Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to tell you about the magic of fractal practicing. Fractals are when one part of something is the same as the whole. No matter how small you go, it’s just a replication of the bigger part. You’ve probably seen pictures that are fractals. No matter how much you zoom in, you keep seeing the same patterns. Your music could be thought of in the same way.
Watch the video to see the demonstration!
I’m going to demonstrate with a little piece of Kabalevsky called Fairy Tale. I’m going to start at the beginning and play a little bit, delineating each phrase for you. Then I’m going to do it again, but this time I’m going to put those two phrases together as one long phrase and see what that sounds like.
You could take a whole section of music and think of it as one big phrase.
Ultimately, the entire piece is one statement. As Rachmaninoff said, “The bigger the phrase, the bigger the musician.” Now, here’s where it gets really interesting. If you’re playing a program with several different pieces, for example, you play a sonata, which has three or four movements. At first, each movement is its own concept, its own large phrase. Eventually, the whole sonata becomes a coherent whole thought—one big phrase. Then half a program can become one musical statement. And then the entire program can be one big phrase.
If you start thinking about these larger units in your music, it becomes true storytelling on a personal level.
It’s not just each little individual phrase; it’s how the phrase is built into a coherent whole that’s greater than the sum of the parts. So go through your score, whether it’s Mozart or Chopin. First, identify the smallest unit that makes sense as a phrase with a nice rise and fall, assuming it’s a melodic piece of music. Then try joining two phrases and making one long phrase out of that. Then maybe even four phrases. Or take an exposition—the whole first section of a sonata movement. See if you can make a coherent whole out of that to figure out where the climax is. Do that with all of your music and find all the different fractals, all the different-sized phrases, and you can have a coherent whole that has all the nuances of these smaller phrases but doesn’t lose sight of the whole. And that’s what makes a great performance! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
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4 thoughts on “The Magic of Fractal Practicing”
2024.02.12
Hi Robert,
Thanks for your fractal insight into the structure of a piece of music! I am working on a keyboard version of the Bach Chaconne, using just the violin score played an octave lower (which is plenty difficult enough without getting into the Busoni arrangement of it) and I was beginning to get a sense of what I thought are small structures within it, that are part of larger structures, that are part of yet larger structures, etc. Then you come along with this video, and put descriptors on all of it for me. You helped me verbalize what I was getting a sense of. Thank you so much for this.
By the way, I love the Steinway you have been using for your recent videos, and furthermore, it is in good tune!
Charles in Albuquerque
The Bach Chaconne is a great example of how you can look at larger and larger phrases! You can also explore the Brahms transcription which is for the left hand alone.
Since I am a visual fractal artist, I found this most fascinating. I did have to listen to your early phrases several times to hear what you were talking about. More separation between the two phrases to begin with would help. Fractals work the opposite: you go from the whole to the tiny parts (each of which becomes a whole in turn).
Actually, you can look at fractals or musical phrases from either big to small or small to big!