Tag: Piano

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Learning How to Learn

I was originally going to dedicate an article on Hamelin’s Toccata, talking about the technical and musical challenges, and what is unusual or particular about the piece from a pianistic standpoint. After looking at the piece a bit, I’ve concluded that it is a fairly standard virtuosic work, relatively conservative in the context of Hamelin’s other pieces. To be fair, I have not practiced this piece, only read through it a couple of times and listened to some of the performers play it. But, there are no striking registrations, crazy fugues, strange figurations, or near-impossible runs. Just fast and exciting.

Furthermore, I don’t want these posts to really be music-theoretical, unless the topic is specifically about that. I think we would benefit more talking about stuff more piano-related, instead of things like how he uses polychords, hemiolas, augmentation, chromatic build-up over a pedal-tone – things that are very intuitive that I just end up having to make up terms for. We shall leave that for the theorists.

So, I am going to be talking about how to learn new repertoire, new in both the sense of it being something not of the common practice era, and also in the sense that it is a new piece that you may not have known previously. As always, this is from my point of view and my experiences. Other pianists might have developed other techniques or take things in a different order with different priorities. However, I hope that some of these ideas will inspire you to discover other ways to learn music efficiently and deeply. And, if you’re not a musician, I hope my suggestions can stimulate analogous ideas in other fields.

A borrowed title

No, I did not come up with the title of this article myself. In fact, there is a course on coursera.org called “Learning How to Learn” that I highly recommend (no I’m not being paid for this suggestion, I promise). All of the concepts they present on learning and test-taking are applicable to us as musicians and performers. Furthermore, all of the information is from research on how the mind works, and it is great for people of all ages. I highly recommend watching the videos, even if you think you are an efficient learner. It’s sometimes good to have those ideas told to you explicitly.

Getting it in the ear

I would argue that atonal or less-tonal modern music is harder to learn not because the non-tonality is factually harder to learn, but because it is not in our ear. The ear plays such an important role in sight-reading and learning music (at least for me). When I decide to start practicing a piece from the common-practice era, I’ve usually heard the piece at least once, if not dozens of times, and have probably read it a few times as well. Even in this Hamelin Toccata, when progressions and patterns are more similar to passages from some common-practice pieces, I find myself being able to read faster and assume more of the notes aurally.

Try reading a tonal piece that you have not heard before – like a Medtner sonata or the Scriabin 8th, or even something like the Mompou Variations on a theme by Chopin – you’ll find it surprisingly hard to sight-read because, though it is tonal, you don’t know how it goes and you need to actually read each note. Contrast that to reading a Beethoven sonata you’ve heard. You don’t actually need to read all of the notes because you can fill most of it in by assumption (and be correct when doing so).

Of course, this is assuming a general level of complexity in the piece – I’m sure you would be able to sight-read a Soler piece that you have not heard before relatively easily. If that’s not the case, get on it! You can get better only by doing it more.

So, one of the first things we as pianists have to do when learning a new piece is to get it in our ears. I would advocate for reading through the piece frequently when starting off. You may also speed up the process by listening to recordings, though then you run the risk of getting an interpretation stuck in your head if you only listen to one rendition over and over. Reading and listening not only puts the sound world into your head, but also gives you a good idea of the large-scale structure of the piece. It allows you to subconsciously prep your later practice plan: you begin to have an idea of what parts are more difficult than others, what parts fit your hand relatively well, and what parts are just plain confusing and will cause problems later when trying to memorize it.

Caveat: reading is not quite possible on the hardest of pieces, like a Ligeti etude or a Xenakis piece.

Let it grow on you

Many pianists have pieces they really don’t like. But I don’t think many of them have pieces that they know really well AND they don’t like. Personally, whenever I’ve started a piece that I disliked for whatever reason, I find myself saying, “This piece is actually not bad” after I get to know it and actually learn it. So, give it a chance. I’m not particularly fond of this Hamelin piece that has been commissioned, but I don’t know it well, and who knows? Ask me again in a few years and my opinions on it might very well have changed!

The Metronome is your friend

I’ve heard my teacher say it, you’ve heard your teacher say it, we all know we should use it, but, but, but…

Just use the metronome. I’ll talk about the metronome more thoroughly in the next article, but don’t just do slow practice, and definitely don’t just play fast. Mix it up a bit.

Survey the Land

I mentioned it briefly, but I want to cover more in-depth the concept of having a good idea of the general structure of the piece. Identifying different sections of the piece, whether that be a character change, a key change, a meter change, contour change, or just even a page-turn, can help you organize your practice. It can also help with memory. We will talk about memory more in-depth in a later article as well, but for now, know that having these goal-posts are a good technique for memorizing and dealing with memory-slips. (Hey, this sounds like building repertoire by moving outwards from the must-have pieces!)

You can even start seeing patterns in the structure – maybe there are two passages that are similar, or the same but transposed, or maybe there are passages that are easy and you don’t need to worry about them so much. An example:

Prokofiev 2nd Concerto, first movement. You know the cadenza is going to be the hardest and most problematic part. That means you would probably work on that first, so you can get a head-start on it. It doesn’t mean you won’t practice the other parts. You realize that the first section has two statements of the theme, and that the two statements share a chunk of the material. That means you don’t have to explicitly learn the two parts, but you have to make sure that you know the differences between the statements – that they end in different dynamics and go onto different versions of the “second theme,” etc.

The second section is sort of like variations (and modulations) on a new theme. You identify to yourself the characteristics of the variations: first is piano solo in A minor – nothing too bad besides maybe articulation considerations. Second variation is piano accompaniment in A minor. Those hand crossing and bass jumps seem kind of nasty; I would make a note to really know those notes and the changes in the harmony. Then there is a sort of bridge/development variations which leads to the next variation of piano solo in D minor – there are some unison runs, but all-in-all not bad. The runs continue into the last variation where the orchestra again has the theme. Those weird scales can be problematic, so I would sit down and really internalize those accidentals.

This is just an example of surveying the piece to really make practicing efficient – once it is clear in the mind, it will be clear for your body.

Back to the Basics

Sometimes, you there’s just no way around learning pieces like your teacher first taught you: hands separately, measure by measure, line by line, page by page. This method is great for thorny pieces like Carter’s Caténaires or any Ligeti etude because they’re basically impossible to read. I remember trying to read through these pieces, and even after a week, it still felt like I was reading them for the first time. Things would sound different every day – I would go, “wait was that accidental there yesterday? I also don’t remember that treble clef being there, and could have sworn that that was a fourth and not a fifth.”

This method shouldn’t be used blindly, either. Don’t just start from the beginning and do measure by measure by measure by measure. Group them. Do the first measure, then the next. Then maybe try putting the two measures together. Then do the next two measures, and then the four measures all together. Maybe try to build the whole line now. After you have two lines you can put them together, but you also need to spend some extra time on the measure before and after the line-break because you have yet to practice those measures together. Same thing with the lines before and after the page turns. Again, it is important to mix it up with large and small sections so you can both concentrate on details as well as get into the flow of it.

When I was learning Ligeti’s L’escalier du diable, I had to do this entire process twice: once to be able to play through with the score, and a second time for actually memorizing it.

Spaced Repetition

Don’t procrastinate. It is better that you start the piece earlier on (so you can get it in your ear), and read it once in a while before you really start diving into it, than it is to plunge straight into a week-long cram session. I believe this is why pieces that you learned when you were young stick better in your head than more recent pieces. Those old pieces you probably have brought back a dozen times throughout your educational and performing career, whereas those new pieces you probably played them 5 times in a span of two months, and haven’t touched since. The spaced repetition over years allows your brain to marinate the information, and every time you bring it back it is reinforced.

So, it is a good idea to read new pieces earlier on, even if you don’t have the time to dedicate to working on it in detail. Just let your ears soak it up slowly.

Convince Them

The hardest thing about new works isn’t their technical difficulty, it is how to perform them convincingly. Playing the notes well and accurately is relatively easy (most of the time), and with a lot of new music, that probably is enough to sell it to the audience. But, as musicians, we don’t let ourselves get away with the minimum – we always strive to find meaning, interesting things, expression, colors, or stories in the music we play.

Part of accomplishing this is to make sure you are practicing the musicality while you are doing your slow practice. You should never practice the notes devoid of expression, whether that expression is coming from articulation, dynamics, phrasing, or something else. If you practice robotically, you will play robotically, or end up spending a lot of time undoing that and adding musicality to it. And the worst thing you can do is play like a robot. (Well, you could play like a robot and miss all the notes. But we’re assuming a level of competence here.)

Many people have trouble with the atonality of pieces, and if you play it like it’s a dissonant piece, you’ll never get the audience on board. Rather, it is important to find musical interest in the piece – it can mean tracing how the dissonances “resolve” relative to one another. Or maybe the dissonance is a product of individual lines that can be brought out at different times to make more sense. Or perhaps the dissonance is secondary to the registration shifts. Sometimes, the rhythm is more important. I’m not saying that we must fit music into common-practice boxes that we feel familiar with, but it can provide a good basis for understanding newer music. You also have to remember that music does not exist in a vacuum; there is always something of the old in the new.

Play it Through

For your friends; for your girl/boy-friend(s); for your parents, your stuffed animals, your neighbors, your cat. The more experience you have going through the piece in an environment that is more stressful than your normal practice routine, the better. You find out how much stamina you need and where you are liable to lose focus. Sometimes memory issues or technical challenges don’t show themselves until a run-through.

I really love recording as a technique. I feel like my mental state changes the moment I press record. Not only does it force you to go through the whole piece without stopping, hopefully without making any huge mistakes, but it also results in a product that you can listen to afterwards. And there’s no better teacher than listening to yourself, realizing your habits and hearing how the piece comes across as a whole. Sometimes you’ll find yourself cringing at certain things, but then concluding that, “eh, it wasn’t as bad as I thought.” Other times you’ll say, “All the notes are there, but somehow the feeling wasn’t quite right.” It gives you direction for how to guide your future practice sessions, and informs of what you need to fix and where.

Sit down with a score and headphones and really be your own teacher. Mark it up, and you’ll even find yourself saying the exact same things your teachers say. “Why did you rush here? Don’t play these downbeats so vertically. Can you not throw away the last note of each group of sixteenths?” And, you can be as nasty or nice to yourself as you want!

No such thing

There are lots of sayings of “There’s no such thing as a bad ____, only a bad ____.” We can put “piece” and “performance” in there and get a sentiment that I mostly agree with. Though, I think it is more that we as performers can make a bad piece good by delivering it well – in the right context and with the right conviction. I think this “how do I make this work” attitude is applicable even to the most commonly played piece. After all, people are always asking musicians to perform with fresh ideas. Hey, maybe it isn’t a bad idea to treat old music like new music sometimes!

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Choose Your Repertoire!

For the first article ­­I want talk about repertoire and repertoire choice. It is my opinion that picking the right pieces, whatever that means for any individual pianist, is second only to playing well in maximizing a pianist’s chances to do well in a competition. In the following sections, I will lay out points that might guide a pianist towards a successful program. Though it may seem very procedural or methodical, many of these choices are done subconsciously, intuitively, or emotionally. A well-designed program not only showcases a pianist well, but allows them to perform to their potential.

Something to be remembered by

Before I get into the actual parameters we consider in choosing pieces, I want to explain why I feel so strongly about good programming.

The overt goal in a piano competition is to receive the highest score from the panel of jury. We can argue about the “best” or “most-interesting” pianist, but the only way to win is to score more points or get more votes (in whatever system) than anyone else. One of my former teachers would say, when asked by a student why they didn’t win, “because you didn’t get as many points.” Though this response is slightly facetious and heartless, the sooner we accept that fact, the sooner we can look at competitions rationally.

Couple this with my personal experience on juries that one generally remembers their most and least favorite players – the middle of the pack generally fades into a blur, especially when there are a lot of competitors. While it would be ideal if every judge could remember every performance (taking notes does help to a degree), that is just not a realistic expectation.

These two facts mean that as a competitor you want to be remembered, ideally positively, by the jury members, and hopefully they will be more likely to give you a higher score. This sounds simple, but it is worth saying. Now, that is not to say I agree with doing something for a shock-and-awe effect, or doing something crazy because you think it will grab a jury member’s attention. However, if it is coming from a musically genuine place, and happens to be memorable and unique, then I think that is both a good strategy and a very fulfilling experience for the performer and audience members.

As you watch and listen to the competition, try to be conscious of who you think will move on to the next round (not just who you like) and see if there is a correlation between that and who you remember the most (again, not necessarily someone you like). You will notice how many different ways there are to be remembered by, whether it is a physical movement, the way someone walks onto stage, the way they play their legato, or anything else.

This is all to set up the idea that a competitor’s choice of repertoire can become a point by which the competitor is remembered. This happens even before the competitor walks on stage. Perusing through the programs, I already have in my mind a few pianists that I would like to hear just based on how they programmed their recital, or a specific piece they will play. I’ve had people come up to me, years after the competition, and say, “I still remember your _____ from the 2013 competition!” Not only is that a strategy for doing well in a competition, it is a satisfying feeling anytime, knowing you are remembered!

“My piece”

When trying to decide what pieces to play in a recital or competition, most of us have a list of must-have pieces that we turn to. I’ll break these must-have pieces into three categories:

1.  Pieces we feel attached to

Most of us have pieces that we feel strongly about, especially in our interpretation. We might program these pieces to make an interpretive statement. Or maybe we just really enjoy playing these pieces on stage. Or, perhaps, we like starting a program with a certain piece, because we know it well, and it helps us get into the zone.

2.  Pieces we’ve gotten positive feedback on

Most pianists have had people tell them certain pieces were “their piece.” There are pieces or composers that I immediately associate with a colleague. And, since most pianists are not competition virgins, they already have in their head an idea of what works for them in a competition setting and what doesn’t. As we do more and more competitions, we add to and prune from that list.

3.  Pieces that we’ve always wanted to play but never got a chance to.

This is probably the riskiest, since it implies that the piece is relatively new, or that the competitor hasn’t performed it very often in competition setting. However, that is a risk that is sometimes necessary to create a program that works. Choosing to take this option requires that the competitor is confident that they are able to deliver a convincing performance of the relatively fresh piece.

I would argue that for most of us pianists, these must-haves form the cores that we build the rest of the program around. We take these pieces, and work outwards to form cohesive and interesting programs. This construction seems to be the most organic, especially in a situation where we are given (mostly) free reign in our repertoire choice. In the case of a compulsory piece, that piece also becomes one of the cores to build around.

A monolithic structure, or strength in numbers?

Sometimes you’ll see competitors who program five or six pieces in a span of thirty minutes (giving about 5 or 6 minutes for each piece), or those who program just one long piece for that same duration. On one hand, you don’t want to put all your eggs in one basket and stake whether you get past the round on just one piece. Maybe that one piece doesn’t show enough of you as a pianist, or is very challenging to pull off effectively. On the other hand, you don’t want to spread yourself too thin, either. Going from piece to piece might prevent you from establishing a “groove” and keep you from getting into a good performance zone. To a judge or an audience member, you might seem indecisive or unsure of what you want to showcase as a pianist.

Neither is better than the other, but I think there is a balance to it – a happy medium that is obviously dependent on what the pieces are. If you are playing multiple pieces by the same composer that work well together, the resulting group might act as a multi-movement work. The same could happen to pieces from different composers if they are connected thematically or tonally. Conversely, a single long work could have many sections or movements, allowing you to present a complete pianistic and musical picture.

The final consideration is if there are non-elimination rounds. For example, because there was no cut between the first two rounds in the 2013 Cliburn, I found it worth the risk to play the Beethoven Hammerklavier sonata as the sole work in the second round, balancing out a more diverse program I played in the first round.

Balance of Styles

The previous section talked mainly about the duration and “magnitude” of pieces. This section focuses on styles and distribution of piece from different periods throughout the rounds. Again, as with many things in life, an appropriate balance is key. When you become seasoned and a well-known pianist, you might be known for playing a specific style of piece or composer, such as Uchida for Mozart, Schiff for Bach, or Rubinstein for Chopin. In a competition, while we don’t necessarily need to cover the entire gamut of musical history, we do need to show breadth, flexibility, and proficiency.

When considering the variety in styles, a competitor also has to consider that most of the large concerti allowed in major competitions are early-romantic to early-20th century. If you have a desire to program anything baroque to early-classical (excepting Mozart), it will have to be a solo piece in the earlier rounds. Similarly, the chamber music selections generally span a short time period.

Expectation is another factor: a competitor who only plays a certain style of piece will have an inherent disadvantage, not because it doesn’t show enough variety, but because the audience then thinks, “Ooh, this guy must be really confident in his interpretation of ______!” Then, you must meet and exceed that! Of course, if a specific style is something you believe is your forte, then perhaps it is worth the risk.

Putting it in Context

Do you start with the baroque piece, because that’s just how you’ve always done it, or do you open with a thorny modern work, and segue almost attacca into a calm romantic work for contrast? The order of pieces matters quite a bit. It can be used effectively to capture the audience’s attention, and provide a good dramatic arch to the program. A good cadence of different lengths of pieces can also help a program flow more, and actually make it easier to perform, both mentally and physically.

You also have to consider fatigue throughout the competition. You might be able to play through both Gaspard and Petrouchka in one sitting at home, but for many of us, programming both pieces in one round in a competition setting, especially one later in the competition, is a recipe for disaster. In the later rounds, you’re going to be also working on the Mozart concerto as you’re preparing your semi-final solo music. Are you going to have the time and mental concentration to bring back the pieces?

 Playing it Safe

The final topic is on the effectiveness of a piece. There are certain pieces that are just easier to do well or win competitions with, given a general level of playing. Though people might not like to hear it, it’s just more effective to play something like Tchaikovsky First Concerto over Brahms First Concerto in a competition setting. If I were given a choice between the two, and to guess what piece would win without knowing the pianists or jury members, I would choose Tchaikovsky every time. I haven’t done this research before, but if you take a survey of the pieces that have won major competitions, I’m assuming you won’t find much variation. We know them: Tchaikovsky, Prokofievs, and Rachmaninoffs. Maybe some Beethovens. We also know the solo pieces, and you will definitely hear many of them this year: Barber Sonata, Liszt Sonata, Petrouchka, Gaspard, etc.

We like to think that we would be able to do well with any piece, but that’s just not the reality of it. It’s a combination of difficulty, overt showiness of the piano part, and ease of ensemble work and musical interpretation. Sure, it is possible with something like the Brahms, but most people would agree that certain pieces require a higher level of musical sophistication and finesse to play well, and unless you possess those skills, it really might be safer to play something from the tried-and-true list.

That doesn’t mean I’m not super excited when I see someone win a competition with a piece not from that list.

Coda

I hope this has given you some insight into how programs can be built, whether you are a piano fan trying to understand why a competitor might pick the pieces he did, or a pianist trying to get ideas for your next recital or competition program. This is certainly not an exhaustive list of parameters, and many things might be obvious, but as with most knowledge, having things explicitly laid out might give way to clearer thinking and even to more creative approaches.

Stay tuned for the next article, where we’ll be going over the commissioned piece by Hamelin!