Piano Addict

Galumphing With Mr. Hanon

Piano Addict — Tue, 15 May 2012 22:44:31 +0000

Inspired by Steven Nachmanovich’s book, Freeplay, my friend and mentor, Dr. Lisa Zdechlik talks a lot about galumphing as we learn. (you know- the playing part of playing piano) We galumph when we take a tricky passage and practice it in rhythms, or improvise on it, or create an exercise from it and transpose it all over the map.

This year, I have quite a few transfer students who have struggled with large leaps (10ths and more) in the LH while the RH is busy with intricate passagework. Waltzes, stride, and ragtime all require this skill. Advanced classical culprits include Liszt’s Waldesrauschen and Chopin’s Scherzo in C# Minor, where courage, accuracy, power, and speed are all crucial.

So, we started galumphing. First, we took the basic motion of the LH and played it randomly all over the keyboard. Accuracy was out of the equation and feel was everything. Next, we added the RH while still playing random intervals in the LH. We kept refining until the LH was again accurate.

Unfortunately, that process wasn’t always totally successful. So, we reversed it and improvised with the RH while playing the written LH. This was much harder for everyone. The task of keeping an improvised RH part galumphing along over the LH leaps resulted in the need to review the basic motion steps from the previous paragraph and a few meltdowns.

I needed to find a gateway to the skill. Something that was so basic that students could galumph with just the right amount of frustration.

(Yes, there is a right amount of frustration. Without it we don’t ask questions and grow. But, as they say, that’s another blog.)

Then, at 2:04 am, it came to me. Hanon. Here were the perfect repeated patterns under which the LH could galumph to its hearts content. We galumphed randomly using two half notes, then two quarter notes, and finally two 8ths per measure. We used octaves, then 10ths, and increased the intervals from there.

We started with the 5th finger and went upward. We started with the thumb and went downward. We kept the thumb note the same and changed the lower note and then reversed things, keeping the bass note and changing the upper one.

A great thing started to happen. Students began to create their own patterns and galumph with them. Some of them even reversed the hands. Quite a few of them found delight in getting back at Mr. Hanon. And, because they relaxed into playing with the skill their pieces got better too.

Have you galumphed today?

SuiteLinks: May 11

Piano Addict — Fri, 11 May 2012 21:34:29 +0000

In this SuiteLinks: Busoni monster concerto with audio, Widmann’s new Circus Dances, Lang Lang adds new repertoire, Van Cliburn collection auctioned by Christies, Author of The Pianist taken to court over Gestapo allegations, A celebration of Cecil Taylor, Gould’s piano gets a new home, and more!

Busoni’s monster concerto

Listen to Busoni

Piano teacher’s guide to creative composition

Chisholm piano concertos 1 & 2

Schiff plays Jorg Widmann’s new Circus Dances

Van-(Cliburn)tiques Roadshow

Family of Szpilman takes author of The Pianist to court over Gestapo allegations

Celebration of Cecil Taylor

Lang Lang’s new repertoire

5 jazz piano trios from NPR

Gould’s piano to be permanently displayed

Summer Reads

Piano Addict — Wed, 09 May 2012 00:08:22 +0000

Well, it’s that crazy time of year again and you know what that means. Summer is almost upon us! Is reading in your plans? If so, here are some juicy pianistic treats to dive into. Do you have more books to share? Please, please do!

Midnight Arpeggios: An Illustrated Philosophy of Practicing and Music, M.J. Murphy (available for Kindle and Nook; iBook coming soon)

Mr. Langshaw’s Square Piano: The Story of the First Pianos and how they caused a Cultural Revolution, Madeline Goold

Piano Forte: The Colonial New Zealand Piano, Kristine Moffat

The Piano Lesson, August Wilson

The Secret Piano: From Mao’s Labor Camps to Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Zhu Xiao-Mei

Alice’s Piano: The Life of Alice Hertz-Sommer, Melissa Muller & Reinhard Piechocki

Memoirs of a Secret Pianist: Learning the Piano Later in Life, Robert M. Fells

for kids…

Hit the Right Note, Basher & Dan Green

Piano Piano, David Cali & Eric Heliot

Pictures at an Exhibition, Anna Harwel Celenza (also check out Rhapsody in Blue, Bach’s Goldberg Variations and more by this author)

Lulu’s Piano Lesson, Arlene Alda

My Friend the Piano, Catherine Cowan

SuiteLinks: May 6

Piano Addict — Sun, 06 May 2012 21:45:52 +0000

In this SuiteLinks: Fine-tuning at Jazz Fest, Becoming a stage mother, de la Cerna goes classical, Gabriel Kahane as cuisinart, Lindberg’s 2nd concerto, Why man creates, Angela Hewitt talks about going on the road, and more!

Angela Hewitt packs her bags

Lindberg’s Concerto No. 2

Fine tuning at jazz fest

Rachmaninoff”s Etudes Tableaux

Behzod Abduraimov on NPR (remember you heard it here first!)

Jorge Luis Prats on NPR (Yes, you heard this first here too!)

On becoming a stage mother

Yuja Wang review

Why Man Creates

Jazz artist de la Cerna goes classical

15 things to let go

Gabriel Kahane as cultural cuisinart

PA Shorts: Opportunity Knocks

Piano Addict — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 20:24:08 +0000

One of my Facebook friends recently shared a few words of advice to aspiring musicians by pianist, singer, songwriter, and producer, Ben Folds. This earthy collection of thoughts struck a chord with me. Also, I find it entertaining and awesome that he wrote it while on a flight to Boston.

The advice applies to us all no matter the genre or where we are in our musical journey. So, this PA Shorts is a collection of quotes from Ben’s FB post. I hope it will strike a chord with all of you as well.

Thank you Ben!

It may become important for you to be savvy about distribution and promotion, but it won’t do you any good if you’re not making music first.

There isn’t really a break. It’s a lot of different breaks, some good and some bad. There will be significant lucky opportunities that you may or may not recognize as such.

I do believe that if you’re not ready musically, the best opportunity in the world isn’t even an opportunity.

Everything I’m not made me everything I am – Kanye West

Finding your Voice takes a lot of frustrating time. That’s a painful period that all artists go through, sometimes more than once… You will eventually find that it takes no effort to just be yourself, but the road to that place can be long and rough.

Be schooled in form and technique as much as you can swallow and abandon it when you feel it’s nearly killed you. Know how people did it before you… It will make you suck for a while.

Any gains you make as a musician, especially technically generally have the side effect of rendering you unfocused for a short period of time. Basically, you can expect to play and write like a goober for a while when digesting concepts.

I say, try, try, and try again but just put the effort into the right things. That’s probably the basis of good musical technique. Intense effort, focused into what it takes to express.

Don’t spend effort on crap like… well, being cool. It’s a killer. It takes effort to appear as if you don’t care. What a waste.

You can’t make people like you. You just can’t. You can’t make people who won’t understand your music, understand your music. Effort spent trying to win votes steals from energy needed for pure expression… It’s about taking the music you naturally make and finding its home.

Keep an open mind to the distinct possibility that you might be moving on… Don’t try actively to evolve, just be willing.

Nobody needs to be told what they can’t do. If they can’t do, they’ll find out. Lift your standing if you must by the quality of your work but not by pushing somebody else down. If for no other reason, it can stifle your own work as you succumb to the idea that there are rules of what sucks and doesn’t suck. It’s like letting praise get to your head.

SuiteLinks: April 28

Piano Addict — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 19:10:46 +0000

In this SuiteLinks: How to drop a piano, traditionally, Goode & Zacharias at Carnegie Hall, Tracing New Zealand’s first piano, The joy of Enoch Smith, A tale of survival, and more!

MIT students observe traditional piano drop

Music making and empathy

6 year old Autistic boy a piano sensation

Clare Fischer on Piano Jazz

Finalists named for piano prize

Chicago piano day

Tracing New Zealand’s first piano

A tale of survival

Goode at Carnegie Hall

Jazz pianist Enoch Smith’s joy

Andsnes’ & Goerne’s miraculous evening

Zacharias at Carnegie Hall

Duty or Joy?

Piano Addict — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 23:41:20 +0000

A gonga post by John Terrauds of Musical Toronto made me sit up and take notice last week. In it, he wrote about his experiences taking on a group of students for a teacher on leave. Working with these students caused him to reflect on lessons as toil, duty, and obligation through rigid adherence to a syllabus. You can read his entire post here.

How many children leave with a lifelong love and yearning for making their own music versus the number who walk away, never to touch their instruments again? If a piano or a violin comes to represent toil, duty and obligation, I suspect its status as a potential source of inspiration, self-expression and invention diminishes in proportion. A 45-minute-a-week lesson in a small studio, centred around the requirements of a syllabus, strikes me as an inadequate response to that conundrum.

These are questions fine teachers and caring parents ask themselves daily. I think that just asking the questions and acknowledging the fact that the answers are not easy is, in itself, a good thing. Students come in all shapes and sizes. They also grow and change at very unexpected moments. How could we expect one system to work for all?

Here are some of my own thoughts on the subject in no particular order:

Over the last few decades, there has been a reluctance to single out students by level. In fact, there were active policies in place in many areas against it. This thinking also extended to sports and music. The clock has swung around but sill, in some teachers’ and parents’ eyes, everyone has the same potential in all things. I find this view flawed. If we are helping a person become their best individual adult self, how could everyone have the same potential? Are we teaching a thing or a person?
Approaching learning from where a person is right now, may mean choosing to pursue theory through composition/improvisation rather than written work, or finding that perfect classical piece to partner with a student’s favorite pop piece, or deciding not to participate in yearly evaluations, or ???. Every person has their own combination of personality traits that make up their total learning style. For me, going with a student’s nature and experience has always been more successful than imposing a way of looking at music.
Syllabi and evaluation programs generally have a certain flexibility built in. Our state program allows for up to 4 evaluation pieces and for memorized and non-memorized pieces. It does not allow for popular music or musical theater selections and the theory tests are mandatory. I do not require that all my students participate. Some of my best students don’t. Some are focused on improvisation/composition and others are learning late intermediate and advanced classical pieces. They absorb the theory and use it daily. Taking the test is just added busy work for them.
Some teachers and parents feel that a yearly evaluation program is an incentive to keep up their practicing all year long. And, for some it is. I have had a lot of experience with the other lot though- you know, the ones who wait until the last minute to do everything whenever they have a deadline. I’ve found that if you don’t give these students a deadline, they can be quite happy to work faithfully at a task. There’s something about that deadline that makes them shut down completely.
Teachers need to monitor themselves and decide whether their own teaching gifts are right for all their students. The teacher who brings up students in the classical tradition and regularly sends them on the competition circuit is not the right one for John’s student with the twitchy legs. A student who is at home discovering new things in a self directed manner is not right for a teacher who adheres rigidly to a syllabus. Teachers are unique individuals too.
Music should be a joy and release from everyday life. If adhering to a syllabus is making someone miserable, why do it? My own priority in teaching is to help the student discover communicating meaning through sound. The flip side here is that in order to be able to communicate and take joy in making any kind of music you have to have some basic skills. These don’t always come from a syllabus however. I am constantly amazed at the whole and partially self taught young adults who come to me at the college. They often surpass students with traditional lesson backgrounds. Dutiful students don’t always become great musical problem solvers.
Students who stop taking lessons for whatever reason are not lost causes if we have given them the gift of making music at their level. (Notice that I didn’t say the gift of knowing the note names or counting eighth notes in 3/4 time.) Thinking that they are lost causes is thinking that you as a teacher have failed. I have many adults who come back to lessons and succeed brilliantly. Some are completely amazed to discover a gift for improvisation, Bach, French music, or Fats Waller. I recently had a student, now in medical school, return who had stopped taking lessons in high school. (His legs had done some twitching of their own on certain pieces.) He wanted some help with figuring out the chords for Ain’t Misbehavin’. He was totally at home at the keyboard and he should be since he has played in a band, composed, and released recordings for the last 10 years. ”Of course you remember that I hate to read,” he said. Who cared? He picked up the meaning of those chord symbols in a flash and, on the spot, created a marvelous accompaniment to play with his singer friend.

Thank you John for making us did deep and ponder!

SuiteLinks: April 20

Piano Addict — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 00:17:38 +0000

In this SuiteLinks: Buzz Aldrin in Recital, Pianos in the electronic age: an amusing view from 1979, Interview with George Li, Jenny Q Chai’s past and present, and more!

New Orleans’ piano from a master

Aline Bartissol: Feel the music

Nakamatsu & Manasse: The power of two

Buzz Aldrin in Recital

Piano notes for charity

Interview with George Li

Opening musical doors

Nancarrow’s automatic piano

Past and present: Jenny Q Chai

Archives: Getting pianos ready for the electronic age: Nov. “79

PA Shorts: What Has Your Piano Eaten Lately?

Piano Addict — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 00:15:07 +0000

Do pianos eat things? Some technicians I know think maybe they do. I received a great question from PA reader, Josh about quite an unusual something he and his technician found inside his piano.

I have a 1910 Jewett Upright Piano. Recently I had the keyboard pulled to repair some various felts and repair keys. Anyway, low and behold there were two very old cheesecloth bags with cloves in them in each far corner under the keys. Have you ever seen this before? The tuner had never seen that done before. We figured it was for the smell or maybe to deter pests or both.. Anyway curious if you’ve seen cloves in an old piano before or heard of it.

No I hadn’t. So, I looked up the use of cloves as a pest deterrent and yes, that is one of their uses–especially against mosquitos. Cloves also contain Eugenol, which has been used in dentistry for centuries. In fact, People of many culture chew whole cloves because of their effectiveness in relieving sore gums, toothache, and mouth sores, as well as freshening the breath. Hmmm… Under the keys you say???

All kidding aside, none of the technicians I contacted had ever encountered cloves under the keys of a piano. But, they told me about all kinds of other things they had found. One technician was called to attend to a piano with a stuck action and found a diamond ring which had been smashed flat. Another found a bent spoon used for cooking heroin hidden inside the action of an upright (clearly it’s owner was not so upright). I also enjoyed the story of a friend’s most ’rewarding’ tuning experience. He found a crisp $100 bill inside a grand piano.

Here are some other items, aside from the expected pencils and paperclips, which my technician friends tell me pianos have eaten:

Mice & Squirrels (alive and not)
Volume of World Book Encyclopedia
Toys
Necklaces & Watches
Marriage License
Hot Chocolate (hammers soaked- yummo!)
Chicken Bones
Playing Cards
Marbles
Dead Crawfish
Car Keys from a 50′s era Oldsmobile
Potato Chips (complete with bag)
Letter to Santa
Dog’s bone (well chewed)
Tuning hammer (now that was inevitable wasn’t it?)

SuiteLinks: April 13

Piano Addict — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 21:00:15 +0000

In this SuiteLinks: Prutsman’s many hats, Two pianists on the wrong side of the law, Hearing forks drop at Le Poisson Rouge, Recreating Beethoven’s own sound, Glasnost at Carnegie Hall, Creativity & imagination from TTBK, and more!

Piano in a Factory reflects different China

Recreating Beethoven’s own sound

Michael Brown makes a strong impression

Many hats of Stephen Prutsman

Turkish pianists faces prison for Tweets

Gerstein’s nomadic life

Pianist commits housing fraud

Why memorize?

Hearing a fork drop at Le Poisson Rouge

Vomiting at the keyboard

Glasnost at Carnegie Hall

Arrau hopes music heals May 1984

Creative Pairs

Imagination