Online Piano Lessons: Thoughts and Challenges

by Nikos Kokkinis | Jan 31, 2021 | 0 comments

Reader discretion is advised

I hate online piano lessons, both as a teacher, but also as a pedagogue.

There’s no way you will learn the piano properly with online lessons. Period. And if you eventually reach a certain level of pianism, imagine what you could have done in the physical presence of a trained instructor…

I just can’t imagine Leopold Mozart teaching his son through a computer screen rearing him to the Magic Flute. The thought of Picasso feasting upon the works of El-Greco through a computer screen, in the hopes of creating The old Guitarist, repulses me. Those artists wouldn’t become the men we admire today. Better men, perhaps? Maybe, but I doubt it.

On a more pragmatic scale, I can’t imagine even myself in my “dark-age” years to not having in-person lessons, but scrabbling around to make sense of the piano through the clunkiness of the personal computer (PC). I couldn’t possibly have become the mediocre pianist that I am today, and would have remained in the sphere of aspiring musicians, possibly following a completely different career path to survive. I would have been too mentally and technically weak to unearth myself through the horrid medium of online instruction.

Because online lessons are not for everyone. They are perhaps sufficient if you wish to play a fake iteration of Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean on your digital keyboard — a keyboard that we, teachers, have unashamedly baptised “Piano” — and do not care whether your fingers will take you further than your local community center.

But for your fingers to take you to Carnegie Hall, you need a teacher passing you her own tradition through her physical presence. You need her amalgam of knowledge conveyed to your brain through her greasy fingernails on the piano of her studio, while you are physically there. You need her to breathe down your neck when you kept messing up the start of the op. 111, and see her cheeks blossom on your epic finale of the Appassionata. And when you do your last lesson, before opening your wings and depart from her tutorship, you need to see her tears running down her cheeks.

❦

Those things above can’t happen by looking at a couple of computer screens.

However… I’m now a teacher.

There are people that count on me, and, to my surprise, look up at me. This virus nonsense will tantalise us to the end of the universe as it seems, and we, somehow, should plow on regardless if we want to save the arts and the artist. So, no matter how much I persist that if someone wants to become the next Christian Blackshaw online piano lessons are a lost cause, I do them merrily. I just do them. And the vast majority of people — people in the arts, the students, the parents — couldn’t care less.

My challenges as a teacher? Countless.

Challenges

To begin with, listening to what your student’s performance actually sounds like, is out of the equation; to this day there are no electronic devices that can faithfully record the sound of Environment A and faithfully direct it to Environment B in real time. This both is impractical and impossible. Here’s why:

First, the student must have an extraordinary machine to record with fidelity his/her playing.Then, the teacher must have an equally exceptional “receiving machine” to receive the recording in a lossless manner, and then faithfully reproduce it in another technologically gargantuan device, to make a verdict and teach the student. As you may understand, even if the teacher invests in such a laborious studio equipment, you won’t be able to stop the parent of the student from entering the BMW dealership and escort him to the nearest music store instead.

Another challenge that I have encountered is that there is still no sure way to avoid changes in latency (audio delay) between the transmitter of the information and the receiver; that means, whenever a teacher spontaneously wants to stop a student and make a quick remark, the student gets spoiled and loses his/her momentum. In the class, this starting and stopping endeavour is much, much more efficient. However, a teacher can deliver only so much guidance by the end of the online lesson.

Thus, not only do we not have the technological advancement yet to have a stable, real time communication with our students, but also we do not have the rapport necessary to transfer art from one mind to another.

The next challenge I found, which is equally of immense importance, is the psychological factor of having to teach and learn online.

It is so much harder to enjoy the performance of a student through a horde of cables, microphones, computer mouses, cameras, delays and all the rest of “noise” that in actual fact stops you from teaching our lovely, massive block of wood, that makes nice noises.

By the time the student connects their equipment and declares readiness to start the lesson, the momentum has already started to wane. A marathon of keeping the student’s interest alive begins, drawing from you the energy to teach and leaving you lost in a heap of calculations on how to see the lesson through. And then, don’t forget that at some point you will also run out of clownish tricks to entertain the student too…

The student? Who knows? I guess he is still somewhere there too, equally bewildered and lost in his thoughts, longing to finish that pianistic tyranny and go back to his social media page.

Madness…

So, as you may understand, if you love online lessons and feel inspiringly blessed that you have just discovered their beauty and their voguishness, I’m not going to become your friend any time soon. But then again, we all differ, and that’s the beauty of it all.

Off to my next online piano lesson now.

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I am indebted to the following artists the images of whom I used to create the composite image used in this article: This image tries to convey the angst and the mayhem created through the medium of online tutorship. THANK YOU:

ThisisEngineering RAEng on Unsplash

Robert Bye on Unsplash

Matthew T Rader on Unsplash

Laurens Derks on Unsplash

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← What Is Forte and How Loud It Is Online Piano Lessons Setup →

What Is Forte and How Loud It Is

by Nikos Kokkinis | Jan 1, 2021 | 0 comments

In this article we talk about what is forte in music. Then, after defining forte we shall attempt to describe how loud forte should really be.

❦

Asking what is forte in music, is like asking what is sweet in baking. Being a pianist, and not a baker, if someone was to ask me what is sweet, I would probably answer that sweet is something that has a sizeable amount of sugar in it. If then I was asked how much sugar, I would answer that perhaps it depends on the size of the sweet I bake. Then, I would elaborate that if I wanted a sweet cup of coffee I would add no fewer than two teaspoons of sugar and if I wanted to bake a chocolate cake, I would add no fewer than five big spoonfuls of sugar. And if I was asked how much is too sweet, I would say that it would depend on one’s own personal preference…

You see? ‘Sweet’ is a subjective matter — For some sweet means two spoonfuls, for others three, and for some others it would mean perhaps one-and-a-have spoonfuls…

The same applies to piano; forte translated means loud — but what is forte for me, it could be too loud for you, and for an exponent of the Russian piano school, my forte could mean that it lingers in the sphere of mezzo-piano…

Again, parallelizing music to baking, how sweet is something also depends on what you are baking; a coffee to be sweet might need two teaspoons of sugar, whereas a cake with two teaspoons of sugar… won’t cut the mustard — transferring this to musical terms, the Mozartian forte would be our coffee, that would sound like a wimpy cry in the context of the cake, if cake was Rachmaninov’s second piano sonata. Oh, the convenience of the contextual interpretation, eh?

What is forte

“So, what is forte then, can you define it for me already?” I hear you ask…

Well, forte means that I play quite loud. Not just loud, but with a sizeable amount of loudness.

Let me elaborate: When we play forte (especially on composers after 1945) we should really go for it and be head and shoulders above the dynamic of mezzo-forte; we should be blown away by the sheer velocity of the piano as it sings like most brilliant operatic soprano on her corona.

“What? Really? But what happens to fortissimo?” I hear you ask. “How loud fortissimo should be then, if I play forte quite loud?” Here, you need to remember that dynamics in music do not increase sequentially. For example, the table below is illogical:

Dynamic	Loudness
p	1	(pp x 2)
mp	2	(p x 2)
mf	4	(mp x 2)
f	8	(mf x 2)
ff	16	(f x 2)

Illogical sequence in musical dynamics; I.e. it doesn’t go like that.

Fortissimo in music is, in essence, a fake dynamic — a made-up dynamic to literally mean…even more forte, but not twice the forte. So when Rachmaninov asks the pianist to do ffff, he doesn’t mean to play four times the dynamic of forte (impossible), but he insinuates that the pianist should be banging the piano mercilessly and to the fullest of her/his physical capacities. And that “merciless banging” of the piano is, of course, a subjective matter.

Factors to consider when playing forte

Before playing forte, we should consider the following factors to help us in its prompt delivery:

Whose forte we are playing: Do we play Schnittke’s forte? Is it an editorial forte on a Scarlatti sonata? is it Mozart’s forte, or is it forte on a fake arrangement of Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance? We should treat all those fortes with a completely different technical approach. For example, Mozart’s forte is too quite loud, and since the fortepiano of his era could not produce a very high velocity sound, nowadays we erroneously try to imitate his then perceivable softer forte on the grandiose and more rigid modern piano. We should really be playing much louder than the self-serving, delicate fantasy we try to produce on the Steinway nowadays. See on the start of his C minor K. 457 sonata, for example: Mozart surely wanted a glorious, orchestral ascent, and if he could savour on the immense, 7 ft pianos of todays, he would have begged the pianist to really “smash” the keys with some serious velocity. It’s a pity nowadays pianists maintain such a distorted version of how Mozart’s forte should be played, relying on letters, films and on other voguish doctrines to reduce his forte to a whimsical laughter.

The sheer number of dynamic levels in your piece: For example, if a piece had only two dynamic levels (p and f) we often might have to choose to not differentiate substantially between the two and avoid assuming that there are two more dynamics in the middle of them (mp & mf). We should not play them too far apart from each-other in case the piece becomes eccentric or even comedic. Scarce dynamics can be found in elementary level piano works, where the composer simply wants to teach the pianist how to handle softer and louder passages by just indicating p and f. However, in a piece that has, say, six different dynamic levels (pp, p, mp, mf, f, ff) we may choose to be more subtle with our velocities in order to be able to distinguish between all those dynamic levels; here, f will sound even more contrasting to p.

The style of a piece from the same composer: Do we play forte on Chopin’s e minor nocturne or do we built up on the finale of the same composer’s monumental third piano sonata?

The articulation of the forte: Is it forte on the start of the op. 111, or is it forte on the semiquavers of the Op. 2, Nr. 2? (Beethoven): Surely below, some of those fortes should be more reserved. Can you tell which?

The actual piano we are playing: For example, If we are to play Liszt’s B minor sonata on an 140cm upright from the late 90s, we might have to resort to produce a more down-to-earth forte since it might be harder to produce more extreme velocities, such as pp or fff; uprights in general have more dense dynamic ranges compared to, say, an Imperial Grand that can beat us for pace and can produce the subtlest nuances or the speediest velocities a pianist’s mind could handle.

The room we are playing: Guilty your honour! I failed an audition in a spectacular fashion many years ago, when I butchered Prokofiev’s 5th piano sonata in a 20 sq. m room with an audition panel of no less that six distinguished examiners, some of them being celebrated pianists. The shame. They looked at me startled, too kind-hearted to cover their ears with their hands! Little did I know, though. Those failed auditions (there was actually another one of the same pianistic “calibre”…) made me quite conscious of the venue of my performances, and the sound I should produce. Mind you, I felt equally guilty of my inability to produce p that had presence, in a few other legendary pianistic massacres of mine, but hey ho, that’s life…

❦

So, forte? Play very loud! Fortissimo? As loud as you can! Fifteen fortes? Give your whole! And just relax, stop being uptight and stop reading pointless writings like this on how to do piano. Three things you need: Stool, piano, and teacher. That’s it. Oh, and to get off your hi horse while at it.

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← Student From a Former Teacher Etiquette Online Piano Lessons: Thoughts and Challenges →

Student From a Former Teacher Etiquette

by Nikos Kokkinis | Dec 1, 2020 | 0 comments

Warning: Reader Discretion Advised:

So, the phone rung one day, and you heard the following words from the other end of the line:

“Hello! I’m Mrs Soen-So and I’m calling to enquire about piano lessons!”

“Oh, hi! Yes, of course. How may I help you?”

“Well, my son Junior was having lessons last term with Mr. Nikos Kokkinis, and…”

“Um, sorry, before you carry on… Did you just say… Mr. Kokkinis?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Sorry, Mr. Nikos Kokkinis?”

“Yes.”

“You mean, the legendary pianist and renowned editor of Piano Practising, the world’s greatest independent piano website?”

“Well, yes, but why are you asking?”

“Just checking, please continue.”

“Well, um, as I was saying, my son was having lessons with him and he lost interest in his piano.”

“Hm, carry on!”

“Yes, I mean, this teacher was not inspiring at all and didn’t make my son like the piano.”

“Do continue.”

“Well, he was teaching him how to play, I suppose, but my son lost interest in only his first year of piano lessons. Mr. Kokkinis has a ghastly personality, and for some reason he was constantly going on and on about his greatness and how important his website was! He was so money oriented, and was always insisting on receiving tuition on the exact day every month, and not a minute later, as if he was some sort of a bank! Can you believe it? Not to mention his horrible sense of humour.”

“Hm, I’m intrigued, please carry on!”

“Well, enough is enough I said one morning, and I decided to remove Junior from his piano lessons and seek to find a better, more fitting piano instructor. Someone, that will inspire my son, make him enjoy the piano more, because, after all, piano is about being happy and positive about life and its blessings, isn’t it? It is about enjoying learning and savouring the goods of music.”

“Right.”

“And, what is music without enjoyment, after all? I knew my son liked the piano, oh so much. I don’t want him to lose this wonderful connection he had with the instrument when he first started… And all this why? Because of the incapability of a piano teacher to teach properly. Go figure.”

“*cough. Yes. And what can we do about it now?”

“Well, Missy told me to call you, because you are sensitive, realistic and compassionate she said.”

“… and broke…”

“Sorry, what did you say?”

“Nothing, go on!”

“… and you know how to handle talent and the youth.”

“Hm, yes.”

“Please, tell me you are going to accept Junior in your piano studio!”

“Of course I will! Come by tomorrow morning at 10 to discuss!”

❦

The overall response to the phone call from the fictitious piano teacher was ideal; she kept her cool and kept equal distances between former teacher and mother on that first encounter. She neither showed compassion for the mother nor contempt for the alleged shortcomings of the inferiorly presented former teacher. The mother didn’t get an empathetic response from the new teacher, and to be honest, on that first call she would have been okay either way. Again, the new teacher’s responses were appropriate, considering the human aspect and the type of situation (she was caught off guard).

Avoid 1: Mentioning the Former Teacher

A teacher should rise above the situation and needs to avoid mentioning of the previous teacher in her class, if at all possible. Frankly, there is no good reason you would ever want to mention a former teacher. Nothing good will come out of it.

Avoid 2: Mentioning a Former Teacher’s Pedagogical Inadequacy

I’m not happy when I hear teachers asking their students, “didn’t your last teacher teach you this?”

No, he didn’t teach it, okay?! Maybe his former teacher didn’t teach it because the student would have been incapable of doing it in the first place, and now he miraculously can because his mother scolded him to practice and to be good with his new teacher! Or maybe the student only just became so wonderfully inspired by the greatness and didactic voguishness of his new teacher, that he has now finally let his talent flow. You hate me readers; I know — but, I don’t care!

So, STOP IT! Do not ask this nonsensical question, ever. That former teacher is and should be seen as an esteemed colleague of yours.

Never Show Compassion to Your Student’s Fiction

I hate it when a student of mine tells me his/her version of the flaws of the former teacher; I despise that, and I subconsciously start becoming distanced from the student, since I somehow expect the student to equally “betray” me when in the tutorship of a future instructor.

I never buy the distorted stories of the students when they come to me belittling their former pedagogues anyway, because I know that this is part of their, albeit understandable, self-defense mechanism and they most certainly exaggerate the situation in full measure, to their advantage of course — this depends on the age of the student, of course, and one can sniff out lying very easily, however, I do not care at all whether the student is right or wrong. I just hate the backstabbing and the storytelling, especially if I haven’t heard the other side’s version of the story.

Never empathize with the fiction of your new student. Especially when talking about their poor former teacher. Again, you shouldn’t care if the student is right or wrong, and to what extent are they right or wrong — you wouldn’t know anyway, simply because you weren’t there, present in their lessons, anyway.

“Oh, my former teacher couldn’t understand me, sir!” “Um, she wasn’t inspiring enough unfortunately…” “Oh, she didn’t get my plight.” “Oh, she forgot to mention that accent,” “Oh, this, oh that!” This nonsense has got to stop. Please respect the previous teacher if you may and don’t feed the bad wolf. Maybe the teacher “forgot” to mention that accent because:

A. She is human after all

B. She was going to mention it at a later stage

C. Maybe she did mention it, but in one-in-a-million chances you forgot?

D. Maybe she didn’t mention it because you couldn’t do it

E. Maybe… maybe for many other reasons…

How would you know if your student is right? You trust your instincts, right? Well, don’t; trust your own teaching and your student’s future progress.

I’ve written it before, but I seriously doubt that any human being followed one of the most sacred of duties (piano teacher) to destroy the extraordinary talent of someone’s child. Their goal was to educate and to teach, so let’s just respect those poor souls and just let them be. Okay?

Repertoire

And, enough of this fixation on repertoire. Repertoire is… repertoire. Again, you never knew the circumstances under which a former teacher chose what they chose, so forget about it. It’s future now.

Just make sure your future choices of repertoire are the right ones and stop worrying if that method was better than the other, or if that edition of that piece was not the right one – Respect your poor colleague.

❦

I never knew a bad piano teacher at heart. Even the ones that backstabed me were good. They were all good. They all didn’t know any better. I didn’t. They were simply human beings trying to get through another day in the piano jungle.

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← The Primary Quality of a Piano Teacher What Is Forte and How Loud It Is →

The Primary Quality of a Piano Teacher

by Nikos Kokkinis | Nov 1, 2020 | 0 comments

Hm… what should be the primary quality, the most needed, the most desired quality, that would make a piano teacher fulfil their teaching duties to the fullest?

Could it that the teacher should be kind and accepting of the student’s individual pianistic customs? Could it be to be compassionate, or perhaps able to instil confidence to their pupils? Could it be to be ever-pleasant? Or, what about having a tendency to succumbing to the students’ idiosyncratic voguishnesses? Could it be this and that and the other thing?

It could be all, albeit unachievable, but some of them qualities, and perhaps one of them, should surely be paramount in a teacher’s journey.

I have decided that the primary quality a teacher should have is to understand the quality of the student. Because, when a teacher apprehends the ‘quality’ of the student that stands in front of him, he would then efficiently lead the student to make the most out of their own qualities.

But before going any further, let us understand what is the “quality of a student”. For me, the quality of a student is what a teacher perceives as the gestalt of the student; i.e. how the teacher perceives the student through their physical, verbal, nonverbal, and piano-performing signals they emanate.

So, in order to feel the quality of the student, we need to answer two questions: a) what the student’s provenance is, and b) what the student’s desired end-product is.

Student’s Provenance

Every student enters your piano studio with a bagful of distinct history (or provenance, as we say). Some of them come with lessons from a previous teacher, some have a grand piano that sits around at home, others like to listen to piano music in general, and some of them had to come to you simply because their parents forced them to have piano lessons.

Some questions to answer here are: What type of music my student likes to listen to and wants to play? Does he receive the necessary psychological support to pursue the piano? Has he got an instrument at home to practice? Is he busy in his everyday life? How old is he? (yes, age matters—read here why).

Your goal is to understand which provenance follows a student, and then you take it from there.

The reason to do that is to decide how to implement your teaching regime to a particular student; for example, you would approach differently a student that likes the piano and one that doesn’t. You would teach differently a student that likes to play Michael Jackson on his five-octave keyboard than someone who adores Keith Jarrett’s solo improvisations. You would ask for a bit more commitment from a student that sports a Steinway grand in their living room than from a student that his parents live with benefits and cannot afford a keyboard at home. As you can appreciate, the students and thus the individual teaching strategies, are innumerable.

Student’s End-Product

After finding the student’s inclinations through their provenance, the next step, and perhaps the most important one in order to teach them efficiently, is to get a sense of where a student wants to go with their piano.

You achieve this through dialogue, so as to explore the student’s presuppositions and future pianistic goals, but also sometimes through the student’s own playing. I more than once understood a quiet student’s pianistic goals by listening to the way their sound came out of their fingers; a few years ago, to the astonishment of my student (and to mine to be honest) I understood his penchant towards Adele’s music by how he was projecting the chords in the “introduction” of the Beethoven’s Pathetique (bars 7 & 8).

This led me to evolve my teaching behind the scenes, change my teaching pace, and make micro-adjustments to his future repertoire. I said ‘micro-adjustments’ because one must not alter his teaching dramatically to cater for a student’s musical caprices; I teach the classical piano and my goal is to make every single student of mine to have a classical sound (per se). I would refuse to make their playing jazzy, pop-like, or anything else, because, frankly, I do not know how to do those things.

What my students want from me is none of my business. My students come to me for my own distinct product; as you wouldn’t go to a Chinese restaurant to order tacos, equally you won’t ask a jazz pianist to teach you how to play the La Campanella. The Chinese restaurateur couldn’t care less if you wanted tacos because he only prepares chicken fried rice and other Chinese indulgences. The same applies to the jazz pianist: He wants to make you the next Oscar Peterson, not the next András Schiff.

At the same time, dialogue and general verbal communication will often give you telltale signs of what the students want to eventually achieve with music and the piano.

Here are a couple of examples:

Example 1: Student says: “Sir, when I finish school I want to do piano and [so and so].” That “and” near the end of the sentence means that the student does not want to wholeheartedly dedicate themselves to the piano: I.e. they don’t like the piano enough to make it their sole future occupation (sorry to break the news)—meaning that probably they won’t progress enough to compete in this merciless world of music job-hunting.

Example 2: Student says: “My last two piano teachers weren’t inspiring enough”. Again, that means student is not interested in the piano and superficially seeks to find a pedagogue as a means to entertain themselves and to be magically injected with the ad libitum superpower of endless inspiration.

Example 3: Student’s says: “Sir, I practiced at my aunt’s yesterday afternoon, since I couldn’t bear the b flat being so out of tune”. That shows a commitment on the part of the student, a sense that time is of utmost importance, and perhaps an urgency to perfect the art of piano playing.

So

So, your goal as a piano pedagogue and teacher is to masterfully lead your students abide to yourown end-product calling. To achieve this, you must possess the quality of identifying the student’s individual quality.

Good luck on your musical endeavours.

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Photo by Mathew Schwartz on Unsplash. Thank you for the wonderful image used in this artcle.

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← Mezzo-Staccato and Non-Legato: Two Sides of the Same Coin? Student From a Former Teacher Etiquette →

Mezzo-Staccato and Non-Legato: Two Sides of the Same Coin?

by Nikos Kokkinis | Oct 1, 2020 | 0 comments

One question that pianists ask every so often is the following: Does mezzo-staccato simply means non-legato?

My answer derives from my provenance as a student of the English Piano School—a pianistic school that (surprisingly to many) exists, and to my mind has one main axiom: Attention to detail. But what is the English piano school is a subject for another article, one that I will tackle one day, hopefully. Anyway, attention to detail is what helps us separate the different notions and aftertastes of notes and can show us that different articulations have different names.

Now, coming to why mezzo-staccato is different to non-legato, it is indeed a question that has two answers. And that’s only to start with…

Firstly, if the definition of mezzo-staccato was firmly established in the pianistic world, it wouldn’t need an endless charade of debating, a constant going back and forth explanatorily, or philosophical nights with cheese and pinot noir from Patagonia. And secondly, because the articulation simply contains the word “staccato” in its name. If it wasn’t affiliated with staccato and was closer to the notion of legato (or non-legato in our case) it wouldn’t have had that staccato word hanging around.

I often (usually out of the blue) ask my students the following question:

“How much is one plus one?”, only to be looked at as if I were some kind of mad person (not that I’m not) and I receive the following reply:

“Um, it’s… two sir”, they would softly reply looking at me perplexed,

followed by me saying

“Are you sure?”

“Um, yes, sir!”, with a smile on their faces.

The reason I ask this question is to persuade my students that if something in life is well established, it does not need regular examination of its validity and it does not have a controversial status. One plus one equals two indeed, and no-one in this world can deny it. Whereas, If I asked my students “what is fast in music?” Or “who is the best pianist in the world?”, they would have had a different story as to why their opinion is the correct one.

Scolding commences:

So, yes, do make this “leap of faith” and believe it: Mezzo-legato is not the non-legato; if we want to fix our salty soup we do not add sugar, if you get my gist (Wait what?). A drink that is non-hot does not mean it is medium-cold, okay? Non-hot means it is not lip-burning hot but still lingers to the sphere of “hot”—it is by no means medium-cold and you should be extra careful when you are trying to consume it. So.

Same with the dreaded mezzo-staccato. Mezzo in the Italian language means ‘half’—medium, middle, in the midst of something. Staccato means ‘detached’. Of course, you could argue that the etymological zeitgeist of every word constantly changes, and that we should not take every word too seriously and perceive it to its face value, per se, still, mezzo-staccato, means medium STACCATO! Okay? Medium, what? Medium-Staccato!

S T A C C A T O. ST – AC – CA – TO. S-T-A-C-C-A-T-O. Yes, it’s my website and I can do whatever I want. (Sorry, by the way).

Okay. Now that we have established (through my bullying) what mezzo-staccato is and none of you have any objections (!) 👀,

*with a woman’s soft and deliberate voice*

let’s get to how to play this articulation on our wonderful instrument.

Appearance

The articulation is presented with a slur & a dot on a group of two or more notes:

Play

In piano-playing mezzo-staccato involves the use of pedal. We tackle the quavers above as we would if they were simply written as staccato, but by adding the pedal, as well—the pedal could be half-pressed, fully pressed, and so on and so forth. Sometimes the pedal is not written, but assumed.
The notes of the mezzo-staccato are naturally treated as part of a group and not as individually articulated entities.
The mezzo-staccato articulation is often used in pianistic passages where the composer desires a sense of ethereal sound combined with a kind of a pitter-patter feel.

Difference to other short articulations

Mezzo staccato is different to staccato, since it requires invariably the use of pedal; otherwise it would have been almost impossible to distinguish between the two.

It is different to tenuto, because it doesn’t require the note to sport its full value, nor pushes for a sense of crescendoing as on every tenutoed note.

Again, its distinction to non-legato is apparent since a) non-legato passages do not necessarily require the use of pedal, b) the non-legato is closer to the notion of legato (as forcefully presented above), c) non-legato should be held for almost three quarters of its full duration, in contrast to the mezzo-staccato which should be held for up to half of its full duration, and d) because non-legato is more versatile since contextually can be used in more compositional circumstances.

In context

In Liszt’s Années de Pèlerinage II, in the Piu lento section we encounter this passage which requires the use of pedal in every beat (à chaque mesure) to facilitate a sense of broadness in the sound that gently prepare us for the finale’s eminent agitation:

In another of Liszt’s works, Paysage, from his Twelve Trancendental Etudes, the use of mezzo-staccato is ample. Here’s an instance were Liszt intensifies the serenity of the study’s landscape descriptiveness:

In Beethoven’s Op. 111, a little after we are introduced to the tempestuous Allegro con brio ed Appassionato, Beethoven chooses to not continue with the uniformity of the rushing semiquavers and opts for extra turbulence by hitting the breaks by repeating the previous phrasing with mezzo-staccato. Here are bars 30-31:

As with all piano music it all depends on context of course (how convenient, eh?) and you should exercise caution when trying to interpret works that have been established in the ears of audiences and in the scholars’ doctrines. And always remember: no matter what a website, an article or a self-appointed expert says (*cough), nothing can beat the piano teacher in the class.

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All examples above were engraved in-house using the music engraving software Dorico.

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