Tag Archives: robert estrin

How to Play the Piano Without Looking at Your Hands

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The topic today is about the magic of the five finger position on the piano. This is particularly important for beginning students. First I’m going to explain what I mean. Put your five fingers over five keys, for example right now I’m over C, D, E, F, G in both hands. Interestingly, when young students are playing, you’ll notice that they will constantly be looking down, even if they are in a five finger position. But the keys aren’t going to go anywhere! If you just leave your hands in this position you should be able to have your eyes closed and play whatever key you want. This is a great way to develop reading skills, because you know which fingers go down in each hand in order to play those five notes.

Of course, it can be shifted to other keys.

You might rest your fingers over G, A, B, C, D. Whatever the position, once you are comfortable in that position you should be able to play without looking down at your hands at all. This is invaluable, because as music gets more complex you can do things like reach one note beyond. It’s not a far reach to be able to play one key beyond in one hand or the other. Getting that sense of the keyboard, of where the notes are and where your hands are on them without having to look down is so important. And if you don’t do it in the five finger position when you first start, you’ll likely never do it. So it’s really important to get comfortable playing in that position without having to look down at your hands, to develop your connection between your fingers and the keyboard, irrespective of looking at them.

That is the secret of the five finger position!

There’s amazing things you can do just with five keys on the piano! So test yourself. Close your eyes and play, and see if you can hit the keys you intend to hit. Naturally, if you’re at a more advanced level, go back to some easier music. If you find your reading skills are really lacking, try to find books that are in that five finger position and sight read without looking down at your hands at all. Get comfortable with that, and build up from there. This could be a tremendous help for you to develop your sight reading skills with that connection to the keyboard just from the feel of the keys. I hope this is helpful for you! I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

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Robert@LivingPianos.com
949-244-3729

Learn the Piano While You Sleep?

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The question today is very thought-provoking. Can you learn to play the piano while you sleep? This might sound absurd, but there’s actually scientific evidence supporting the idea that there is a possibility of learning music while you sleep!

There was a study where researchers taught a group of people to play piano melodies using a technique borrowed from the video game Guitar Hero. Afterwards, all the volunteers slept. When they woke up, they were all asked to play the music again. Unbeknownst to the sleeping participants, one group heard the melody they had just learned as they slept, while the other group did not. The volunteers who heard the music while they slept, even though they had no memory of it, played the melody far better than those who didn’t hear it. So indeed, you can absorb some information while sleeping.

Things you think about just before bedtime can seep into your subconscious.

There have been other studies showing how what you think about just before going to bed affects you. Now you probably are already somewhat aware of this phenomenon. Did you ever think of scary things before going to bed? Maybe you watched a horror movie before bed and then had nightmares. So, you can actually leverage your practice time by doing some practicing, or at least mentally refreshing the music you learned during the day, just before going to bed. That way it’s percolating in your head and will get reinforced.

Sometimes I will have music going on in my head all night long!

Every time I wake up, I’ll still be at that same place in the music. The same themes keep playing mentally. Indeed, your subconscious is affected by your consciousness just before bedtime, and even while you’re sleeping. I’m not sure if there’s any way of leveraging the time you’re asleep by playing recordings of pieces you are learning. But certainly refreshing the music you played throughout the day just before bedtime is going to help you reinforce things by cementing it in your subconscious.

I bet you didn’t expect this, but there are scientific studies proving this phenomena. I do it all the time! Sometimes I actually come up with music in the middle of the night. Surprisingly, I’ll play it through a few times in my head and in the morning I still remember it! So, you can cement things through your sleep, by just refreshing before bedtime. Try it out and see how it works for you! Thanks again for joining me! I’m Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
Please consider joining the Living Pianos Patreon to help support us and get access to extra Living Pianos content!

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949-244-3729

How Technology has Completely Changed Music

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s question comes from a viewer. Mike asks, “How has technology changed how we learn and experience music?” This is a deep subject. I’m going to give some pointers and a bit of a historical perspective.

We take modern technology for granted to a great extent. But early in the 20th century, pianists and musicians of every ilk had no idea what other people did in music. People would only know the few musicians who toured in their area. Until finally, when recording came about, people were able to hear other performers! People living in rural areas didn’t even have access to symphony orchestras. So, people would learn how to play four hand arrangements of Beethoven symphonies (and others), because there were no opportunities to hear the music any other way.

Today it’s so easy. You can just go on YouTube or Spotify and instantly have access to many performances of almost anything you can think of!

One thing that this has done is make performers much more homogenous. If you listen to recordings from the infancy of recording in the 1930s, the variety of interpretations was astounding because everybody didn’t hear everybody else. There wasn’t a “normal” performance at that point. Listen to Cortot, Schnabel, Rachmaninoff, Hofmann or Levine and you can’t believe the variety of ideas in their interpretations of pieces. So, it’s a little bit sad that people now are so highly influenced by each other that everybody sounds more and more like one another. That’s one of the downsides. The positive is being exposed to so many great instrumentalists, as well as so much music literally at your fingertips. It’s phenomenal! So it’s a balance, but overall I think it’s positive.

In terms of learning music, MIDI, the Musical Instrument Digital Interface that came about in the 1980s, was a tremendous development.

Previous to MIDI, anybody who wanted a computer music system had to invest tens of thousands of dollars in a turnkey system by a company that offered them. For example, New England Digital had the Synclavier system, Fairlight had theirs. This was very expensive! MIDI enabled products from any manufacturer to connect to any other. So this ushered in things like music notation transcription software. With this you could take any keyboard that has MIDI and it could print out the music on your computer. What a time saver that is!

The downside of that is some people will just play into their computers, not really giving thought to each note. When you’re working with a pencil, much less a quill and ink, you are thinking about every note you’re writing, because it’s an arduous task and you don’t want to get it wrong. But if you could just play things in, the same thought isn’t required. I’ve seen some compositions where it was obvious they didn’t really understand what they were writing, because the way it was notated didn’t make sense rhythmically. Just because you have these tools doesn’t mean they’re necessarily going to be used in a positive way.

There are music education software programs for things like note reading.

It used to be the best tools in music education you could hope for were flashcards. Now you have apps that can help you learn to read music! There are even music software programs that can show you if you’re playing something right. It shows you what notes you missed! So there are tremendous opportunities and developments in music education regarding technology, not to mention what’s possible with recording. You can use an iPhone to make what would have been a professional video or audio recording in the 1980s, and share it with the world at the click of a few buttons. It’s pretty remarkable!

Overall I’d say technology is ushering in a lot of positive new learning strategies. And we have easy access to almost everything ever recorded! We have all kinds of tools at our disposal and yes, they can be used positively. But it doesn’t mean that we’re going to have better music just because we have these tools. Having great teachers is invaluable, technology or not. So, that’s my take on this subject. It’s a deep subject. We can get a lot of discussions going in the comments on YouTube! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

Please consider joining the Living Pianos Patreon to help support us and get access to extra Living Pianos content!
www.patreon.com/robertestrin

Robert@LivingPianos.com

949-244-3729

The Secret of Music: Randomness Vs. Order

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today’s topic is about the Secret of Music: Order Versus Randomness. This is a weighty topic. The essential truth is that familiarness is comfortable, but if things are too familiar and predictable they can be boring. This is true of everything, not just music. On the other side, randomness is very interesting but it can be difficult to digest. Listening to music that’s all random can sound cacophonous and it’s difficult to make sense of it.

Something that has an element of order but enough randomness to keep you wondering what’s coming next can be very engaging!

Abstract Art

Looking at a painting that contains a bunch of random squiggly lines and different colors might be interesting for a while. But it’s exhausting trying to make sense of it, because as humans, we seek to find order in things in order to gain understanding. Conversely, something that is predictably geometric is equally boring since there is nothing new to surprise you and keep you engaged. Elements of both order and randomness are intrinsically important in art and music.

Here’s an historical perspective on this. The origins of written music goes back to Gregorian chant in the 9th century, which was monophonic plainsong based upon liturgical text. The music grew in complexity somewhat during the Renaissance gaining polyphony and other elements. Music got more and more complex in the later Baroque era. In fact, during Bach’s later years, he was writing some fantastically complex music like Art of the Fugue. He had actually lost favor in the public and many composers writing the new simpler, structured Classical style were more popular than he was, including his own son Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach! Can you imagine such a thing? So music became more and more complex. I wouldn’t describe the late Baroque music as being random, but if you listen to a complex multi-voice fugue it can almost feel random the first time you hear it if you’re not musically astute and comfortable with that level of complexity. This is one of the reasons why music with a structured form became much more popular in the Classical era with Mozart and Haydn. With very clear repetition, development and recapitulation of themes, it was very digestible music. Over the centuries, music became more and more complex once again. Beethoven expanded the form. Then in the Romantic era, music became more overtly emotional.

Harmonies became more and more complicated, until finally composers were writing things that were not based upon tonality.

Alexander Scriabin, at the turn of the 20th century, was writing pieces based upon all different intervals, even ninths! Bartok was also writing music that bordered on atonality. But it was Arnold Schoenberg who came up with the twelve-tone system which systematically avoided repetition of any of the 12 possible notes in what was called a tone row. Music composed with the 12-tone system was extremely difficult to sing. Things went even further with Anton Webern who serialized not just pitches, but rhythms, systematically avoiding rhythmic patterns. Even textures and articulations were serialized in a similar manner. So, there was very little to grab onto. As a work of sheer mathematics, many of these works were brilliant compositions. But this music is extremely challenging to listen to.

This led to a major breakdown of music once again which led to minimalism.

People wanted something that was digestible with repeated patterns. Not to say that minimalism is simple, because the way things are nested and overlapped can be quite fascinating. But compared to what came before, it was much more listenable. So, you see the historical pattern of music becoming more and more complex over time until there’s a breakdown to something simpler, and then the process starts all over again. The intrinsic nature of what makes music tick is that balance between order and randomness.

I hope this is enlightening for you. I’d love to hear your opinions on this subject! It’s really fascinating how our brains perceive things. The comfort of the familiar, and the exploration of the new, and how those two things are balanced is really what it’s all about in music and art, and in life itself! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

Please consider joining the Living Pianos Patreon to help support us and get access to extra Living Pianos content! There are some exciting new developments you’re going to hear about soon!

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Robert@LivingPianos.com
949-244-3729

How to Make it in Music (Or Any Other Field)

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. There are many aspects to becoming a successful musician. Like any other field, it requires a combination of talent, intelligence, training, and consistent work. We could explore all the intricacies of the nuts and bolts of carving out a career. But today I am going to focus attention on one particular aspect of how to approach developing a career in music which relates to almost any endeavor. Sometimes, the hardest thing is just knowing where to begin. You are faced with a myriad of possibilities of what to do each moment of every day. The great trumpeter Adoph Herseth said:

“Analysis = Paralysis”

It would be comforting to have a clear vision of all the steps involved in carving out a successful life in music or whatever it is you want to achieve. But the reality is often murky with vague possibilities of how to approach building a meaningful career. But sometimes you just have to do something in order to know how to proceed.

It’s like if you were lost in the woods. Obviously, just standing there, you aren’t going to escape to safety before dark. But you certainly don’t want to get deeper into the abyss surrounding you! So, what is necessary is to start moving and looking for clues. Perhaps you know that there is a mountainside beyond the road you entered the forest. But you can’t see through the thick brush. But if you come upon a stream, you can notice the direction of the water and surmise that it must be coming from a higher elevation. So, you can follow the stream and hope it leads to something familiar. Then maybe there is a clearing and you can see the mountainside and then you know you are on the right path. Or perhaps not! You may have to make adjustments along the journey to safety. It’s exactly the same thing when trying to carve out a new path in your life.

You must take steps in the general direction you want to go even though you don’t know exactly where you are headed!

As time goes on, you make the necessary adjustments in your direction in order to achieve the desired goal. You will learn how to achieve success as you face obstacles learning what works and what doesn’t work. Whole new avenues of possibilities will emerge as you bravely power on without the comfort of a clear plan. This is the way most people find fulfillment in their lives. Only from the outside looking in, in hindsight does it ever appear that people know exactly what they are doing.

Adversity and unexpected twists and turns form the foundation for building a plan of action.

So, even if you don’t know exactly where you are going or how you are going to get there, you must move in the general direction in order to gain clues and insights as to how to achieve a fulfilling life in music or whatever it is you have a passion for in life – just like finding your way out when you are lost in the wilderness.

I hope this life lesson resonates with you. I would love to hear from those of you who have either bravely forged ahead in life even though you didn’t know exactly where you were headed, or from those of you who are trying to gain the courage to take the first step to a new life. You must keep moving forward as you learn from both adversity and success.

Thanks for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.

Robert@LivingPianos.com
949-244-3729