While Practising Articles | Piano Practising

Will a Better Piano Make Us Better Pianists?

by Nikos Kokkinis | Jul 31, 2022 | 0 comments

What an imbecilic question! Will a better piano make us better pianists? Really? What a preposterous notion to even ask this question. However, needless to say, that thousands of piano teachers believe, at least subconsciously, that a better piano doesn’t make better pianists. Well, in my opinion, definitely an electric piano won’t make us better at the piano. Wouldn’t you agree?

Apparently for some people, a classical, an acoustic, a proper, square piano is unnecessary in our quest to mastering the piano. For them an acoustic piano is, lo-and-behold, a luxury; something that only the well-offs could afford. Meanwhile, you can see those very people sporting a Mercedes in their weekend outings and then complaining that they cannot afford a piano for their child. Priorities, heh? For some people, we do not need an acoustic piano when taking up the piano – a digital keyboard would suffice to start you off, the say – but I guess you’re not one of them, are you? Of course, you are.

You are preaching too this extraordinary hocus-pocus philosophy that to play Wimbledon you should practice on a toy racket from Toys “R” Us. And you know why you do that? Because, you are not meant to be a great teacher—only just a few can. If all the piano teachers in the world were competent and not mediocre ignoramuses like you and me, then the notion of “great teacher” would have been too vague to grasp. The world simply needs incompetent, ludicrous teachers, with laughable guru-like ideations, like you and me. We are necessary in the musical world for many reasons; for example, to make sure that great professors get more money than us when they actually teach? Also, we are needed in order to solidify the notion that if you’re not a adequate musician, you will endlessly suffer in the piano arena—who could have been a better example than us?

So, from the very first time we meet our pupils, somehow, we must at all costs cement our frightful stature in the music world by proclaiming that they can learn the piano with a digital simulator. It’s impossible for some people to escape from their Darwinian instincts, and you can’t escape from your mediocrity either. Well, Darwin was right: the fittest will survive—but he forgot to say that the non-fittest will also survive but they will unfortunately make the lives of some pianists miserable in the process.

So, no, you cannot study the “piano” using a piano-like “toy” from Tesco or Walmart. No, you may not talk technique and nuances of sound if you practise Satie’s tired Gymnopédie No.1 on a plasticky, plastic “instrument”. No, you are not allowed to ask juvenile questions on piano groups on Facebook, and at the same time splashing 400 dollars on a swimsuit for you upcoming visit to Playa de Palma.

We need a classical piano at all costs my dear, save gullible friends. I’m not saying you should ask your student to buy the Steinway concert D in their first week of lessons, but you owe it to yourself and to your standing as a pedagogue to explain from day one that “your child won’t be able to learn the piano properly with an electric keyboard”.

I say those very same words on the first meeting with parents, and I have to admit that I have received in return some peculiar facial expressions and exclamations over the years. Well, hey-ho, who cares if they don’t come to study with me? Another, gullible, loutish and philistine parent will surely come my way.

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Rushing the Music

by Nikos Kokkinis | Jun 30, 2022 | 0 comments

What Does It Mean To Be Rushing On A Piece Of Music

Who hasn’t rushed the music before? I, for one, have rushed the tempo one too many times, especially on sticky occasions, such as on auditions, on unprepared rehearsals (on my part) and often, on culturally pretentious venues.

Even the greats have rushed their musical performances, inside the concert halls and on recordings! Especially the live ones. I mean, they didn’t rush their pieces from the beginning to the end—they are not complete amateurs like me—but by their standards, there are places that the music felt it was rushing a bit. And I don’t mean they did rubato and the likes—those pianists flatly rushed the tempo.

But, what is rushing the music? Is it just getting faster? Like you would you start a piece on 40 BPM and end up at 110 BPM? Is this even possible? Would you start the Op.10 No.1 study by Chopin Allegro and be at a Vivace pace in its finale; I suppose, it depends on what allegro means to you, but still “rushing” is not getting faster. It’s not accelerating your piece.

But before I go any further, I would like to clarify what is accelerando (and not… rushing). Accelerando simply means that you gradually and in an equable manner increase the tempo of a passage. Remember that you have to increase the tempo in an “equable manner”, otherwise you might fall into the stretto sphere (figure 1), where the tempo has a more radical ascent. By the way, we usually use stretto towards the finale of a piece or phrase.

Example 1: From the finale of the Farewell Samba by Nikos Kokkinis

Rushing, also, should not be confused with the stringendo (figure 2) that you find in places where the composer wants to supercharge the excitement of the piece and urges the performer to play as if something eminent is about to happen; here, the performer often increases the tempo ever so slightly and puts some mustard on their expressivity.

Example 2: From Liszt’s B Minor Sonata

Rushing, on the other hand, has none of the above characteristics. Rushing has the following three characteristics that performers, without knowing it, follow to the letter in their rushed musical iterations.

They cut off a tiny bit from the very last part of a bar, then
They continue with the correct tempo afterwards, and
They repeat 1 & 2 to the end of the piece.

This feels as if the piece keeps going faster because the next bar starts sooner, but somehow, the tempo remains always the same. It is so paradoxical, in essence. This has a very unsettling effect on the audience, where they do not know where to hold on to musically and they subconsciously think that something agitated the performer.

Rushing the music happens to all of us, for one reason or another, but mostly to developing pianists who hurry to complete the piece with an as perfect as possible rendition, and put themselves out of their misery.

We, teachers, should pay special attention to the end of every bar, and explain to our students the perils of starting the succeeding bar too early. Some ways to achieve this is by tapping or clapping on the beat, and let our students know that our tap at the beginning of the following bar started after they played the first beat.

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Many thanks to by Mathew Schwartz on Unsplash for the Wonderfull photo used in this article

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← The Neighbours Syndrome | Freedom of Playing Will a Better Piano Make Us Better Pianists? →

The Neighbours Syndrome | Freedom of Playing

by Nikos Kokkinis | May 29, 2022 | 0 comments

Censored art is everywhere. You cannot see it in galleries (or at least it is kept from public access until for some politically correct excuse it becomes acceptable) and you cannot savour it in its natural habitats, like the gallery, the cinema theatre or wherever the artist wished it to be presented. There are tones of examples of works of creativity that have been censored through the centuries around the world, and some are more or less established in our minds as unfairly censored, such as “The Last Judgement” by Michelangelo, or the Film adaptation of “Alice in Wonderland” that enraged censors in many countries because, apparently, animals couldn’t talk and should not be treated equal to human beings! Go figure.

Equally in music, previously censored music is flooding our radios nowadays. Still, now and then, musical censors decide that music is so powerful that it can destabilise empires. From controlling the Soviet music, to Hitler’s ban on Jewish composers, the insanity of censors has been none but infinite.

But, let’s think for a second: should we censor the artistic freedom and thirst for creativity of the noble artist?

Yes, of course we should! We must!

I strongly believe that we shouldn’t allow any self-proclaimed “artist” to present us their creations, when those “creations” depict acts of violence, racism, child molestation or any other contemptible acts. What do you think? Should we allow artistic freedom to someone who wants to make a photo collage depicting acts of violence towards your child? Do you think we should? Well, I think I will refrain from becoming voguish and “open minded” and say “no, we shouldn’t”. We should CENSOR them and we censor them good. Okay?

Outcomes of Censorship

However, artistic censorship, be it right or wrong, moral or immoral, has tantalised artists for many a century. Artists felt intimidated – again, for the right or wrong reasons. They started expressing their own artistic views subtly, but not boldly. They became so intimidated that their mind looked faded in their paintings, in their films and in their musical interpretations.

But Nikos, what does all this have to do with the “Neighbours Syndrome” you so unashamedly wrote above? Well, read on!

The “Neighbours Syndrome” is a disadvantageous artistic condition that happens upon us artists, in our effort to not disturb the existence of our neighbours. We are so afraid of our neighbors’ reaction that we self-censor our performances by playing with a guilty-ridden sound.

Social imperatives dictate our behaviours, of course, and in the case of piano we basically have to respect our neighbours by often playing “acceptable” repertoire, or softer, especially in common times of silence (e.g., read the UK noise act of 1996). This syndrome has very serious repercussions for our playing.

The more we play softer (especially when nearing the quiet hours of the night) the more our overall musical sound stays apologetic and timid. This happens because softer sound allows (although wrongly) for less energy on our fingers when practising. Often, young students by not knowing better, and not knowing how to practise softly with keeping the intensity going, they resort in pressing the keys weakly, resulting in an unprojected sound.

Through the years, many of my students had this “Neighbours Syndrome” with their neighbouring ears. Some of them lived with capricious siblings who preferred (understandably) other kinds of musics, others lived in apartment buildings surrounded by elderly neighbours, and others were made by their parents to just “shut the door”. The list of cases is long, but there was one single end-result in their piano playing: lack of contrasting dynamics. Their playing sounded soft and timid in all the dynamic levels they were trying to produce. And this, my dear readers, is a form of censorship. It is a kind of censorship that happens in real time, and we inflict it on ourselves. It is our own self-censorship. Is there anything worse than that?

So we should stay strong, play freely, and drop any trace of intimidation from our fingers. At the end of the day, let’s create the right environment for our art to thrive, even if that means changing our current circumstances, such as our place of residence. We must educate our siblings, parents and neighbours that what we do is of extreme importance and that we promise to stop practising in the specified times we have previously set and promised.

Because we can educate the uneducable and we can improve the aesthetics of our future audiences. And all this by stopping censoring ourselves.

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How to Approach an Accent

by Nikos Kokkinis | Mar 24, 2022 | 0 comments

An interpretation of an articulation on the piano is only as good as the successful interpretation of both its preceding and succeeding passages.

To explain this in a more simplified setting, it’s like when you aim to do, say, a successful pianissimo; to do that, you have to have already set clear dynamic boundaries of your own forte, your own piano and of all other dynamics in the preceding passages of the piece you are trying to play. If those previous dynamics are not presented clearly to your audience (or you haven’t taken them in clearly yourself), then the success of your pianissimo could be compromised.

The climax of the story you’re telling your audience depends not only on the quality of the story itself but also on your own musical prosody.

The accent symbol is like a short, open hairpin. It’s placed underneath or above a note and its purpose is to pronounce a rhythmical or melodic element (chord or note) of a passage.

As implied at the beginning of this article, the interpretational success of an articulation, in our case an accent, depends strongly on the interpretation of the preceding and succeeding music; if the music encircling the accent is not well presented, the accent won’t achieve its desired effect. Thus, the accent is, in essence, an integral result of its neighbouring musical gestalt.

The performer should anticipate the imminent arrival of an accent and treat the precursory passage accordingly (ex. by playing a softer melodic line) so to clearly establish the accented note or chord when it arrives. Equally, when leaving the accented note, the performer should create a more subtle musical canvas, departing from the “sharpness” of the accent and thus boosting the effect of the accented note.

In practice

So, as a general rule when attempting to perform an accent on a note or chord:

Avoid crescendoing smoothly to reach the accented note, since, frankly, the accented note won’t be considered accented if it derives from a symmetrical dynamic development of a previous passage. See example 1, below:

Contrary to “Example 1”, if the dynamic ascent to the accent arrives more abruptly, per se, the effect of the accent will be more discernible. See, example 2, below:

If the passage continues without accent on the voice that had the accent previously, then it is advisable to lower the dynamics of the succeeding passage, thus amplifying the “aftertaste” of the accent. See, example 3, below.

Finish

The approach of interpreting common articulations on the piano is not set in stone, and depends on many factors, such as the composer, the context (how convenient!) the tempo, and other provincial opinions that scholars have in abundance. Hope this text gets you off to a good start on the accents.

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← Real Dynamics in Music Which Is the Perfect Repertoire to Teach Your Pupils →

Real Dynamics in Music

by Nikos Kokkinis | Mar 1, 2022 | 2 comments

p – f – ppp – mp – pf – fff – ffff – fp – pp – mf – ppp…

… and the list goes on…

and on…

REALLY???

Are you really telling me that a pianist could implement all those nonsensical dynamics on a piece of music? And, in our case, a pianist can differentiate between p, pp, ppp, pppp, or ppppppppp, in a single piece? Come on!

Well, to save you from the endless headaches that composers have inflicted on us through the centuries, NO, you cannot play all those dynamics, because, simply, most of them do not exist! Yes, you read it correctly. Most dynamics written laboriously on music scores (especially of the past 40 years) are fakes – Gimmicks, “composers” of today’s use to differentiate themselves from the other “composers” in an effort to distinguish their musics from a sea of similar musics.

What composers of today want

The absolutely vast majority of “serious” composers today, from the ones writing on DAW’s to the ones using digital notators and to a lesser extent the composers who write by hand, care only about one thing and one thing only: To show off their engraving capabilities, and perchance to entertain a bit through their compositional malarkey.

Enough is enough! I’m telling you.

The nonsense has got to stop at some point, dear ladies and sirs. “Lesser” composers, such as Bach(!), were on to something, weren’t they? Guess what! They used no dynamics, or, well, they used them, but laconically. And I do not want to hear any “but the instruments of the day couldn’t handle dynamics” or “but the music often was written incidentally” or “but the musicians themselves knew what to do” and the rest of moaning, and mellow-mooded excuses of the Imperial Grand heirs of today. I do not buy any of that.

It’s simple luck of originality, of Netflix-Era procrastination and self-love, that today’s musical “creators” use those gimmicks and tricks to pump up their musical standings – to the disadvantage of the performer, of course. But performers themselves are equally guilty – most are gullible, inexperienced and, frankly, inferior musical minds, that accept the composers’ caprices because they think that just because something is written down, it must be right and should be performed. Go figure. Pfff. I’ve just realised I’ve had too much coffee today! Sorry.

So.

What are the real dynamics?

Real dynamics are only three: Piano, Forte, and Mezzo Piano. Those are the only dynamics you must learn to play. Softly, loudly and normal.

Dynamics do not move up and down sequentially. There are not just “one plus one equals two” like in mathematics. Dynamics are general guidelines. You should learn to play the “real” dynamics first and then spice up your dynamics repertoire.

So, play forte (f) first, before aspiring to follow a composer’s indication of fffff, okay? As if a dynamic like this is even possible to attempt. What’s the matter with you, pianists? Relax a little! Learn the basics first. And, I haven’t even started on the articulations…

Play piano (p), and when you feel that your p has substance and any discernible body, then try to control an ever softer pp , perhaps.

Do not care yet about playing a “mastermind’s” pppppppppppp . What?

Sweating over the ludicrous offsprings of the 20th and 21st century freakish composers is not fair. Not fair for your own wellbeing, but dare I say, not fair for the future of music creation. The grotesque use of today’s overabundant compositional tools has to stop. The composers should not be geeks. They should write music and stay clear of their shallow, false compositional priorities.

Learn to play the basics first – and then, if your instrument or your fingers permit, go for the extra mile.

Off you go now and play a ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff.

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← Leggiero and Its Differences to Legato How to Approach an Accent →

Leggiero and Its Differences to Legato

by Nikos Kokkinis | Jan 29, 2022 | 0 comments

Is it possible to describe with words a musical articulation? Well, I could easily say no, because I’m sure that I would be insufficient to achieve this in this very article you are reading. However, a seasoned writer and musical scholar of pianism might let out a sizeable guffaw reading my thoughts above and profess that you could certainly describe articulations by both demonstrating them on an instrument (that goes without saying), and by writing about them; and, I would have to admit, he would be absolutely correct.

In this article I’m trying to define leggiero and answer a follow up question my pupils ask after I ask them to oblige to the articulation in our lessons — because, let’s face it, quite often “leggiero” is not written on the score and we have to add it when the music asks for it. The question my students ask after they see leggiero is, you guessed it, “Is it like more legato?” And, sometimes they could be right.

But leggiero is by no means legato.

Legato is when we tie notes together to create the effect of smoothness, but also to carve the boundaries of a phrase.

What is Leggiero

If I was forced to sum-up the definition of leggiero in a single sentence, I would say that leggiero is when you pitter-patter lightly on the piano keys. Leggiero is reserved for passages that belong to the quick denomination and contain sounds of light velocities (example 1). Leggiero is not legato, in a sense that all notes are tied between them producing a sense of sound unification, but, more often than not, it feels like a lightly pat staccato.

Note that often, leggiero is neither explicitly notated nor typeset as in this revised Schirmer edition by Arthur Friedman below. However, it could be desired on the R.H quavers of the finale:

Example 1: Ending of Chopin Study Op. 25 No. 2

In the following example, Rachmaninov suggests that the oval-shaped groups of semiquavers in the R.H must be played with an airy and gleaming feel. (Moscow Muzgiz – Example 2) The dynamic is pp, fitting for this type of articulation:

Example 2: Rachmaninov Prelude Op. 32. No. 5

In the following example from his Op. 849, Czerny tries to persuade us that a more playful touch can be achieved by not succumbing to the “heaviness” of a legato iteration, but by “scratching” lightly on the nimble semiquavers of the R.H. The sound to be achieved should be crisp and exciting, something that a mere legato wouldn’t be able to suffice (example 3). Again, sensibly, the dynamic range of the leggiero remains in the sphere of soft (p), miles away from the “showoffness” of today’s voguish composers who claim they “push the limits” of notation by using leggiero on fortissimo passages (!) — example withheld.

Example 3: Czerny Etude Op. 849, No. 6

Mendelssohn, on the other hand, submits that his leggiero could be legibly insinuated with the use of staccatoed quavers, provided, of course, that the tempo marking includes the very word (example 4). Arguably, his desire for an unassuming accompaniment to the melodic line cannot be notated in a healthier way. Laconic use of pedal is paramount throughout the accompaniamental parts of the piece (perhaps none or ¾ pedal) and only ½ pedal and above when the melodic takes over.

Example 4: Songs without words, Op. 67, No.2

As you may see, different composers, different notational approaches to indicate leggiero. Nothing is set in stone here, but, just to be on the safe side, using the word “leggiero” or (unfortunately) “leggero” in our own performance editions, is highly advised. Some neo-purists even claim that leggierissimo is certainly needed to cater to the insufficiency of leggiero to denote an ever so light touch, and not only that, but apparently one could hear the difference between the two. Go figure — do not worry about them, though.

What is leggiero and its differences to legato

Again, leggiero is not a relative of legato. Well, maybe it is a distant relative who’s only left with a couple of black and white photos of some people he barely recognises… But, with that said here’s a few differences between leggiero and legato:

Legato can be applied to both extremely loud and extremely soft passages.
Leggiero works better in softer passages
Legato’s notational approach is most of the time straightforward; a slur above the passage
Leggiero needs to be explicitly written on the score, but sometimes its necessity is assumed
Legato’s job is to join rather than to distinguish the notes
Legato is suited to both fast-paced and slow music
Leggiero is better suited to faster passages

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