Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to tell you about the worst mistake you can make on the piano. There are a lot of different mistakes you can make that are terrible. I picked one particular mistake that I think is worse than any of them!
What kind of mistakes can you make on the piano?
You could hit wrong notes. Wrong notes are certainly bad. Of course you don’t want to play wrong notes! You could play the wrong rhythm. A lot of people play wrong rhythms. What about somebody who plays with an ugly sound? That’s a terrible mistake, isn’t it? Another mistake is smearing everything with the pedal. Some people think they’re playing really musically by using a lot of pedal. It can cover up a lot of inadequacies if the fingering is bad and things aren’t as connected as they should be. But of course you sacrifice the clarity of your playing. So what could possibly be worse than wrong notes, wrong rhythms, or an ugly sound?
The most insidious problem on the piano is…………..Hesitation!
Why is hesitation so bad? Well, have you ever seen a film where there’s a jump cut in the middle of the film? There’s a mistake in the editing where a scene jumps back or forward a little bit. It’s jarring! Even if you weren’t paying attention to the film, it draws you in. It’s the same in musical performance. If somebody is playing and then suddenly they make a mistake and hesitate for a moment and go back a little bit, it takes you out of the moment. It draws you in more than other mistakes.
When you make a mistake in your practice, you’re probably in the habit of stopping and correcting it.
That is the appropriate thing to do when you practice. But in performance, the show must go on! You have to keep moving. If you hesitate, everyone will be disturbed by it. It not only makes you look bad, it takes the joy out of the musical performance for the audience. They’re trying to just soak it in and enjoy it. They might be able to overlook little mistakes like cracked notes or slight rhythmic inaccuracies. But once you lose the continuity, it ruins the musical performance. So what can you do about it?
You must differentiate when you are practicing and when you are performing.
Not only that, you must practice performing! Most of the time when you’re practicing, if you make a mistake, you go back and correct it. As I’ve explained, this is a multi-pronged exercise. First, take out the score. Find exactly where the correction is and take note of it. Work out the correction until it is solidified and repeatable. Then go back to the beginning of that phrase and pass that point several times until smooth. Are you done? No, you’re not done yet! Believe it or not, you must go back to the beginning of the piece or the beginning of the whole section. Even though you’ve made the correction and you’ve even put the correction into a musical context by starting a little bit before, if you are used to missing it when starting from the beginning, you will probably miss it again unless you’re present at that moment. You’ve got to think it through. So it takes all of that work to make a correction.
How do you practice performing?
The easiest way is doing it by yourself. To have the discipline, take out your phone or other recording device and set it up. Get it into your head that this is a performance. No matter what, you’re not going to stop. You’re not going to correct anything. That’s not the appropriate time to make corrections. Nobody wants to hear you practice in the middle of a performance! Once you get comfortable performing by yourself or for a device that records you, then you can play for close friends or relatives. Take advantage of that opportunity to see how you will recover from mistakes.
You have to practice recovering from mishaps.
Everybody has mishaps! There isn’t a pianist alive who doesn’t have a finger slip or a memory insecurity at some point in a performance. You must learn how to deal with it. The only way to do that is by practicing performing. So those are the two lessons for today. One, avoid hesitations by practicing how to eradicate them with the three pronged approach of finding the place in the score and working out the correction, going back to the beginning of that phrase and being able to get through that point several times, and then going back to the beginning of the piece or the section and thinking through the correction. And the second thing is to practice performing so you can play from the beginning to the end of a piece without losing continuity, without hesitations. I hope this is helpful 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
5 thoughts on “What is the Worst Mistake on the Piano?”
– I actually thought the “wrong” harmony” sounded better than the original – Debussey should have written it that way !
I like to use the word “rehearsal” for playing through by myself, but with no stops. The only difference between performance and rehearsal is the audience. Practice is all the rest….
You have it exactly right – Rehearsing is practicing your performance!
For decades I was an organist in a parish in NYC. You had to be the the habit of not hesitating if you made a mistake, because the cantor and congregation would get thrown. In a similar situation, I remember going to a Mostly Mozart concert in which a very famous pianist blanked out during the last movement of Mozart’s G Major piano concerto. The last movement consists of a series of variations and the pianist (whom I will not name) forgot a section of one of the variations. Of course, that resulted in the orchestra not playing the proper music. I think she restated the variation a number of times, always forgetting the music, until the conductor somehow signaled to the orchestra is a way that corrected the problem by the next variation.
The final NYPhil concert Maazel conducted as a music director way Mahler’s 8th Symphony. The last trumpet cue (before the final assault on the tonic key) was botched by the trumpet section. In that tpe of situation, you just sit and play nothing. You cannot hesitate and then play the correct notes. The silence was certainly better than the botched high c-sharp at the beginning of the Mahler 5th Symphony. The trumpeter of the London Phil turned a very bright red, and the sour note lingered in the air for a long time for me. Sometimes it can be so bad you really should stop and start over again.
Those are some horrific stories. The worst possible outcome is having a musical problem so great that the music has to stop!