IMG_0107Megan sighed, “I’ve never been able to play louder with one hand and softer with the other. I just can’t do it.” We had been working on balance of layers in her Chopin Waltz. Megan is 14 and just began studying with me this fall. She has innate musicality and great learning skills but, I think, because she has had 5 piano teachers in about that many years, some things, like balance, have fallen by the wayside. Or, maybe she has just matured to the point that she now hears the voices shouting as they valiantly try to be heard above each other.

So, we switched places. I played it her way and then I played it my way. “Do you see anything different happening between the two ways?”, I asked. “You don’t touch all the keys in the same way.”, she said. I told her that I felt as though I used the harder tips of my fingers for the melody and bass line and my fingers lay flatter for the chords.

We experimented. She said she had never thought of using the same hand in two different ways (bass line and chords). I told her about something my undergraduate teacher used to tell us.  If you want your fingers or your hands to sound the same, then you have to use them in the same way. Then, I asked her what she thought the opposite of that was. “Oh,” she said, “if you want something to sound different, then you have to do something different!”

Last week, her Waltz had vastly improved and she seemed so much more relaxed as she played. We reviewed our lesson on balancing voices and applied it to another piece. She seemed relieved to be moving forward rather than hitting the proverbial wall.

I’m grateful to her for reminding me of that important lesson from my undergraduate years. Quite a few of my other students have benefitted from a similar experimentation with balance.

Does all this gesturing really change sound? Some say emphatically not. Some say the naysayers and their studies are a plot by digital retailers to help make the case that their products are just as good as acoustic instruments. Some advocate using a compendium of different gestures and body motions to vary tone qualities.

I don’t know if the science of the whole thing matters. If I can use words like pointed, or flat, or circular, or rotation to help my students feel a tactile connection to a particular sound, they will be able to make that sound whenever they want.

And that, to me, is what counts.

Portions of this post were originally published in November 2013

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