Bach lived in Leipzig, Germany and did very little travelling. However, whenever musicians came through town, he would make a point of hearing them. So he wrote a vast array of music of different cultures including English Suites, French Suites, Italian Concerto, as well as a wealth of other music. He wrote weekly masses at the church where he worked. At one point, he was composing music for 3 different churches!
One of Bach’s most substantial bodies of work are his 48 Preludes & Fugues known as, The Well Tempered Clavier. He celebrated the advancement of tuning technology, which finally afforded the possibility of playing in all 12 keys without the necessity of re-tuning the instrument, by composing Preludes and Fugues in each of the major and minor keys. As if that wasn’t enough, he composed 2 books of them!
The Toccatas are pieces in which Bach explores free-form writing.
This gives insights as to what it might have been like to hear Bach improvise music at the keyboard. The E minor Toccata starts with a short movement, then goes right into a fugue. Then there is a very free movement which is like a fantasy. Finally, an incredible fugue with a subject that only Bach could utilize with his brilliance with counterpoint. It is a long, fast subject, and the fugue ends with a flourish of notes for a rousing ending to this fantastic piece!
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. With over 1500 videos on LivingPianos.com, it’s amazing when I think of a topic that I’ve never covered before that’s so fundamental! Today I’m going to talk about how to practice reading pieces. First of all, let me explain what I’m talking about. I have obviously described the process of practicing pieces to memorize: the painstaking process of taking one hand at a time, very small phrases, mastering all elements of the score, the notes, rhythm, fingering, phrasing, and expression of each hand separately, memorizing them, putting them together one phrase at a time, and then connecting them. But sometimes your pieces are not solo pieces, and it wouldn’t make much sense to memorize them.
You may have pieces you aren’t going to memorize but still want to play at a high level.
For example, let’s say you’re playing in an orchestra that has a piano part in it. You’re not going to memorize such a score. Or if you’re accompanying a singer, if the piece is at your reading level, you can just read through it. But suppose it’s harder than that, and you want to play it with them. You’re not going to memorize this piece; so how do you approach such a thing? I’m going to tell you about that. Read to the end because I’m going to tell you an additional benefit to this that’s essential for your piano practice.
You can’t learn a piece by simply reading through it.
I describe the process of how to learn a piece of music that you’re memorizing as opposed to just reading it through again and again until you kind of get it. The danger with that type of practice is that unless you’re playing it perfectly, you are likely doing more harm than good. If the piece is of sufficient difficulty for you, it’s probably not something you cqn just read through perfectly. Otherwise, why study that piece if you can already play it? So usually, you’re taking a piece of music that has more challenges than something you can just read through perfectly. If you read through something you’re missing again and again, you’re going to reinforce those mistakes. In a piece, each note has a rhythm, a fingering, a dynamic level, and other expression markings. So if you count up the number of notes in a piece and multiply by four or five with all the elements that it has, you come up with thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of details! There’s no way that you can just assimilate that kind of information without an organized approach.
What do you do to learn a piece of music you’re not memorizing?
Interestingly, you can use much of the same type of practice method with a piece you are not going to memorize! First, read through the piece just to get acquainted. If there are large sections you can already play just reading, that’s good. You may not need to practice those parts further. But for any sections that you can’t just read through adequately, practice them the same way you practice memorizing. However, because you’re not memorizing, you can take a bigger chunk of music at a time. So if normally you take two measure phrases, hands separately, maybe you take four measure phrases or even eight measure phrases.
Get one hand really fluent, study the score carefully for all details, get the dynamics right from the get-go, and work out good fingering. Learn all the details of the score. If there are expression marks that provide additional indications of how the music should be played, incorporate them right from the beginning. Get one hand as fluent as possible, and then do the same thing with the other hand. You’re not memorizing, but just getting it totally fluid. Then put your hands together. Slow down at first so you can get it accurate the first time, then play it many times and speed the phrase up. Work through the whole piece in this manner connecting sections as you go. You might not be able to get everything up to tempo right at the beginning, but get each section as fast as you can, knowing that you’re going to revisit it tomorrow to work on all the sections again. Then you can get it a little bit faster and get more fluid connections between sections, always working to the point of diminishing returns on all sections. You’ll know which sections still need work because you won’t be able to play those sections adequately up to tempo yet.
You can revisit pieces you’ve already memorized and solidify your work by reading them.
You can go through pieces you’ve already memorized, and any sections you can’t read, you can practice in this manner. It’s absolutely essential that you are able to read through pieces you have memorized. Otherwise, over time, they will degrade. You won’t possibly be able to keep all the integrity of your memory over a long period of time through sheer repetition of playing without referencing the score. You must go back and reinforce the memory by reading through the score. This is a great way to develop your reading abilities in pieces that you want to be able to play that are not to be memorized, as well as reinforcing the memory of pieces you’ve already learned. I hope this is helpful for you! 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. I am so pleased to have a special guest today, Bijan Taghavi! Bijan was a student of mine from the time he was eight years old until after high school, when he went to the Manhattan School of Music as a piano major. He studied classical music, played concertos, and accompanied metropolitan opera singers, but all along, he also played other styles of music. I’m proud to announce that:
He is coming out with his second album with his trio, TrioGram!
Robert: Welcome, Bijan!
Bijan: Thanks for having me, Bob. I’m so happy to be here.
Robert: So tell me the latest. What’s going on with you? Then we’ll start from the beginning and talk about your metamorphosis in music. I’m sure everybody’s interested in this.
Bijan: I’m actually in town visiting Cleveland now because I’m playing at the Treelawn, which is a new jazz club. They got their piano from you, actually. It’s literally a two-minute walk from here in the Waterloo Arts District in Cleveland. So I’m going to be playing here, and then we’re off to Europe for a tour for our first album, which came out a few months ago. And then, pretty soon thereafter, we’re going to be going to L.A. to do our second TrioGram album. It’s a jazz piano trio with myself, led by my friend, the great bassist Will Lyle. We’re going to have a special guest drummer who played with the Bill Evans Trio: Joe LaBarbera. So I’m so excited about that. It’s going to be great!
Robert: That’s really exciting! This is your second European tour, is that right?
Bijan: It’s my second international tour. I did a Bijan Taghavi Trio tour back in 2018 in Japan, which, by the way, has an incredibly vibrant… I was going to say music scene, but it’s actually a perfect situation where the musicians aren’t necessarily as great as they are here, but the audiences actually love jazz over there, so it’s a perfect problem. There’s more demand than supply! So when we go there, they absolutely love it. The venues are packed, and it’s a lot of fun.
Robert: Fantastic!
You’re teaching at Hillsdale College.
We could talk a little bit about your academic background, but I think people would be really interested in how you started off in classical, but from the very beginning, you’d come in with blues and Elton John tunes. I always worked with you on these other styles, but you were spearheading major concertos by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, and then suddenly you had a pivotal event that shifted everything. Talk about the difference between classical and jazz. What was it like for you to make that shift? How did this happen?
Bijan: When I switched to studying with you, that was really when I became serious with the piano. Before that, I had just gone to the Yamaha School of Music. I was there for maybe five years or something. I started when I was three and a half. Elton John was actually my inspiration, so that’s probably why later on, when I first started venturing outside of classical music, I started just exploring with some Elton John tunes. But then I went to a performance of yours, and do you remember where I sat in relation to you?
Robert: Yes, yes. This was very early on, and you were just a little kid. I was playing a private concert in a beautiful home in Huntington Beach, and this little kid came over and sat with his head right on the edge of the keyboard! I said, “Can you go to the other side?” Because you were blocking the audience!
Bijan: Completely blocking the audience!
Robert: The entire performance, you were just riveted! For such a young kid, that was really pretty shocking! Then I heard you play, and I could hear that, you know, even though you were elementary, you had a lot of talent and so much enthusiasm. I always enjoyed working with you. The interesting thing was that, from the very beginning, you’d spend your allowance money on sheet music. Not many kids do that!
Bijan: At the time, I remember you weren’t taking students, or at least that’s what you said. Maybe you just didn’t want to take the elementary level first. But then, once you heard that I was spending my allowance on sheet music, that showed you that I was really committed to doing something with the piano, whether it was professional or not, and that I was taking it seriously. You know,
Studying with you—it’s not hyperbole to say it really changed my life in terms of my trajectory.
First of all, with the piano, I figured out how to practice, which I’m sure people who watch your YouTube channel know is a big concept that you emphasize in your lessons and everything. I learned everything I know about how to play the piano, piano technique, how to get a good sound out of the piano, piano tone, etc., from you. I did all those main classical works, as far as even playing solo piano concerts at your old Art District Concert series.
You even prepared me to play the Grieg Piano Concerto with the South Coast Symphony.
But then I made the transition. It was really sort of two main catalyst events for me that made me switch. The first thing was that I had a concert with a Latin jazz flutist, Néstor Torres. That was the first true sort of jazz experience that I ever had. At that time, even though I had spent, like you said, some allowance money on rock songs, Billy Joel, Elton John, and a little bit of blues, I didn’t really know how to read chord charts. So that was the craziest thing for me to look at. They were looking for a jazz pianist out of the high school group because he came to our high school, and I just said I could play jazz piano. Then I was handed, over the summer, this stack of like 20 lead sheets. Now it might be easy for me because I’m so used to that, but at the time, reading a lead sheet was like the craziest thing. I didn’t even know what I was looking at!
Robert: I remember you coming into your lesson with this book. We had done some theory, but to realize an entire concert’s worth of lead sheets? There’s no way there would be time during a lesson! We just scratched the surface, but somehow you assimilated all those scores! And that was when you were still in high school.
Bijan: Yeah, I was still in high school. My guitar teacher, who also helped me a lot in making the transition, gave me this sort of cheat sheet that had every single chord on it. And there were unnecessary chords too. It was like maybe a stack of like 25 chords written on this page. It had the chord, and then it had the formula. I didn’t really understand how there are only four chord families, and you don’t need that list of 25, but I went through each chord methodically in the lead sheet and figured out what the chords are. So it was a lot of work. But I sort of temporarily quit my foray into jazz after that. In retrospect, Néstor was right. He told me something that sort of depressed me a little bit about the possibility. He said, “Look, kid, you’ve got a long way to go.” Particularly with my improvisation and things like that, because I didn’t have much jazz language then, even though I was experimenting with things. That’s an area where you were really encouraging to me. I’m indebted to you forever for that. You encouraged me to keep going and to explore more and more.
The second catalyst for me was when I heard the great late pianist Oscar Peterson. When I first transitioned to jazz, I didn’t have a jazz teacher for the longest time. You would help me out a lot, but:
I didn’t study with a jazz teacher until I went to the Manhattan School of Music later.
So I had sort of a year-long period where it was really just Oscar Peterson. I actually didn’t like jazz, which is the funniest thing. Some of the greatest jazz pianists like Bill Evans and McCoy Tyner, for me, my ears weren’t even ready for that. But I was lucky enough that Oscar was able to draw me in. Now I can appreciate all those artists, and I’ve taken so much from those other pianists as well. But those were the main two catalysts for me.
Robert: With all my students, I give a solid background in the three macro skills of memorization, sight reading, and improvisation. One of the things I do from the earliest stages is just have students play a very simple chord progression. First, I will go on one side of the piano and comp and let the student play all white keys. I’ll do a Dorian mode. Then I’ll switch it and let the student comp (and I solo). Then I say, “Okay, now the hard part. See if you can comp with your left hand and solo with the right hand.” And there are varying degrees of success. Sometimes people just start playing methodically up the keyboard, one note at a time. I’ll say, “Hold some notes longer than others,” to try to get some variety. But right from the very first time you did it; I couldn’t believe you were able to do it the first time you tried! That’s when I realized that you had an incredible affinity for this. The other thing was your sense of rhythm with popular styles. You had a great groove, even as the youngest kid, in addition to being able to play Beethoven and Chopin scherzos and all of that.
But getting back to TrioGram, what is the whole concept of TrioGram? On your albums, It’s all original music. How much of it is yours? Tell us a bit more about your trio.
Bijan: Yeah, it’s a lot of original music. TrioGram is an association of myself and one of my best friends, Will Lyle, a great bass player. We’re both from Southern California, actually, although we never met there. We met afterwards when we were both in college, and we found out we’re both from there. But he and I had worked a lot together in the past, and we always meant to do a project together. We thought, what better way than to do a piano trio? First of all, as a pianist, a piano trio is one of the premier settings to feature a jazz pianist because you’re in control of everything. You’re playing the melodies; you’re the main soloist instrument, although the bassist can solo as well. So it really features the pianist. It’s a lot of fun, but it’s also kind of intimidating at the same time. But it was this project that he and I put together. Basically, it was just the end of last summer in 2022. We were both incredibly busy, but we thought, let’s do a record together at the end of a month. So we only gave ourselves a month. Naturally, he and I both got busy. I’m doing a lot of work in Michigan, and he’s doing a lot of work in New York. But our drummer mistakenly thought we were still going on with the project even though we had decided to stop it. He just did this little post on Facebook. He said, “Hey guys, I’m going to be in town doing this recording session.” I was like, “Hey, Will, did you not tell Kofi that we’re not going to be doing this anymore?” Then we talked about it and decided that maybe we should go ahead and do it. So it was really put together at the last minute. We decided the tunes last minute, and we wrote the tunes last minute, but it turned out a lot better than we expected. It was great. We did a lot of original music. He did some original tunes, and
I did some original tunes, one of which was dedicated to you, actually. It’s called “Changes.”
Robert: A great tune, by the way. We’ll have links for you so you can check out some of Bijan’s music.
The last thing I want to ask about is your upcoming album. You’ve got another drummer featuring on this album. Tell us about that, because that’s a really exciting development.
Bijan: After we did the first record, Will and I did a series of tours. We did one on the West Coast, where we went to Mexico and did a series of shows there with incredible audiences. They were so supportive of our music. Then we went to California and Arizona. In California, we had featured special guest drummers with us, and in L.A., we played with the great drummer Joe LaBarbera, who was one of the drummers for the iconic Bill Evans trio. We had the rehearsal, and I’m really picky with musicians and drummers because there’s a very particular thing that I want, and Will is the same way. But after the rehearsal, he and I went outside, and we just started dancing like a bunch of old Iranian women! We were celebrating! It was the most incredible thing. I had never played with a drummer where I felt so good and comfortable. He knew how to support you and play under you, and the sound he gets out of the instrument, I could go on forever. His time feel is just so incredible! We have another tour coming up.
We’re going to be playing with Joe LaBarbera in California, in
San Francisco on July 26 at the Black Cat and on July 27th at Campus Jack’s Jazz Club in Orange County.
And we thought, since we’re doing these gigs with them and we’re going to be in California, let’s do another record with him. So we’re going to be doing another album with Joe LaBarbera, and I’m so excited for it.
Robert: Well, we’ll have links to your website, and once again, it’s great having you here! I know you’ve got to get to your gig up the street in about 5 minutes.
Bijan: I’m going to change and run over there!
Robert: Thanks again for coming. And once again, I’m Robert Estrin, this is LivingPianos.com.
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about why you must exaggerate your playing when practicing slowly. Why would you want to exaggerate? Shouldn’t you try to play exactly the same way slowly as when you speed up? Yes, that’s a valuable technique, but there are many times when you want to exaggerate dynamics and phrasing in your slow playing.
If you don’t exaggerate your slow practice, you may end up with a watered-down performance.
If you’re practicing a piece slowly without exaggerated dynamics, when you play it up to speed, it can sound dull. Since you had so little definition of dynamics and phrasing, it all but disappears when you go faster. You naturally lighten up in order to facilitate speed. Those differences in dynamics and phrasing become diluted. So instead, when practicing slowly, exaggerate all the elements of the music. Then, when you play faster and with ease, your hands know what to do. The fingers are staying closer to the keys. The wrists are not making such exaggerated motions because they are already solidified. It still comes out because you have trained your fingers and wrists to delineate the phrasing and dynamics with such definition that when you speed up, staying closer to the keys, and lightenening up, the dynamics and the phrasing are still there. You can play with ease, and you don’t lose the expressiveness of your playing!
Try that in your practice! Let me know how it works for you in the comments! 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 how to become comfortable playing the piano for people. It’s imperative that you practice performing, but how can you do such a thing? You probably know if you’ve ever tried to play for someone, that things can go haywire. Why does that happen? You practice a piece, you can play it over and over again perfectly, but when you try to play it for someone, a friend or maybe for your teacher, everything goes wrong! What can you do to keep this from happening?
Preparation is key.
You can’t expect to play something in front of people that you can’t even play consistently on your own. So prepare like crazy! Practicing slowly is a great way to reinforce your memory and secure your performance. You are analyzing everything that’s happening when you play slowly, which is a little bit akin to what happens when you’re performing. Suddenly you’re hyper focused and you notice every little thing that maybe you didn’t really notice before. Have you ever felt that? When you play slowly, it’s more deliberate. That is a terrific way to solidify your playing so you feel more in control when you’re performing.
You can practice performing by recording yourself.
Set up your phone, computer, or any other recording device, audio or video, and record yourself playing. Get yourself psyched up like it’s a performance. The most important thing is that once you start, for better or worse, go through to the end. Make it feel like a real performance! You can always do it again later if you’re not happy with the way it came out. But don’t stop halfway through and start again, because that is not an option when you’re playing for people. Nobody wants to hear you start over. It’s kind of like someone telling a story and in the middle they stumble over a few words and start over from the beginning. You’re going to be really bored with them. So it’s really important to learn how to keep going. It’s one of the most important aspects of performing.
Play for friends and family.
Once you’ve gotten comfortable playing for a machine that records you, it’s time to play for people! Hopefully you have a good friend who likes music enough that they’ll sit and listen to you play something. And once again, even though they’re good friends, and they’ll forgive you if you stop and start again, don’t do that! Take advantage of the fact that you have this performance opportunity and play through for them. Plus they’ll enjoy it more if you don’t stop. Even if you’re not happy with the performance, they will enjoy it more if there’s continuity. Be in the service of your listener – the performance isn’t about you. It’s about your audience when you’re performing. When you practice, you can stop any time and make those repairs that are necessary. When you’re playing for people, it’s all about them. Make the experience enriching for them, which means don’t start over. They don’t want to hear that.
Challenge yourself by playing for more people.
Perhaps when you have company over say, “Would anybody like to hear some music?” Be bold! Give yourself an opportunity to play for more than just one person. In other words, you want to build up. So at first, you start just with the lowest pressure possible, just playing by yourself. Then you record yourself. Then play for a single person who doesn’t make you feel nervous. Then play for larger numbers of people. Then finally, if you’re ever in a place with a piano, particularly if it’s a better piano than what you regularly play on, that is a great opportunity to play through your music and learn how to adjust to another instrument. This is a tremendous challenge. You may discover things about the piece that you never even thought of before, just from hearing it on a different piano. Plus, with all the eyes on you, you’re hyper focused, and that attention you’re giving can really aid in discovering new things in the music. Of course, the downside of that is you might become distracted and things could fall apart. But that can help you to strengthen your performance, because you’ll know what to practice.
Building up from smaller to larger audiences is a great way to strengthen your performance.
Do it as many times as it takes to become comfortable. You’ll find that when you have a new piece, you may need to repeat this process. If you’ve never performed a piece, you want to break it in. My father, who performed at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center and in Europe, would always have tryout recitals before he played in public. He would invite people over and play through his program. He tried to do this a number of times before the actual event. He would often record himself, and that way he’d know what state the performance was in. It would help him to focus his practice where it was needed.
This is a great idea for anybody on any level!
So remember, practice performing and you will be richly rewarded. It will take your piano playing to the next level. If you never perform your music for anyone, you’ll never have the opportunity to really understand what it’s all about. So go for it – you have nothing to lose! People will appreciate the opportunity to hear you play. You can’t imagine how much people really do appreciate live music. So give it a try! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about how playing fast is easier than playing slowly. You might think that’s crazy. Of course, it would take more work to be able to develop speed in your playing. There is some truth to that. But once you do have some speed and fluency in your playing, have you ever tried to go back and play slowly again? It can be really difficult! There are a lot of reasons for this. We’re going to discuss this and what you can do to help your playing.
Once you’ve played a piece many times, your fingers just know where to go.
Years ago I made a video about how playing your scales should be on autopilot. I likened it to learning how to walk. You see toddlers taking their first steps. The concentration on their faces is unbelievable! Of course, once you learn how to walk, you really don’t think about it. It’s almost involuntary. You can be thinking about other things while you’re walking once you learn how to do it. Well, the same thing is true of scales! It’s also true of all the music you play. You get to a point where your mind is wandering, but your fingers keep going. That’s actually a good thing in some respects. If you didn’t have that to rely upon, it would be hard to be focused 100% of the time. But naturally, you can’t depend upon that motor memory, finger memory, muscle memory, whatever you want to call it.
When you play slowly, it’s harder to think through everything.
When you slow things down, every single note becomes very obvious. But there’s another reason why playing fast is easier than playing slowly. I’m not even talking about the solidity of how well you know the score. I’m talking about musical considerations. When you’re playing slowly, it’s very difficult to even know where the line is. For example, Chopin’s E Minor Prelude. Playing that piece slowly and trying to get a sense of the rise and the fall of the line is all but impossible. It’s very difficult to maintain a line playing under tempo.
All music really is reflective of the human voice.
All instruments are an extension of the instrument we all carry with us. Naturally, wind instruments are a direct analog to the human voice, because the breath is involved. It’s a natural extension. Bowed instruments, like a violin or cello, have the continuum of the bow against the strings. On the piano, it’s a challenge to create that continuum of sound. But imagine a wind player or a singer trying to sing a song much slower than its normal speed. It would be hard to sustain the phrase. You would run out of air! It would be hard to get a sense of the line. That same Chopin prelude played at a faster tempo, with the pulse of the quarter note or even the half note, makes it much easier to feel the musical line.
Once you know a piece, it’s so much easier to play it faster, because you can get a sense of the line.
The challenge is gaining enough fluency that you can play up to speed. Sometimes it helps just trying to play something up to tempo. Even if it’s not totally polished, playing it up to tempo helps you know what you’re working for. Of course, you don’t want to repeat sloppy playing again and again. You may even want to play just the right hand, just to get the feel of the phrasing. Once you understand the intention of the music, your practice is so much more productive. You want to know what you’re aiming for. So think of your music up to tempo, even if you can’t quite play it yet. Try to play it up to speed so you get a sense of the music. Your practice is always in service of the music.
That’s the message for today! I hope this works well for you. Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin
Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com
