Disclaimer: if you are a sensitive individual, if sometimes you take what you read personally, if you occasionally are ever so slightly uptight about what you read, then please DO NOT read this article. This article contains exaggerated opinions and harsh, disrespectful and informal expressions to facilitate an enjoyable read. Everything below should be approached with a humorous aura. No advice below is to be followed. The following article is meant to be a humorous text only. Read at your own discretion.

How I acquired the diary

It was the 15th of September 1964. Early morning. I had just reached the summit, and the views where spellbinding. I could have lived there forever. But I knew that time was my enemy here, and I had to mentally drag myself to get ready for my descent as quickly as possible. I had to survive to tell my story. I couldn’t afford to enjoy a minute longer on this dream journey of mine. 

I hopped on my paraglider and begun my return, albeit reluctantly. The only thing that kept me going was the spectacular views flying down the white oasis. It wasn’t the same as savouring the sight from the world’s top peak, of course, but at least it was something; a reduced delight by the second. At about one-and-a-half minutes into the descent, I picked up on a shinning object, flat as a pancake, 20 degrees on the right, from where I was. It was sitting upon a massive chunk of white land, and I could see the footsteps of what was probably an earlier group’s descending path. 

The urge to grab the object was monumental. I don’t know why I did it. I don’t know why I went down and landed, trying to retrieve a seemingly meaningless artefact that attracted me like no other thing in this significant moment of my life. It didn’t make any sense. Was it going to take over my legendary journey up here, this impulsive thing I had just done? I didn’t know at the time. I just landed, grabbed the object, and flew down again towards the base camp. 

Two nights later, after tenths of hugs, hundreds of smiles, phone calls to family and friends and a few unexpected tears, I was at my hotel in Lhasa trying to get a grip of what had just happened. I had just conquered the world. However, in the corner of the room, on top of a wooden chair, the 6” x 4” little golden box that I had found, was starring at me. I had to open it and, once and for all, try to make sense why I almost jeopardised the whole thing for a vanity item. 

I slowly opened the box, and inside, folded in four, was an A5 beige page with some writings on it. The writings, however, wasn’t for me to apprehend, so a few weeks later, when I got back to my home in Port Talbot, I phoned the amazing editor of the legendary PianoPractising.com (I thought it was called like that anyway) website, to inquire. 

“Hello. Is this Nikos?”

“Who’s this??”

“It’s Howard Glockendoors, and I have in my possession something that might be of interest to you!”

“Really? Could it be a million pounds?”

“Um, no but…”

“So, what is it then? Could it be a lost episode from Blackadder’s fifth season?”

“Sir, I’m sorry to interrupt but this object that I have in my hands, has perhaps some sort of academic value to you, if I may say.”

“Urgh, I knew it. It’s again about the horrid piano, isn’t it? You just can’t give up you people! I know that I am an expert on the piano and the definitive authority on how to perform with one-centimetre fingernails, but that’s ridiculous.”

“So sorry sir if I made you feel…”

“Alright. What is this thing you’re talking about then?”

“Well, it seems to be some sort of handwritten rules, that a piano teacher had scribbled on a piece of paper! And then folded them carefully and placed them inside a golden box!”

“Golden box you just said? You must bring it to me at once! Um… I mean together with the paper in it of course, because I need to make an authoritative… um… academic evaluation… um… of the whole thing.”

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And this is how I acquired the rules that you are about to read. Well, I had to pay a hefty amount of money to Mr. Glockendoors for the box, but I made all of it back and then some, by pawning that golden box in Camden Town’s John’s Pawning Shop. 

Traits Of The Piano Teacher

1. You’re not teaching the piano to make the student LIKE it, but to make them PLAY it. It’s like you go to a movie director and ask them to make you like direction; that doesn’t make any sense, don’t you think? You normally ask a director to teach you direction because you like the passing of a story on screen, in the first place. In our case, students will keep liking the piano because you teach well and they see results. 
2. You’re not a psychologist or other self-appointed therapist. You’re not getting paid to treat and cure the psychosomatic issues of your pupils. You’re there to… um, let me remember… oh yes! TO TEACH THE PIANO!!! If in any amount or degree, the only way a student could be “treated” and “healed” is through your piano teaching. Your piano teaching in itself can teach valuable life lessons to your students through music; a student will hopefully be able to perform wonderful music and through their creating of this music they could potentially improve upon their personalities in a “subconscious” way. 
3. Do not ask personal questions. Ever. Personal questions and other similar “conversations” (so later on you can pick your student to pieces with your colleagues in a restaurant) are NOT allowed. Questions allowed are: “How are you?” “How was your concert?” “How was your practising this week?” “How did you improve this trill?” and similar. 
4. Swiftly accept that you might not know something asked. Delaying your response or forging a poor answer only increases your educational shortcomings by the second. 
5. Explain to each and everyone of your students that they’re all equal to you. You must explain this to them both in WORDS, but also by your ACTIONS. Don’t play favourites and give equal opportunities to each and everyone of your pupils. Keep saying this phrase to your students every now and then: “You are all equal to me.” (Your students should be able to hear this sentence for at least ten times in an academic year). Do not fall into the trap of thinking that an individual student might deserve better treatment or chances. All students deserve the same chances if they are willing to put in the practising hours. Accept from the start that not all of your students are going to credit your commitment to them in the future; especially the ones that you helped the most. 
6. Always check that you finished and started your lesson on time. Never finish earlier, even a second earlier. Even if “you’ve covered everything” and even if there’s volcanic lava coming towards you. If anything, finish later. Fashionable teachers may say something in the lines of, “But I just needed to finish what I’ve started, and didn’t want to leave my explanation incomplete and make the student wait until next time.” Nonsense – bad time management is called and not commitment, so do not try to excuse your incapacity to be a punctual teacher. A lesson will never be enough to cover everything, anyway. Laconic teaching is paramount. And students are more comfortable when they know that you are not holding them up from going to play with their mobiles in the café after the lesson.  
7. Only teach students things that they can take in until their next lesson. Do not overwhelm them with details they won’t be able to improve by the time their next lesson has started. 
8. Do not offer charitable lessons. For reason No 5 above of course, but also because you must show compassion for the teachers that are badly off,  and they cannot afford to be as “bighearted” as you. Okay? You must charge at all costs. 
9. Charge your lessons at very high rates. Firstly, because this way you educate the masses (the masses could include yourself sometimes, you know) that you’re doing something important. Secondly, because you teach yourself that piano is not your trivial endeavour. Then, because people will think, often gullibly, that you’re a good teacher since you’re charging top dollar, and lastly, because there are some teachers that are not as competent as you and they must also make a living by having to charge lower rates; let them survive as well.
10. Do not lure students into becoming musicians. When a student asks a piano teacher what they should do in their lives, that immediately means that they’re not sure if they want to become musicians. That’s not good news. Otherwise, they wouldn’t ask. Only the students themselves can tell you that they must become musicians, and then, if they express this explicitly,  you owe to help them. 

Copyright © 2018 by Nikos Kokkinis

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Many thanks to Solmaz Hatamian at unsplash.com, for the use of the image for this article. Visit the link below for more great images.

Claude hang up the phone. His vain request to be accepted as a student at the Jopper Music College, went astray once again. 

“They’re right”, he mumbled. 

“I’m fifty-eight years old! What do I expect? To play at Carnegie hall with the New York philharmonic?”

His face had the hue of an overripe peach. His eyes? His eyes looked straight at the upright piano in the corner. His wife’s voice from the back room sounded like a most distant recollection of Bach’s prelude in C minor, from the first book of the Well Tempered Klavier. He couldn’t move his right leg to approach the couch. It felt like he had another stroke. But he didn’t have one. He knew he didn’t. This time around, it wasn’t an actual stroke. This time it was a stroke of the worst kind, though. It was a, sort of, piano stroke… 

“Why can’t I persuade them?” he thought. “Surely, they should know by now if I know how to play this wooden beast. Is it only hands? Is it only youth? Don’t I deserve to be appreciated? It’s not their fault though. They have to go with the flow, as they say. They can’t accept me no matter how good a musician I am. No matter how good I know phrasing, and no matter how good an interpreter I could have been. For them, I’m just a brain virtuoso.”

Claude wasn’t the type of person that easily gives up. He was a well-known attorney and fought every battle in life with dignity. But this time, he barely held himself up straight. He pushed himself hard not to shed the tiniest tear. He almost made it. 

“What sort of virtuoso knows how a passage should sound, knows how to teach its interpretation, but, alas, he can’t physically do it? That must be the worst kind of virtuoso…” he thought. 

Claude was an avid fan of good recordings, and in his eyes, he knew where Richter was at fault compared to Horowitz, and where Glenn Gould was delivering a slightly too far-fetched performance of a Bach Fugue. He was an avid listener of the Classical Boundaries FM radio station and was a member of the International Association of Pianoforte.  Interpretation was also his strength back in the day. He was playing a few Czerny’s Studies from the Op. 750 —his favourite one was number 14 in G minor— and he was playing Chopin’s first ballade, and he was playing this and that, and everybody was saying what a wonderful pianist he could have been, “had he taken his piano more seriously.”

However, the years were flowing past, and he never came around to really devote himself to the piano. Family, work, and the day-to-day trivialities, all came to hinder him from a prosperous life on the keyboard. Well, at least that’s what he thought. 

But fate, sometimes, has its unique ways of telling us that we didn’t take the right paths in life, and no matter how hard we try, our past dreams and secret passions always come back to knock our heart’s unfailing door of mercilessness. 

So, one day, this unforgiving urge to restart the piano machine, came back, though, in Claude’s early fifties. But this urge didn’t take musical shape until last year when he witnessed a car crash from his porch. This poor, middle-aged driver, with a smile on his face and a mobile in his left hand, crashed his car into the Benjamin tree next door… Claude witnessed the whole scene in great detail. 

“Maybe that man had dreams. Maybe he was getting a promotion today. Maybe he was going to pick up painting that weekend. Maybe… Maybe, who knows. All’s gone now, though. No point.” he thought.  

This incident shook Claude so hard that an hour later he was back at his shed, furiously trying to locate his tuner’s phone number in his address book. Later that afternoon, he found himself practising Chopin’s first Ballade, oh so rigorously. 

From that day onwards he decided that he wanted to make the piano his life. He wanted to start from the basics though; he would find a teacher first, and then if he saw progress, he would make his next musical steps. 

And so he did. He found an accomplished piano teacher at his local community centre and he followed his instructions to the letter. He meticulously practiced Czerny studies, but from the Op. 299 this time, and sonatinas from the main exponents of the type. He wouldn’t dive into harder repertoire however, such as Rachmaninov preludes or Bach partitas, because his goal was to, once and for all, become certain that his technique could eventually handle the greats. 

He tried to push aside the day-to-day things that would stop him from devoting himself to his wonderful piano, and put aside three hours daily, for practising. He also remembered what he read a few years back in the legendary pianopractising.com website; that three hours is perhaps the sweet practising spot, that every pianist should follow. 

He always felt that three hours was indeed the correct amount of time and he always meant to thank the genius of an editor of that magical site, the pianopractising.com one. Not to mention that he adored the writings on that site. But enough, of this adoration of the epic musical oasis, that’s called pianopractising.com that has helped thousands of pianists over the years. Let’s swiftly get back on our story, and forget about this monumental and humble site. 

However, the more Claude was practising the more he realised that something was wrong; his technique wasn’t improving as fast as he was hoping for. He could see improvement, of course, and obviously he wasn’t expecting a pianistic leap to the top, but he wasn’t expecting such a tiny improvement either. They all said that pianists can’t really feel their own improvement themselves, and only an audience can feel the improvement of a performer and such, but that was ridiculous. Plus, he was getting so, so tired after every practising session. 

“What’s the matter with me?” he thought. “Can it be that I practice the wrong repertoire? Can it be that my ageing piano is not helping me in my efforts anymore?”

However, Claude knew that it was nothing of the sort. He realised that at fault wasn’t his dated repertoire, nor the ageing piano that used to collect dust in his living room, but it was a particular part of his body that was ageing, indeed. It was his fingers. He looked at them and thought, “yep, they look beaten-up alright. With their veins so eager to burst out from their dorsum, but so what? Surely, I can’t play Schubert’s Spinning Song on top speed, and perhaps Feux Follets has slipped through the cracks of the well of my technique, but speed is not everything…” 

“I could easily do a math or a philosophy degree if I wanted to. That should be the case with the piano, as well. The more you grow the more maturity shows on the doorstep of interpretation, they say.  I must be right on that… but, I’m not sure anymore.”

The more he was thinking about those things, the more Claude realised that the old piano was not like a math, or a philosophy, or a psychology endeavour. Not only it required mental rigorousness, but also physical ability. His youthful, bubbly mind and merry approach to life wasn’t, of course, enough to save his own physical depreciation. He had to face the facts. He had to face the facts, now. He owed it to himself to be truthful with his dreams. Maths? Sure. He could get a degree anytime and perhaps become a competent mathematician. “But a pianist? A person to deliver the 21st century zeitgeist on classical composers, with… strong finger ability? That’s out of reach. Can’t be done.” He nodded. 

“So, they were right Claude, admit it.” He whispered to himself. His wife was still trying unsuccessfully to grab his attention from the Kitchen at the back. “I’m old. My hands are almost gone. What’s left? For one, honesty to oneself is certainly left. I should, at least, honour that. I must be honest with myself and that’s paramount.” 

Claude realised that honesty was the last resort to his now eminent pianistic demise. A musician, a good musician indeed, is not necessarily the one who plays virtuosic pieces, or who plays an instrument at all, but one who appreciates music and knows the current interpretational zeitgeist even if sometimes he can’t it bring about. Claude wished he was wiser before, and realised, albeit the unrealistic teachings of the fashionable teachers, that anything cannot be accomplished whenever we want to, and that life has indeed some cornerstones, for the good or for the worst. There are, truly, time restrictions even in music. So, at least now, Claude knew the way forward.

He put an old recording of Richter playing live Schubert’s D960 on the record player and sat down on the couch. He picked up the college rejection letter with his right hand and closed his eyes. 

His wife came at the door, saw him sitting there, but she didn’t say a word. She remained there for a few seconds and then gently pulled back into the quietness of the Kitchen. 

She sat there, listening to Richter’s performance, devouring every second of it. Then, she heard the sound of paper tearing, after the first Gs of the final movement. 

This article is a work of fiction and serves as an educational text, only. It’s food for thought, as they say. Any resemblance to real people or events is coincidental. 

Many thanks to Tadas Mikuckis for using his image at unsplash.com. Visit the link below for more details.

Some Initial Thoughts

Arguably, every music piece consists of phrases. We’ve all heard of how to do phrases, and how to shape a piece of music. Our teachers continuously talked about phrases and phrasing and they kept showing us on the piano that this phrase should be played like this, but the other should be approached like that. The fate of a phrase is and was always on our hands to decide.

So, we have learned how to beautifully shape phrases and how to obey the composer’s wishes for phrasings, but also, we have learned how to do phrasing with our own capacities.

Often, for us, good phrasing had some of the following characteristics:

A) Each phrase should have a predetermined start and finish

B) Each phrase should be consciously decided prior to performing

C) A phrase should reach its destination mercilessly (meaning that we should try to convey meaning of phrase regardless of incidental interpretational obstacles)

Not only have we learned how to do phrasing, but we have also learned how to connect phrases together – how to elegantly and appropriately move from our current phrase to the next one. And that was one of our main targets of good phrasing.

In my quest to writing this article, I strategically asked one too many pianists and teachers to explain to me how to perform the place between two phrases. So, it went something like this:

“Hey Antonis, how are you!?”

“Nikos! Not too bad! And you?”

“Yeah, it’s going really well! How was your Christmas!”

“Oh, it was great, but not much time to rest I’m afraid. And yours Nikos?”

“Well, it was excellent? What do you think exists between two music phrases?”

Well something along those lines…

I have to admit, that I caught most of them off-guard, as they say. They looked at me as if they have never thought about this before. Most of them took quite some time to think, and none gave me an answer. It was like I asked them what was the meaning of life or what is the distance between the sun and the end of the universe; You see? You have no idea as well. I don’t know either. Bear in mind, I just came up with those silly questions, and there’s no need for you to try and find an answer online. Just because someone asks you a well phrased question, doesn’t mean that the question isn’t ludicrous and doesn’t have an answer. So, just for fun, here’s another unreasonable question that has no answer: Who’s the best pianist of all time? Which foolish and frivolous pianist hasn’t asked this question? For one, I have at least fifteen hundred times the last couple of years.

However, my ludicrous question in this article, does, indeed, have an answer.

Thus, have we ever really thought about what is this “gap”, or “silence”, or “instance” that exists between two musical phrases? I bet not often. But, before going to talk about that element, let’s see what really is a phrase.

What Is A Phrase

A phrase in music is whatever an editor, a composer or a performer decides that should belong in a state of oneness.

It is often stated that a phrase is always something that gives a sense of completeness with one, concrete meaning.

I disagree. I believe that a phrase should not be imprisoned into numbers of bars, meanings, sentimentalities, stylistic provenances, and other, dare I say, armchair-musician nonsense. It would be unfair, for instance, to force contemporary composers to bow to the bills of the classical period, and do their phrasings similarly to the composers back then. That wouldn’t have been musical freedom. That’s the opposite to what uninhibited music expression should be.

So a phrase, in the 21st century music composition and onwards, should be decided freely, unchained from historic or other established norms.

So, In order to come closer to what lays between two phrases, we should decide their start and finish, first. Then, after we’ve established that, and their unique destinations and generally decided what to do with them, then we should contemplate what’s between them.

So, the rational choices that we should make, between two phrases are:

A. How much time-gap should exist between those phrases

B. How to prepare the first phrase to reach successfully the second one; How to technically shape the ending of the first phrase and, of course, the beginning of the second. Basically, we have to decide how to build up the momentum from phrase one to phrase two.

What Does Exist Between Two Phrases

What exists between two phrases in music is a musical gap that shows us the musical resolution and intention of the first phrase – It is the built-up momentum from the preceding phrase.

This gap or breath or whatever else we might call it, belongs to the first phrase; it is its last part or its conclusion. It is its legacy to the second phrase so it starts its musical life with better “prospects.” (This musical gap, it’s not necessarily a sound gap, because it could still contain sound remnants. But, for the sake of understanding this article, we name it “gap.”)

So, when practicing the place between two phrases we should start by practicing the first phrase on its own, including its conclusion — which is that gap that we talked about. Then, when we’re confident on how to do the first phrase successfully, we can establish our approach of the second phrase by practising them together.

Copyright © 2018 by Nikos Kokkinis