.jpg)
Recommended Reading
What makes a good pianist?
If I were to step into a time machine and spend an afternoon with my 10 year old self, this is the advice I would give him (and avoid much wasted time!). Fortunately (for me) I am not about to embark on a 1000-page doctoral thesis. Rather, outline some principles which should be taught and nurtured right from the start. Many friends at my current conservatoire, myself included, find themselves battling to acquire technical and musical habits. Even when those were mentioned in childhood and understood, they were not always adequately nurtured and made to seep into our deepest instincts.
On practice:
Practice is the repetition of a passage or even a little exercise with a view to improve it. Let's take for example a scale. One could mindlessly play it through a few times and it will have improved a little because the different motions involved have been consolidated in our subconscious. But these motions may not be entirely adequate and at best only provide an average-sounding scale no matter how comfortable we are at performing them.
I recently asked a mature student to play a scale and monitor (or pay attention to) its rhythmic evenness. Her scale was immediately better, but here is the point: I asked her to rate on a scale of 1-10 the intensity of her monitoring and to her astonishment she realised it had only been a '2'.
Here is my point: rather than practice a passage, why not practice our practice, i.e. aim at all times to improve our intensity of monitoring. We will find that everything else takes care of itself. The only skill is then to know what to monitor. For a scale, we could once monitor our amount of wrong (and split) notes, then once evenness of the rhythm, then the angle of approach to the key of our fingertips, the picking-up of fingers once they've played, the height of the wrist, the alignment of each finger (excluding the thumb and 5th) to the key, the evenness of tone, the evenness of legato, the quality of a musical rise and fall in tone, etc. Try it, it's magic.
For greater difficulties, simple monitoring is not enough. In those cases one must analyse the problem in order to identify all of its components and create specific exercises for each one. Of course, keep using your monitoring faculties when playing the exercises. For example, in a fast passage one could play the notes that fall on the beats while 'miming' the others, and while doing so choose to monitor the rhythm, however unnecessary that might seem. This is because playing anything with a dull mind will consolidate the unconscious habit of playing with a dull mind, whereas it is also true of the opposite. And remember not to simply play with a high monitoring intensity, but always aim to increase that intensity. Monitor your monitoring!
(More to follow on different pianistic topics...)
Gaspar Hunt LRSM
