Back in my idealistic student days, there was something of a movement going on in pedagogy where teachers were defining “piano” as “quiet” instead of “soft.” The idea made good academic sense – forte meant loud, and the opposite of loud is quiet, so we started using “loud” and “quiet” instead of “loud” and “soft.”
I’m changing my tune.
After listening to 27 students at a local festival recently, I found myself a bit disappointed at the dynamics in many of the performances. It felt like everyone interpreted “forte” as “bang” and “piano” as “timid and a little slower.” This is no doubt in response to many teachers and judges telling students to exaggerate their dynamics and make “more contrast” between piano and forte.
I think it’s important to realize that dynamics are not volume indications, and they’re not about contrast. They’re about character. Forte means more than just turning the volume knob up to 8, it implies some kind of feeling or emotion. If we look “forte” up in an Italian dictionary, we find words like “strong,” “heavy,” and “large.” If we look up “piano,” we find words like “carefully,” and “smooth.”
In other words, instead of defining forte and piano as “loud” and “quiet,” I think we should define it more like a toilet paper commercial: ”strong and soft.”
I completely agree. Nothing worse that students trying to play as quietly as possible and losing all musicality. I did a post a while back called ‘No Such Thing As Piano’ which covers essentially the same point.
Let’s hope more teachers take this up and prevent the timid performances so often seen at festivals and recitals.
Exactly! I also just finished judging the same students – how did that happen?
Little Melody thinks playing (p) means dancing on top of the keys and not getting the bottom. However, most of the (f)I heard sounded like harsh stabbing tones with no release once getting to the keybed.
Love your toilet paper analogy!
Thank you for sharing your wisdom.