Music Video Lesson: What Can You Do With a Piece You Have Learned?

This is living pianos.com. I'm Robert Estrin asking the question, what to do with a piece you have learned? My goodness there's so many things you can do with it. You wonder, how do you approach such a thing? Well, the first thing I've got to say right out of the gate is the most obvious thing in the world. Play it. You'd be surprised how many people learn pieces and then they never play them and they forget them. Now there's so many benefits to playing the pieces you have learned. One, it's fun. What's all the work for anyway if not to be able to play music? Well, secondly, it keeps the pieces fresh so that if you play these pieces every day, it gets to the point where you could just whip them off without any problems. So if you ever have a performance opportunity, whether it's something informal for friends or family or something even a concert type of situation, you're so used to playing it that it's almost automatic pilot. You can just whip it off any time you want.

Now, what other benefits are there? Well, think about this. A lot of people spend hours a day on exercises to keep their fingers in shape and the muscles moving. You know what? There are many pieces of music can accomplish much the same thing. Now this isn't to say that there isn't a place for exercises. There certainly is. Scales and arpeggios, octaves and other exercises are a vital part of piano practice. But in regards to just keeping your fingers limber and the muscles in good shape, just playing through your music can accomplish that and that you have the ancillary benefits of developing the fluidity and reliability in performance. But like anything else, if you play them over and over and over again, there could be minute changes along the way.

In the olden days of analog tape recording, if you ever made a tape of a tape of a tape, the sound gets pretty awful because each successive generation has a little bit of loss of quality unlike digital recording today. Another example of this is the old game of telephone that we all played in school, where you whisper a message to the person next to you who then whispers it to the person next to them going all the way around the room. And you know what have happens, at the end you have a completely different message. Well you can end up with a completely different piece of music if you just play it over and over and over again without ever referring back to the original which in this case is the musical score. So how do you approach that?

The best way is to take your score out of whatever piece it is that you've been playing all the time, find a tempo in which you can read it. Now that tempo is going to be far slower than the speed you're probably playing it at. Because if it's a piece that you learned and have played hundreds of times, you have a tempo that's much faster than the tempo you can actually read all the details of the score. Slow way down, find that speed in the metronome, take your foot off the pedal so you can hear clearly everything you're doing. Then exaggerate everything as you play, delineating all the notes, phrasing, fingering and expression.

For example, let's say you learned the Moonlight Sonata and then you wanted to refresh it. You've been playing it and playing and playing it and you say, "Oh, I want to make sure I'm playing this accurately" or solidify the performance exactly where all the rests are, whether chords have two notes or three notes. There's all little subtle things, where the crescendos start and end. It's not just the notes and the rhythm and the fingering, it's every single detail you want to cement and re-cement. So Moonlight Sonata 1st Movement, turn the metronome on and play very definitely. (Piano interlude).

Now if you can reach that 9th, by all means play it. My hand is so small I have to catch that on the pedal which is why it sounded that way. But that might not be an appropriate tempo for you. You might want to take it even slower, slow enough that you can read every note and play everything accurately. I guarantee you any piece no matter how well you play it and how well you've learned it, if you slow it down and play with the score with no pedal with a metronome, you will find little things and you'll cement your performance and make it much stronger.

So the lesson for today, what do you do with pieces you've played before that you've learned? Keep playing them so you don't forget them, number one. Number two, resolidify with a score, playing slowly with no pedal, with a metronome to make sure you keep an honest performance. There could be other practice techniques you could also employ in strategic parts that need the work obviously, but these are the basics for what to do with pieces you already know. I hope this is helpful for you. Again, I'm Robert Estrin, livingpianos.com, your online piano resource. Thank you so much for joining me and you can subscribe if you want to get videos like this in the future. See you next time.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/what-can-you-do-with-a-piece-you-have-learned/

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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