The Piano Pedagogy Page

Here’s an exercise I use to help speed up Alberti bass figures:

First, sit so that the C above middle C is directly in front of you.

Second, turn your body to the right so that you’re facing the top C on the keyboard.

Third, practice this, using 5131 5131 for your fingering:

Doing this simple exercise can help students develop fluidity and speed in Alberti bass figures.  It aligns the arm and hand in a much more natural position, and it’s much easier for students to get used to the type of rotation necessary to develop speed.

I started doing this with students because I so many beginning pieces that use Alberti bass require you to play in the octave between Bass C and Middle C, and they usually use white keys.  While this promotes pattern recognition and reading, it’s physically awkward, and students often end up with a crooked wrist and tense fingers.

Once a student has practiced the exercise above and knows what playing Alberti figures are supposed to feel like, I ask them “now, see if you can have that same feeling in the piece you’re playing.”

Okay, I have to get this off my chest.  For years now, we’ve all been reading about how piano lessons benefit children.  There are plenty of lists that describe the benefits of music study, and MENC even has a database to help music teachers convince their administrators to give them the resources they need to do their jobs.  Music teachers have used The Mozart Effect to convince parents to enroll their children in music lessons, and studies continue to make the news on a fairly regular basis.

What bothers me is that none of these studies mention the real benefit of piano study.  The real benefit of piano study, and by far the best reason to take piano lessons is that you get to learn how to actually play the piano.  That’s right, I’m actually suggesting that the best reason to take music lessons is to learn how to actually make music!

At the piano, you can do stuff like this and this and this and this.  No matter who you are, you can find an outlet for self expression through music.  Whether you devote yourself to the classical tradition or build your own piano to match your bubble dress and quirky personality, the piano can help, and it’s AWESOME.

So yes, the study of music has a lot of benefits, but let’s not forget the most important one – playing the piano.

Two things inspired this post:

The first is Concert Hands, a completely ridiculous piece of technology that you strap on to your wrists and hands to help you learn to play.  (Seriously, watch the video, it’s hilarious!)

The second is a description of a teaching technique in Julie Knerr’s excellent article on elementary technique in the first issue of MTNA’s e-Journal.  (To view back issues, open the current issue and click “Archives” in the upper left corner.)

What Knerr described is that successful teachers go beyond which key to play and help students learn where to play it.  In other words, we shouldn’t always position our finger on the same spot on the key every time.  Sometimes it’s best to move a bit – towards and away from the fallboard.

What bothered me so much about Concert Hands is that it treats piano technique as one-dimensional, back and forth along the rail.

As teachers, I think an important part of teaching technique is in the realization that technique is 3-dimensional.  We don’t simply move our arms and hands left and right, we are in a constant state of motion that includes left, right, up, down, away, towards, and every imaginable combination.  Incidentally, this is also why I find discussions of hand position and hand shape unnecessarily tedious – while playing the piano, our hands have many shapes and find themselves in many different positions.

One of my New Year’s Resolutions is to bring more 3-dimensional awareness to my teaching:

• How do I help my students feel at ease moving side-to-side along the keyboard?
  
• How do I help my students better control the descent and release of the key?
• How do I help students negotiate the surface of the keys?

Feel free to share any thoughts or exercises you have that address these important questions, I’d love to hear them!

I tried something new with my students this year, and I think it helped make our winter recital a huge success.  I gave them a simple recipe for how to keep their memory secure in the week before their recital.

It goes like this:

1) With the score out of sight, play the first section or phrase and through from memory.
2) Put the music up and play the passage again, being sure to keep your eyes on the score.
3) Lay the music aside and play it again from memory.
4) Play the passage through again with the music.
5) Go on to the next section or phrase…

It’s that simple, and it works!  I think it works because it avoids two problems – if we spend all our time with the score, we tend to use it as a crutch, or if we’re not really looking at it, we use it as a safety net, a teddy bear sitting on the music rack ready to jump in and save us should monsters crawl out from under the bed.  But if we spend all our time practicing without the score, small errors begin to creep in, and we don’t really notice them until the adrenaline shines a big spotlight on them onstage.  There we are in performance, and a voice appears in our heads saying “UH OH, DO I PLAY AN E OR A G HERE?”  Yikes!

So I figured why not go half and half?  Spend half the time with the score, focusing our eyes on it and burning it into our memories.  Then spend half the time without it.  No safety net.  Just go and do the best you can.  Jumping back and forth allows you to build on what came previously.  Learn from your mistakes, and practice your success.

Try it out with your students and see if it helps, and let me know if you have any other memorization strategies.  I’d love to hear them!

For this final exercise, devote yourself to only one of your senses.  Turn away from your student and only listen.  Don’t watch them – evaluate and discuss their playing based solely on the sounds you see.  Refrain from discussing technical issues, focus the dialogue solely on the sounds that are desired.

OR

Don’t listen.  Have your student play on a silent keyboard, or if none is available (or if you teach violin or voice), videotape your student’s performance and watch the video with the sound off.  I believe that beautiful technique produces beautiful sounds.  Rarely have a seen a student who looks awkward but sounds great (or who looks great but sounds awkward.)  Focus the discussion solely on the beauty of the motions themselves.

A brief tangent – this is how I learned to hit a golf ball.  After a year of hacking away at the ground, I began practicing my golf swing with no other goal than to make it look like a golf swing.  Amazingly, I found that once I began swinging the golf club in a way that looked good, the club magically found the ball and propelled it up into the air.  As in sports, form is everything, and if you practice with the idea of having good physical form, results have a tendency to follow.

Thanks to all who’ve been reading these – I hope you’ve gotten an idea or two to take to your studio as we move into winter recital season!