Top Down and Inside Out

 

How we approach our practicing, our technique, and all aspects of learning and playing the piano, will make the difference between great results and mediocre or poor results. There are certain principles which need to be understood and put into practice. Two principles I stress in my teaching are Top Down and Inside Out.

Top Down:

I believe in starting with the whole and then moving down to the parts or smaller details later. For example, starting with an outline when starting a new piece gives you a sense of the whole piece. (See my post titled Outlining for a full explanation.) This process is a cornerstone of my own playing and my teaching. Unfortunately, most people would just start with the first note(s) they see on the page and proceed to the next and the next and so on. This would be like driving without any sense of the destination. If you are a great sight-reader you might manage it this way with some degree of ease, but if your sight-reading is not quite up to snuff, this will be a very long, laborious process, and you will tend to get lost in the weeds, so to speak. As you've heard me say before, virtually everyting we do, from building a house to writing an essay, requires starting with the main structure first and gradually filling in details (assuming you don't want the house to collapse or the essay to be incomprehensible). 

Another example of top down is the teaching and understanding of rhythm. If you read my posts on rhythm, you will see that I start with the larger unit (such as a measure), which will, of course, vary with the tempo of the piece, and then train the student to hear that unit of time, and then hear it divide in two, then in four, etc. (or in three). The important skill you get from this is learning to actually hear a unit of time, and then hear it divide into smaller units. If you can reliably hear any unit of time, you will not have difficulty with rhythm. Most methods start with, say, a quarter note, and then try to hear a unit which is twice as long (a half note), etc. External tools such as a metronome and/or "counting" are employed to help you with this, but unfortunately they often don't work. In addition, focusing on the smaller rhythmic units first (essentially going "bottom up") can tend you make your playing sound stiff, and what I call "note-wise." 

Inside Out:

This concept applies to many aspects, but most importantly, the physical ways in which we move around the keyboard. Almost everyone you talk to and anything you read will focus on the fingers, and on techniques for training and strengthening the fingers. It is important to realize, however, that the hands and fingers aren't going anywhere that the arm doesn't take them! We can play the piano, with its expanse of 88 keys, only because we have a ball-and-socket joint at the shoulder, which enables us to move our arms laterally, towards the fallboard and towards our body, in circular motions, etc. If you were playing a clavichord (pre-dating the harpsichord), you might get away with using mostly just your fingers. But that would be impossible on our modern pianos, with the range of techniques and the range of dynamics required by all piano literature since the 1700s.

Movement goes from center to periphery. This is a basic rule of physics. You may see the bicycle tire move in a circle and propel the bike forward, but the movement starts at the center, where the pedal is attached to the hub of the tire, which attaches to the spokes, and finally to the rim of the tire. I would challenge you to think of any exception to this rule. When sitting at the piano, the shoulder joint is our center, and the movement travels down the arm to the hand and fingers. (One could argue that the torso is actually the center; see my post titled The Torso.) You may not even realize this is happening, because the movements at the center are small. The hub of the bicycle wheel hardly seems to move, because the movement at the center is smaller than at the periphery. You might ask, if it's happening anyway, why should I care? Because if you understand the role that is played by each area of the pianist's anatomy, it stands to reason you can train it better, use it with more finesse or power or efficiency.

People who have seen or learned with my approach often comment that it is very "holistic," or even very "Zen." While that may be true, what I know for certain is that everything I do or teach is firmly based in that place where the human anatomy meets the laws of physics meets the physical properties of the piano itself. 

Recitals

 

If you took piano lessons as a child you may remember that your teacher required that you participate in periodic recitals. Presumably, the reason for these is that the child gets to demonstrate to family and friends how well they play and/or how much they have improved. Some children enjoy these and get satisfaction from working towards a goal. But many do not.

Most of the people I have spoken to over the years do not have fond memories of these recitals. For many children, it is just too much pressure to be up there, alone, on stage, with everyone focused on them (as opposed to sports, where one is part of a team). The fear of making mistakes, or worse, of just succumbing to nerves and falling apart, can be very hard on the child. 

Although most teachers want their students to do well at the recitals for the children's sake, some want them to do well to reflect positively on themselves. I was told by one student that his teacher had him work on one recital piece for months and months, so that it would be "perfect" at the recital. Not only does this kill the fun of lessons for the students, but it limits their progress significantly, to not have a broader range of music to experience and skills to learn over the course of the year. The teacher, in that case, clearly wanted her students to play "perfectly" so that it would reflect well on her. (The student quit lessons as soon as the recital was over.)

In addition to recitals, some students are asked to participate in "adjudications." For these, the student performs in front of a panel of judges, who then grade the student and give written feedback. Presumably this would be constructive criticism for the child. At best it would give the student some feedback from teachers other than his own, in order to get multiple perspectives. At worst, it applies too much pressure and the student feels "judged," which is exactly what it is.

In the "old days," only children were taking piano lessons. But more recently, adults have taken up lessons in greater numbers. I have adult students who told me that they were required to participate in recitals, where they were the only adult among children as young as six years old. It was humiliating for them. 

In the past, when I taught children, I did have annual recitals. But it was not mandatory. I tried to have it in a less intimidating environment. For example, they were on the same level as the audience, not on a stage.

Now that I am teaching adults only, I do things differently. We have semi-annual "soirees." We get together at my home, where they get to play on my 9-foot concert grand. Everyone plays two or three pieces, usually not very long ones, depending on the number of people we have participating. Even very new beginners can opt to play something. Or, they can choose to come and listen and meet the other students. Participants do not have to play by memory if they choose not to. I encourage them to play "works in progress," as opposed to fully polished performances. If the playing of a piece doesn't go as well as they hoped, they can opt to play it again. We do work dilligently at the lessons to get the pieces to feel quite solid, but we don't necessarily work on these pieces to the exclusion of everything else. Since they are going through the same thing as all the others, they are very supportive of each other, and there is no "judgement" for missed notes, memory lapses, etc. At the soiree, we have some appetizers and social time first, then the playing, then a potluck dinner afterwards. Spouses or partners are invited. My students tell me they really look forward to these. Over the years they have gotten to know each other and a few have become friends with the other students and their spouses. The idea is that they get some experience playing in front of others so they feel comfortable doing that. I also like the idea that they feel they are a community of learners and music-lovers.

If your child is really excited about the idea of performing, then by all means do recitals. Find other opportunities to play, such as at senior living facilities. Many places would be delighted to have a young person play for them. Coping with the pressures of performance is something that can be learned, and is learned more quickly the more you do it, so a once-a-year recital is not really enough. If the child doesn't want to perform, please don't make them do it. It will only turn them off to the idea of playing the instrument.

If you are an adult student and want some opportunities to get experience playing in front of others, talk to your teacher about the idea of a soiree, or look for other opportunities to perform in a more casual setting. Maybe you can organize your own Meetup group. Another option is to find ways of playing with singers or other instrumentalists. Where I live, there are Meetup groups for this as well. If you prefer to simply play for yourself in the comfort of your own home, that is fine. If you want to branch out and play with, and for, others, that could turn out to be a wonderful experience.

What is Talent?

 

Everyone talks about talent, but not everyone understands what it means. Of course talent is different depending on the field of endeavor. Talent for sports is quite different than talent in the visual arts, for example. I'm going to discuss musical talent, specifically, talent for playing a musical instrument such as the piano. Talent for composition or conducting would be somewhat different, and is beyond the scope of this post.

I believe their are three aspects of talent in music: ear, physical ability, and emotional depth.

Everyone would agree that having a great ear is necessary for great musicianship. In fact, the term "ear" is synonomous with musical talent. When we talk about ear, we are, of course, talking about the auditory cortex of the brain. If you have a good, or great ear, it means you are very sensitive to the subtleties of the relationships of tones and rhythm. How this happens in the brain ist still a mystery. It is not about the acoustics, or physical properties of sound, but about the "dynamic quality of tone," that is, the intangible (but very real) way that tones relate to each other. If this quality didn't exist, music would be just a string of unrelated tones and would have little or no meaning to us. (See my post The Cosmic Mystery of the Musical Scale for more about this.) As we know, just about everyone can hear music in their heads, and hearing the actual music being played aloud is not necessary to "hear" the music. Beethoven spent the latter years of his life completely deaf, but could hear everything internally, and composed many of his most complex works without the benefit of physically hearing it. 

Some people think having a great ear means having so-called perfect pitch (or absolute pitch). This is absolutely not the case. Being able to identify a single tone just hearing it without any reference point is a very nice ability to have, but it doesn't necessarily mean you hear relationships well. In fact, relying on one's perfect pitch could hamper one's ability to hear relationships between tones to the degree you want. That was true for me. I have perfect pitch since birth, and thought (and was told by teachers!) that my ear was great and there wasn't much more to do. I later learned, from my late great teacher Joseph Prostakoff, that I had a lot of work to do to strenghten my relative pitch. I still work on that, four decades later. (If you need clarification about this subject, see my post Perfect vs. Relative Pitch.)

The second aspect of talent is the physical coordination. Most people who do not play an instrument do not realize the athleticism that playing an instrument, especially the piano, requires. Although you don't need to run fast, jump high, hit a ball hard, and so on, there is still tremendous agility and coordination needed to play with speed, power, and accuracy. Just watch any video of a top pianist playing difficult pieces of Chopin, Brahms, Rachmaninoff and so on and there will be no doubt in your mind that great pianists are great athletes. In addition to that, there is the subtlety of control needed to play extremely soft, as well as a whole spectrum of other tonal qualities. 

The third aspect of talent is the emotional depth. It's the ability to feel the music deeply and connect with the listeners to convey that depth of emotion. There are many pianists who have the ear and the athleticism, but lack the expressiveness. Their playing may be dazzling technically, but it just doesn't move you. This aspect of talent is the most difficult to explain or quantify. Are we born with it? Do we develop it through life experience? It used to be the case that amazing young child prodigies who played with the equivalent technical prowess as adults would not be as expressive as adults with more experience. "They just don't have enough life experience yet," we used to say. Not so anymore. I recently heard the Junior Tchaikovsky Piano Competition finalists, all of them under age 17, and they all played with incredible musicality as well as technical perfection. How to explain it? I don't know. I think that the playing of the piano, time spent with so much beautiful and profound music, has given them the depth that comes with "life experience" in a shorter amount of time.

With my students, I don't talk about talent. Regardless of how much natural ability you were -- or weren't -- born with, you can still work to improve all three aspects of talent. Work on your ear every time you practice through playing by ear, transposing, and other techniques I have mentioned in previous posts. Singing improves your ear, provided you try to sing on key. Practice technique always, not by doing boring, mechanical exercises, but by choosing pieces that stretch you in terms of technique. (For technique, you really must have a good, or great, teacher.) And for the emotional/expressive aspect, always play with full emotional engagement. Don't be content to just "get the notes right." Feel the music in your soul. Why would you do it any other way?

No Judgement

 

I think we'd all agree that no one likes to feel judged. Feeling judged by family, friends, colleagues, or teachers is never pleasant, and in many cases will be harmful to one's self-esteem. Self-judgement is probably the most common kind of judgement many people experience.

A teacher is supposed to give you constructive feedback without being judgemental. If your piano teacher is making pronoucements such as "you're just not talented enough" or "you played that piece badly" or "you had too many mistakes," not only is it hurtful, but it certainly does nothing to help you solve the problems you are having.

I find that students have experienced this judgement so often from their previous teachers that they have come to expect it. Therefore, they can become very anxious at the lessons, wanting to please their teacher, play their very best and show them how well they have done and how much they have practiced during the week. Of course, if they don't play their best at the lesson then they feel they have let their teacher -- and themselves -- down. And they may be very judgemental towards themselves about this.

I try to make it clear to my students that I am never judging them. Whether you have a lot of "wrong notes" or even fall apart when playing, I am only interested in the causes of those problems and how we can address them. That is why they come to me for lessons. (Some teachers just seem to have little or no tolerance for "wrong notes" and even cringe when they hear them. I have a high tolerance for them because I know they are part of the learning process.)

Even though I've explained this to my students, and they understand it theoretically, it's habit -- and maybe human nature -- to still want to "perform" for me at the lesson and show me their best.  Maybe you think this is a good idea; why not try to do your best? One reason is that it usually doesn't work anyway. If you've done one way of practicing at home -- let's say looking at your hands when reading, as an example -- but then at the lesson you don't look at them to show me you're doing it the "right way," you'll have so much trouble you will play worse! It's just logical that if you do one thing at home for six days and then something different on the seventh day at your lesson, it will feel unfamiliar and cause you problems. The second reason is that at the lesson I want to see how things really are as far as your playing and your progress goes. Even if you think you are somehow hiding the mistakes you usually make, I can always tell what is really going on.

I hope my students can make the shift in their way of thinking to view the lesson as "supervised practice." The "practicing" they do at the lesson is the best quality practice, because they have me observing everything they are doing. I'm not only working on their technique, their expression, their understanding of the music, their ear development, but I'm working on their practice habits. Your practice habits are one of the biggest things -- maybe the biggest -- which will determine your rate of progress. They may also determine how much you enjoy your practicing, or not.

I urge you to read my earlier post titled Lessons vs. Practicing (October 2020) for a more in-depth discussion of why lessons should not be viewed as a performance, and how piano lessons need to follow an entirely different model than many of the classes or other instruction you've had in school.

If you can be relaxed at the lesson, with no fear of being judged, you will get better results. 

Talking to Yourself

 

When my students play at the lesson, I can't hear their inner thoughts, of course. But after decades of experience teaching and observing students, I have a pretty good idea of what's going on in their minds, at least in general terms. When a student is struggling to play fluently -- having a lot of stops and starts, hesitations, "correction" of wrong notes (which, as you've heard me say many times, doesn't actually correct them), and so on -- I suspect that they are doing a lot of talking to themselves. And when I ask them if that is what is happening, they almost always say yes. But sometimes they are barely aware they are doing it because it is such a strong habit.

In essence, they are trying to talk their way through the music, giving verbal instructions to themselves such as "now I need to move down a fourth, now I need to play this G chord in the left hand, now such and such happens...." This approach doesn't work at all. Even in simple music there is too much going on to be able to verbalize it all, but certainly in more complex music it would be impossible to narrate everything. It is also far too slow. But perhaps most important, if you have a lot of chatter going on in your mind, you can't actually be listening to your playing, and without that, you won't ever play your best. It seems to me it would also take most of the fun out of it.

Talking to yourself -- attempting to narrate what is happening -- is a way of trying to exert control. It is a response, in my opinion, to the "anxiety" of potential wrong notes. There is a fear of just letting go and letting the music flow. 

Students may think that they just need to do this in the beginning, but after a while they will stop. But as you can guess, it's more likely to become a habit that you can't just overcome by will power.

When you are a total beginner, there is a lot of information to absorb. There is some terminology to learn and concepts to understand. However, the best approach maximizes the actual playing, including training the ear and the phyical mechanisms (arms, hands, fingers). Concepts are important but should be kept to the areas that the student can use right at the present time, not just in the future. 

When learning to sight-read as a beginner, the approach should be learning to read by interval, not note-names (see my post on this subject) and the goal is to develop a direct connection between what the eyes see and what the hands feel. Too much "frontal lobe processing" (analysis) in the brain gets in the way of that direct connection. The sure way to wreck good sight-reading is to try to name every note you are playing. It's actually not possible but some students try to do just that.

When learning rhythm, the approach should be on learning to actually hear the relationships of the sounds in time (see my posts on this topic) rather than trying to just do "the math" with systems such as "counting."

Your goal while playing should be to have a quiet mind. Many disciplines such as meditation, yoga, tai chi and others, stress needing to quiet the mind of its constant chatter. I believe this is true for playing an instrument as well. The mind has a role to play, however. You might think of it as the pilot on a flight; the plane is flying on auto-pilot for the most part, but the human pilot is there to oversee everything and watch for any potential problems. In playing the piano, you may need to remember the way the first section of the piece ends versus the last section which is very similar. If you are an auto-pilot alone, you might accidentally go to the wrong one and end up in a loop. But a subtle mental note to yourself reminds you of which ending you are on, so there won't be a problem.

The chatter will inevitably pop back up. You may be thinking about the notes you need to play or you may find yourself thinking about what you'll have for dinner tonight. But each time you realize you are talking to yourself, try to just return to listening to the music. After all, if you were playing for others, you would hope that your audience would be listening, rather than talking to themselves. Try to make sure you are doing that yourself as well.

Understanding Repetition

 

Anyone you talk to about learning to play the piano -- or any instrument -- will tell you that it entails doing lots and lots of repetition. Thousands of hours. You hear this so often that most people just assume it's true. They don't tell you much about how to do the repetition, just that you must do it.

Before coming to me for lessons, one of my students would often repeat a certain measure or short passage in a piece of music fifty or more times in a row. He always thought that if he just did something enough times, one day it would just all fall into place and he would play it fluently. Sadly, this never happened for him.

What are we trying to achieve when we do something numerous times in succession? As you've read in my previous posts, learning to do any set of physical movements, whether at the piano or elsewhere, requires that neural pathways in your brain be established. This is true for learning to walk as a toddler, or playing a Chopin Etude. Every person is different in the speed at which they form these neural connections, and every person forms them differently for different activities. Someone may be very quick at forming the pathways for the piano but could be slow at forming them for golf or tennis, and, of course, vice versa.

There is no magic number of repetitions which will establish the brain connections you desire. Many people believe that if five repetitions is good then fifty must be better. Not true. The brain does not like to be bored. After a certain amount of repetition, boredom sets in and you lose focus. After that point, the repetitions are probably useless, and very likely detrimental. If you have lost focus, then your playing of that passage will be mechanical and not musical, so you are reinforcing something you don't actually want in your playing. Many students of the piano are 100% concerned with only the notes themselves and nothing else. Any student with this attitude will never play beautifully, and never up to their full potential. You wouldn't dream of learning to do public speaking by practicing just saying the words of your speech over and over, mechanically, without any inflection or nuance, and then think you will later give the speech with those nuances. That is what you are doing when you just practice "the notes."

My recommendations are as follows:

Don't do repetitions unless you have to. If you read my post about "spot work" versus playing through, you'll see I encourage playing through as much as possible; this means the whole piece, if you can, but if not, then at least meaningful sections of the piece. This, however, doesn't mean all the details, which is why I teach and emphasize the importance of outlining, that is, playing a sketch of the piece, adding details little by little. If you do this, the goal is that most of the piece may never need "spot work."

If you are consistently having trouble with a given spot, you will need to isolate it and work on it separately. First however, you need to analyze why are you having trouble. This is where a good teacher is critically important. If you don't really know the technical (or auditory) reason for your stumbling in that spot, doing a lot of repetition may not solve it. If you have been consistently playing "wrong notes," you now have some neural pathways for that, and they need to be discarded and replaced by the desired neural pathways. I recommend doing three to four repetitions. Two is definitely too few; five begins to verge on boredom. Then, when you play the piece through, see if it is better. If not, do the same process the next time you practice. Doing repetition spread out over several practice sessions and/or several days is better than trying to ram it through all at once. It is my experience that when you tell your brain that this is the action you want it to do and you are telling it that day after day, it realizes it must keep this neural pathway and not discard it. This is why when you cram for a test you may know the information the next day, but a week later and it is gone. The brain seems to know it doesn't need it anymore. On the other hand, when you study the material slow and steady over a period of time, the brain is far more likely to retain it.

Use other methods of practice besides repetition which also strengthen the neural pathways. Making the brain work harder through practices such as transposition, playing eyes closed, playing hands crossed, and other methods I have written about, are often more effective than pure repetition, and may take less time as well. Repetition is the "brute force" method of learning, but other, more subtle methods, make your practice time more effective and probably more enjoyable.

Walking Backwards

 

I've just read an article about walking backwards. Specifically, it has benefits for the muscles (such as the hamstrings) due to the difference of how you place your foot down (toes first versus heel first in normal walking). But what's more interesting -- to me, at least -- is the benefits it has for the brain. (You can find the article on bbc.com's Just One Thing.) The article says the Chinese have a saying that 100 steps backwards are worth 1000 steps forward. 

What does this have to do with playing the piano?

Apparently there isn't much research on the brain benefits of backwards walking yet, but it may boost memory. This comes as no surprise to me. Anytime we do things in a way which is different from our habitual ways, the brain must forge new neural pathways, and that's always a good thing. More pathways = more brain power. I view it as  similar to many of the techniques I use myself and recommend to my students, such as playing hands crossed, playing with eyes closed, and transposing. These are all challenging and require the brain to work hard. That's why I call them "desirable difficulties."

Many people mistakenly believe that practice time should be spent playing through pieces, perhaps some extra work on certain difficult spots by employing lots of repetition, and maybe some technical exercises, also with lots of repetition. Or maybe it's not so much that they believe it, it's just that no one has helped them to see other possibilities. Although you will possibly see improvement in your playing from this approach, it is also likely that at some point you will reach an impasse, a plateau in your progress, and it may seem like you're stuck and and go no further in developing the mastery of the music. This is almost certainly because the brain is in a rut; it just goes down the same pathways over and over. In addition to this type of practice being less beneficial, it can also be boring and make the practice time feel like a chore.

When I observe a student struggling with a specific passage in the music, I have many tools in my toolbox to try (a few of them are mentioned above.) Sometimes I just try something really out of left field, something that just pops into my mind at the moment. (You can imagine the looks I get from my students.) The goal is to experience the passage in a new way, mostly physically, but that also means the brain is working differently. It's amazing how often it helps.

I've done my backwards walking today, and plan to continue. My recommendation: do it indoors to start with!