July 2011

July 2011

Saturday 30 July 2011

Annual Showcase


Whangarei piano-students have been working hard this year and give a show case of their progress in Captaine Bourgainville Theatre on Saturday 27 August 2011 at 16:00.



It is going to be an exciting show, because special guests Elmo and Pops (two puppets) have come over from abroad for the Rugby World Cup and were so excited about the show last year that they happily agreed to give their encouraging and humorous comments on the performance and will give a special prize of $100 to the audience’s favourite performance. Apparently Elmo has written a special composition for the occasion! Well, we’ll see (or hear)!

Besides that we have two pianos lined up: the theatre’s Steinway and Boston grand pianos and there will be some works for two pianos also as well as some movements of piano concertos by Mozart and Bach.


But also fans of popular piano will enjoy themselves as there will be some improvisation on the two pianos and the programme is an exciting mix of good modern and classical piano music. In the interval there will be good food and drinks available and children are welcome. Guests may very well make a family event of it. Master of ceremony will be Tony Underwood and there is also an award for the Piano Student of the year 2011.


The ticket prize is a friendly $5 to be bought at the door or in advance from Art Zegelaar School of Piano 09 430 8533

Monday 25 July 2011

How to overcome difficult sections

How to overcome difficult sections




Many a music student just practise a difficult section over and over again and just hope that at some stage the muscular memory will be trained enough to go through the section without too much of an accident. 


Practising both hands separately may be helpful, but many people find it very difficult to co-ordinate both hands afterwards. 

For some people it is actually difficult to not play all the notes and they would rather sacrifice every other aspect of a section of music, like rhythm, basic pulse, mood and phrase structure than not trying to have all the notes. 

In serious music theory there is a man named Schenker who developed a form of analyzing a piece of music which went from very basic to more complex every step pulling in more details of the actual score. 

You can compare it with building a house. Do the builders try to wall paper the walls immediately whilst building them and perhaps even fitting in the nails for things to hang up on the wall? No, of course they will not. 



Schenker analysis may go something like this:

C  (6 bars)    G (10 bars) :[]: G (8 bars) C (8  bars) :[

This is useful information for the aspiring piano performer. It is good to be aware of what is the key of a certain section  you are working on. 


Once you have familiarized yourselves with the phrase structure of the right hand, perhaps leaving out ornaments you can gradually 'pull in' the left hand, first playing the bass notes on the first beat of the bar and gradually filling in more until you can play both hands, without impeding on other important musical aspects. At every stage you are practising the essence of the music.






Sunday 17 July 2011

How to prepare for an exam

How to prepare for an exam...


You have put a lot of work into preparing for your (perhaps first) music exam or performance. We have some tips for you to make this event as less stressful as possible:

1. First of all, you go into this exam voluntarily remember? No one forces you to undertake it and hence there is no reason to worry about it too much. You have prepared well - otherwise we wouldn't let you go - and there is sufficient reason for you to expect to do well.



The examination though is only the opinion of one person on one particular day. You may be disappointed or happy about the result, it doesn't take away or add to the skills you have acquired over the past period. You will never disappoint you teacher, because he knows what you can or can't do.

2. Once you have decided to undertake an exam, we will prepare you to be ready about a couple of weeks before the exam takes place. There will be an opportunity for you to play your exam in front of other students who will also undertake an exam and will play their pieces for you.

3. When you go into the exam and play piano, you have a slight disadvantage compared with students who bring their own instruments. You don't know what kind of instrument you will be playing on. Therefore it is best to start your exam with your scales. This enables you to get to know the instrument before you start playing your pieces. 

4. If the idea of an examiner being in the room with you disturbs you then, while you are playing project the music into the most far away corner on the other side of where the examiner sits. 

5. The examiner is a (w0)man just like you and me and knows how you feel.

6. Before you start playing your pieces breath out first. When you are nervous, you take too much air. So, breath out first. It is also good practise to walk about a bit before you enter the room. 

7. Count at least two bars before you start playing and while you are playing breath through the mouth. Practise to breath at the same basic rhythm as the piece you are playing.

8. Contrary to what you think errors are usually no problem. The examiner wants to know the things you can do and judges your overall performance. 

9. Once you have done your exam, a period of a couple of weeks of waiting starts. This robs some people of their sleep. Especially those who actually prepared very well, because they are more critical about their performance. For obvious reasons you almost never play as well in the exam as you did at home, although some people excel under stress. I have had students who were convinced they failed and in the end received a merit!

10. Stay open minded regarding your actual results. They can be less or more than you expect. Remember, they only represent the opinion of one person at one particular day.

Wednesday 13 July 2011

My teacher must be very good...


My teacher must be very good..


In his book about teaching guitar 'not pulling strings' Joseph O'Connor makes an interesting observation:

'The less you play for your students, the better they think you are'.



So, some students observe: 'My teacher NEVER plays for me. 

She must be very good.' 



I say she, because male piano teachers are in a frightful minority.

Moreover I play for my students all the time, which means there are no secrets there for sure. When after the lesson they ask me to play something, I never refuse.

Another little student, Peter, after one year's piano lessons asked with some worry: 'When will I be able to play the piano?'

That is indeed an interesting observation. He obviously had expected after some time to be able to play the piano and not having to practise anymore. Also he probably would have expected that it would gradually become easier instead of harder.






That is an obstacle the teacher has to avoid. Which means, that the student must gradually become convinced that his skills are indeed increasing and many things he can now do easily.


The student will want to learn 'to play' the piano and 'playing' must therefore be an import factor of the piano lesson.

Monday 11 July 2011

Music is organising time

Music is organising Time

Music is organisation of sound in time and from that perspective our practise should be organising time also, since all practising is or should be really preparing for performance.

Even if you are on your own, you have to  be performing with yourselves as listener. If you do that  you can enjoy every minute of it, if - of course - you do more than practising the right notes. 

Once you transcend the individual notes to catch the rhythm, the mood and the feel of a piece of music you are well on your way. For so many students practising a piece of music means playing it from the beginning until the end over and over again until the muscular memory of the fingers is trained enough so they will find their way through the piece. 

And then suddenly when the situation changes, a different piano than at home or a lesson situation with a teacher or a small performance situation, suddenly the piece falls flat, because the subconscious memory has given way to uncertainty. 

Your practise should therefor always be practising music. As soon as you have grasped the 'right' notes of the first two bars for instance, you should try to understand the meaning of the first phrase and practise carefully the first two bars. You have to create in your body the elements required to co-ordinate the movements of both hands and catch the mood of the phrase. That is fun, as soon as realise you are actually playing the first phrase. It makes all the difference like between letters and words or sentences!


More over once you have grasped the phrase structure of a piece of music you will realise it is not that long after all. In the beginning many attractive pieces of music go from 16 to 32 bars at the most, so there is nothing against it to master the first 4-8 bars only of a piece of music in the first week. 

The guitarist John Williams said once that typically he would never practise more than one hour a day. But he was very grateful for his father to have taught him to practise very slowly and intelligently, so he would never practise mistakes. 

And once you have mastered to play 4 phrases of a piece, knowing and understanding every aspect of them, it is not so hard to play these phrases in a new performance situation with confidence, for instance your next music lesson... 
 

Saturday 9 July 2011

Reverse Engineering


Reverse Engineering

Tom always got stuck at the same place and no matter how much he practised, he always made a mistake there and stopped. He had done that long enough and was in fact practising a mistake. 

I advised him that in some cases it may be practical to change the strategy and try to practise in a different way. By always starting at the beginning of a section and stopping at a certain place it was not possible to practise the end part very well. Tom never got there. 

Sacrificing fluency and rhythm in order to have all the notes right is a behaviour students should really try to avoid. For that reason I asked him to work back to front. Start with the last bar of the difficult section.

A good example is Christopher Norton's 'Tram Stop' from Micro jazz Collection nr. 1.  The first four bars are Ok, but then students have a real problem with the following three bars:



Start repeating the last bar until the reposition and drop of your left hand is fluent and easy.
         


Then you go 1 bar backwards and start with the left hand there. It is important not the stop at the bar-line. A bar-line has no musical merit whatsoever. Music always wants to move over the barline towards the first beat of the next bar!


Then you add the right hand of that bar.

 
Then you start one bar backwards again. And within a short time span Tom was able to play the whole section fluently. 







Wednesday 6 July 2011

Teaching 'How to' not 'What to'


Teaching 'How-to' not 'What-to'


Playing the piano involves a great deal of being able to play without any music at hand. Which is in fact improvising. For this reason from the first lesson there is always some time reserved for playing without music. Which is in fact putting the scales and chord to practice.

'Practice' NOT 'Practise! 

Playing a four bar phrase in one of the keys which the student has mastered is something each of my piano students can do easily. The small beginners of 7 years old can do it after their third lesson or so on any white key using five notes.

So often we are so overwhelmed by the details of a new piece of music, that we forget about the music behind it. We forget rhythm, the prase structure and the mood and character of the music, all in order to have all the notes right. 

Sometimes you hear students argue: 

"Yes, but I'll put that all in later". How wrong and in-efficient. At every stage we have to realise we are practising music. We are performing, even if only we ourselves are the listener. I only we were listening.

I still remember when I was a student and went to a piano lesson my teacher used to scratch all sorts of remarks over the music and it annoyed me beyond end, because I had arrived at the level, where after a year or so I would come back to the piece I had worked on and had difficulty seeing the threes through the wood. Soon I developed a habit of borrowing my music teacher's book for the pieces I was working on. She would then write all over her own pages and when finished I still had my own clean copy!

Some people find the written marks very important and I was once sitting in a music centre after working on a Scriabin Sonata. A highly respect musician came in and wanted to know what I was working on and I give him my book. 

He looked at the pages of a Dover Edition, which I like because they do not offer fingering, and arrived at the conclusion that I obviously was not studying seriously, because I had written nothing over the pages.

Hence with me as a teacher my students keep their pages clean, because only very rarely will I write over their pages. It should go in their heads and not in their books. And with most of my students that seems to work out Ok.

Tuesday 5 July 2011

Olympics

Olympics

Hamish likes to play fast. Very fast. I am not sure what the fuss is about, but Hamish likes it fast.

I had given him an arrangement of 'the Entertainer' to play and the faster he could do it the more entertainment it was for him. 

And my refusal to follow in his footsteps gave him even more satisfaction, because he was convinced that I didn't play it that fast, because I couldn't do it as fast as he could. And so I heard him say to his Dad after I closed the door on him: 'He can't play fast!'


So of course, the week after I had no choice but to play it twice as fast as he did. May Scott Joplin forgive me. 








What then is the art of playing fast?

In fact I believe there is no fast music! 

That may solve the problem all right then you may think. But no, there is a philosophy of 'playing fast': All music is performed at heart beat speed I believe, unless the music is meant to rouse the emotion. But in fast music much more is happening during the same basic pulse.


You can apply the same thoughts to learning your scales. It is not the issue of playing the same scale the same way but faster.


When a horse goes slowly it walks. When it goes faster the horse trots and then it gallops. Why would it do that? It does that to regulate its energy better. 

When you want to go faster you maintain the heart-beat pulse, but you play two notes in one beat: Tadi-tadi-tadi-tadi-etc. If you want to go faster again you still maintain the heart-beat pulse, but you play four notes in one beat: Tadititi-Tadititi-Tadititi-Tadititi-etc.


You can continue this process: 8 notes in one beat or 16 notes. That's advanced stuff but once the student gets the hang of it many will try that and they will manage.


Monday 4 July 2011

Yes, big boys can do this too..

Yes, Big Boys can do this too!

I get students in all shapes, age, gender and it is surprising to know how many people like to learn to play the piano in their twenties or thirties with the idea that they missed out on something when they were young.

And indeed it is true. There goes a lot of time into learning to play the piano, but it is an investment well worth making. You can lose friends, family, business and money in your life but you can never lose the music you once learned. It is an asset which will stay with you all your life.

Hence it is a good investment to make while you are still young, but there is no barrier to still do that while you are older. I know of a lady who started to learn the piano when she had become sixty and by the time she was sixty seven she had acquired her qualifications to teach the piano.

And so it was with Chris. He had a nice job working at a computer firm, but had repeatedly told his girlfriend about his love for music. And for this reason his girlfriend called me up with the question if I could give a 'voucher' for piano lessons. 


She would give it to him for his birthday. And so she did. And Chris went on a learning curve, which went quite fast and worked out well.

All Chris needed was a regular slot in his day of about half an hour a day for the necessary practise.

His sense of rhythm was already developed well, which gives the advantage of paying attention to the technical side of things. That can be quite cumbersome and if you want to learn fast, this does not mean you can take short cuts, because there aren't any.

But a teacher's job is to remove obstacles, which make the learning curve harder and longer as is necessary.

Sunday 3 July 2011

Talent is no substitute



Talent is no substitute 


When people encounter a young boy or girl playing very well, they immediately assume that – since music is a gift – obviously the person is very talented.

The secret though of getting ahead is getting started and in reality talent develops along the way.


A better defining factor is the intelligence and the regularity behind the practise and I have always wondered why my most hard working students are also the most talented ...

Saturday 2 July 2011

Ah! Not that big after all!

Little Grace (2)



Someone once said that he knew that Liam Gallagher would become a good guitar player, because he behaved like one right away from the start. 

There is nothing wrong with the idea 'Oh, I am going to be awfully good at this!'

And there was Grace now, sitting behind the large black grand piano. This being very much an 'adult' instrument, nevertheless she could with her right hand reach the lowest key on the piano and with her left hand the highest one. 

'Ah! Not that big after all!'

I ask Grace to keep her right arm in the air in a straight line with the floor. Her hand should be in a straight line with her upper arm and she should not do anything at all with her fingers. They are then slightly curved.

I ask Grace, whether this feels good, which it does.

'Can you now stretch your fingers and check how much effort it costs to keep them like that?' Admittedly, that costs quite some effort!

'Can you now bend your fingers a little bit as if you hold something in your hand?'

Admittedly, that doesn't feel quite so good either. A common misperception amongst piano teachers! They ask the child to keep the fingers 'as if they are holding an apple' and the fingers then play the keys as if they were little hammers. That is surely the way to go, if you want to wreck the child's piano playing right away from the start.

We will later see how this misperception came to exist amongst piano teachers. 





The hands then are put on the piano just the way they are, when the fingers are not used at all and the wrist can best be flexible. Piano books starting on the black keys are indeed very practical, because the fingers not used can easily 'fall back' to the white keys and the hand shape is natural. 

The wrist can drop slightly with every keystroke. Because a child's fingers are really still very weak and specific finger exercises should not be attempted before reaching grade 4.

This helps developing a sense of rhythm when playing the first tunes and that is the most important thing to develop in the beginning. Later we will see how the child will learn how to feel rhythms and phrases, so essential in learning to play the piano with pleasure. And playing with a sense of rhythm surely is also a pleasure for those listening to it.

Little Grace


Little Grace

Grace's Mum had already called me one and a half years ago. Grace was just five and her mother asked me whether she could start piano lessons.

"Well, that depends. Is there someone already playing in the family?" "No".

"Can she already understand ABC, can she read a little bit?"

"Oh yes, she is quite clever and I am reading every day with her".

Nevertheless it was decided to wait a little bit until she approached 7 years. You see, a piano is very much an instrument built for an adult human being. There are no ¼ size pianos to start learning like a violin and the hand should be developed accordingly.

It is all right usually when someone already plays in the family and the child really can't be stopped and then only in small time units, because of the small attention span.

Hence children of five years old having mastered Bach's Chiacone are really very rare. But now it was time for Myra and she had insisted on her first lesson. Ok!

What's got a Mum to do, to ensure that the weekly lesson fee is not wasted?
There are a few tips here:
  • It is all right for Mum to sit in, provided she does not try to explain what the teacher is saying.
  • Having a one to one lesson is for a child really an experience in communication and the child should develop the skill to say anything and ask the teacher herself: “Oh, i did not get that”.
  • You can’t expect from a child from the very beginning the discipline to play every day a little bit. It needs a some help to do this.
  • When the child does his/her practise It needs to become aware that indeed he/she can do this very well.
  • Tell you child after the practise that you could hear it from the kitchen and it sounded SO good. Until it becomes part of the identity of the child. ‘I play the piano!”.

Friday 1 July 2011

Awesome Piano Practise


Love of Music

You will lose friends in your life, you can lose money in your life, but music is something which stays with you whenever you have acquired a musical skill.  That is why so many people still start to learn to play the piano even when they are older. I am always amazed how much time children can devote to learning a musical skill and it is definitely worth the effort. 

Music appeals to the whole human person and has the ability to create a sense of unity in the two aspects of the brain and hence a sense of wholeness. For this reason the Greek thought of Music as the main art form, the most important of the muses, from which the word music comes from. 

There is only good and bad music and from there it is good to observe that people are getting more open for any musical style and the idea of all the good music which we have acquired over the ages. 

We have a whole support environment for people devoting themselves to sports, but very often musicians have to fend for themselves. Many of my young, especially male students, will keep it very quiet at school that they like to play the piano. Luckily that is changing, since there is so much merit in mastering an instrument well and getting familiar with all that great music ‘out there’.  Music is a Universal language and can be understood by all.