How to Choose the Best Possible Piano Edition

How to Choose the Best Possible Piano Edition

by | Apr 5, 2017 | 0 comments

Choosing the best edition of piano music has been a chore for a lot of us pianists since piano music entered the realm of serious music; that means, well… perhaps from the beginning of keyboard history.  Because of editions, pianists had always had to put up with stiff-lipped opinions and judgmental experts, together with the ironic smirks of their beloved colleagues.

 

[with funny voice] “Is this the right edition for my music?” “Is the other one better?” “Will the panel of that piano competition approve of my playing?” “Will my auntie consent to my playing Chopin’s second ballad from this edition?” All those questions popped up at one time or another in our pianistic lives.

 

Edition Anxiety

 

The reason why there is always a constant twaddle, moaning and superiority complex syndrome about editions and which is the most acceptable, is because pianists associate editions with their own musical standing. They think that a wrong edition could undermine their ability to perform and that a questionable edition would belittle them in the eyes of their colleagues in this judgmental world of classical music. Apparently, a correct edition would give the pianist, and generally the musician, the keys to musical legitimacy and a “license” to perform. It sounds a bit farfetched, but not too far from reality.

 

If only pianists could think that piano is just a piece of wood, with strings and keys that you press to make sounds…

 

Who has the right edition?  Nobody ever knew. Nobody will ever know. Do you know? Do you have the ultimate answer to state with authority that yours is the best edition, and no other can compete with it? As soon as the notes escape from the composer’s mind, there’s no return. They enter the realm of interpretation; an abyss of innumerable opinions and considerations. Even the original manuscript, is, in fact, an edition to the composer’s mind; an edition that in no way can replicate the actual mind.

 

 

There’s No Best Edition

 

There are a few things we are left with in order to make a plausible choice of which edition could be best for our own musical circumstances. Here, we should appreciate that there’s always no “best edition”; there’s only… “better edition”. This is because an edition is really a fictional representation of the original artefact. Even a facsimile edition is still a vaguest representation of the original work, since, arguably, you can still lose a lot of nuances (e.g. a composer’s handwriting stresses and other graphological observations that could signal underlying musical intentions). One could go as far as arguing that even the original manuscript is a “dreamy” statement of the composer’s mind.

 

So, when it comes to editions, we have a few of the following choices:

 

  • Use straight “out-of-the-box” an edition that was suggested to us by someone else. (The suggester could be a teacher, a friend of ours, a scholar of the composer, or generally, anybody else).
  • Get an edition from the store without really caring about its provenance and quality. Then edit this edition to fit our own performance views, or let our instructor do the editing for us and give us the end result to play.
  • Acquire all editions of that work available in the world today, compare them (hopefully by researching) and then choose our favorite.
  • Call every editor and ask them to explain their editorial suggestions, and then make a more informed decision regarding which edition to choose.
  • Find the autograph music written originally by the composer, conduct our own research, and do our own editing – tough, for the laziest of us.
  • And of course there are more drastic ways, such as finding the original manuscript of the composition, then, if the composer is not alive remove the composer from the grave and ask them to describe in writing how to perform their piece. Then, of course, make them sign their written description as a worldwide binding contract.

 

Can you see? The choice and the… madness are endless.

 

Simplicity is the Elixir of Music

 

Just pick an edition and start playing; yes, you’ve read it right. Any edition would do. Is this an oversimplification? Yes, it is. Why? Because, generally editors are mere… editors, and, of course, are human.  Often, they are well read and scholarly efficient people; well, perhaps more so than most of us, who haven’t published any editions in print. Do you have? And yes, every editor is different and every editor can be wrong or right. Every editor has their own advantages and disadvantages. There’s no perfection and there is no perfect editor. Typographical errors together with personal or universal musical preferences cannot count as legitimate reasons for dismissing an edition or an editor for that matter.

 

The Best Edition is “Change”

 

It would be such an unfair situation for the composer and for music in general to reach editorial ultimatums and absolute certainties. Uncertainty is what drives music forward and glorifies its ever-changing medium.

 

Static is Not Healthy

 

Change in the musical zeitgeist should be welcomed, and change cannot happen if we live in a constant musical comfort zone. The music language is ever-evolving, and as with our spoken and written language, it evolves with assistance from our own wrongdoings. Editorial mistakes and controversial musical views are what ultimately shape music and, subsequently, our understanding of it.

 

So, just play; just put your fingers on the keys and paddle your own canoe like there is no tomorrow. No time to think and judge that horrifying edition. Do play and stop thinking, because music thrives in the air and not on the paper; it is this air that will eventually drive, like the most accomplished pilot, the pen on the page.

 

And one day, you might realise that your slower take on the La Campanella is actually not too far out from the zeitgeist.

 

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Copyright © by Nikos Kokkinis

 

Would you like to read more about piano editions? Here’s a related article on “what is the best piano edition”

 

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What is the Best Piano Edition

What is the Best Piano Edition

by | Mar 14, 2017 | 0 comments

In this article, we shall discuss – albeit in no depth whatsoever and try to give an answer to what is the best edition of any given piano work.

Before I start, please, do let me ask you the following questions: Can it ever be an ultimate edition for a pianist to follow? Can it ever be an edition that will make every other edition obsolete? Is there any such edition available to us today? I suspect, that to all those three questions your answer would, hopefully, be a resounding “No”.

At this point let’s quickly define what an “edition”, per se, of a piano work, is; this applies to all other instruments: An “edition” is a notated view of how a work should be interpreted. In our case, what takes place is, that the piano editor, by hopefully following research, presents us with her/his own notated views of a piano work.

It’s vital to understand that there are many reasons for why we need editions for works of music. Some of them are:

  • To correct mistakes that composers themselves explicitly admitted to have done in a composition.
  • To correct mistakes, the editor thought the composer might negligently have done.
  • For a composer to improve upon a composition by correcting passages or even adding more music.
  • To scholarly give a personal opinion of how a piece was intended to be interpreted by the composer.
  • To preserve a piece’s accurate future interpretation, after consultation with the composer.
  • To improve the readability of a piece.
  • To give our own, personal interpretational view on a work of music.

 

Can it Ever be an Ultimate Edition?

To cut to the chase, I’m afraid that NO edition is or will ever be good enough. No edition of music will ever get close enough to a composer’s music intentions. No edition will ever mirror the composer’s mind.

Here are two reasons for why this happens:

a) A composer, axiomatically, can never express themselves precisely when notating their music. This is the first point. Here’s why: say, we have a piano piece. A composer can never (or is enormously hard)  do the following: notate how hard each key should be pressed by each finger on each hand; this is also almost impossible to achieve, because there are millions of pianos in this world so a composer has to accommodate his notation for all those instruments: impossible. Moreover, the composer if they want to be as accurate as possible, they will have to precisely notate the exact progression of the dynamics; for example, how should you crescendo from a Piano to Forte in a phrase? Should it be done robotically, increasing decibel by decibel? Should it crescendo with a more “curved” progression? What kind of curve should this progression have? If you go down that road, even more questions arise: For instance, how long a composer’s staccato should last in time on a Steinway Grand D or a Yamaha U1 A? As you can see, no composer can ever notate as precisely, and perhaps no composer wants to do just that.

The only way a composition could potentially and credibly be precisely notated (if ever), is when a composer pre-selects a particular instrument (model, etc.) to perform his composition, write her/his composition to only be performed by that particular instrument, making sure that this instrument doesn’t physically depreciate of course, then choose a specific time and date for the composition to be performed, be in constant consultation with a sole performer of that composition, and by fulfilling other extremely intricate requests.

b) The second reason for why no edition will ever be sufficient enough is because a composer understands the element of the existence of an interpreter. An interpreter of a work of music could essentially be a music editor, a music critic, a listener or a performer of course. The composer, in a way, has to accept that his music will always be vaguely interpreted by his interpreters. In music, every composition will always have an interpreter, and that is the definitive meaning of the word interpreter: You essentially interpret something the way you, personally, see it.

So, what a composer fundamentally does when notating her/his music, is to give a broad map of his composition – a composition that derived from his brain (which is impossible to pick) – to a performer, and leave the performer to make do with whatever musical tools they have accumulated through time, and hope that the performer will come as close as possible to his indented idea; hard.

 

Don’t Throw Away Your Edition, Just Yet

Indeed, please do not throw away your, allegedly, obsolete edition just yet. There are a few reasons for why you should never do that – Here is a couple of them:

1. An obsolete edition can show us the provenance of how things were done in the past. Even if we think that an edition is valid no more, at the same time, we could seize the opportunity to taste the way earlier editors used to approach editing a piece, the tools they used and even the choice of symbols they preferred.  Indeed, we could keep an old edition as an objet d’art that could be of historical value in the future, for many reasons.

2. An objectionable edition can make us better editors: Well, if we are being given everything on a plate, we will never improve our skills in this never-ending world of music; so grab the opportunity and correct a faulty edition, if you can. Do use, perhaps, your preferred fingerings, or call your old teacher and ask them if indeed this composer meant to write that extra note at the end of that piece.

 

What is the Best Edition?

The best edition is the edition you currently possess. And you have to make the best of it.

I know what you are thinking: “But my edition has a zillion wrong fingerings”, or “Wait to see how out-of-style this trill is written in my edition”, “Oh, but the editor forgot that those instruments didn’t do those things back then” and other, well, silly remarks, if I may say.

Well, that’s life I’m afraid we have to accept this fact about editions; let me be unkind and ask you, why didn’t you write a better edition to be on the shelves of Chappel’s of Bond Street or The Juilliard Store in New York. If you think that the editors of those unacceptable editions were amateurs and goofs, why is that your edition is not celebrated in last month’s cover of Pianist Magazine? Indeed, why are you reading this article right now? Guess why; because you don’t have a clue which is the best edition. (I don’t think I’m getting too many likes on my Facebook page, after this article).

I’m sick and tired of that constant fault-finding and moaning that “there are always better editions”, and “I wish this edition did this, and I wish that edition did the other thing” and “yes, I suppose this is an ok edition, but the other one is better”, and all this nonsense. Get a grip – editions are there to help and suggest. Editions are not written in stone. If you don’t want to play them, fine. Just Buy the Urtexter Intergalactic Of The Ultimate Order Edition, or something. Terribly sorry to be so harsh.

Instead of this constant drivel about intolerable editions, I suggest that we first learn how to actually interpret those “wrong” editorial suggestions. An edition, be it wrong or correct, cannot salvage our incapability of performing something correctly. A bad or a good edition is not going to improve our technique or musicality (that shows through technique); well, not necessarily. I’m not saying that you should follow the edition that says that it’s better to play Chopin’s first study 0p.10 with your nose, but what I’m trying to say is that a bad edition, can at least teach us how to follow orders. Always, be gracious and give credit to an editor; you can always learn something from any edition.

I just want to finish this, by asking you if I may, to try to relate to the following scenario.

Imagine that somehow you find yourself stranded on a remote island. You are stuck with a horrible edition of your favourite composer and you are just so eager to play their music. What, would you do? Would you just put the music down and refuse to play? Would you just say “no, I’m not playing this edition?” Or, would you try to improve upon this edition, by using your own musical capacities? – Capacities, that can never be completely perfected – What would you do? What is the right thing to do? Keep in mind, that you can never get the perfect edition.

In life, we are the ultimate editors of what comes to us.

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Copyright © by Nikos Kokkinis

Would you like to read more on piano editions? Click to read “How to choose the best piano edition” on this website.

Pianist’s Block: How to Overcome It and Keep Practicing More Constructively

Pianist’s Block: How to Overcome It and Keep Practicing More Constructively

by | Nov 16, 2016 | 0 comments

Pianist’s Block

As in writer’s block¹, piano playing, by being a creative activity and hopefully not a monotonous typewriter-type routine, often encompasses its own share of stalling. So, the “Pianist’s Block” per se, is when you have run out of ideas of improving a piece of music, but also, when you’ve lost the motivation to practice. It’s arguably one of the most dreaded situations a pianist could face. In this article, we are going to learn how to overcome the pianist’s block, regain motivation and get back to practicing, with flair.

Loss of Motivation to Practise

It is an extremely common human disposition to have difficulty in performing a task that requires repetition. In our case, this “repetitive” or perhaps monotonous task, is the act of practicing. And, as you know, practicing is hard as it is, let alone practicing efficiently. Students are the usual suspects here, and their difficulty to get down and practice and generally doing non pleasant activities has always been there from the beginning of time; this was always normal though. There are many reasons for students’ difficulty to practice; here are some of them:
  • Too much homework at home, so not enough time to squeeze practicing in.
  • Too tired after an academically exhausting day.
  • Too many after-school activities that drained their energy by the time they have finally reached the piano.
  • Too bored to practice – do not feel guilty about this, it’s expected.
  • Prefer watching their favorite TV series or playing their beloved video games – also understandable.
We need to appreciate, that all reasons above, are perfectly legitimate, reasonable, and of course, absolutely typical for us, mere human beings. We are not robots, let me remind you, be programmed to do things faultlessly. To make their children listen and do the right thing, parents for instance, had always had to resort to some grown-up ways; for example, they would use mild warnings. They would often say, “If you don’t practice the scales as your teacher told you, you are not having pizza for supper tonight”, or,” If you don’t learn Für Elise by Christmas, you are not getting the latest iPhone”. Those ways were always perfectly normal, because, children inherently needed to ultimately learn the value of things and the value of doing things timely and correctly. Make no mistake, if parents keep succumbing to their offsprings’ tantrums and their, predictable, constant desire for pleasurable pastimes, their children are going to eventually hold them accountable for their future failures. And ultimately, the children are going ask their parents why they haven’t pushed them enough to accomplish more things in life. As a general advice, we need to encourage and be sympathetic with people who find regular practicing hard. We should listen to them, understand their way of thinking and try not to make them feel guilty. Our goal, if at all possible, should be to help them recover from a possible pianist’s block and help them carry on practicing and improving their pieces, efficiently. To finish this section, I would say that loss of motivation in things we do in life was always very common. There were always many reasons for it and they differ from person to person. However, there is always hope, and as the saying goes, there’s always, always, a solution to every problem.  

There’s Always a Solution to Every Problem

In life, as you appreciate, when we like something a lot, we can’t wait to do it, and we like doing it as often as possible. So, I have to alarm you that if you have reached a point of motivation-to-practice loss, it’s time to start reconsidering things in music perhaps, and recover your music goals. As with the “writer’s block”, there isn’t any university course, or a vaccine, or a special miraculous treatment to treat and cure the pianist’s block forever. We just have to follow some simple techniques that will eventually help us to soldier on through this peculiar condition. Here are my two techniques that I found help my pupils to shake off the pianist’s block:  

Recovering from Pianist’s Block

Robot Mode

First of all, we have to turn Robot Mode on. The general idea here is to just sit on the piano stool, place our fingers on the keyboard and start playing, without evaluating too much. However, refrain from playing “Robotically”. Far from it. Let me elaborate: Robots, as seen on TV or generally perceived by most people, just go about their businesses without expressing feelings and without evaluating the reason why they have to accomplish their tasks. They just act “robotically”, as we say. Here’s how to exercise the Robot Mode: 1. Every time you go past your piano try not to do the following: A) Think about how difficult your pieces are. B) The sheer length of them. C) Their negative psychological impact on you-if any. Just see the piano as the wonderful instrument it is. 2. When you have time during the day, just sit on the piano stool and open any of your piano books. 3. Place right hand on the keys and start playing the passage you are not comfortable with, without thinking its complexity. Repeat with the left hand. 4. Just plough on, without any type of emotional evaluation. 5. After, you have finished practicing, treat yourself with a small gift. For example, a cup of tea, or a small bar of chocolate, or even watch your favorite series. This last part is extremely important to do. 6. Repeat this process daily. By following the above steps, gradually, you will become accustomed to the notion that practicing is not a laborious activity but a pleasurable one, since you stop thinking of the negatives, and instead you just receive the pleasure deriving from just playing music. So, to put Robot Mode into perspective, pianists just need to start practicing without evaluating the act-of-practising, prior to them commencing practicing. Through this unchallenged act of sitting down and practice, you will start automatically and inevitably find interpretational answers and rekindle your desire to keep playing the piano. Well, you will find more interpretational answers than not practicing at all, anyway. You will also start experiencing incremental results and progress. Humans, often tend to value the importance of things accordingly to their emotional state at any particular time. That’s why we often use the expressions “I don’t feel like it” or “I’m not in the mood for it”, etc. However, when we feel stressed out or are in a grave situation and we have to take quick action, logic kicks in and we start doing the right thing without evaluating our actions too much, because simply, there is not enough time available to us. Here’s an example: Say that you need to perform a hard piano piece for a concert in two months time. At the same time, you know that you only need perhaps a week to learn the piece. Subconsciously, you know that the right thing to do is to start practicing as soon as possible and get done with it. However, since you’re human and naturally susceptible to procrastination, you could just decide to start practising in the following days; that’s perfectly acceptable in our lives. However, if your concert was next week, you would just sit down and practise without further ado, without thinking about it, without overanalyzing and without procrastinating, because you know your piano limits and because there is not enough time left. So, coming back to the “unchallenged act of sitting down and practice”, the essence of the Robot Mode is that the appetite comes with eating, as the saying goes.  

Recovering from Pianist’s Block

Setting Short Term Goals

The next approach in recovering from the pianist’s block is to set short term goals. “Short term goals” in music, means to set more achievable, more realistic and smaller objectives, to help you complete a grander music task. Instead of thinking, for instance, “I have to play the Hammerclavier by the summer”, you have to set smaller goals/steps in achieving your ultimate goal, of playing the Hammerclavier. Having to play a momentous work can be overwhelming, so, to stop vagueness in practising and loss of focus, you just need to take it step by step.

Here’s How:

Example Goal: Learn the Hammerclavier.(Here, the Hammerclavier stands for our ultimate goal) 1. Do not contemplate the piece’s gestalt. Well, do not often contemplate the piece’s gestalt. In essence, we should refrain from constantly reflecting on the whole picture/sheer length/magnitude/artistic influence, popular culture etc. of our piece. This could overwhelm us and make get down to practicing even harder. 2. Break piece into smaller objectives. Instead of, say, thinking that you need to start completing the first movement, decide that you are going to learn a system per day. This way, the piece doesn’t overwhelm you and you just keep on practicing more comfortably and more realistically. 3. Join smaller goals together. This is the final part; merging all those smaller objectives together to consolidate the piece. (Piece = our ultimate goal). So, there’s not a lot of science in practicing constructively, with permanence and flair. All we need is a couple of positive thoughts, a piano stool, a cup of tea on the table perhaps and a bit of strategy. So, do consider using combined those two little suggestions above, and you might enjoy a more prosperous piano life ahead.  
¹The term Writer’s Block was coined by Edmund Bergler in 1947. Read more about Edmund Bergler, here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Bergler
Am I Allowed to Stop Liking the Piano?

Am I Allowed to Stop Liking the Piano?

by | Mar 8, 2016 | 0 comments

In this article I will discuss one of the most dreaded questions a pianist could face. “Am I allowed to stop liking the piano?” Or, by paraphrasing, “what the cousin of my auntie’s friend would think if I stop liking this horrible big instrument?” Have you ever asked those questions yourself?

I would like to start by saying that in my minute studies of music I discovered this: the best way to manipulate and control a musician is by the employment of guilt. How powerful a tool guilt is… isn’t it?

Music, similar to many other pursuits in life, often requires irrational ways to convince us, mere mortals, that something is more important than we actually think it is. Apart from performing, one of musicians’ ways of advocating that music is to be considered as a superior human occupation, is by using guilt as often as possible. This often happens subconsciously.

Thus, that’s why teachers naively and genuinely ask their students some of the following questions: “Did you practice this week?”, or “Did you listen to this performer play at the proms last night?” etc. This is an unfailing subconscious way we all teachers used to instill guilt in our students’ fragile, pure, and perhaps infantile musical ideals. The thing is, that even if we teachers try to be as soft as possible in our wordings and expressions, we can’t escape from forcing the feeling of guilt on our students, since this is the way teaching was done from the beginning of time. So, the principle is: “Do A to achieve B, because B is important”, so, if you don’t do A, you won’t achieve the important B. We’ve learned to accept all this.

So, by the time a student decides that piano is not their cup of tea, it’s too late. The claws of guilt have spread all over them, grabbing every drop of sheer and undemanding enjoyment of music.

However, coming back to the question, whether it is ok to stop liking the piano, I think it’s ok. You are free to do whatever you like in life as long as you don’t harm anyone or yourself. Stopping liking the piano it’s perfectly fine, except, of course, if your goal is to become a concert pianist; I would frown upon stopping liking the piano at that point.

“Hm, but what are my friends will think of me?” I hear you say. Well, here starts the second part of this article.

In life sometimes, you need to find ways of benefiting from when people are wrongly judgmental about you. Let me elaborate. Often, the people you least expect might try to over-exaggerate and point out your “mistakes” no matter how small those mistakes are. For example, here are some trivial things they would say: “Oh, you held this b flat longer, John” or “I wish you didn’t take that fast tempo, Barbara”. Those people will have their own agenda, of course, and more often than not, their motives will not be directed to helping you. Thus, you need to be as vigilant as possible, and always try to discover other people’s ill agendas promptly. Here, you have no other solution to encounter those perfectly human insecurities and complexes of others, but to welcome them and perhaps using them as future reference or as a great story to tell your friends or grandchildren. The more we succumb to other people’s opinions, the more guilt is succeeding in making us weaker and less confident in whatever we do in life.

So, always try to think of how to benefit from a comment or remark, rather than automatically and instinctively defend yourself from it. As they say, “there are two sides to every coin”.

To recap, often the route of our musical problems lies in not so great places, such as in guilt. And guilt will lead to fear. Technique and all are just incidental in our music lives. First in the parade of our musical endeavors marches our mentality, and second behind follows our fingers, by being shown the way from their stronger leader.

 

 

Copyright © by Nikos Kokkinis

 

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How to Become a Great Pianist in Just a Minute

How to Become a Great Pianist in Just a Minute

by | Feb 3, 2016 | 0 comments

[ Attention: Strong sense of humor required, before commencing reading this article ]

In an age where vanity has reached new zeniths and pianists want to grasp the essence of pianism in quick fashion, I made the greatest discovery of pianokind.

In a ‘eurika’ moment I found how to become a great pianist in just a minute.

But before going into detail, I just want to share a few thoughts on the thousands of pianists that practised hard and sincerely only to now be amazed by this discovery.

They’ve spent years practising and rehearsing, trying to play fast and loud, to no avail. If only they knew…

If only they had stopped and think, instead of aimlessly practising geeky composers’ pompous offsprings and other competitive banalities.

They never spent a minute to think, or a minute to reflect. That minute could have saved their dreams.

However, it’s my “minute” that is going to shine; it’s my minute that is going to save the day, once again.

So, pay attention. Forget about musicological research, structural analysis, philosophical evenings with cheese and wine or good old piano practising. Everything is going to be accomplished in just a minute.

So, here’s how you are going to become a great pianist in just a minute. It is a very simple trick:

First, you need to build a time machine.

Now, I am a piano teacher, so I sincerely apologize if I cannot provide you with detailed instructions on how to build a time machine. If by any chance you don’t know how to build one by yourself, here’s what to do: Ask somebody else to built it for you. Simple. That’s the easiest way, with the added advantage that you can concentrate on your other musical activities during the building process.

Now, after the time machine is ready, you only need to go back in time 20 years. Then you practice as much as you can. The good thing is that you will still have the knowledge that you currently possess in the past, so you don’t have to re-learn things.

After you become a great pianist, the only thing that you have to do is to set the time machine back to the present time, and you ready. You will be regarded as a great pianist!

Did you see how simple it was?

All best!