Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about how to get your kids to practice the piano. This is a really important subject because you want your kids to enjoy the piano. But if they never practice, how can you justify the lessons you’re taking them to and spending money on? You feel really committed, and you want your kids to be committed. Sometimes it can really come to loggerheads. So I’m going to give you some tips today!
I have vast experience with this subject.
I come from a family of teachers. Both my parents were music teachers. My sister is a piano teacher. I’ve taught piano pedagogy to many teachers. Getting kids to practice is a universal challenge for anyone who teaches kids or parents with kids studying the piano. I started teaching the piano when I was in high school, assisting my father with his teaching, as my sister did before me. And it’s been a continuum of my career since that time. I’ve pretty much always taught. Today, I have the great privilege of teaching students all over the world because of my popular YouTube channel and website, LivingPianos.com. I have students from Australia to Alaska and all points in between. For the most part, they’re serious students. I have some kids who are just wonderful to work with, as well as people decades older than me! However, when I was starting out making a living as a private piano teacher, I took all kinds of kids and adults as well. They didn’t all love the piano the way my students do today. I saw many different ways that parents dealt with their kids, some effective and some that were really counterproductive.
The first thing you have to understand about working at the piano is that practicing correctly is hard work.
So when you tell your kids they have to practice for 30 minutes or an hour, realize that, if they’re doing it correctly, it’s an incredibly intense experience. You must appreciate that. I remember my wife had a student, and the mother was always upset with her child for not practicing enough. Eventually, the mother started taking lessons, and then she finally realized how difficult it really was! So you have to appreciate that. To encourage your kids to practice, you have to think of it the way you think of so many other things in life.
Your kids, given a choice, probably wouldn’t clean their room, do their homework, or brush their teeth!
There are myriad things that your kids are kind of coaxed or trained to do, and piano practice must fit into that realm. So the techniques you’ve used to get your kids to do what they need to do are also appropriate for piano practice. But piano practice is not something that’s legally required, the way school is, or a matter of personal hygiene, the way brushing your teeth is, so they might feel there’s some wiggle room there. You must encourage your kids to practice by understanding and appreciating the hard work they do. Showcase their talents to your family and friends whenever possible. If they’ve been working really hard and they have a piece they can play well, when company comes over, let them shine. Give them a chance to enjoy the fruits of their labor!
You can encourage young students by bringing them to concerts and expanding their scope of music.
Bring them to classical concerts and other styles of music that maybe they haven’t been exposed to. I can’t tell you how many times people have said to me something like, “I hate opera.” And I say, “Have you ever been to an opera?” And they say, “No.” Well, how do you know? Seeing an opera performed by a great opera company, like the Metropolitan Opera, is just an astounding experience. You can’t get that experience by listening to music on a sound system. It’s not the same at all. That’s also true with classical music in general. Some types of music translate better to an electronic medium. For example, rock music is coming out of speakers, whether you’re going to a live event or not. But acoustic music sounds so much better when you’re listening to it live. It doesn’t sound the same coming through speakers. The sound of an acoustic performance in a great hall can’t be described or duplicated any other way. So take your kids to concerts! But you can also play them great recordings. Expose them to great music. They may just latch on to a few key pieces that could change their lives.
So remember to encourage your children!
Remember that it’s hard work to practice correctly. Expose your kids to great music, both live and recorded. Showcase their talents whenever possible so that they can feel appreciated for the hard work they do with the instrument. If nothing seems to work, condider finding a more inspiring teacheer. I hope this is helpful for you! Share your stories in the comments about what has worked for you or the challenges you have faced. 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. The subject today is about staccatos. Are staccatos accented? You see the little dots in your music, and you know to play short or detached, but does that mean you also articulate them with accents?
There are different markings for accents.
You have little sideways triangles, and you also have sforzandos, which are strong accents. For example, Ballad of Burgmüller starts off with staccatos, and then you have sforzandos. You have the nice, crisp staccatos and the accented sforzandos. But what about other instances where there are just staccatos? Should they be accented?
There are times when staccatos are an indication to play with some emphasis, but oftentimes it’s exactly the opposite!
A good example of that is when you have two-note slurs. The first note is articulated with some energy, particularly when it’s on the beat, and then the offbeats are light. For example, in the Allegro k.3 of Mozart, you want to articulate the two-note slurs by playing the second note of each slur staccato. By doing this, you end up with a light staccato. Imagine if those staccatos were articulated with energy. It would give a syncopated feel to the rhythm like in Debussy’s Golliwog’s Cakewalk, which is not at all what a 2/4 time usually is. Generally, the strong beats are on the beats and the off beats are lighter, except in instances where syncopation is happening. There are times when accents are on staccato notes and off the beat, but most often staccatos are light, particularly when there are two note slurs. Remember to accentuate the beat. The offbeats, the second notes of two note slurs, should be light.
The way to achieve light staccatos is by using a down-up motion.
Staccato is simply an down-up motion of the wrist. Well, a two-note slur is the same thing, except it’s delayed. For example, at the beginning of the Mozart Allegro, the first note is staccato. So it involves just a simple down and up motion of the wrist. Nothing could be simpler. Then, when you have two-note slurs, go down on the slurred notes and up on the staccato notes, which is also a down-up motion. This naturally gives you the energy on the slurred notes and makes the staccato notes light. That’s how you achieve a light staccato, even when playing quickly. That is something you should consider in your music. It’s all about context. Weak beats should be de-emphasized, and you can do this with the wrist with two note slurs. Try it in your music and see how it works for you! 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. Today I’m going to show you how to make memorization easier. Memorizing piano in music is one of the most difficult things you’ll ever do mentally. It takes all of your concentration. I’m going to show you how to approach this so that you can make it easier and more effective!
How much music should you learn at a time?
I will use, as an example, the second movement of Beethoven’s Pathetique Sonata. I’m going to play the first phrase, and then I’m going to show you how to approach memorizing it to make it easier. Let’s say you sit down to learn this piece. You figure the first eight measures is a good amount to learn, so you play it over and over again until you kind of get it. But that is far too much material to take at a time! If you were to add up the sheer number of notes, it doesn’t seem like a lot of music. But there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of details when you consider that every note has its own fingering, phrasing, and expression. So there are four details to each note, not to mention the rhythm!
I’ve talked about how to memorize by taking small amounts of music at a time, playing hands separately, and then putting them together. Well, there is more to it than that. I’m going to show you some tips right now. First of all, if you analyze the score right at the beginning, you realize that the right hand is in chords. So learn it in chords first. Now, if I were learning this, I wouldn’t take eight measures at a time. Sometimes you can learn four measures of one hand, but when you put the hands together, chop it in half. Just do two measures when you’re putting the hands together, because:
The hardest part about memorization is putting the hands together.
I would suggest just learning the first two measures. Start with just the first two measures, but give yourself the extra note of the beginning of the third measure as a connection point. That’s plenty of material, believe it or not. How long will it take you to learn that? Not so long. Now, you might have gone through the first eight measures and played it over and over again for 30 minutes or an hour. But you know what? You’ll never quite get it because you don’t give yourself the opportunity to really study the infinitesimally small details that you can master in just a few minutes. Once you get the right hand memorized in chords, then you get the left hand memorized. Then you put hands together in chords. The next step would be to play the right hand alone the way it’s written. And then finally, put the hands together going extremely slowly at first. Then, if you like, you can reward yourself and play with the pedal, which is the last thing you do in your practice.
If you have trouble delineating the melody from the 16th notes in the right hand, you can practice with articulations.
Play with a light finger staccato on the 16th notes to train your hand which notes are accompaniment and which notes are melody. Better yet, put your hands together, and you have a duet between the soprano and the bass with the inner voice playing with a gentle finger staccato.
If you learn just two measures, or if you learn four measures, hands separately and then put together just two measures at a time, you’ll give yourself a fighting chance to really perfect the music as you go. Plus, since you’re not overwhelming yourself, you can sustain a longer, productive practice. So remember to cut things in half. Learn less at a time, and don’t use the pedal until the very end of the process so that you can hear what’s there and develop the best fingering in your playing. So those are some memorization tips for you! I hope this helps with your memorization. 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. Today I will be talking with William Fitzpatrick about what makes a great teacher. I’ve had the good fortune to study with great pianists John Ogden, Ruth Slenczynska, Constance Keene, and I started my piano studies with my father, Morton Estrin. I want to talk a little bit about our guest. William Fitzpatrick was the founder and first violinist of the New York String Quartet. He has a dual career in France and the United States. As a matter of fact, he was the director of chamber music at The American Conservatory in Fontainebleau, France. Long ago, he graduated from The Juilliard School, where he studied with the seminal teacher, Dorothy DeLay. Most recently, he held the esteemed Temianka Chair as professor of violin at Chapman University Conservatory of Music. He’s now living in France.
I want to introduce to all of you someone who’s very close to me, William Fitzpatrick.
Robert: William, welcome to LivingPianos.com. It’s great to have you!
William: It’s great to be here, Robert. Thanks for inviting me.
Robert: We’ve been great friends for years, and I want people to understand our connection, which is my daughter, Jenny Estrin. When we moved to Orange County, she was trying to find another teacher because she had started violin at the great Indiana University Young Violinist program. We figured in Southern California, there had to be good teachers. We went through so many people until we finally found you. You were life changing for Jenny, your whole concept of teaching. I want you to talk a little bit about your feelings about teaching. Why don’t you tell people a little bit about your background and your ideas about teaching. I think it’s unique the way you approach students, and I think people would really be fascinated to learn more about that.
William: The way I approach students is sort of a reflection on how I was taught by Ms. DeLay. One of my friends said it very well: “When you talk to a bunch of DeLay students, it’s like talking to blind people around an elephant. They’re all touching the elephant, and they’re going, ‘Oh, that’s an elephant.’ And somebody’s touching the tusk going, ‘Oh, that’s an elephant.’ Everybody’s got their take.” The reason for that is that she was different with everyone. She really tried to understand and zone in on the needs of that individual, with what they needed, and where they wanted to go. For myself, I felt like that was just incredible. For me, it was really helpful. I try very hard to reflect that in the way I look at the students who come to study with me.
I don’t have a cookie-cutter kind of methodology about teaching.
I try to figure out the best way to get them to understand the information from their point of view. And I think that’s one of the most important traits of a teacher. It’s not about giving the information. It’s about how you give that information so that someone understands and believes it. It’s them that have come to those decisions, because that’s the only way they’re going to do it.
Robert: Watching you teach Jenny was really an enlightening experience. Sometimes you would say things that almost sounded like riddles, getting her to think—not feeding her the answers, but getting her to realize these things herself. Interestingly, I come from a different background. My father was really not that type of teacher, and yet he was a great teacher. I think his methodology of teaching comes down to the fact that he didn’t have his first good teacher until just before his 18th birthday. So everything he really learned on the piano, he learned as an adult. As a result, every aspect of piano playing and music theory he figured out step by step in a very logical fashion. That’s the style of teaching that my father had, and I embrace that style of teaching as well. Certainly, with the violin, there’s an order of steps from how to hold the instrument to tone production and intonation. How do you reckon with this duality of having the lessons tailored to each person and having a regimen of steps involved in mastering the different facets of the instrument? How do you come to a balance between those two elements?
William: For me, I think it goes back to when I started teaching in France. First off, my French was awful. But somehow or the other, I managed to get a job. It was difficult because it was a language that I didn’t know at the time. And certainly, attitudes towards music, towards this whole thing of playing the violin were very different. What happened for me was that I had to interrogate myself. How did I learn something? Because I couldn’t translate it into French until I knew exactly what I did. It turned out that I never had really done that. For me, a lot of what I did was very intuitive as a player. So I didn’t question it; I just sort of did it. But to teach it, I had to know why and how I got to that point.
Robert: There are so many virtuoso pianists, violinists, and other musicians who grew up as child prodigies with a great deal of natural ability. Of course, they put in hard work. But you think of somebody who’s playing on a concert level of performance as a young child. As an adult, how could they possibly relate to the average student? I wonder how people like that approach teaching. You mentioned that things came very intuitively to you, and you had to break it down at some point. How many teachers actually go through that process, particularly ones who were child prodigies?
William: I sort of put myself, as a teacher, in a place where I wanted to prepare students to be able to deal with teachers like that, knowing that that teacher probably wasn’t going to do the rudimentary work. It was more about this feeling, this flow, but if you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s very difficult to react, to respond, and to do what that person is saying. So my feeling was always, how do I get them to a point where they can actually deal with that?
Robert: At the conservatory level, many of the teachers are really more coaches than teachers, as you describe. You need somebody in the trenches with you at some point in your development, showing you step by step how to practice, how to learn music, how to assimilate things, how to produce tone, and all of that. And then you can be enriched with different flavors of interpretation, sound production, and rhythmic feel. I was very fortunate to have a phenomenal French horn teacher, Hugh Cowden. He had played in the Chicago Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, and the Boston Symphony. But this was at a point later in his career when he was a freelance New York musician. He was a mentor to me. He made me do things that I was convinced I couldn’t do!
I think that’s a sign of a great teacher—somebody who enables you to do things that you didn’t think you were capable of doing.
I’ve worked with a lot of teachers, teaching them how to teach. My father taught me how to teach, and he taught my sister how to teach because we assisted him in his teaching when we were both in high school. But you brought up getting inside somebody’s head so that you can reach them where they are. Can that be taught?
William: How much of teaching can be taught? That’s a really tough question. It begs of someone to be willing to trust the journey, to have a journey, to make a decision about where they want to go and what they want to do, but not be so bound and myopic in that vision that they can’t open themselves up to going to the left instead of the right.
Robert: I think it’s kind of like musical talent. There’s a certain amount of natural ability that people have. It could be kids who are at an intermediate level. One or two of them will play perfectly fine, and then one of them plays, and everyone in the audience just gets this rush of emotions. Can that be taught? There’s a certain amount of innate ability that people have in reaching people on an emotional level as a performer, and as a teacher being inspiring.
I think, to a great extent, it comes down to really caring about the student.
I won’t mention any names, but one of my teachers was not particularly emotionally supportive, but was a great teacher nonetheless. If I had had that teacher from my formative years, maybe it wouldn’t have been the best fit. But as I was already an accomplished player, I took the criticism well. It was a growing experience for me. So I think finding the right teacher at the level that you’re at is really important. Whether it’s a teacher who is going to show you the fundamentals and help you grow into an accomplished musician or somebody who’s going to do the refining and the fine touches. I think a lot of the university and conservatory teachers are really of that latter style. They really aren’t great teachers of the fundamentals, but they do that honing and refinement. Those are the teachers who get noted for all the contest winners because their students come to them already at a high level. They get to do that final polishing, which is an enviable position to be in!
William: Something you said brought something into my mind, which is that, in terms of looking at myself, it’s important to understand that I really sucked as a violinist when I was a kid. When I was 16 years old, a Handel sonata was like a mountain for me. And for me, getting to the top of the mountain didn’t mean it was good. It just meant I got to the top of the mountain. So I’ve always had the attitude that every child has talent. The deal is to help them find out how to channel the talent that they have.
Robert: That’s exactly right. You know, with piano playing, there are so many different skill sets, and nobody’s got every single one at the top level.
You have to work with students to develop their strengths and mitigate their weaknesses.
I won’t mention any names, but one of my teachers was not particularly emotionally supportive, but was a great teacher nonetheless. If I had had that teacher from my formative years, maybe it wouldn’t have been the best fit. But as I was already an accomplished player, I took the criticism well. It was a growing experience for me. So I think finding the right teacher at the level that you’re at is really important. Whether it’s a teacher who is going to show you the fundamentals and help you grow into an accomplished musician or somebody who’s going to do the refining and the fine touches. I think a lot of the university and conservatory teachers are really of that latter style. They really aren’t great teachers of the fundamentals, but they do that honing and refinement. Those are the teachers who get noted for all the contest winners because their students come to them already at a high level. They get to do that final polishing, which is an enviable position to be in!
William: Something you said brought something into my mind, which is that, in terms of looking at myself, it’s important to understand that I really sucked as a violinist when I was a kid. When I was 16 years old, a Handel sonata was like a mountain for me. And for me, getting to the top of the mountain didn’t mean it was good. It just meant I got to the top of the mountain. So I’ve always had the attitude that every child has talent. The deal is to help them find out how to channel the talent that they have.
Robert: That’s exactly right. You know, with piano playing, there are so many different skill sets, and nobody’s got every single one at the top level.
You have to work with students to develop their strengths and mitigate their weaknesses.
No two people have the same strengths and weaknesses. The other thing is being willing to let the student guide to a certain extent. Right now I have a student, and he was working on some literature that was pretty basic classical repertoire, not intermediate, but then he wanted to do some Ravel. And I said, “If you really want to do it and your heart’s in it, let’s see what happens.” Next week he comes in, and he’s got more than half of the Ravel Sonatine, one of the movements, going just beautifully. And I’ve had students in the past who jumped from levels that they shouldn’t have been able to do. If somebody’s heart is really in it and they have embraced the methodology of how to learn music, which is what I teach, sometimes they can go from here to there. So many teachers are so methodical in their repertoire. I think going with the natural inclinations of the student is best, as long as they’re not trying to play pieces that are just completely above them, which naturally is not in anybody’s best interest.
William: Like I said, when I was 16, Handel was an issue. I went to college when I was 17. When I was 17, my big accomplishment was Beethoven’s Romance in F, which, in fact, your daughter did. I had difficulty even playing that. Now, what’s really fascinating to me is that when I was 19, I got into Aspen Music Festival. I was playing the Tchaikovsky Concerto. I had the luckiest thing happen because my teacher, Stephen Clapp, was open to what I wanted to do. He knew what I needed to do, but he allowed me to get there. He didn’t try to harness me; he just allowed me to roam. I remember once I went to his studio and I saw Galamian’s book on the principles of violin, and I started reading it. I saw this thing about bow grips. He walked in, and he said, “William, you found this book?” “Yes. Mr. Clapp. And you know what? I’ve decided that I want to hold my bow this way.” I was mimicking what I was seeing in the book. Stephen didn’t say, “No, do it my way.” He was not only encouraging me but also helping me find out how to do what was in the book. He had spent a year trying to get me to hold the bow one way, and here I’m doing it another way, and he’s helping me to do it! To me, that’s really somebody who has the student at heart and will allow that student to go as far as they can go.
Robert:
It’s a real balance that teachers have to have with guiding students but not pigeonholing them into one way of playing.
For example, when I studied at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, I had a French horn teacher there who was an absolute virtuoso, magnificent player. But he would teach every single student how to play the Mozart Horn Concertos note for note, phrase by phrase, exactly the way he played them. There are a lot of teachers who do that. Now, I will say that sometimes on the very elementary level, if a student has no clue how to craft a musical phrase, you can spoon feed them note by note so they understand the architecture, and at some point they’ll get it. But when you get to the conservatory level, you have to let the student’s own inclinations come through.
William: This brings up a story of a student. I assigned a student a new piece of music at the end of the lesson, and the student looked at me and said, “Could you play it for me?” And I was really sort of surprised and asked why. They said, “Because I want to know how it sounds.” So I said, “Just go around the corner; there’s a music store with a bunch of records. You can buy a couple and see.” They said, “I don’t have that much money to do that.” So I said, “Oh, okay. Well, if you go to the library, you can just listen to everything.” And the student finally looks at me and says, “Oh, I get it. I’m going to do everything, and you’re going to do nothing!”
Robert: They have to discover for themselves, don’t they?
William:
Ultimately, I don’t think you can surpass what you hear.
So you’ve really got to open up. If I can do something as a teacher, it’s to open that aural horizon so that they can hear what goes on. Another story comes to mind. I had another student who came in, and they held their bow in a funny kind of way. But I knew that they had studied with someone who held the bow correctly, so I thought it wouldn’t be a problem. I’ll get them to go back to what they did. But they didn’t want to. They kept saying they liked the way it sounded that way. And we fought for three years! I realized I let my ego get in the way because I wanted to have that student play this way. I didn’t listen to what they wanted to do. In fact, if I really wanted them to change, then what I needed to do wasn’t to show them or try to get them to do this or that, but get them to change how they heard it. Get them to listen to things, and in their effort to try to make that happen, they will come to their own conclusions about what they need to do to make that happen.
Robert: Exactly. It’s all about listening. That’s the key. Along those lines, for a lot of my students, I give them a piece of music, and the first thing they do is latch on to some performance on YouTube and listen to it incessantly.
When I learn a piece of music, I purposely don’t listen to anyone until I have it on performance level.
Then I go crazy and listen to every performance, and drive my wife, Florence, crazy!
William: My wife knows a lot about that!
Robert: I encourage my students and any of you out there, if you’re learning a piece of music, do yourself a favor and come up with your own convictions first. It’s really hard, once you become highly influenced by hearing it from somebody else, to come up with your own impressions.
William: I played a concert when I was in France at the American Church in Paris with an organ. They had just had this beautiful organ installed. I was so happy. But I listened to the recording the next day, and I went, “Oh, that really sucked.” I had this long conversation with myself, and the brunt of it is I decided I needed to change. So for a month I would move this, I would do this, and finally I found a position that was helping me to do what I wanted to do. I listened then every day to Rabin playing Bruch Scottish Fantasy, and I tried to emulate it. That’s what I did for the next month. I didn’t look at the music, I just, you know, from ear tried to sound like him. I remember about a month and a half later, I was doing a festival, and I was sitting in a room practicing. I started to play Scottish Fantasy, and I said, “You did it. That sounds like Rabin!” And I remember sitting down and I said, “Cool. Now you can sound like you.” I needed to understand physically what was going on. The goal was not to be Rabin. My goal was to be me. But I wanted to understand another perspective on how to do that.
Robert: If you want to be able to produce a tone that you imagine in your head, to emulate somebody where you can quantify that you can do that process is a perfect study.
William: Right, but you don’t want to be that person. It’s not about that. I mean, I’ve loved Perlman all my life. He’s been such a model for me, but I don’t want to play like Perlman.
Robert: I listen to the unbelievable performances of Horowitz, but nobody can play like Horowitz. It’s futile to try!
You have to find your own voice, your own physiology, and your own psyche.
That’s really what it’s about.
William: For me, that’s what a teacher can do. They can help the student identify how to do those things.
Robert: That is a beautiful statement because that ultimately is the ideal of teaching—helping each student find their own voice. And if you can do that, it’s the most gratifying thing in the world.
William: I could not agree more.
Robert: Before you go, I just want to thank you for taking the time from your busy schedule to come join us here at LivingPianos.com.
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. Today, I’m going to show you how to recharge your piano playing. Have you ever gotten a piece to a really high level and played it on a regular basis, but somehow it goes stale? It’s just not quite there. It’s not like there are trouble spots you can practice. The whole thing just doesn’t have the spark that it once had. How can you get it back into shape? I’m going to show you today. There are some very basic techniques that are going to do the job for you.
Slow practice is one of the most important aspects of piano playing.
I have had the opportunity to study with some absolutely stupendous piano teachers, including my father, Morton Estrin, Ruth Slenczynska, Constance Keene, and John Ogden. They all practiced slowly. Every fine pianist I have ever met practices slowly. Even when you can play something up to tempo, going back and practicing slowly is absolutely essential on the piano. You should also take your foot off the pedal. Listen to what your fingers are doing. The pedal covers so much. I can tell you that these two tips I have just given you are so fundamental that every great classical pianist uses them.
Use the score.
Even if you have a piece memorized, it’s not good enough. You have to reinforce your memory. Do you think you can remember every single detail, like where a slur ends, where a crescendo begins, or the exact voicing of every chord? You must constantly reinforce your memory!
Use the metronome.
Practice with a metronome to keep yourself honest. Put the metronome on a nice, slow speed. Play with no pedal and keep your eyes on the score. The amazing thing is that just going through it slowly like that a few times will already clean up your playing enormously. But if you really want to develop a stellar technique, you can do all the speeds in between, where necessary. You might not have to do all the speeds everywhere. But any place that doesn’t come out consistently or feel comfortable, do progressively faster metronome speeds on those sections.
I remember watching my father practice when he was preparing to record his Brahms album. I used to watch my father practice all the time. I loved it! It was really enriching. I remember he got to a point where he was playing through everything just slightly under tempo without the pedal. It was totally relaxed and clean. That’s what you want. You want to get to the point where you get it up to tempo and it’s all comfortable. The notes are just there. You don’t have to work to make it come out. And because you study the score again and again, slowly seeing every detail, you really perfect your performance.
This is a great way to get any piece back into shape!
If you have a piece that’s gone stale or a piece you’re performing and you want to make sure it’s still in good shape, this technique is bulletproof. Practice slowly, with the score, no pedal, and using a metronome. Try it in your practice! You’ll be amazed at what this can do for your playing! 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
