Piano Video Lesson: How to Make Your Melody Float on Water

Hi, I'm Robert Estrin, you're watching LivingPianos.com, your online piano resource. And today I'm going to show you how to make your melody float on water.

What am I talking about? You want to be able to have your melody just soar above a bed of rippling currents.

I'm giving you some images, but you know what I'm talking about. You don't want to give, let's say you're playing a Chopin Nocturne. Let me play a little bit of a Chopin Nocturne for you so you can kind of grasp what I'm talking about for you. The B -flat minor nocturne, I'm going to play the beginning for you.

So, you hear the beautiful melody and the accompaniment in the left hand is just like the rippling currents with the melody floating above.

How to achieve this is what we're going to discuss today.

Number one, you must find really great fingering for that left hand in order to achieve that legato.

The way to discover the good fingering is by practicing without the pedal.

So, if you were to take this piece and support the melody in the right hand with a lot of arm weight so the melody can be above the accompaniment and then a very fluid legato. I'm going to play it without the pedal so you can hear what's involved in this process.

So, you'll hear that fluidity of the left hand. Listen to it by itself.

So, you got to find fingering that enables that kind of legato. Now, the other side of this is that you must have a buoyant melody, one that rises above this accompaniment. Why is this so difficult? For two reasons. First of all, high notes don't last very long compared to low notes.

And on top of that, you have more notes in the left hand. The left hand is faster than the right hand. So it's a double whammy. So you must make an angularity in your balance where the melody is much, much, much louder than the accompaniment. Well, how can you achieve it without making it sound harsh? Well, the secret, as I made mention about, is the weight of the arm transferring smoothly from note to note. So instead of articulating each separate note, you have a fluid line like the breadth of a singer or the bow of a string player.

And so each note floats to the next.

You can never calculate note to note and make it sound anything but calculated.

When you use the weight of the arm smoothly transferring from key to key, you get that smooth line. And you can play with tremendous energy and still not get a harsh sound. I'm going to really put a tremendous amount of weight into the right hand and see if I can still get a right, smooth, warm sound, not a harsh sound.

Even with that extreme, more than I would do, it's still not a harsh, punched, percussive sound. Remember, the piano, don't tell anybody, but it is a percussion instrument. You're playing a melody like this. How can you get that smoothness? The weight of the arm in the right hand, a fluid left hand that's very beautifully underplayed by finding a fingering where you can play that extreme legato. Practice incessantly without the pedal so you can find the fingering that enables this. That is the secret, the great fingering of the left hand, practicing without pedal and using the weight of the right hand or the melody, whichever hand it's in, in order to get the smooth line. Try it on your plane. Let us all know how it works here at LivingPianos.com. We're your online piano resource. Again, I'm Robert Estrin. Thanks again so much for joining us.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/how-to-make-your-melody-float-on-water/

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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