Piano Video Lesson: How Soft is Piano?

Piano is more a quality of tone than an absolute volume.

Not only that, but you must project out into the room. Remember, you're not just playing the piano, you're playing the room you're in.

Hi, I'm Robert Estrin. This is LivingPianos.com. The question today is, how soft is piano? You see piano written in your music, or maybe you have two P's, pianissimo, and you wonder how soft is it? Is that piano? Is that pianissimo? How soft is soft, and how do you even achieve it on the piano? We're going to dive right into this today and cover this in a way that may make sense to you. You know that there are something called a decibel meter. It measures the unit of volume. You might like to have an answer. Sometimes people see Allegro in their score and they go, how fast is Allegro? What number is it on the metronome? There's a similarity here because Allegro is more of a mood, a feel to the music, not an exact number. It's exactly the same thing with dynamics in music.

How do you achieve the piano sound or a pianissimo? How do you get this quiet sound? It has more to do with the tone than it does the actual volume. I can demonstrate this. For example, if any of you play the first Clementi Sonatina, Op. 36, No. 1.

You get into the second movement and it is a quiet movement. Some people struggle. They try to play really, really quietly.

It's hard to even get the keys down. They might wonder, how can you possibly play that quietly? There's a lot to be considered here. First of all, realize and understand that you're the closest person to your piano. Anybody listening to you is going to be much further away. Even if they're just across the room, they'll might be three, four, five times further away than you are from the piano.

Think about in public performance, the audience can be 10 times further away, 15 times, 20 times, because in a hall way out in the last row of the balcony, think about how far they are. You must project. I'm going to give you a parallel here. I don't know how many of you have ever been to an opera house, but the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City at Lincoln Center is an astounding hall with magnificent acoustics. Yet, it can hold almost 4 ,000 people. It holds 3 ,800 people in the audience. You can have over 100 people between the pit and the stage. It's an enormous place to fill with sound. You'd think they must have quite a PA system. Not at all. It's all just acoustics.

Those singers on stage and the instrumentalists in the pit, they are being heard just with what they are playing. There are no microphones, no speakers.

When they see something that's written to be piano, there's an immense amount of energy that it takes to create a projecting sound.

The singers take big breaths. They put it under tension, under pressure, with a diaphragm so that they can project even the softest sound. My father would describe it this way. Playing piano or pianissimo is like being able to project a whisper by, once again, using the diaphragm support. Because if you whisper, there's nobody can hear you. But if you whisper with diaphragm support, you can hear it across the room. That's what you must achieve in your piano and pianissimo playing. I'm going to show you in that same example, the beginning of the second movement of the Clementi Opus 36, No. 1, how with the weight of the arm you can project a big flowing line that will come through and it will still have a soft quality, even though the actual decibel level may be greater than you think.

I'm going to show you that in a moment. Would not believe the amount of energy I'm putting into the keyboard with a tremendous weight of the arm that is transferring smoothly from finger to finger. So it's not just limply pushing on a key and then going for the next one. The continuity of that arm weight is what creates the line and assures that you can control a quiet line. But remember, that line must project above these triplets in the left hand. So it has to have more projection you might think.

This, in contrast to a loud sound, even if it isn't louder, but it would sound louder without that support, would have more percussive energetic quality.

That doesn't have a piano lyricism. It sounds percussive and it almost sounds loud even though I'm not playing particularly energetically compared to the smooth quality that evokes a sound of piano or pianissimo.

It also enables you to shape the phrase of the rise and the fall so you have some room to grow and die away, giving a nice architecture to your music.

So remember, piano is more a quality of tone than an absolute volume.

Not only that, but you must project out into the room. Remember, you're not just playing the piano, you're playing the room you're in. And you must reach every listener that you have in that room. So project your sound. Don't be afraid to use some energy. As long as it's a smooth energy transferring from key to key with the weight of the arm, it will never have a harshness and it won't sound forte or even mezzo forte. It will have a quality of piano.

And that's the lesson for today. I hope you enjoyed this. If you do, you might consider subscribing and ringing the bell so you'll know about new videos. Always appreciate the thumbs up and thanks for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com. And you can also find me on your online piano resource.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/how-soft-is-piano/

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