The #1 Most Overlooked Piano Technique

Hi, I'm Robert Estrin and you're watching LivingPianos.com, your online piano resource. Today we're going to discuss the secrets to releasing notes on the piano. I don't know how many of you have ever thought about this and the profound effect it makes on your music. Of course, how you push a key down, you spend all your time thinking about that. The release is equally important. Now, there are many things we can discuss. One of them is when you're playing fast passage work, the evenness of scale work so that you get a jewel -like experience how connected or disconnected notes are like in Schubert impromptu in E flat. Do you want to have it in legato like this? Or would you rather have each note like a little jewel, a little space between each note? That's the release that I'm talking about.

The choice is yours, how you release notes. But what I'm talking about today here is even more fundamental than that, however important that is. And that's a whole study in itself, how you practice scales and arpeggios to develop that clean evenness between notes. Not just the attack of the notes, but the release of the notes so the space between notes are equal. That's what gives that beautiful clarity of your scale, passage work, and broken chords in your playing. But what I'm really going to cover today is how you release, because when you release your fingers off the keys, the dampers come in contact with the strings. Now, you can use this in conjunction with the pedal, and the speed at which you release the pedal also affects the tone dramatically.

So, for example, if you're ending a beautiful Chopin nocturne and want the sound to just fade away, you will release your hands and your pedal very slowly to get the sound to fade out like this at the end of the B flat minor nocturne.

And notice how you can nuance the sound. You can release some notes a little bit before others. There's so many different ways you can achieve the end.

But I'm going to show you something dramatically different. Suppose you're playing Bach now.

Bach didn't compose for the piano.

He composed simply for clavier, keyboard. The primary keyboard instrument in performance other than the organ was the harpsichord. Have you ever heard harpsichord, how it releases? You get actually a click because a little plectra, back in the day they were duck quills, and you get a noticeable click. It's a very definite end. So it's appropriate then at the end of something held at the end of a piece of Bach to release quickly, to get an abrupt ending, like at the end of his Taring and Cherubim.

First movement for you.

So you get that very definite release.

Now imagine if I did it the opposite now, just so you can hear what happens. I'm going to play that Bach again for you and I'm going to release it gradually like I'm ending Chopin. And you see it's stylistically, it doesn't have the same energy.

You want that little bit of crunch there, that rhythmic sense of the end of the chord. Now what if I flip it and I play the end of that Chopin and I give it that abrupt ending? Listen how stylistically alien this is.

That doesn't work at all, does it? So you can see how you release the notes on the piano have a really big effect. Imagine playing that whole beautiful nocturne and ending it like that.

It's kind of like, I was thinking, like making love and then slapping somebody. That's what it feels like, it's just really off putting.

You want to have that gentle ending to your music when it's appropriate in a romantic era. Nocturne, let it linger and how you release it, listen to that release. Release your hand slowly, release the pedal slowly, but when you want more of an energetic ending like in a Baroque piece or even a piece of Prokofiev, an ending that's more bravura and you want that energy, the release to be clean, then do it suddenly. Release your hands, release the pedal quickly and you'll get that abrupt ending that's appropriate for some music.

It's all about being stylistically in conjunction with the music. Being sensitive to the sound and the mood of the music you play.

Let me know how helpful this is for you here at LivingPianos.com.

I'm Robert Estrin, lots more videos coming your way and by the way, you can make suggestions in the comments at LivingPianos.com.

See you next time.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/the-1-most-overlooked-piano-technique-note-release/

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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