Follow The Leader

I had an exciting day today, so I figured I’d jump back to an anecdotal blog post today.

BECAUSE I’M NARCISSISTIC AND LOVE TO TALK ABOUT MYSELF.

Haha. Just kidding. But really, though. 

Today, I met with the conductor for the Vancouver Metropolitan Orchestra, and in four days, I’ll be performing Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini with them. Super exciting stuff! If only the date wasn’t so close.

Sometimes, when everyone has busy schedules that are hard to coordinate, we don’t have the luxury of having multiple rehearsals before a concert. I met with the orchestra’s conductor today, we have one rehearsal on Saturday, and then the concert is on Monday. I have half an hour on the day of the concert to run through my piece with the orchestra before the concert in the evening. 

If it were a different concerto I were playing that didn’t involve so much back-and-forth interaction between the orchestra and the soloist, I wouldn’t be as worried. But considering this concerto is so interactive, and I can’t even manage to get some variations to sync up with my single-person orchestra (my orchestral pianist), how do you expect me to feel about syncing up with about fifty or so other people who have never heard me play this piece before?!! Talk about stressful circumstances.

There’s something that needs to be said, though, when working with limited time in collaboration. Of course, when you’re collaborating with an orchestra, you’re dealing with a force of more than fifty people, but there is no reason for you to compromise the way you feel about a piece for someone else. 

“I want to take this variation faster,” the conductor said.

As a student, I know a lot of people who would just immediately say yes and just go with it. We, as students, are used to be told what to do. Our teacher tells us that we’re doing something wrong, and we practice to fix it. But at some point, we have to learn that collaboration isn’t just about going along with what everyone else is saying and playing Follow the Leader. Sometimes it’s important to take charge and do things the way you want them to go. You’re the soloist, after all. Put your ideas on the table, too. Discuss, and then come up with the best solution.

“Let’s give it a shot, see how it goes,” I replied.

After playing through that variation at the faster tempo, he looked at me expectantly. “I don’t really like it,” I said. “Can we go back to the tempo I originally started with?”

The point is that although we didn’t end up going with the new tempo, at least I was willing to try. That’s the beauty of collaboration. Everyone has different ideas; as long as everyone is willing to listen and try out different things, collaboration is a great experience and there’s something to be learned, and to be taught, in every session. Collaboration is about keeping an open mind, and being ready for anything.

Of course, things don’t always go the way you want them to. Be as it may that tempos might have been alright today, but I might end up taking something slower on the day of the concert. Some variations might end up being faster. Being in a concert situation changes the way our minds work, and sometimes it’s not always the best thing for us when we’ve gotten used to playing something a certain way. The best thing to do at this point is to practice the piece in a way that nothing will catch me off guard. Practice things at the tempo I want them to go at, of course, because in the best case scenario, everything will fall into place on the day of the concert. However, that’s not how things turn out in life sometimes. Sometimes, sh*t happens. I practiced the orchestra part so I know it inside and out, so I can catch onto any weird blips that might happen and potentially throw me off. I practiced each variation faster and slower than the tempo I’d like to take it at, so that if anything happens and the tempo doesn’t happen to be where I want it to be during the concert, I can still catch onto it and keep playing as though that was the tempo I wanted. Being ready for any circumstance is a skill that every performer needs to have. Adjusting on the spot to things that were not planned is something we have to always be ready for, and practicing for any possible situation is the only way to be fully prepared. The best the conductor and I can do is to listen actively and fit to each other. There is no leader in this context; we are equals, working together to create a piece of art. With that mentality, I could probably play my concert tomorrow and still feel pretty good about it. 

Four more days, and the stage is mine! (:

Until next week,

Dream big, music-makers!

No F**ks!!

I have an exam tomorrow. I have a recital to play on Sunday.

I am flipping out. But that’s okay!

Why? Because I’m ready. Or, at least, that’s what I’m telling myself.

And that’s what you should be telling yourself, too. You spend so much time in a practice room perfecting everything, making sure all your notes are in the right place at the right time with the right sound and the right color. You spend hours working on those two bars for them to sound great. You spend days doing slow practice, rhythm practice, metronome practice, sometimes even all at the same time. You put in all that work.

Shouldn’t you believe in yourself?

People always tell you what you should think about when you’re on stage. “Just have fun!”, “You’re gonna be great!”, “You know your stuff so well!”

Sure, these things help. But me? Nah, I’m a little more vulgar than that. Excuse the language.

“NO F**KS. HERE WE GO.”

That’s the mentality I like to take on. You’d be surprised how much better you play when you just let everything go. It’s not just, “I don’t care about how my playing ends up being,” it’s more like a… “I don’t care if you like my playing or not, I’m just going to play this how I want to play it, whether or not you like it isn’t my problem. I’m just gonna do my thing. Take it or leave it. Kay, thanks, bye.”

People kept on telling me to take this attitude for the past few days while they’ve watched my confidence in myself fall below zero. Today, I finally found that feeling. I dragged a friend into the recital hall today and asked him to listen to me play some Tchaikovsky. By the end of it, I realized I was thinking to myself, “YOU KNOW WHAT, I KNOW THIS. WHATEVER. JUST GO FOR IT.”

And sure, there were a few inaccuracies, but it was AWESOME. It was exciting. It was full of energy. And it was me. It was the kind of feeling that I wanted to get from playing that piece. It was exhilarating.

And that’s when I knew for sure, that’s the trick. I’m not supposed to tell myself that I can do it. Why am I telling myself something my body and my heart already know? F**k it all. That’s it.

Dream big, music-makers! (:

PS. I’m really excited about my recital dress. Okay, I’m done.

Rule Number One : Don’t Panic.

This post is a day late… Finals + Recital + Papers = A very stressed out little pianist.

While I should have been writing up a new post yesterday, I spent the whole day moping about, trying to practice and not being able to because once a sound came out of my piano, I thought it was the worst sound in the world. Everything sounds bad. I have a recital in a week. Why does everything sound like crap?!

Rule number one: Don’t panic.

One of my professors at school found me sobbing, slamming the door to a practice room, several pages on the floor from being angrily torn from my book. (I’m not actually tearing them out, they’re photocopies that accidentally get torn by slightly-too-aggressive page turns. Don’t worry, I’m not a Henle-abuser. I love my books just as much as you do, I promise!)

He kept on telling me that it was going to be okay, that I sound better than I think I do. For those of you who find that everything you play sounds bad, here’s some perspective for you. Things only sound bad to you because you’re pushing yourself, because you’re expecting more from yourself. The frustration gives you more focus, pushes you past your former limits. The wall needs to be scaled, and you can’t conquer it without determination and perseverance.

The words of my prof were something like this:

“We’re not in music because we like music. We’re in music because we have to be. Because we are the only people who are willing to put up with the crap that we have to do. Not everybody can make it here, and you did. You can do this. I mean, I can’t play the damn instrument… I’m afraid of it! Just remember, rule number one: Don’t. Panic.”

I’m not going to say my playing miraculously got better overnight, because to be completely honest, my Tchaikovsky still sounds like a messy ball of crap right now. But that’s okay. Because I’m someone who is willing to put up with all the slow practice and all the annoying metronome beats and all the rhythm drills to get things to where I want them to be.

But at the end of the day, Dr. Bob was right. Rule number one: Don’t panic. Take things one at a time. And in the end, you’ll conquer all that frustration. You’ll tear down that wall and you’ll be so, so, so pleased with the work you’ve done and how much you’ve improved.

Dream big, music-makers!

STOP.

I wanted to take a post (probably the first of many more to come in the future) and write about practice-induced injuries. As final exams are coming up and people are scrambling to get their jury or recital repertoire under their fingers, stress levels are rising and our bodies naturally get tense.

A few years ago, I was practicing for long hours every day preparing for competitions and concerts. One day, I felt something pull through my hand all the way up to my elbow, and up to my shoulder. Me, being young and foolish, thought it was nothing, and kept playing through pain. “It’ll go away,” I told myself, “I need to practice.” That’s the kind of attitude all musicians take when they’re determined to get something right. It’s a great attitude to have, but sometimes the stubbornness behind it can really cause some damage.

I had two weeks full of concerts that month, so I kept on telling myself, “I can’t slack off. I need to clean things up.” During the last concert, something pulled in my hand. Hard. It was the kind of pain that sent a shock straight from my fingers all the way up to my shoulder and my back. Tendinitis. Hooray.

So for those of you who don’t know what tendinitis is, it’s just a fancy word for when your tendons are all inflamed. Painful, uncomfortable, and just a real drag. Trust me, I would know. I have tendinitis in all four limbs. (Yes, all four, I’m a dancer, too. And very disaster-prone.)

My doctor got at me for practicing through the pain. “You should have just stopped,” she said. “If you stopped that first day, your hand wouldn’t be in such a bad condition right now.”

“Stopped?” I thought. “How could I stop? Piano is my life, I can’t just stop playing. That’s like… offensive to my entire existence.”

A few days ago, I was practicing the Brahms Handel Variations. I was working on cleaning up the fugue, until it happened. Something pulled. Hard. Right from the knuckle joint of my fourth finger all the way up to my elbow. “F***, that hurt.” Yes, I curse in the practice room. Loudly. I’m so sure everyone within a ten-mile radius could hear me, considering the sound-proof walls in my building are not actually sound-proof.

Just to make sure the pain was what I thought it was, I played through a scale slowly. Found that the pain was coming from my third finger joint, and it pulled all the way up to my elbow. “Crap. It came back.”

I reluctantly packed up my things and left the practice room. I spent the rest of the day with my arm propped up on a pillow with an ice pack. I took the next day off, didn’t touch a piano at all. I also stayed away from anything at the computer that would require typing. (Papers? What? Nahh, I’m injured, can’t write those.)

So, all y’all who have stuff coming up and feel like you need to practice… I know you feel guilty if you don’t practice, but you’re going to feel worse if you practice through pain and end up landing yourself out of commission. It sucks to keep yourself away from your instrument and from your music, but the best thing to do if something hurts is just to STOP. Don’t play through it like I did. I know you’ll really want to, but please don’t. Trust me; I’ve learned my lesson. I went back to the piano today after a day and a half of rest and ice and pillows and relaxing… and everything feels better. Everything sounds better, even.

Sometimes, the best thing you can do for yourself is just to drop everything and take a break. Pushing yourself is good, but knowing when to stop is also something essential to learn. Injury prevention is also something to know, but more on that some other time.

Until next week,

Dream big, music-makers! (:

The ‘A’ Word

During the course of every pianist’s career, one is bound to be asked to play with instrumentalists or singers. Although we can get away with being completely independent playing our solo music, instrumentalists and singers can’t hide from pianists forever. At some point, they will hand us some orchestral reduction of a concerto. They will give us the piano part of a piece they need us to play, whether it be an art song or a sonata for piano and [insert their instrument here].

Just because we are working with someone else doesn’t mean we don’t shine. A sonata for violin and piano includes “and piano” in the title because we are just as invested in the music as the violinist is. The sonata isn’t for them; it’s for us both. Art song is the same way; the singer may be the one reading the poetry, but the pianist is the one who creates the atmosphere and really sets the scene for the singer to tell the story. I hate to sound super pompous about it, but they can’t survive without us.

So, being given this huge role to support and collaborate with someone else, why is there often such a big difference in the way we approach our own solo works as opposed to pieces that other people want us to play with them?

“I’m just the accompanist.”

Wait, what? You’re a what?

No. You’re not an accompanist. You’re not the carpet the singer or instrumentalist walks all over in order to get to the spotlight. You share that spotlight. You’re just as invested in the music as they are. You have the power to control the way the instrumentalist plays, the way the singer sings. You’re creating this music together.

The next time a singer or an instrumentalist asks you to play for them, play it like it’s your solo piece. Think of it as though you’re taking to the stage by yourself, giving every ounce of your energy. Music is music, no matter what you’re playing. Whether it be a chamber work, an orchestral reduction of a concerto, or an art song, you should be putting every bit of attention to every detail. You should be completely invested emotionally. There’s no excuse for half-assing anything, for lack of a better word.

You’re never accompanying. You’re collaborating. You’re making music together. And don’t for once tell yourself that no one listens to the pianist. If they’re not listening, give them something they will listen to. Make them pay attention. Compel them to listen. That’s when you know you’ve done your job as a collaborative artist. 

Dream big, music-makers! (:

Brain Fart!

As performers, we all know what it’s like to get nervous before a show. We’ve all experienced that feeling before: THE BRAIN FART. Don’t even pretend like it’s never happened to you. It could be anything: nerves, stage fright, fatigue, stress, illness… or just an off-day. You’re staring at the keys – sometimes before you start, sometimes mid-performance – and your mind just draws a blank. And then you panic. Oh my goodness where am I what are my hands doing what are my notes where are my notes what are these chords where is my left hand what is my right hand doing what is the melody – OKAY I’LL JUST STOP.

And then you start feeling around for something that’s familiar. This chord? That chord? Is this my starting note? Okay, beginning of the section. Wait, I’m in the wrong key. Shoot, backtrack a few bars? Oh, no, that’s not right, either. Maybe I’ll skip ahead to the next section…

We’ve all been there. Even if it may not have been as bad, we’ve all experienced some sort of panic attack where we need to think quickly and recover.

Now, I’m no expert on keeping my nerves calm during performances. I get real nervous.  And I mean really, really nervous. There were a few years during high school where I had a memory slip literally in every performance I ever did. I can’t say I got over it; I still get nervous. I still get memory slips… But I have to say, the number of memory slips I’ve had since then has decreased significantly. I can’t tell you how to win over stage fright or nerves, but what I can tell you is just several ways I’ve learned over the course of the last few years to help lessen the chances of having those memory slips. Of course, they will still happen, as we are all human, but having a certain amount of padding underneath your feet will always help cushion your fall if you ever slip.

1) Brain work.
One of the things I’ve been doing with my music for the past few years to help solidify memory, and help speed up recovery time during performances, is to divide up my pieces into a lot of small chunks. Eight bars, sixteen bars, whatever’s logical. These chunks are usually a phrase or two. I would practice each of these chunks over and over, knowing exactly how the chunk starts – the key, the harmony, the melody – so that if I ever have a memory slip, I know exactly where to jump. After familiarizing myself with these chunks, I would start quizzing myself. “Start from H,”, I would tell myself, and the chunk marked letter H is exactly where I’d start. In doing this, you’re getting to know your music inside and out. It’s also reassuring to know that no matter what happens in performance, you can have faith in yourself that you have somewhere to jump and you know it well.

2) Muscle memory.
If you don’t have enough faith in your mind to jump exactly where you need it to, train your fingers to know exactly what to do. This exercise is actually one of my favorites because it’s just so stupid. What I like to do is take a really slow tempo and literally bash out the notes at quadruple forte as unmusically as possible. Obviously one would never perform this way, but playing everything loudly, with confidence, makes sure that your fingers know exactly where to go and what to do on their own. Slowly, turn the metronome up no more than a couple notches at a time and repeat until performance tempo, and you’ll find that your fingers will know what to do even if your eyes are closed and you’re pretty much half asleep.

3) Perform, and love every second of it.
The best way to learn how to recover in performances, is to keep performing. Take each opportunity you have to perform for others. It doesn’t matter whether your audience is one person or a thousand. Perform as much as you can, for as many people as you can. Don’t tell yourself that you’re feeling “nervous”; you’re “excited”. Excited to play for an audience. Why? Because you enjoy the music you’re making. Immerse yourself in the music. Smile. You’re a performer because you love doing what you do. You want people to hear the reasons why you fell in love with the music you’re playing.

I’ve written these words in a previous post before, but they’re important, so I’ll write them again:

Play the music, not the notes.

When you lose yourself in the music, you stop thinking about the smaller things like, “what’s my next chord?” Stop it. You know the next chord. Your head knows it, your fingers know it. Don’t doubt yourself. It’s the little doubts that trigger the big slips. When you’re focused on the right things, magic happens.

Dream big, music-makers! (:

Negative

We all know it’s important to listen to recordings. There is so much to learn through listening; the recordings of those we idolize become our inspiration. In listening to others, we expand our own creative language and open our minds to new ideas that we can take and make our own.

Listening to fantastic recordings of things aren’t the only recordings we can learn from, though. We can also learn from the recordings we don’t really like. Some recordings will fall short of what we want, sometimes, because we all have our own personal style and our own ideas of how certain things should sound. But these recordings can end up being some of the most helpful recordings to listen to while trying to develop one’s personal interpretation of a piece. The answers lie in the details.

When you hear something that doesn’t really sit well with you, the first thing you do should not be to dismiss the recording. One thing to ask yourself might be, “Why?” Ask yourself why the passage isn’t exactly what you want it to be. Is it the articulation?  The color, the dynamic, the tempo? Think of every detail that you can possibly think of, and ask yourself, “If I were playing this part, what would I do differently?” This is where these recordings can be very helpful. If you’re constantly listening to recordings that you like, you might just end up copying the recording. It might make for a very strong performance, but it might lack some of your own personal flair, because you may end up just simply imitating someone else’s playing. In listening to recordings that are technically very strong, but different from what you imagine in your head in terms of interpretation, you will learn more about what you want out of the piece for yourself, drawing from your own style and your own experiences to build a convincing performance that’s all your own. Play lots, listen more!

Dream big, music-makers!

Comic Relief

Because this week is a hectic week in my life, with midterms happening left and right, with concerts and rehearsals and lessons and lectures and coachings and everything in between, this week’s post is just a video for you guys,  just for laughs.

Yesterday, comedian Sid Caesar passed away at age 91. In honor of his memory, I present to you one of his acts, “First Piano Recital”. I’m sure you’ll recognize the piece straight away! Enjoy! (:

I’ll be back with a full-length post next week, I promise! In the meantime,

Dream big, music-makers!

Learning by Listening

As musicians, we love listening to music as much as we love playing it. But nowadays, there’s a growing fascination with an idea of digitally perfect music, where your fingers move like robots working to hit all the right notes at the right times.

Accuracy is important, of course, but what happened to musicality? What happened to emotion, to passion? As professional musicians, sometimes it’s easy to forget that we’re playing the music, not the notes. It’s easy to get lost in the flashiness that is virtuosity, but technique is more than just hitting the right notes at the right time.Good technique means getting the sound you want, getting the note you’re playing to have the color you want, whether it be a warm sound, a sparkling tone, a round richness to big chords, or a delicate whisper of running notes. Also, there is a facet to music that people sometimes forget these days, and it’s the idea of creativity in interpretation. How many times have you heard someone sternly tell you that you shouldn’t use pedal in Bach? How many people have told you that your classical sonata needs to be perfectly steady without any significant amount of rubato? How many people have told you that you’re using too much rubato in your Chopin? All these “restrictions” that we have these days are not necessarily wrong, but they definitely give the idea that there is a “correct” way to play a piece and an “incorrect” way to play it. We are so focused on following all the notes that are written on the page in front of us that we forget what the true purpose of music is. Music is a way of expression.

Of course, following all the notes and markings on your score to a tee is one way to deliver a performance. But there is so much more to music that we’ve lost over the years. In listening to historical recordings, one might be surprised by how far our current performance practices have deviated from the times in which the composers actually lived.

Today, I listened to some old recordings of Brahms played by pianists who knew the composer. Etelka Freund was a Hungarian pianist who knew both Bartok and Brahms. She had coachings from Brahms, and Brahms really liked her playing. From her playing, we can find a different sense of rhythm than we’re used to hearing; the rubato is different from what we’re used to, and actually more extreme than what people tend to say is “right” these days. I personally found it very organic and charming, the way her phrases never seemed to end, her sense of timing giving long lines that went on for pages and pages. Another pianist that Brahms loved was Ilona Eibenschütz, another Hungarian pianist. Clara Schumann actually didn’t like her playing; she always thought Eibenschütz played too fast. Listening to Eibenschütz play really gives a different perspective on how to interpret Brahms’s music; she played with extreme tempo choices (everything she played of Brahms’s is almost double the tempo of what we usually hear these days), very big contrasts in dynamics and character, and very extreme rubato. In knowing that Brahms loved Eibenschütz’s playing, we can use her playing to develop new ideas on how to approach Brahms’s music.

There are so many ways to learn and expand one’s musical knowledge, but listening to historical recordings is probably one of my top ways to improve my own playing. In finding musicians that knew the composers themselves, we gain more insight into how the composers actually intended for the piece to be played. Some pianists may play something differently than how a composer intended for it to sound, and actually end up having the composer love the performance for its creativity. It has been said that when Chopin played his Nocturnes for his students, there would be something different about it each time. He would improvise his own flourishes, insert new ideas here and there; no two performances would be the same. If the composers were all for improvising and exercising one’s creativity at the piano, why are we so uptight about following the score exactly as it is these days? Although we want to stay true to a composer’s words, we still need to infuse the music with our own personality, our own ideas. It’s the little things; the colors, the details, the voicing, the phrasing. All these little things add up to a big picture, and it’s up to us as performers to bring these things to life. Living through the notes on the page isn’t enough, we have to go beyond what’s on the page and live the music. Live the stories that these pieces tell, live the experiences that inspired the works.

On that note, I present to you two unbelievable recordings. Both are works by Brahms, as I’m in a rather Brahms-y mood today.

Here is a 1953 recording of the Paganini Variations, Op.35, recorded by Geza Anda. His tone is incredible; everything sparkles. The clarity is impeccable, and the warmth in his sound is to die for. And check out the octave glissandi he does; my first reaction when I first heard this recording was, “I think I’m just gonna go and quit life now.” INCREDIBLE.

I’m ending this rather long post with two incredible pianists playing together: Dinu Lipatti and Nadia Boulanger, playing some Waltzes from Op.39. The balance is seriously perfect! Their sense of timing is unbelievable; if only everyone played like these two legends.

Dream big, music-makers!