Tag Archives: robert estrin

When Was the Golden Age of Pianos?

Robert Estrin here from LivingPianos.com with another great question. When was the golden age of pianos? You may have heard the term, “Golden Era”, particularly referring to American pianos. Did you know,

A hundred years ago there were over a thousand companies manufacturing pianos in the United States!

Even before the Great Depression and the crash of the stock market in 1929 there were still hundreds of piano companies in the U.S. The piano was as ubiquitous in homes as big screen televisions are today and in no small part by the player piano.

The player piano was the first home entertainment system.

In the late 1920’s the piano plummeted as radio and phonograph technologies came about. Of course when the Great Depression hit, the piano industry was heavily impacted. The golden era was really before this time. Yet, you could say it extended to before World War II when there were still hundreds of piano companies in this country.

However, during the 1930’s there was tremendous attrition of the piano market for the reasons I articulated: The Great Depression as well as technologies in audio such as radio and the phonograph dealt a death blow to the piano market. Yet there were still many companies making fine pianos.

Ten times more new pianos were sold in the United States sometime between the turn of the century and before World War I.

Remember, that was when the population was less than ⅓ of what we have today! The piano was extremely popular. That was the golden era.

Today, the piano has a renascence of activity in:

China where there are more companies manufacturing pianos than there are piano stores in the United States!

80% of the world’s piano students are in China today. You’ve got to be thankful that the piano is alive and well, just not in the United States like it used to be.

Of course, there are many of you who love the piano just as I do and they will always be around. Keep the questions coming in, again I’m Robert Estrin from LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store.

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Can Music Be Created Instantly?

This is Robert Estrin at livingpianos.com. The question today is, can music be created instantly? Truth be known, nearly all the great composers were phenomenal improvisers. We can only imagine what it must have been like sitting and hearing Liszt make up one of his fantasies, or hearing Mozart improvise theme, variations and sonata movements with good form and beautiful architecture of melodies and harmonies. So, yes, music can be created instantly.
In this video, I’m going to create an improvisation and see what I can create for you on the spot with zero preconceived notions as to what is going to come out. I hope you enjoy!

Is improvisation dead in the world today?

Well, in classical music it’s really just a micron of the entire industry of classical music. But in jazz and other forms of music, improvisation is a vibrant art form, and the crafting of solos by great jazz artists is awe-inspiring.

So, the tradition lives on in other styles of music today. I hope you’ve enjoyed this. Again, I’m Robert Estrin here at livingpianos.com, Your Online Piano Store.
Thanks so much for joining me.

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949-244-3729

Honest Expression On Demand!


Sitting down at a beautiful semi-concert grand can be inspiring! But the challenge of being able to instantly remove all distractions and focus solely on music can be enormous!

At first, I wasn’t going to release this video since the video quality isn’t the best. But after relistening to the music, I believe it is worth checking out.

Hope you enjoy!
Robert@LivingPianos.com
949-244-3729

How to Memorize Music Faster

This is Robert Estrin from LivingPianos.com today with a great tip for you about how to memorize music faster. Don’t we all want to be able to learn music faster? Someday maybe they’ll put a chip in your head and you’ll have all the sonatas of Beethoven or the well-tempered Clavier of Bach. Wouldn’t that be great? In the meantime, we’ve got to go through and memorize music. I’ve explained in detail in some of my other videos the process.

HOW TO PRACTICE THE PIANO PART 1 – MEMORIZING MUSIC

Today I’m not going to go into all the details about how to memorize. I’m going to show you one incredibly important technique that can save you vast amounts of time:

Practicing in Chords First

Let’s say you were learning the famous Mozart Sonata in C major K 545. As I’ve explained before, you want to learn hands separately first. Start with a little section, something you can digest relatively quickly. You want to be productive your entire practice section instead of taking on a big section that wears you out for the day too early on. Pay attention to the left hand. What is it doing? It is what is referred to as alberti bass, basically broken chords.

WHAT MAKES MOZART SO SPECIAL?

It seems like a lot of notes. Or is it? If you think about it, it is really just several broken chords.

The whole first measure can be reduced down to one chord!

This has many benefits for you. You will understand intrinsically the underlying harmony. This is because you see the chords you are playing instead of separate notes. It also enables you to discover the best fingering to accommodate chord to chord instead of thinking separate notes. You’re going to understand the structure of the music better, you’ll find a better fingering, and it is less to learn.

This was a short tip but it can save you hours of work when learning your music while solidifying your understanding of the underlying harmonic structure. I hope you’ve enjoyed this. Again, Robert Estrin at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store. See you next time.

info@LivingPianos.com
949-244-3729

What is an Opus?

This is Robert Estrin from LivingPianos.com with a really interesting question for you: What is an opus? You probably have heard this when you go to concerts and see, for example, a piano Sonata no. 7, opus 10 no. 3 by Beethoven. You may have wondered what this means. You have the number of the piece, the key of the piece, what does opus mean?

Opus numbers started way back in the time of Handel in the 1700s. It is a way of organizing music so generally, lower opus numbers are earlier works, and higher opus numbers are later works. However, it is not quite so simple. If you have sonatas numbered, that already tells you when they were written. Why would you still need opus numbers? Chopin wrote a whole book of mazurkas and an entire book of waltzes. Many of them are in the same key and to be able to identify them, opus numbers can be very handy.

Let’s say Beethoven had three sonatas he wanted to publish. He would go to his publisher with the works. If the last works he published were, “opus 9”, these new compositions would be cataloged as, “opus 10”. If he presents three piano sonatas opus 10, they will be designated as opus 10 no. 1, opus 10 no. 2, and opus 10 no 3. That is a whole body of work. Next time he composes music it will be cataloged as opus 11. It could be piano pieces, string quartets, or a symphony. It depends on what is in that opus. It could be one work or a group of works.

Each opus represents a group of works published together

Here is where it gets a little tricky. Sometimes opuses are out of order. For example, the Opus 49 Sonatas of Beethoven come to mind. He wrote two sonatas that were published pretty late, Opus 49, yet they were written much earlier. While these pieces were composed earlier in his life, he didn’t publish them until later on.

You can’t always go by opus numbers in regards to the date that something was written.

However, they provide a way to clarify what works you are referring to. That is the whole purpose of opus numbers. Why do I bring this all up? It is a little personal story. Years ago, I composed a piece that was a mammoth work for synthesizers, digital pianos, and a whole host of other technologies. I called it “Opus 1” because I thought it was a cool name. I just did an improvisation in my living room after visiting my daughter in Portland, Oregon. I hadn’t touched the piano in a few days and I just came in, hit record, and sat down. I’m calling it “Opus 2” for you.

I hope you enjoyed this brief tutorial on what “opus” means. If you have any questions I’m always here for you: robert@livingpianos.com I’d love to hear from you. Thanks for joining me again. This is Robert Estrin from LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store.

info@LivingPianos.com
949-244-3729

Do You Have to Keep Learning New Music on the Piano?

This is Robert Estrin of LivingPianos.com. The question today is “Do you have to keep learning new music on the piano?” If you know about piano repertoire, you know how vast it is. It is the most amazing thing. I have been playing the piano since I was a young child, and I’ve learned a great deal of music. Yet, people come up to me and say, “Do you know…” and whatever that piece is, before they even say the name, I think to myself, “Uh-oh, I hope I know it!”. It doesn’t matter who you are and how vast your repertoire is:

There is so much more music written for the piano that nobody knows it all.

Often I do know the requested piece, or at least know something similar by the same composer.

Do you have to keep learning music your whole life? My father was concertizing well into his eighties. He was in his eighties when he learned for the first time, Mussorgsky’s, “Pictures at an Exhibition”. You know this is a mammoth work. He was a firm believer in learning new music, always challenging himself, and always learning more music. I’ve got to say that I am very influenced by my father, Morton Estrin. He would lament that often times he would see some of his colleagues giving solo recitals. He would look at the program and say, “What? That’s the same thing program they performed at their graduate recital at Juilliard twenty years ago!” He used to scoff at that: the idea that someone could learn a certain amount of repertoire and keep playing the same things over and over again was anathema to his musical convictions. Is it really essential to keep learning music your whole life? Not necessarily, however, I think you’d be missing out on a great deal for two reasons. First of all:

You’d miss out on the beauty of the music and depth of expression that is possible by learning different pieces.

There is no substitution for that. For example, if you have seen some great movies, you still want to see new ones. If you’ve read great books, that doesn’t mean you aren’t ever going to read any new books in your life. It is the same thing with learning new pieces of music. More than that, by learning new pieces of music, you go back to pieces you’ve studied before and you will have gained new insights into the music. This isn’t just if you learn more compositions and genres of the same composer, but even unrelated works.

Pieces that demand techniques which expand your playing has benefits when revisiting other pieces taking them on a new level of performance.

Once again this is Robert Estrin at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store.

info@LivingPianos.com
949-244-3729