Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about how to use the pedal on the piano. This is such a deep subject. I have other videos on the finer points about pedaling, how it imparts changes in tone, when to use it, when not to use it, and how to use the sustain pedal in conjunction with the soft pedal. But today I will cover the fundamentals. If you’ve ever wondered how the pedal works, you’ve come to the right place!
The interesting thing about the pedal is that it does not go down rhythmically.
If you’ve just started using the pedal the hardest thing about it is that it is not used rhythmically, because you want to tap your foot on the beat. It’s the most natural thing in the world! Yet that doesn’t work on the piano. It doesn’t work because if you push the pedal down when a note plays, you will capture the harmonies of the previous notes that were down. It’s a mess. Why is that? The fact of the matter is, when you push the pedal down, whatever notes are held down are going to continue holding down. When you play a note, you’re still holding down the previous notes to some extent, particularly if something is slurred.
How do you create a slur on the piano?
A slur is a glide between notes. A singer or a French horn player does it very naturally and the notes between the slur are all there. On the piano, you can’t do that. So you tend to overlap notes, and that’s the way you create the illusion of a slur. But what happens when you pedal on the beat is the previously played notes are going to be held. If I play middle C and then a C sharp and I pedal at the same moment as I play the C sharp, you’re going to hear the C and the C sharp together. You will hear dissonance. The pedal must go down right after notes plays.
But here’s some good news for you, the pedal comes up exactly on the beat!
The pedal goes up exactly when you play a note. But the pedal goes down right after the note, arrhythmically. It’s important that you understand that, otherwise, you’re going to hear dissonance. It’s the nature of the pedal.
There’s so much more to the pedal. As a matter of fact, I will put links in the description of some other videos I have on pedaling. Decades ago, I made 50 hour-long presentations live on the internet, for a company in Irvine. My show was called Keyboard Kaleidoscope. One episode is an hour long show on the pedal that I will share with you in the notes below, in the description, and on LivingPianos.com! I hope this is helpful for you. Thanks so much 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’s subject is about how to keep your review pieces on performance level. I talk to so many people who wonder how they can learn new pieces without forgetting old pieces. People can end up studying the piano for years and still only have one piece they can play, the piece they’re working on that week! So, how do you keep old pieces in shape? How can you possibly have time to learn new pieces when you’re reviewing all your old pieces?
Of course the answer is, you can’t keep every piece you’ve ever played in your hands and in your head all the time. It becomes impossible! Once you amass a repertoire of five or six hours of music, you can’t possibly keep everything in shape. However, it is vitally important that you keep at least the last few pieces you’ve studied in your hands and in your head. Because there’s a pleasure and an ease you gain with music you’ve played for a long time. So, how do you do that without taking up all of your practice time?
The best, easiest, and most fun way of keeping your review pieces in shape is to play them!
Play your pieces all the time! play them every day! Why not? Obviously, if you have pieces like the Hammerklavier Sonata of Beethoven or the Bach Goldberg Variations, they’re going to take a while to play through. So, there are certain limitations depending upon the level you’re on. But certainly you should keep playing the pieces that you’ve studied within the past few weeks.
Let’s say you’re working on a brand new piece, and you have the piece you did at your last lesson. Well, it’s better to have the last few pieces, at least three to five pieces. Otherwise, as I said, you could be playing the piano for years and never have anything really secure. Because there’s nothing like the security of playing a piece that you’ve known for a long time. The ease and security you gain from living with music is tremendous. If you never review those pieces, everything is kind of tentative and you never have that pleasure.
Simply playing through your pieces, is that all you have to do?
Playing through your pieces isn’t all you have to do, but most of the time that’s enough. On a daily basis or at least every other day, play through your review pieces. Play through a bunch of them. It’s fun because they’re pieces you already know. What’s the purpose of all this practicing if you’re not going to have anything you can play? You should enjoy playing the piano, not just practicing. You put in all this tedious work of learning music and working out all the technical details. The reward at the end of the line is being able to play! So of course play them, and play them for people. You’ll get better at performing simply by playing for other people.
Now, if you keep playing your pieces over and over again for weeks on end and that’s all you do, they will deteriorate over time. Because there are slight changes that happen. Which is why you must go back to the score on a periodic basis with your music if it’s something you’ve memorized. Put the score up and play with your foot off the pedal so you can hear the underlying performance without the benefit of the pedal which can obscure things. Sometimes you should use a metronome to make sure you’re playing at a constant tempo. This is a great way to reinforce your playing. Playing with the score slowly to a metronome with no pedal reinforces everything that you’ve learned before. It’s a refresher. I recommend it highly for all of your review pieces. This is particularly helpful with pieces you’ve recently learned that you’re trying to get on that ultimate level. This is a terrific way of doing that. You can actually work at different speeds. Start very slowly with the score, because it’s hard to read something you’ve memorized, particularly if it’s a piece that’s above your reading level. You undoubtedly read through it when you first got it just to see what it was about, and then you got to work and learned it. Going back trying to read it is a tough task, but it’s also vitally important if you want to keep your performance on a high level. Otherwise, it’s like a game of telephone where the message gets so garbled it ends up being a whole new message. If you play your piece over and over enough times and never refer to the score, you can end up with a whole different piece! So, it’s incredibly important to reference the score.
Choose wisely which pieces you keep in your repertoire.
Definitely keep at least the last two or three pieces you’ve learned in your repertoire so you can really solidify them and enjoy the fruits of your labor. You might also select some choice pieces that you’ve learned that you never want to forget. Play them often enough that they don’t get too far gone. If you find that they’ve deteriorated to a great extent, go back to the score. You might have to practice some sections, but don’t let them get so far gone that you have to practically start all over to learn them again. But even if you do, you’ll find if you’ve really learned a piece of music and committed it to memory, relearning it is much faster than initially learning it. So, that’s the good news for any of you out there who haven’t done this. Go ahead and relearn some of those pieces. At first it’ll seem arduous, but then you’ll quickly assimilate the score once again.
There are pieces I’ve learned and relearned multiple times. They become cemented almost as a part of my permanent repertoire. There’s a number of pieces that I just have all the time. Even if I haven’t played them in years, they’re still there. But it takes a long time to get to that point. In the meantime, play through your pieces on a regular basis and have fun with your music! Thanks so much 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
This is Robert Estrin from LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store with a question. “Does playing the piano make you smarter?” I hope so. I’ve been playing a long time and wonder what I would be like if I didn’t play the piano! This is a serious question. Indeed there have been studies, like famous Gordon Shaw – Frances Rauscher studies at UC Irvine. These studies showed:
With a control group of children studying the piano, compared to other groups studying computers, as well as a control group studying nothing, the children who studied piano showed an increase of math and science scores and even increase in English skills!
That is exciting to think about! Later on, they even discovered the “Mozart Effect”, which had some controversy. They simply played recordings of Mozart while kids were taking tests and found that there was a temporary increase in IQ scores just from listening to the music! Temporary is the keyword here. Later on their findings were diminished when they found it was just a temporary boost, but that is exciting enough!
Why should playing the piano increase your intelligence? Did you know?
Playing the piano uses more parts of your brain than any other human activity.
This is according to the New York Times in article years ago about the human brain that showed piano playing as the single most complex endeavor of the human mind. How can this be? Think about it. You have short-term memory, long-term memory, tactile memory as well as visual and aural cues.
You have just about every part of your brain firing when playing the piano.
It is a fantastic opportunity to develop your mind. Of course if you play with other musicians you also develop social skills. It is endless. Just playing music is a great way to expand your mind. The discipline of practicing and the organization it takes to digest a piece of music make for an incredible opportunity to explore aspects of your own mind in ways that are richly rewarding. At the end of the line, you have something to show for it. You can play a piece of music or many pieces of music!
As if that isn’t enough of a reason to play the piano, being able to increase your intelligence is a benefit too! Everyone should study the piano, don’t you think? Let me know how you feel about this. I wonder how many of you are on board. I suppose if you are reading this there could be skewed results because many of my readers might already feel this way!
There are studies that prove an increase in intelligence just from playing the piano.
Spend more time with the piano and your brain will thank you! Once again, this is Robert Estrin at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store.
Tone poems are programmatic pieces which are based upon stories.
They are typically large orchestral works, sometimes approaching an hour or more in length. Richard Strauss, Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life) is one such epic work for symphony orchestra. Richard Wagner also composed tone poems as did Debussy. However, it was actually Franz Liszt who first developed the tone poem earlier in the 19th century even though he is known mostly as the quintessential virtuoso pianist and composer of brilliant piano works.
Since early childhood, throughout conservatory and beyond, I played both piano and French horn.
So, I have always been enamored with tone poems. The great tone poems of the late Romantic era are in my blood! I hope you enjoy the tone poem I have created for you. info@LivingPianos.com 949-244-3729
This is Robert Estrin at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store. Today, I have three secrets to playing slow music. When you hear instrumentalists, such as pianists, you notice that many have a lot of technical achievement. But when you hear a great artist play a slow movement, magic can happen. It can reach the inner depths of your soul. This is the sign of a great musician. How do you approach slow movements in order to get that quality, to get that beauty and be able to reach people on an emotional level? These are the secrets I’m going to give to you today.
Number one is: Make sure you take the right tempo.
A lot of people play slow movements too slowly. For example, if someone were to perform Debussy, Clair de Lune, you may hear it played very slowly. Now, it might be okay at the beginning, but by the time you get to the middle and compare the tempo they’re playing in the middle of the piece, often, they’re going faster because it gets ponderous after awhile at such a slow tempo.
Another clue for you when you’re taking a tempo that is too slow is that you will find that if there are repeats, you won’t want to take them. They don’t seem to work. So, if you have a piece of music and think, “Mozart didn’t mean all those repeats”. Yes, he did! And if they don’t work, it’s a clue that you are playing too slow a tempo. Another thing related to this is to:
Hold long notes long enough.
There’s nothing worse than robbing long notes. But it’s so easy to rob long notes because you’re just sitting there doing nothing! It’s easy to count to yourself and accelerate your counting in your head. You can lose the pulse.
A lot of performers play very slowly and rob the long notes, such as again, the beginning of Clair de Lune. To me, that is simply playing out of rhythm. But you’d be surprised how many performances you’ll find online of very renowned concert pianists playing this piece and robbing the long notes. Holding all the long notes for their full written value gives the music soul, doesn’t it? You’ve got to take the right tempo and you must hold the long notes long enough. What else is there? The other thing is to:
Think of the long note as the pulse.
This enables you to have a slow pulse with a faster tempo. An example is the second movement of the K. 332 Mozart Sonata in F major. First, you could play it thinking of each sixteenth note as the beat. The left hand has sixteenth notes, and each one of those can be punctuated as the beat. Then, instead of thinking each sixteenth note as the beat, try thinking each eighth note as the beat. It’s already going to be better. Rachmaninoff said,
“The bigger the phrase, the bigger the musician.”
Well, related to this is, the longer note that you feel as the pulse, the more freedom you have with your music. Now try feeling the quarter note as the pulse. This also gives you the benefit of being able to take a faster tempo but still having a relaxed feel to your music. Even with a slightly faster tempo, but with the quarter note as the pulse, it doesn’t feel hurried! Those are three secrets to being able to play slow music.
Make sure to hold long notes long enough, feel the long note as the beat, and choose the right tempo.
Don’t take slow pieces too slowly. If you do those three tips, it will enhance the performance of your slow music. I’d love to hear from all of you and give me your perspective. And if you haven’t subscribed to LivingPianosVideos’ YouTube channel, go for it! You’ll get all the fresh videos. We produce them for you every week.
Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com with a really fascinating show that I think you’re going to really appreciate, which is how to reach the last row in a concert hall.
If you’ve ever been to a performance of a world-class pianist, it’s an unforgettable experience. I had the opportunity to hear Vladimir Horowitz on several occasions. The first time was when he made one of his many comebacks, and every time he did this, it was a huge event. This was in 1974, and he was playing a performance at the Metropolitan Opera House. And if you have any idea of the scope of the size of that hall, you wonder how could you possibly play a concert in a hall that big?
I actually camped out at Lincoln Center, the tickets went on sale 6 AM and I got there at nine at night – I was number 311 in line already! Can you imagine? Interesting thing is that about 2:30 in the morning, Horowitz and his wife came by with coffee and donuts for the people waiting camped out there. It was really something. I get tickets and it was limited to only two. And my tickets were way, way up. The amazing thing was he was able to project a sound that came right through to the last row with beauty and singing quality. That was really something.
Well, here’s the interesting thing. Just a couple of months later, I was studying with Constance Keene at the Manhattan School of Music, and she was really good friends with the Horowitz’s. She actually was able to get tickets to a Carnegie Hall Concert he was giving. On this occasion, I was in one of the very front box seats and I could actually hear what he was doing that made it possible for me to enjoy his performance from the last row. Everything was punctuated much bigger.
Have you ever been to a museum and seen a great painting of one of the impressionists? You look from a distance and it’s just gorgeous colors and patterns, and you get up close and see all these angularities to the strokes. It was kind of like that hearing him so close in that front box seat. I could hear what he was doing in order to project to the back of the concert hall. In the video included with this article, I demonstrate this for you. I’ll show you what a delicate way of playing Mozart sounds like and then a way of playing Mozart that would go to the last row of the hall.
In the video above, you’ll hear a perfectly valid and wonderful way to play Mozart with a nice characteristic delicacy. The G major is a 283 Köchel.
Up until recently I’ve been playing it that way and I’ve been experimenting with a completely different way of playing it. Using a lot more arm weight, projecting a bigger sound, one that would carry through in a very large hall. When you listen to the video, compare these different styles.
So it’s not a right or wrong proposition here. And I would say to a great extent, it comes down to where you’re performing. In a big hall, approach a piece by playing bigger and with more arm weight, while punctuating the fast notes. Rather than playing everything in a fluid matter the way I did the first time, lighten up so that you can negotiate them. So that’s the secret. You have to play with more arm weight, more angularity, and punctuate fast passages by detaching the notes from one another so they carry through, even with the reverb of a large hall.
So these are some pointers for you. You’ve got to always listen to the piano and the room you’re playing in so that you can produce a sound that carries through to the last row.
Thanks so much for joining me again. This is Robert Estrin at LivingPianos.com, your online piano store.
949-244-3729 info@LivingPianos.com
