Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about how Mozart broke the rules. Did Mozart really break the rules? What do I mean by that? It’s a funny thing that we, in retrospect, analyze music from hundreds of years ago, and come up with the forms these great composers composed in.
The quintessential form of all time is the sonata allegro form.
Sonatas are generally three- or four-movement works (sometimes two movements), and the first movement is almost always in the sonata allegro form. Why do they call it the sonata allegro? Because the first movement is usually the fast movement, and allegro means fast. In a nutshell, it’s a three-part form:
A. Exposition
– Theme 1. in the tonic key (the key of the piece)
– Theme 2. in the dominant key (the key starting on the 5th note of the scale of the key of the piece). – The Exposition Repeats-
B. Development: This is a free development of both themes
C. Recapitulation
– Theme 1. in the tonic key (the key of the piece) – Theme 2. in the tonic key (so the movement ends in the key it started in!)
The exposition has two themes. The first theme is in the tonic key, which is the key of the piece. The second theme is in the dominant key, which is five notes higher than the tonic. Then, the whole exposition repeats.
I’m going to outline it here in Mozart’s famous K 545 C Major Sonata, so you can see how he broke the rules.
The first theme is in C major, naturally, which you would expect. It continues to the second subject in G major, and the entire exposition ends in G major. This is a classic sonata allegro form. That’s the end of the exposition. Then you come to the repeat, and the entire exposition repeats.
After the exposition, you come to what’s called the development section. The development comes after the double bar, after the repeat, and it’s a free development of both the first theme and the second theme. After the development section comes the recapitulation. What’s the recapitulation? It’s a repeat of the beginning. You have theme one and theme two. Except theme two this time doesn’t modulate to the dominant. It stays in the tonic. So the piece ends in the same key it started!
But Mozart takes a turn that is unexpected.
Then the first theme comes back in F major, the subdominant. How did this happen? It continues in F major. But the first theme is supposed to come back in the recapitulation in the tonic key, C major, but we’re in F major. Then it goes to the second theme in C major, which is what you would expect. But there is never a restatement of the first theme, the opening theme in C major, which is a textbook of what a sonata is, and he just leaves it out. In fact, that statement of the main theme in the subdominant in F major is simply part of the development section. He never gives you the first theme in the recapitulation in the tonic key as expected. The recapitulation just has a short statement of the first theme in the subdominant, F major, in the development section. Then it goes right into the second theme in C major to the end. So yes, Mozart broke the rules.
All great composers break the rules!
The rules are just observations after the fact. It’s all the deviations from what you expect that make music great. Lesser composers do exactly what you think they’ll do, and it’s boring! Composers like Mozart or Beethoven are so full of surprises, always taking turns you don’t expect. That is the secret of great music! I’m wondering what you think about this. Are there any examples that you can bring to the table? Let us 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.
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Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Are there musical geniuses like Mozart alive today? In the world today with billions of people, there have got to be some people with tremendous talent. There are great players and child prodigies, but is there anybody at the level of artistry, creative beauty, and pure genius of Mozart?
The answer is yes!
If you have not seen her already on YouTube, you must check out Alma Deutscher. I’ve been following her for years. She started posting on YouTube when she was five. There are videos of her playing the violin from a very young age. She is unlike any musical talent I think you’ve probably ever seen in your life. Just to give you an overview, she’s now 18 years old. She has composed three operas. She composed her first complete opera when she was only ten years old! There are some videos of her performing where the audience chooses notes and she improvises using those notes. She can instantly create a composition on the highest level, beyond what you would think of as improvisation.
She is an accomplished pianist, violinist, and singer.
She’s great on all three of these instruments, as well as being a conductor. She’s written violin concertos, piano concertos, and three operas. It’s just amazing. You could see her evolution through time. But from the youngest age, there is a spark of joy in her, and an appreciation for beautiful melodies, which just flow out of her naturally, whether she’s improvising or composing. If she just played the violin, sang, played the piano, or composed even a fraction of the music that she’s written, she would be noteworthy. But the fact that she does all of these things is astounding! She is much like Mozart, who was great on violin, piano, conducting, improvising, and composing for so many different ensembles, from opera to piano to symphonies, from the youngest age.
There are still musical geniuses like Mozart alive today! But where can they shine?
Are there places for people like Alma Deutscher? Where will her career take her? This will be very interesting. Many composers today are in the film industry because it’s one area where people can actually make a living composing music. We no longer have royal courts with benefactors the way they existed back in Mozart’s time.
I want all of you to check out Alma Deutscher!
Check out her compositions and her improvisations. Watch her from the youngest age to what she’s doing now. I think you will be astounded at this world-class musician in our midst. I just thought I’d call it to your attention to her. I’m interested in other great artists of our time. If you know of anyone like this, share it 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.
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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. How much freedom is there in musical performance? If you listen to the same piece by different performers on the piano or any other instrument, you’ll find dramatically different interpretations. How much do you have to be faithful to the score, and how much can you just take off and do what you want to do? The answer may surprise you!
You want to play faithfully to the score.
If somebody was listening to a piece of music written by a great composer and they were transcribing it note for note, they should end up with the same score that the composer wrote with every last detail. Does that mean that every performance should be the same? No, surprisingly, because you can execute every detail of the score in different ways to indicate what is written, and different people have various ideas about how to achieve that.
I’m going to give you a great example today, which is Debussy.
Debussy was a French impressionist composer from the early 20th century. His music is a wash of colors and sounds. And yet, it’s important to have the clarity of what is intended in the score come out in your performance. But there is more than one way to achieve that. For example, sometimes there are double-stemmed notes, a note with a stem going down and a stem going up. Why are there two stems? Well, that note is part of two different lines of music, like different instruments playing. It may be 16th notes and 8th notes at the same time. One voice is on the top and one voice is on the bottom. Sometimes voices overlap, and they both hit the same note at the same time. The composer wants you to understand that and project it into the performance. It creates different sounds. So in the first movement of Debussy’s Children’s Corner Suite, there are double-stemmed notes. Interestingly, it starts off in the third measure with double-stemmed eighth notes (with staccatos), which intersect with 16th notes on the bottom. What makes it even more interesting is that starting in the fifth measure, you have a similar passage except with double-stemmed quarter notes with 16th notes on the bottom. This is a subtle difference which is the genius of Debussy creating nuances of sound. (You can reference the accompanying video to hear this on the piano with the score provided.)
Ideally, you want to do as much as you possibly can with your fingers and then use the pedal for expression.
That’s just one example where the composer wants to have different lines of music, and it’s up to you as a performer to find a way to execute it to create the effect. On the seventh measure, you have the same pattern twice, but the first time with a crescendo/decrescendo, then it repeats with no dynamic changes. There are all kinds of subtle phrasing, double stemmed-notes, inner lines, expression, and crescendos. What I have found over the years is that if you really learn the precision of where the crescendos start and end, exactly how many notes are slurred, attention to double-stemmed note values, and you delineate all the minutiae of the score, it brings the music to life!
Be sure you’re not working from a heavily edited edition of the score.
You want to follow the markings of the composer, not the editor, because the editor may or may not have great ideas. You should always know what the composer had in mind with an urtext edition, one that is not edited, or one that clearly indicates what’s coming from the editor rather than the composer. That way, you can get in the head of the composer and get an idea of the concept of what they really were after. Those small details all come together to mold a great performance. So you can indeed follow the inclinations of the composer and do so with the conviction of how you believe the music can best be expressed. I hope this is helpful for you! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at Living Pianos: Your Online Piano Resource. Join the discussion at LivingPianos.com where you can leave your comments on countless articles with accompanying videos.
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Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I will share some secrets to executing trills. When I was in music conservatory, I remember the really advanced students would spend an inordinate amount of time working on trills. And in fact, it’s one aspect of my playing that I have developed further in the past year or so. I’m always discovering new things.
The most intrinsically important thing about trills is that they must be measured.
I know that when you hear a trill, it just sounds like a whole bunch of random notes. But if you don’t know exactly how many notes you’re playing in a trill, good luck ending it! You may not end up on the right note. You have a 50/50 chance of being on the right or the wrong note. So you have to figure out exactly how many notes you’re playing. So even though it sounds like a flurry of notes, the number of notes is worked out precisely. There are different ways to execute trills with different numbers of notes, but each one should be measured.
Today I’m going to give you a hack for your trills!
I recently performed a concert in New York. I played the Mozart Sonata K. 457 in C minor. It’s loaded with trills! I wanted to execute those trills really cleanly, and I also wanted to play a good number of notes. You can always play an easier trill with fewer notes, but I didn’t want to do that. I started my program with this sonata, so I wanted to be rock solid on it. I figured out how to achieve very clean, faithful, and accurate trills. And it’s not just for trills like this, but virtually all ornamentation.
The secret is lifting up your fingers just a little bit instead of being right on the keys.
You want to lift up your finger just a little bit before you play the trill. That little bit of lifting articulates trills so wonderfully, you won’t believe it! Try it with your playing wherever you have trills. Lift your finger just before the trill, and you’ll get a clean trill. If your fingers don’t lift up, the notes may not play reliably. That’s the hardest part of a trill. The hardest part about piano playing and finger work isn’t so much the pushing down of the fingers, it’s the lifting up of previously played fingers. If you try to play a trill and the fingers don’t come up, the notes won’t play.
By lifting your fingers, you are certain that the fingers are up and out of the way, so the keys can replay.
The secret is to get the previously played fingers up and out of the way so the key is up and can go down again. It’s simple physics, really. So try lifting your fingers just before you play your trills and see how you get cleaner execution of ornamentation in your playing. I hope this works for you! Let us 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.
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Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about drummers who play the piano. Why do drummers love to play the piano? I want to hear from all of you drummers out there who tune in to this video. Tell us why you love to play the piano.
I have a lot of drummers in my life, and, almost categorically, they all love to play the piano!
My son is a drummer, and he loves to play the piano. And this video was inspired by my good friend Bob Friedman, the Steinway Hunter. If you haven’t checked out his book, by the way, it is absolutely the most enjoyable book to read if you love pianos. Bob said I should talk about why drummers love to play the piano, so here it is!
Drummers already have a really highly developed sense of rhythm.
Rhythm is one of the most intrinsically difficult aspects of playing the piano. Drummers are also used to playing with two hands as well as their feet, so they have a good sense of coordination. But what they don’t have is a pitched instrument. It’s all rhythm. Unless they happen to play mallet instruments, they don’t get melody. They play with other musicians, and they hear the melodies in their heads. They want to be able to enjoy that, so they go to the piano.
It’s interesting how drummers approach the keyboard.
Sometimes they’ll take solos in such an interesting fashion, playing like a drummer and coming up with patterns that you wouldn’t think of as a pianist because we’re used to using our fingers in a way that drummers are not. So they come up with interesting patterns and melodies that might not occur to other musicians. It also helps them understand the music they’re playing drums to by playing on the piano. Getting a sense of chord progressions and melodies helps them achieve a more sensitive rhythmic backdrop for the music they play. So there are many reasons why drummers love to play the piano.
The piano is a percussion instrument.
Instead of hitting drum heads with sticks, it’s hammers hitting strings. It’s activated with your fingers. But really, the piano is the ultimate percussion instrument. So, of course, drummers are going to love to play the piano because it’s a percussion instrument and arguably the quintessential percussion instrument. Let me know your thoughts on this 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 maintaining your piano in different environments. We have sold pianos to people all over the world, in all different environments. Just in California, you can be in the desert, in the mountains with snow, or on the beach. How can you possibly maintain pianos in all these different environments? Well, I’m going to give you some tips today to help you keep your piano in good condition, whatever environment you’re in.
What environment do pianos love?
Pianos love what you love. They want to be in a place that’s not too humid, not too dry, not too hot, not too cold, and pretty stable. That’s pretty simple. So are we done? Well, not quite, because there’s a lot more to this subject. Some people don’t have the luxury of those choices. For example, say you live on the beach, with the beautiful sound of the ocean waves and the smell of that air. But also, the piano’s very important to you. What are you going to do—close off your living room, use air conditioning, and not let in the ocean air? Of course not. There are compromises you have to make in life, and sadly, your piano may suffer somewhat.
Even in a beach environment, there are simple things you can do to help mitigate the humidity.
Humidity will take its toll on a piano at the beach. But if you simply close your piano, particularly at night when the marine layer comes in, it will help to mitigate the humidity in your piano. You can even get a cover for your piano. If your piano is completely closed and covered when you’re not playing it, or at least at night, that will really help to minimize the humidity that is going to affect the strings and other parts of the instrument. Another thing you can consider is a string cover. You can get a felt cover cut to the exact shape of the inside of your piano. And interestingly, it doesn’t really affect the sound as much as you might think it would. The sound goes right through the thin felt. But it will help protect it from the humidity. As far as underneath the piano, moisture isn’t really going to hurt the soundboard. But moisture will affect the strings, and all the metal parts will tarnish.
Moisture can also affect the action of your piano.
I remember when I was a kid in my father’s studio before he had air conditioning. In the summertime, the whole piano would become sluggish because all those moving parts on each key have felt bushings, which would absorb moisture. So it would feel slow. It would even affect the sound because the hammers absorb moisture, so you get a less brilliant sound. It was just a mess. So putting a string cover in the piano will not just help to protect the metal parts of the piano from tarnishing or rusting, but it will also help to keep the action from gumming up and giving out a dull, lifeless sound.
You may consider getting a dehumidifier system for your piano.
There are other technologies that come into play. For example, something called the Dampp-Chaser System. The Dampp-Chaser or Piano Life Saver are heating rods that usually go under the piano, but sometimes in extreme environments, rods can actually be fit inside the piano as well. And the way it works is with a humidistat. Just like a thermostat measures the temperature of the air, a humidistat measures the humidity level of the air. And once it gets above a certain level, the heating rods will turn on. That heat will help mitigate the moisture. These are all good techniques for dealing with excessive humidity.
What about climates with excessive dryness?
Even though humidity can really destroy a piano, excessive dry air can be even more deadly to the longevity of your piano because the wood dries out and wood joints can crack. It can be a nightmare for people living in the desert. Even in a temperate climate, your home can get very dry if you have hot air heat. If you don’t have a humidification system built into your central heating system, it can get really dry. We first moved to Cleveland just about two and a half years ago, and one of the first things I did was look for a piano for my studio. It was hard to find a piano that would fit up the stairs. I looked for a Chickering Quarter Grand, which has such thin cheek blocks making the piano narrower, so that the piano could make it up the stairs. Not far from here, I found one from the 1970s. I looked at it, and it looked fine, but it was drastically out of tune. The pin block had dried out, and the piano couldn’t hold tuning anymore. And that’s not that old for a piano. We’ve had 50, even 100-year-old pianos with good tuning stability. But the dry environment from the heating system was too much for it. Extremely dry environments can also cause soundboards to crack which can be a disaster for a piano.
What can you do to mitigate the dryness?
Well, you simply need a humidification system. You’re best off having a whole-house system or a room humidifier. Try to keep the humidity around 45 to 50 percent. That’s ideal. If you’re in the thirties or in the sixties, you’re still okay. But when you get down to single-digit humidity, that is a problem. What else can you do? I mentioned the Dampp-Chaser System. They actually have a humidity-adding system as well. There’s a tank that you fill with water, and whenever the humidity level gets too low, it adds humidity underneath the piano to the soundboard, which is the critical place. If the soundboard gets too dry and cracks, you’ve got a rebuild on your hands. There’s no real way to fix a soundboard without pulling the plate and re-stringing. That can easily cost tens of thousands of dollars. If you’re living in a place where the summers are excessively humid and the winters are really dry, you can get a dual system that engages the heating rods when it gets too humid or the water tank when it gets too dry. Some people in dry climates will put a tray of water under their piano just for the evaporative effect. Believe it or not, just filling your room with a bunch of plants is going to add to the humidity of the air environment quite a bit, particularly if you don’t have hot air blowing. If you just have radiator or baseboard heating, that might just do the trick to bring the humidity up a few percentage points.
Direct sunlight on your piano is another big problem.
Obviously, sunlight hitting the inside of the piano can affect the tuning. But sunlight just hitting the case of the piano is a problem. I’ve seen pianos damaged after just a few months of sitting in a room where sunlight would hit the piano part of the day. A telltale sign is the two-tone lid. You have your piano lid folded over, but then you unfold it, and you see that the part that was not exposed to the sun is darker. It’s been bleached by the sun. To avoid this, you could try a window treatment, which will help somewhat, but really, you need to just close your shades when the piano is being subjected to direct sunlight. If your piano is warm to the touch, your finish is going to be damaged over time. After many years of that, your piano will check. Checking is when you get that alligator look. The finish dries out, and there’s no way to deal with it other than stripping everything and refinishing. This is another hugely expensive endeavor. So you want to avoid that.
You should also think about the environment your piano is in in regards to the sound.
Acoustics are so important. If you have a piano in a room that is really dead and you’re pounding it to be able to be heard, you’re going to wear out your piano, and you’re not going to enjoy playing very much. What can you do about that? Well, short of removing soft furniture and curtains, you can actually just put something hard under the piano. You could use a sheet of plexiglass if you have a rug and you don’t want to ruin the look. You just want something that will reflect the sound. About half the sound of a piano comes from underneath. So something that reflects the sound will help. Having your piano open so it projects into the room will also help. How you place your piano factors in as well. You want it open to the room instead of to a wall.
What if the piano is too loud for its environment?
If your piano is hurting your ears, of course you can close the lid, which will certainly help. If you have hardwood floors, putting your piano on a rug will absorb a lot of the sound because, as I mentioned, half the sound is coming out of the bottom. If that doesn’t help, try putting soft furniture and thick drapes in your room. Anything that will absorb the sound is going to help. You could even hang tapestries on the walls. So these are ways that will actually help you enjoy your piano more and increase its longevity. You don’t want to have to pound your piano when you can’t hear it enough or pussyfoot on it and never enjoy the sound of the instrument. Worse yet, sometimes people will have their hammers needled to bring the voicing way down just so it’s not too loud, but you don’t get that nice, rich tone anymore. You don’t want to compromise the voicing of your piano just to accommodate room acoustic problems.
So these are all the things you can do to maintain a good environment for your piano, both for the structural integrity and for the enjoyment of playing it. I hope this is helpful for you! Let me know your thoughts on this subject 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
