Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about playing by ear. Will playing by ear hurt your classical playing? There are many teachers who tell their students they must not play by ear because it will mess up the precision of their classical playing. The only ounce of truth to this is if somebody is learning classical repertoire by ear and not studying the score. You’re never going to be able to play Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, or Bach as intended if you do it all by ear.
Is playing by ear intrinsically bad for you?
Not only does playing by ear not hurt your classical playing, but I’ll go so far as to say that all playing is by ear! You may take it from the sheet music initially, but ultimately, with all the music you play, you’re playing by ear. You first learn it from the visual representations on the page. But then you hear it and create it on the piano. So playing by ear is essential for piano playing. Not only that, but for most styles of music, it’s absolutely necessary to play by ear because the written score is not how that music was conceived to begin with. You’ll never be able to play blues faithfully from a score. You have to be able to play by ear.
What about playing classical music by ear?
Ultimately, when you play your classical music, even though you’re playing the notes faithfully to what the composer wrote, you should be essentially playing by ear. In fact, one of the biggest fears when playing a memorized piece or program is having a memory slip. But if you can play your classical music by ear, how can you possibly have a memory slip? It’s virtually impossible to have a memory slip because even if you forget where your hands go for a moment, you’ll know where you are and you can keep going. You can get back on track instantly because you know what it’s supposed to sound like.
I encourage all of you to play by ear!
Play your classical music by ear. Even though you’ve digested the score from the sheet music, you must transcend the visual and turn it into an aural experience that you can share with your audience. I wonder if any of you disagree with this assessment about playing by ear and how it affects your classical playing. Be sure to let me know how you feel about this in the comments!
Will playing swing rhythms in jazz or blues affect the integrity of your classical playing?
The difference between how you approach 19th-century music compared to 18th-century music is stylistically extremely different. If you can play those styles, which are different from one another, why shouldn’t you be able to expand to other styles of music that have different rhythmic feels? My personal feeling is: the more, the merrier! If you can play more styles of music, you will enjoy music more, and you will be a more well-rounded musician. Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin
Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about why you must know your primary chords. What are primary chords? Well, I’m going to break it down for you today. I’m going to show you something called diatonic chords first, because that’s how you can discover what your primary chords are.
Diatonic chords, simply put, are chords built on every note of the scale.
The simplest chords are triads—three notes arranged in thirds. What are thirds? Thirds are every other note of a scale. If you play every other note of a C major scale, you have a C major chord. If you go up the scale, you can play all your diatonic chords. So D-F-A is also a diatonic triad. E-G-B, and on up the scale forming all the diatonic triads. This is essential to understand, and it can help you immensely in digesting a score if you’re reading or learning it. It’s also valuable just for listening to music.
I’m going to show you what are referred to as primary chords.
If you are vaguely aware of this now, this is going to be a revelatory moment for you. So let’s go through. We start with the one chord, and you notice that you have four half-steps on the bottom between the C and the E. That’s called a major third. Now on the top, there are three half-steps between the E and G. That’s a minor third. When you have a major third on the bottom and a minor third on the top, that is a major triad. This is really fundamental to music. We’re going to go up and discover where the major triads occur in Diatonic Chords. So far, we’ve established that the one chord is indeed major. That is the first primary chord. Where is the next one? If you go to the two chord, on the bottom, you have three half-steps between the D and F, which is a minor third, and you have four half-steps on the top between the F and A, which is a major third. So that’s a minor triad. So the two chord is not a primary chord; it’s a secondary chord because it’s not major. What about the three chord? I bet you can figure this out now that I’ve shown you the secret. You have three half-steps on the bottom and four on the top, so that is a minor triad again. The three chord is also a secondary triad. The four chord has four half-steps on the bottom and three on the top, so it is a major triad. So the one chord and the four chord are both major triads; therefore, they’re primary chords. Are there any other primary chords? The five chord has four half-steps on the bottom and three on top. So that’s another major chord.
The one chord, the four chord, and the five chord are your primary chords.
The six chord has three half-steps on the bottom and four on top; therefore, it’s a minor triad, another secondary chord. We have one more left. The seven chord has three half-steps on the bottom and also three on top. What the heck is going on here? That’s not a major or minor triad. Two minor thirds forms a diminished triad. It’s the only place where a diminished triad occurs in a diatonic chord. To recap, you have your major triads, which are your primary chords, the one, four, and five; you have your secondary chords, which are the two, three, and six, which are all minor; and you have your leading tone, the seventh chord, which is diminished.
Why is this so important?
Those basic one, four, and five chords are intrinsic to Western harmony. It’s a classic, authentic cadence and a great way to establish the key. You can go through all your keys this way. It’s a great way to gain comfort in all the major and minor keys. It’s a terrific way to have your primary chords literally at your fingertips! It makes reading music, understanding the harmonic underpinnings of your music, and learning music much easier.
You should know your primary chords in all keys.
It will really help you to have a good grasp of the harmonic structure of your music. From there, you can expand to your secondary chords and all sorts of interesting chords. But you should absolutely cement your primary chords. I hope this is valuable for you! Let me know in the comments here at LivingPianos.com and on YouTube! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin
Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about playing pianissimo. How many different levels of soft playing are there on the piano? By the end of this video, I’m going to reveal the answer to you!
There are different levels of quiet.
So many times, pieces of music are written to be played softly or even very softly. For example, Clair de Lune is written pianissimo at the beginning and stays pianissimo for a long time. Does that mean you should play that entire section as quietly as possible? I’m going to give you a little analogy. Just imagine you’re with someone who’s very dear to you, and you’re having a tender conversation. Maybe it’s late at night when other people are sleeping and you’re whispering. As you’re whispering, you’re saying very important, personal things about yourself. There’s some animation, and there’s tenderness. It’s all quiet, but there are different levels of quiet, aren’t there?
There must be nuanced expression in your pianissimo playing.
When you are playing quietly, there is nuance of expression, just as there would be in a tender conversation with a loved one. You must have expression in your playing. So the question is: how many levels of soft are there? And the answer is that there’s an infinite range of soft expression, just like dividing halfway between two points again and again and again. There is no limit to how much expression you can bring to a well-regulated piano while maintaining a pianissimo dynamic. I want you to try this with your music and see how many different levels of soft playing you can achieve, getting the maximum expression in your music. Let me know how it works for you in the comments here at LivingPianos.com and on YouTube! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin
Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about why you must peak later in your phrases. What am I talking about? In most lyrical music, that is, music with melody, you have a line that has a rise and a fall. You may have noticed that oftentimes, when you are trying to make those decrescendos to have beautiful phrase endings, it’s difficult to control.
Find musical solutions to your technical problems.
Taking the crescendo of the phrase almost to the end and then tapering off sounds much more musical than peaking in the middle of the phrase. And it’s technically so much easier to execute! I often talk about musical solutions to technical problems, and that’s exactly what this is. The music and the technical execution are in perfect alignment. This is what you must look for, not only in this aspect, which is fundamental to melodic music, but in all your technical challenges in music.
By having the peak of the phrase later in the phrase, you’ll get a more intense expression.
The idea of round phrasing is fundamental to music, but remember to make the peak of your phrase later. It propels the music forward and makes it easier to control the end of the phrase to have a nice, expressive, delicate phrase ending. It’s much akin to the way a wind player or a singer will use the air, and they don’t run out of breath before the end of the phrase. Have you ever heard a singer or wind player who just doesn’t have enough air support? They get to the end of the phrase, and it’s just lacking. For wind players, the pitch goes flat at the end. This is exactly the same idea as in your piano playing. I want you to go through all your lyrical music and try this for yourself! Let me know how this works for you in all of your lyrical music. Leave your comments here at LivingPianos.com and on YouTube! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin
Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today we are going to discuss whether or not you should follow metronome markings in your scores. I’ve had students say to me, “I’m really trying to get this piece up to speed, and the tempo marked in the score is 160. I just can’t get anywhere close to that!” They’re beating themselves up, wondering how they can get it up to that speed. There’s a lot to this subject. I’m going to enlighten you about these metronome markings in scores. But first, I want to show you something that will shed some light on this whole subject.
How fast is Allegro?
I have my metronome here, and there’s a whole range of tempos marked “Allegro”. The very slowest Allegro is 126. That seems fine, but there’s a whole range of Allegro. 126 is the lowest setting that’s marked as Allegro on the metronome. 144 is right in the middle of what that’s marked as Allegro. At this speed, I think some pieces lose their elegance. But here’s what’s really crazy: according to this metronome, 168 is at the top range of Allegro. That is a much faster tempo than what you would generally consider to be Allegro. So that’s not much help, is it?
Are metronome markings in the score written by the composer?
You have a piece of music with a tempo marking. Did the composer put that in there? No. Composers almost never put metronome indications in scores. These are the editor’s suggestions that are put in the score. If you look at different editions, there can be drastically different metronome markings in the scores. So you really can’t go by metronome markings. I say ignore them! They are not of any value. They may or may not have anything to do with musical sensibilities.
If you really want to get a sense of what tempo is appropriate for a piece of music, listen to recordings.
Go on YouTube or Spotify and listen to great pianists playing the piece. Get a feel for the range of tempos. But sometimes you will find different pianists will play the same piece at drastically different tempos. For example, the Rondo alla turca movement of Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 11. Listen to Lang Lang play it, then listen to Glenn Gould play it. These are two noted concert pianists, and they are so drastically different in their tempos. You won’t even believe how different they are! So artists have very different ideas about tempo, but at least you get a range for what most people play.
Does that mean you have to play it at that speed?
Not necessarily. You might be able to make a convincing case for a drastically different tempo, as is the case in these performances by Glenn Gould and Lang Lang, who chose drastically different tempos than almost everyone else for that same movement. But you should know when you’re going against the grain because you’ll have a frame of reference. Listeners are used to a certain tempos for pieces, and if you’re drastically different one way or the other, that’s going to be a little bit startling for them. You have to have real conviction if you’re going to do that. And if you’re a student, you want to try to play somewhere in the range of what most people are playing to get a feel for what is musically accepted. Although, to be fair, what is considered appropriate tempo today is different from what it was in the early 20th century. A lot of players played faster back then than they do today. So these are stylistic norms that come and go. But knowing what tempo other players use is a good guide for you. The tempo markings written in the score should be ignored! They are most often not of any value.
I have an interesting story for you about this.
When my wife was going to music conservatory, she was working on a piece. It was a new piece with percussion, flute, and piccolo. The composer wrote metronome markings in it. So in this case, it wasn’t an editor; it was the composer! She was having the hardest time with one movement, trying to get it up to speed. She was practicing diligently, doing progressively faster metronome speeds, one notch at a time, trying to get this thing up to speed. Finally, the musicians had the opportunity to have a rehearsal with the actual composer of the piece. They started playing it, and the composer said, “No, that’s not the tempo. It’s much slower!” So she showed him the metronome markings in the score, and he said, “Oh, yeah, I put that in there. But I didn’t have a metronome handy when I put it in.” So even the composer didn’t take the time to put in the right metronome marking! Even if they do, it’s not etched in stone.
There are many valid tempos that can work for a piece of music.
Composers are not necessarily the best interpreters of their music. And artists sometimes take different tempos with the same piece of music in different performances. So you have to find what works for you in your playing, on your piano, and in the room you’re playing in. Tempo is definitely more art than science! I hope this is helpful for you! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin
Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about memory. How does memory work on the piano? People play whole programs—an hour and a half or more of music—all from memory. Their fingers know just where to go. How does that work? I received a question that addresses this from a viewer named Frank. Frank asks, “When professional pianists perform long, complicated pieces, say, a concerto or sonata, how much of that is from muscle memory versus actual explicit memory? That is, do their hands just know where to go? Or can they actually write out the scores of the works they perform?” This is a great question!
There’s so much involved in memory.
If you’ve played a piece a number of times and you’ve gotten it under control, you get to a point where you can be playing your piece and you realize right in the middle that you’re daydreaming. Yet it keeps going! Well, this is a fact of life, not just with piano playing but with so many things we do, for example, walking. When you walk, you can be thinking about many different things, but the act of walking actually takes a tremendous amount of coordination, as you can see in the face of a toddler learning how to walk for the first time. This is even true about driving a car. I hate to say it, but you can drive a car without really being aware. Did you know that there are people who sleepwalk who sometimes drive cars while they are asleep?
Muscle memory is an intrinsically important part of memory on the piano.
For those brief moments when you lose concentration, thank goodness you have muscle memory to keep your fingers moving. However, you certainly can’t rely on this. Your fingers don’t know if you’re in the earlier or later part of a sonata movement. They don’t know whether you’ve made repeats or not. You have to have that part of yourself looking down on yourself so you know where you are in the music and what comes next. Without this awareness, you could easily take a wrong turn.
Could you actually think through and write out the entire score of a piece you have memorized?
If you really know your score, yes, you could absolutely write it out. Ideally, you should be so familiar with your score that you can remember every detail. If you sit down at the piano and just try to slow down a piece that you’ve played many times, it can be difficult to get from note to note without the benefit of muscle memory. This is why slow practice is so important on the piano. It solidifies your memory. It makes you have intention with every note you play. Slow practice is a great way to develop security and knowledge of the score. Practicing slowly with the score gives you double reinforcement. You get the feeling of each note being delineated clearly and distinctly while also absorbing the visual image of the notes on the score of something you’ve already memorized.
Writing out a score is an incredibly difficult task.
Writing out just one minute of music can take hours, even if you know exactly what you want to write. Figuring out rhythms and counting them out so you know exactly what kinds of notes to write, where each slur comes in, which notes are staccato, where the dynamics start and end, hairpin crescendos and decrescendos—these are the kinds of infinitesimally small details of music that can make a profound difference in the integrity of your performance. Not to mention the fact that great composers didn’t just put these markings in willy-nilly. The architecture of the piece is dependent upon the precision of these details in the composition. So it’s well worth your while to learn the score exactly as it’s written, to the point where you could write it out.
You want to be able to hear every note of the score in your mind.
One of the great ways to practice a piece you’ve learned and can play well is to sit down without the score and start playing in your lap. Better yet, do it without even moving your fingers, thinking it through as if you’re playing. If you can do that, then you really know your scores tremendously well. I had a situation many years ago when I was at the Manhattan School of Music. I came down with mononucleosis, and I just couldn’t seem to knock it. I was in bed for several months. I had a recital that was scheduled, and I had to keep postponing it. Finally, I just really wanted to play the recital. I was getting better, but I wasn’t really strong enough to practice that much. My program was about an hour and a half of music. It was a solo recital, and it was all memorized. So I took the stack of music into bed with me, and I practiced in bed, going through it just as I described, trying to think through every detail. Whenever I couldn’t remember exactly the voicing of a chord, where a slur ended, or exactly where a crescendo started, I would reference the score until I could get through everything successfully.
Visualizing a desired outcome is a valuable tool.
Visualization is a way that many people find success, not just in playing the piano but in almost every aspect of life. If you have an upcoming job interview, you could rehearse in your mind. A basketball player could imagine getting a free throw shot in. This is the best kind of practice you can ever do because you don’t have the benefit of tactile memory. It’s just pure thought, which is pure practicing, because, as I’ve said so many times, practicing is a mental discipline. So take this to heart. And by the way, that recital I played years ago was so much better than one I had played a year earlier, even though I spent far less time at the piano. But I did the mental work to prepare, and it made all the difference in the world.
Try these techniques in your practice!
Take out the score of the music you’ve memorized. Play through slowly and securely. Take your foot off the pedal to hear what’s really there. Exaggerate finger motions with raised fingers and delineate staccato from the wrist. Challenge yourself and try playing mentally, first moving your fingers, and then eventually getting to the point where you can just play through the piece with all the nuance of sound and touch, all away from the piano. Let me know how this works for you! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin
Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com
