The Piano and the Free Press
Music has always been a colorful form of expression and was a very effective backdrop to the protest movements of the 1960's. The desire to study music is largely an expression of the desire to achieve this kind of personal self expression. It's been my experience that most musical curricula fail to deliver on the self expression. There are many reasons for this but a big one is the amount one has to learn and the amount of time it takes to learn.
The musical concepts are relatively simple but each concept represents a skill that takes a lot of time and practice to acquire. It's not just conceptual and most students quit before they experience self expressiion. You may be aware that the Pasadena Piano Institute has programs that are more effective at delivering self expression than most others. We use the Well Prepared Pianist curriculum which develops a student's artistry and beautiful tone. All from the very first lesson. Another effective program is our performance training. It's important to make students comfortable in a performance environment. We have the largest variety of performance " venues" in the music teaching business.
One unique performance venue is our traveling piano called Piano a la Carte. You can read about here in our local free paper Colorado Blvd. Allow me to digress since I've been getting a lot of press these days. I would like to return the favor to the extent I can in this blog. Just a bit of a shout out to Colorado Blvd.net and the art of journalism. Journalism is more than an art from. In our complex world we need to know what's going on and honest journalism is where we're supposed to find out. So I appreciate local news sources and I think one of the most local and most "grass roots" of local newspapers is Colorado Blvd.net. You can find it at coloradoblvd.net. This is reader supported journalizm at its finest. It doesn't get more grass roots than this and as a result, Colorado Blvd.net is free to serve the public interest.
My student Susan Porras wrote the article linked above about live music and how live is so different from all the varieties of canned music most people listen to. Susana is right and what makes live music alive is the musician who is breathing life into the music they are playing. Of course, to stay alive the musician must breath but there's more to going on here and it started with the actual breath. Breath informs a musician's phrasing and articulation and more.
Breath is an integral part of music. Since the voice was the first musical instrument, preceeding by ten's of thousands of years all other instruments, music had to adapt to the breath and be one with it from those early years. This is how breath became so integral to musical phrasing on all instruments. When playing the piano, the wrists connect the body to the fingers. They are also the breath in playing piano. Phrasing on the piano means to lift one's wrists.
When you listen to a recording theoretically all of that breath stuff has been captured in the recording. Well, not so much. The effects of the breath probably were captured but there's an indefinable essence that wasn't captured. One aspect that I could capture in words is communication. The musician communicates to a listener. That sense of contact is not present in a recorded performance. Another reason why it's missing is that many/most musicians are not conscioius of their breathing (and other motions) and how it impacts what they are playing. In fact some/many musicians don't move at all.
One aspect that's missing from most piano curricula is the subject of how the body is supposed to move in support of what the fingers are doing. Contrary to popular opinion, it's not just the fingers that play the piano. The wrist is the most important part and not just because it connects the body to the fingers. Whille you might hear about this in a typical piano lesson you are not likely to get useable instruction on how to learn these motions.
You will get ueseable instruction on this topic from the Pasadena Piano Institute.
