Piano Video Lesson: The Single Greatest Challenge of Piano Playing

This is the secret of artistry at the piano and what you must strive for in all your music that is not percussive in nature.

Welcome to Living Pianos, Robert Estrin here with What is the Single Greatest Challenge about the Piano? Now, there are so many things about playing the piano. Certainly, just playing hands together or playing multiple parts is really hard.

You might think that playing fast, playing scales, arpeggios, repeated notes, thirds, there is so much to consider, but there is one thing that is absolutely the Achilles heel of the piano and to demonstrate what that one major obstacle in the piano that is absolutely, unequivocally the most difficult thing to overcome on the piano, I am going to play just one note and listen to it.

What do you hear? You hear a very sharp attack, a very quick decay and then a slow, very quiet sustain that diminishes in volume.

So how the heck are you supposed to play melodies and to be able to get the sense of a musical line that imitates other instruments, notably the human voice? All instruments, after all, imitate the human voice, the original instrument of all time that we all carry with us. So I am going to show you some techniques for being able to produce a singing line, an illusion. You must be the master of illusion at the piano, creating a sound of a singing line, a sustained line, when every note on the piano is fading out. On the top, they last just a couple of seconds. The bass is a little bit better, but even down there, by the end of the note down there on smaller pianos, you hear more overtone than you hear fundamental tone. This is really an incredibly tough thing to deal with and it is the single greatest challenge on the piano. So let's dive right in and stay to the end because I have an extra little tip at the end that is a little bonus tip for how to create a singing sustained line of the piano. To demonstrate, I am going to play the second movement of Mozart's sonata F major K 332 and you can listen for yourself at the sound that is created if I don't use any techniques to overcome this inherent limitation of the sonic character of the piano.

Now, I didn't use any pedal either, but I am going to play it again. I am not going to use any pedal this time either, but I am going to do something that is going to create a singing line and see if you can figure out what I am doing, then I will explain it to you.

Any of you catch it? I have talked about this so much so those of you who have watched my videos probably know what I am about to say next, which is use the weight of the arm. Now, what am I talking about? The weight of the arm. Your arm has weight, certainly. How do you use that to create this? Well, you have to have some analog to the breath. Obviously, wind instruments have the breath so they have got it covered and bowed instruments have this continuity of sound as well. On the piano, when you play, you don't just push a key down with your finger, you actually let the arm come down and support the arm with the finger the whole time you are playing it, not just during the attack.

What happens is then you can transfer that weight smoothly to the next note and just like the breath you can make the rise and fall to the middle and the end of the phrase, you can have more arm weight and less arm weight creating that smooth line.

Now, this can be enhanced with a pedal but before I talk about that, I have a video talking about the phantom pedal. What is this all about? Well, if you really wanted to have the left hand sound beautiful instead of...

Using the pedal would sound so nice with that, wouldn't it? The problem is then the melody would get blurred. Imagine if I were to add the melody to that using that pedal technique.

It's a blurry mess with the notes of the melody all clashing together all these dissonant intervals. So instead, you can actually use your finger technique to hold down notes just like as if you were using the pedal. That way, you can use the pedal to enhance melody notes to get them to hold longer. So you pedal the longer notes in the melody while sustaining the notes in the left hand as if they're held on the pedal but they're not being held on the pedal. Instead you're using the pedal to enhance melody notes like this.

So you can hear a much more sustained melody. Now, I promised you a little bonus tip. The onychorda pedal on a grand piano shifts the action as you can see here.

In doing so, it adds... It actually subtracts one of the strings. Now, on modern pianos, the hammer still hit all the strings but not directly, not in the hard part of the hammer. So the initial attack is softer but the sustain is just as much as you can hear. Here's pedaling without any pedal playing a note.

And now with the "una corda" depressed.

So you can hear that it has a more sustained tone because the initial attack is softer. Now you can combine the "una corda" pedal with the pedal technique I just showed you earlier and then you have all of these elements all at once.

So those are techniques to help overcome the most inherent limitation of the piano. The envelope of the sound, the sharp attack, the quick decay and the slow diminishing sustain of the tone. This is the secret of artistry at the piano and what you must strive for in all your music that is not percussive in nature.

Thanks so much for joining me. This is Robert Estrin. It's livingpianos.com, your online piano resource. Thank you all you subscribers. Look forward to seeing you next time.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/the-single-greatest-challenge-of-piano-playing/

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