Pitch Perfect

Alright, I’ll admit it: I don’t have perfect pitch.

I’m also perfectly happy not having it.
“What? Really? Why would you not want perfect pitch?”

[Before I start, I just want to throw it out there that I am in no way saying that people who don’t have perfect pitch are superior to those who do. I’m just writing the things I’ve noticed in my experience. I am also in no way painting all perfect pitch-ers with the same brush. Please don’t take offense to anything; I’m not mean, I promise!]

To be completely honest, when I was younger, I envied those who had perfect pitch. The first time I’d heard of the concept, I Googled it and read that only 1 in 10,000 people have perfect pitch. I wanted it so badly. I thought it was so cool, being able to know exactly what pitch is being played without seeing it being played. Then, I came to university to study piano performance. I found out recently that 9 out of the 12 people in my studio have perfect pitch. My best friend has perfect pitch. All of a sudden, not having perfect pitch was special. It wasn’t until I came to university that I really appreciated not having perfect pitch. Why? Because it has forced me to train my ear in ways that people with perfect pitch don’t necessarily have to, because they can already tell pitch without really trying.

Throughout my musical training growing up, I had to do a lot of “identification exercises”. I’m sure you’ve done these, too, if you’ve ever taken up music seriously at any point in your life. I’m talking about the identification of intervals, chords, and cadences. Someone would play you an interval, and you’d have to name it. Relative pitch is something that all musicians develop to some degree, and through lots of hard work, I’ve learned to hone that relative pitch. I always thought perfect pitch would solve all my problems, but I realized that my relative pitch was good enough to make up for the fact that I didn’t have perfect pitch. I’ve trained my ear in a way that I can hear a pitch and know what it is, not by perfect pitch, but by figuring it out quickly by using relative pitch, with my vocal range as a reference point.

The lowest note I can audibly sing is a C3. I know where the note sits in my throat. I’ve used it as a reference point so much, now, that I can physically place that note, not sing it, but still be able to hear it in my head. That’s the beauty of knowing your own body. You can feel where pitches are in your vocal tract without actually singing them, and make connections to that feeling. After being determined to develop some sort of “perfect pitch” for myself to use, I started trying to identify every sound I heard in everyday situations. The soft “ping” a bus makes when someone presses the button for the next stop is a G. I would hear the sound, hum a C3 to myself quietly, and then think back to the pitch I just heard. “Perfect fifth, it’s a G!” Gradually, this process started getting faster. Of course, it’s still not as fast as I’d like it to be (yet!!), but this is something I can continue to work on. Over the past two years, I’ve also managed to memorize where A440 is, mostly thanks to a job I had at a music store where people would come in to buy violin strings and ask me to restring their instruments. My counter was on the other side of the store from the shelf with the metronomes and tuners, and, being the lazy creature that I am, decided to memorize what A440 was so that I could tune their instruments without walking over to the other side of the store. Who said laziness doesn’t have benefits? (:

I’ve also learned to develop my relative pitch through playing things by ear. A lot. In Canada, our Royal Conservatory exams include melody playbacks, where someone plays you a phrase with your back to them, and you have to go to the keyboard (or your instrument, if you’re not a pianist) and play that same phrase back. This is the first step to doing something that lots of people find impressive: someone requests a popular song and you sit down and play it by ear. I started being able to play by ear many, many years ago, but it wasn’t until recently that I discovered how it worked in my head. First, of course, knowledge of chord progressions and harmonies will take you so far in this. But for me, personally, I realized that I’m able to play by ear well because I think of melody notes in terms of scale degrees. Instead of figuring out the intervals from each melody note to the next, I think of each individual pitch in terms of the key I’m in. This helps not only with learning the notes of the melody, but also with figuring out what harmonies to play along with that melody note. One of my favorite ways to develop this sense of scale degree recognition is to solfege every melody you hear. I’m not even kidding. I play a lot of video games, and I’ve realized that a lot of classic video game tunes are perfect for solfege exercise. Take the Tetris theme, or something from Super Mario Bros., or Pokemon… and just solfege the crap out of that stuff.

Another thing you could try training yourself to do is to hear things in your head. I don’t mean voices, because that means you’re just… probably going insane and need help. Or something. Being able to read music and hear it in your head is called audiating. I developed this skill mostly through sight-reading. I always remembered when teachers would put a piece of music in front of a student and ask them to sight-read it. “I’ll give you a moment to look through it, and you can start whenever you’re ready.” Sound familiar? Well, of course, this “moment” is for you to look at what you’re about to play. What you should be doing, though, is hearing it in your head. We learn music easier when we’ve heard it before, so if you can’t physically hear the piece before you play it, why not sing it to yourself in your head? Being able to hear what you see on the page is such a helpful skill to have in terms of learning music faster, but it also helps develop other musical skills. If you train yourself to hear more than one note at a time in your head, it makes it easier to figure out harmonies and chord progressions from that. When you can hear where a phrase goes in your head, it makes it easier for you to kind of “predict” where the music is going next, even if you’ve never heard it before. Of course, this is all assuming that your teachers or examiners aren’t being total jerks and giving you some kind of atonal sh*t to sight-read.

 

And for those of you who wish you had perfect pitch, but don’t, here’s a reason to love not having it.

We can transpose stuff more easily than those with perfect pitch (for the most part). I know so many people with perfect pitch who have trouble with transposition, because they see something on the page and they hear what it is in their heads with the exact pitches. The transposed key sounds totally awful to them. I’ve seen the faces of people with perfect pitch show discomfort when something is transposed. They also have issues with listening to Baroque tuning, because it’s so off from the usual 440 tuning we’re all used to hearing. Without perfect pitch, we hear the general contour of the piece we see on the page without being locked down to a specific tonal center, so we’re more comfortable with playing things in different keys. We can also listen to pieces that are transposed, or use instruments that are tuned differently, without feeling uneasy because, once again, we’re not locked down by specific pitches we hear in our minds. We might know that a key is in the ballpark of where it’s supposed to be, but being a semitone or two off in either direction isn’t going to bother us as much, if at all, as it will for those who have perfect pitch.

Personally, I’m a pretty awful person when it comes to practicing in practice rooms at school. Because practice rooms at my school are little individual cubicles with no windows and poor soundproofing, it’s easy to mess around with people without them knowing who you are. Unless, of course, they get so irritated that they come into your practice room to hunt you down. When I hear people practicing a certain piece that I’ve learned before, or I know well, I’ll do several things:

1) Find out what key the piece is in. If I’ve already learned the piece before, then I’ll know what it is. If I haven’t learned the piece before, but I know it well in my head, I will figure out what the key is, usually by thinking of that C3 at the bottom of my range and figuring out the key of the piece from there.

2) Figure out how the piece goes. If a piece is in my head and I can sing it to myself, figuring out the scale degrees and knowing intervals inside out will make figuring out the pitches a piece of cake. I usually make up the left hand, just filling in harmonies that work.

3) Transpose away. This is the fun part. I’m a horrible human being, I know. But usually, I’ll take other people’s pieces and be extremely mean and play either a semitone away or a tritone away. (:

My favorite thing about not having perfect pitch, though, is that when I hear something out in the blue, like a car horn, I’ll turn to my friend who has perfect pitch and say,

“That was an F, right?”

And when she says yes,

I feel like a million bucks.

 

So for those of you who don’t have perfect pitch, just keep workin’ on that relative pitch and own it! And to those of you who have perfect pitch… Well, let’s just hope you never practice in a room next to mine.

Dream big, music-makers! (:

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!

Baby Einstein

We have a new addition in our family! Ten days ago, our family welcomed baby Lucas, brother to two adoring sisters. Our family had been hoping for a boy during my cousin’s entire pregnancy, so when he entered this world and emerged with his little [man parts], we were all ecstatic! (:

With baby Lucas in our family, I wanted to share with you all some of the research that was presented during the conference I attended a few weeks ago. The lecture was given by Dr. Laurel Trainor, a psychology professor from McMaster University. She runs her research in the University’s Auditory Development Lab, where she studies the perception of sound in infants, children, and adults, as well as the acquisition of music and language. Her research focuses on what infants perceive when they listen to speech and music, how this changes as they grow, and what influences how sound perception develops.

Why do caregivers talk and sing to infants who don’t understand the words? Can infants recognize tunes? What aspects of the musical structure do they encode? How do infants perceive pitch, pitch patterns, and melodies? How is rhythm perceived? What is the multisensory relation between music and movement? How does musical training affect brain development? These are all questions she aims to answer in the lab.

Before getting into any infant research, though, we must familiarize ourselves with how we perceive pitch as adults. In our daily lives, sound is always present. Sounds reach our ears as one massive complex sound, and it may become unclear which sources certain sound waves come from. Our brain parses this complex sound to determine one source of sound from another.

But how does our brain do this?

It uses fundamental frequencies and overtones. Our brains understand that integer multiples of a certain fundamental frequency are mostly produced from the same source. Pitch is created in the auditory cortex in the brain, where harmonics are grouped together and perceived as pitch, at the fundamental frequency. Brains are amazing things. But to take it a step further, shall we? If the fundamental frequency was missing, but all the other harmonics are still present, we’ll still perceive the pitch at the fundamental frequency! Craziness. I know.

So this leads to the question: Can babies tell pitch with the missing fundamental?

After conducting an experiment, it was shown that babies at 3 months cannot perceive pitch at the fundamental… But they can at 4 months. This means that virtual pitch perception emerges in babies between the ages of 3 and 4 months!

Another research question that was looked at was whether babies can tell if a pitch has a mistuned harmonic. This means taking one of the harmonics of a fundamental and altering it slightly. To adults, when presented with a pitch containing a mistuned harmonic, we should hear two pitches. The question is: do babies hear two pitches, too? The answer is yes! The ability to detect mistuning emerges between 4 and 6 months! Babies are amazing creatures.

Aside from research in pitch discrimination, Dr. Trainor also did work on how babies respond to rhythm. Young infants can discriminate rhythmic patterns with ease. First, we need to break down the concept of rhythm. Beats are derived perceptually from the surface of the music, while meter is the hierarchy of beat levels. As musicians, we are capable of internalizing sound events when no sound is present. In other words, we can hear strong beats even if no sound is there to emphasize the beats. In North America, we are enculturated to Western meters. When we’re presented with complex meters, the music is no longer isochronous (isochronous=equally spaced metrical divisions). When adults are first presented with a simple rhythm, then presented with a similar melody in a complex rhythm, we can generally tell that the two are different. However, when we are presented with a complex rhythm first, and then presented with the simple rhythm afterwards, it becomes more difficult to distinguish the two rhythms. When we are being presented with the simple rhythm first, the complex rhythm immediately sounds odd when we hear it. However, when presented with the complex rhythm first, our enculturated minds are working so hard to fit the rhythm into a simple meter that the simple rhythm that comes afterwards is also jumbled in our minds.

At six months, babies can distinguish between simple and complex rhythms when presented with them in either order. However, by 12 months, babies will have difficulty distinguishing between the rhythms when the complex rhythm comes first, just like most adults in North America, because they have also gotten enculturated to simple meters.

The last concept Dr. Trainor introduced in her lecture was that there is no such thing as “too early” to begin musical training. Studies showed that babies who undergo early childhood classes such as the Suzuki program develop sensitivity to sound 2 to 3 years faster than those who don’t. Her research also shows that music trains executive functions such as memory and behavior control. She showed us a video comparing two children at 12 months, one who took the Suzuki classes, and one who didn’t. The two children were presented with a xylophone and two mallets. The child who took the Suzuki classes attempted (rather successfully, for a one-year-old) to play the instrument, hitting the xylophone, alternating hands. This was already considered advance behavior, as babies at that age would probably only be able to control both hands to do the same thing at the same time, while this child was already showing signs of being able to control each hand independently. The other child, who did not take any classes, didn’t do anything with the instrument itself. He was eating the mallets. (: Cute, I know.

More of Dr. Trainor’s research shows that babies are sensitive to rhythm at 6 months, but they generally cannot follow tempo with whole-body movements until the age of 4. They can, however, relate movement to rhythm. This means that they will move their bodies slower or faster depending on the tempo of the music, but they will not be able to motorically synchronize with a beat.

If any of you are interested to see more of Dr. Trainor’s research, you can visit her research projects page here!

That’s it for today! Until next week,

Dream big, music-makers! (:

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! (:

Symphonic

Not too long ago, there were certain skills that were once considered essential that tend to be glossed over these days. Transposing, improvising, reading figured bass, and reducing an orchestral score.

Of course, all of these are important, and most are still taught to young pianists. However, it’s common to forget that reducing orchestral scores is something essential for pianists, especially those looking into working in the field of collaboration.

The piano is one of the few instruments, if not the only one, that covers the entire pitch range, and dynamic range, of an entire orchestra. With recordings being available at our fingertips, the act of going to the piano to try out what something sounds like is something that doesn’t really happen anymore. Although these recordings are easily accessible, though, the best way to learn a piece of music is to play it. In playing orchestral reductions, we learn how to create different timbres and colors, different textures and new ways to voice certain things. It also trains us to audiate, which is to say hear the music we see on the sheet in our heads. In our minds, we have to sight-read while figuring out which notes we should leave out and which lines we have to keep.

Almost all the great composers that we love, such as Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart, and Schumann, all wrote pieces for orchestra. In learning how to read orchestral reductions and being able to hear all the different sounds of instruments in our heads, we can translate all those rich textures into our solo playing. Many of the Beethoven piano sonatas are very symphonic in nature, with their big dynamic contrasts and layered lines. The way you get a warm sound and a full texture in big chords and loud passages is to think orchestrally. Think about what instruments would be playing which notes. Think about what color you want to express in a certain passage and associate that with an instrument that’s not the piano. Maybe horns are playing the melody, while strings are sustaining beautiful long notes underneath. The flute is delicately doing runs above the texture, and suddenly one beautiful clarinet line pops out from the mass of sound. The possibilities are endless when it comes to orchestrating your solo music, and the best way to familiarize yourself with  orchestral music is to listen to orchestral music and do your own score reduction.

When your instrument can take on the role of an entire orchestra, why not take advantage of it to its fullest?

Dream big, music-makers! (:

The Artist and the Art Form

Last week, I got into a heated discussion in one of my classes about “boring music”. What exactly makes music “boring”? The genre of music that was being discussed in particular was art song. Personally, I love art song. I love the poetry, the emotions involved, the connection you make with the singer. Composers like Schubert, Schumann, and Wolf managed to genuisly set poetry to music, allowing certain notes, melodies, and harmonies to come together and effectively convey an multitude of emotions.

A survey was conducted amongst musicians and classical music enthusiasts to see why the interest in art song was significantly lower than other genres of classical music. Pianists would say that the piano parts written for art song are generally uninteresting. Take Das Wandern, the first movement of Die schöne Müllerin, for example. The piano part is essentially one huge Alberti figure, and as this movement is strophic, we’re repeating these two pages five times. How interesting, I know. Other issues that were brought up were that audience members don’t understand the poetry. As art song is most commonly heard in German and French, audience members who don’t speak these languages fluently need to constantly bring their heads up and down to look at the performer and then at the translations in the program, and back up, and back down, and so on and so forth. Finally, it was also brought up that art song doesn’t have the big extravagant sets and costumes that operas have, along with their heightened emotions and exaggerated on-stage movements that tell a very clear story.

Although taking part in an opera is difficult in its own way, art song is just as difficult, if not more. If we look into the essence of art song, we’ll see that it’s one of the most beautiful and emotionally stirring art forms in the whole world of music. Why? Because of the poetry. There’s meaning in the poetry and there are reasons behind why a composer picked the poetry they picked to set to music. There are reasons behind why they chose to set the poetry a certain way.

Art song is something so personal that you have to dig deep within your own experiences, and dive into the pasts of the composers and poets themselves, in order to truly understand the emotions behind the music. You need to know the poetry and feel every word of it. The reason art song is boring is not because the music is boring. It’s boring because the artists are boring.

Don’t get me wrong, there are brilliant art song singer-pianist duos out there. But the art form itself has never been as popular as everything else. From the point of view of a pianist, we see a bunch of chords on the page and we think, “Oh, this is easy, I can sight read this.” We’re just plunking down the chords without thinking anything else of it, other than staying in time with the singer. But as a pianist, have you ever thought that maybe the way you play something will influence the singer on a level that they’re not even aware of? There’s a certain connection a pianist must make with their singer in order to convey a convincing performance of art song that goes far deeper than simply playing together. If you’re playing chords vertically, you can bet that no matter how long of a line your singer wants to make with the vocal line, they can’t because they’re influenced by the vertical way you’re playing the piano part.

Let’s go back to Das Wandern. The first movement, as mentioned before is one giant Alberti. My first thought as a pianist was probably similar to any other pianist out there who sees this for the first time. “Oh good, it’s easy.” By the third repeat, you’re starting to think, “I have to do this two more times after this one?!” And by the final repeat, you’re thinking, “THANK GOD, NO MORE!” Natural reactions, of course. What’s a pianist supposed to do here, anyway?! It’s simple. The beauty of art song is in the poetry. As pianists, we sometimes overlook the fact that we are not accompanists. We are collaborators. We are just as invested in this music as the singer. So, what does that mean? It means we need to know the poetry, too. All our answers are in the poetry. In knowing the poetry, we know where our lines go, which chords and harmonies to emphasize because of the words they’re sung with. The singer’s breathing tells us where to push and pull, where to pause for emphasis. And most of all, the words give us ideas of how to change things up if given something like an Alberti figure for five verses.

I’m not going to put the blame on pianists 100% for turning art song into a boring art form, but we are certainly not guilt-free in the matter. I know a lot of the piano parts don’t look fascinating or challenging to us, but in a way, that’s the challenge. It’s turning something so painfully simple into something unbelievably beautiful and heartfelt. The art form didn’t survive centuries for nothing; it’s still performed today because there’s something in it for everyone. Art song is one of the most emotionally challenging art forms, and there’s a way for every individual to find something personal to feel in every song. We just have to find it and connect with it.

Just remember: If the music seems boring… It’s not the music that’s boring, it’s the artist.

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!

Woman’s Life and Love

Frauenliebe und leben is one of Robert Schumann’s song cycles during his Year of Song, or Liederjahr in German, the year of 1840. During this year, he wrote 168 songs (!!). This song cycle in particular gives us some insight into the way Robert viewed Clara. In no way do I mean that Robert objectified Clara and saw her as a possession, but it does give us an idea of their love story and how their music came to be. 

The text for Frauenliebe und leben (“Woman’s Life and Love”) was written by Adalbert von Chamisso. He wrote this set of poetry at the age of 40, when he married a 17-year-old girl. During Schumann’s time, men would marry young girls, and this young girl would then spend the next ten years or so of her life continuously having children. Because birth control was banned (it was forbidden to even ask about it), the wives of men would have no other option than to keep producing child after child. Most of these girls would pass away because they wore out their bodies by having too many children. After the death of a wife, a man would usually marry another girl, and this girl would be expected to continuously have children, and the process would keep going. This was clearly the case for Chamisso; he must have lost a wife (or two), and then found this young girl to marry. He wrote this poetry with her in mind, which is an idealized version of what a man wants a woman to feel and think when she is in love and married. Essentially, the poetry is written in the point of view of the girl, saying that all she wants to do is live her life to make the man happy, and she will be happy in doing so. 

Something had to have drawn Robert to this poetry, and it would be odd to assume he didn’t have Clara in mind when he set this poetry to music. Clara, being a musical prodigy ever since she was young, would have had a very different life had she not fallen in love with Robert and married him. She would not have needed to limit her performing, which int turn would have boosted her reputation far more than she already had it. She would have had a life dedicating herself solely to music, and who knows what more she could have given us if she hadn’t married Robert.

However, in having her beautiful relationship with Robert, we get beautiful works from Robert that were written with her in mind, like the ever so famous Widmung that he gifted to her for their wedding. Without Clara, Robert’s music would not be filled with as much emotion, as their relationship fueled his writing. She lives in his works and he in hers. Much of Clara’s compositions found their way into Robert’s music (themes written by Clara can be found in many of his works, including his great a minor concerto, Op.54, and his g minor sonata, Op.22, and of course, his Impromptus on a Theme by Clara Wieck, op.5). 

Frauenliebe und leben shows us what men thought women should feel in a marriage, and Robert was no different. Women, ideally, would devote their lives to making her husband happy by simply having lots and lots of children and taking care of these children. In making her husband happy, she herself would be happy. When Robert married Clara, the thought of her happiness stemming from performing and composing could have been described as “charming”, “cute”, or even “silly”. She was expected, ideally, to be happy simply by staying home and having children, and taking care of these children. Robert and Clara had eight children, and having that many children would have definitely taken a toll not only on Clara’s physical being, but also her mental and emotional health. She limited her performing due to this, and composed a little bit on the side of taking care of the seven children that survived out of the eight that she had. To say that Clara was unhappy, though, would be wrong. She loved playing and she loved performing, but the love that she had for Robert allowed her to give up some of her musical life without resenting Robert. 

After Robert’s death, Clara returned to concertizing. From the time of Robert’s death until Clara’s, she spent her time performing only Robert’s works, showing her unending, unconditional devotion to him and his love for her. 

Through Robert’s and Clara’s relationship, I find that there isn’t really a “wrong” way to play Robert’s or Clara’s music if you play with the same sort of unconditional love they had for each other. If you’re thinking of someone that you love with every fiber of your being, you’re sure to create something beautiful.

Dream big, music-makers!

(Further reading if interested: Nancy B. Reich – Clara Schumann : The Artist and the Woman)

Strength Comes From The Heart

One of the comments I get a lot from interacting with audience members during receptions is, “Wow, how does a tiny little person like you get such a big sound?! Your fingers must be so strong!”

Well, in all honesty, not really. I don’t have really strong fingers. My fingers themselves are actually pretty weak. Being able to play powerfully takes so much more than just strong fingers. It takes everything you have.

Your fingers don’t need to be strong, but everything else does. Your forearms need strength, your upper arms need to know when to work, your shoulders need to support your arms. Your back needs to be strong in order to sit with good posture. Your legs need to know where to be in order to keep your body’s balance as your arms move around the keyboard. And most importantly, your strength comes from…

You guessed it. From your butt. (:

Your butt supports your back, and helps control your legs. Everything you use to hold your body the way you’re holding it really comes from your butt when you’re sitting down on a bench.

But all jokes aside, pianists don’t get their power just from their hands. Our power comes from everything but our hands, so that our hands can focus on doing that crazy fast-flying thing they’re trained to be good at. Our fingers are agile, our hands are flexible, our bodies are strong. Our power comes mostly from our lower body, and the smaller portion that’s left over comes from our chest and shoulders.

But most of all, our power comes from our hearts. We feel big, we dream big, we play big. That’s all there is to it!

Dream big, music-makers!