaves, interlocking octaves are a piece of cake. And as I said, they sound very impressive. It’s a virtuoso sound that doesn’t take virtuoso technique – just good octave technique. You too can play interlocking octaves like at the end of the Chopin B-minor scherzo. I hope this has been helpful for you. I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store.

info@LivingPianos.com
949-244-3729