Piano Video Lesson: Do Pianists All Sound the Same?

Welcome to livingpianos.com. I'm Robert Estrin. Thanks so much for joining me. Today's question is a really tough one to answer, but I'm going to do my best. What makes a pianist's sound unique? It's a really interesting thing. My wife is a flutist and she talked about when she was very young and she was studying with some great flutists, and at one point she handed her teacher, who was a concert flutist, her cheap student level flute. And sure enough, playing that garbage flute, it still sounded like this great master flutist. It didn't sound like the Bundy. It sounded like this great flutist. So on wind instruments, it's obvious, of course the most obvious one is singers. As soon as you hear a voice, you know it. You hear Frank Sinatra, two notes, boom. Mel Torme, there's no doubt about who you're listening to with singers. With piano, it's much further removed than singing certainly. Even further removed from other wind instruments or even string instruments. But indeed there is a sound.

Listen, for example, I grew up of course, idolizing Horowitz and Rubinstein and talk about different architecture of sound. The whole methodology of their pianistic approach is so drastically different. So this enters into it, certainly physiology has something to do with the sound of the piano. A massive man, for example, compared to a very slight man or woman can by its very nature, bigger hands, smaller hands. But it goes much deeper because how you hear things are going to affect the way you approach the keyboard, getting a very different sound.

Now what are some of those differences? Well, I was trained from a very young age from my father, Morton Estrin, to have the weight of the arm supported by the finger. Instead of having a limp finger kind of floating in midair with your arms kind of, having them dangle and let the fingers push down now in very fast passages. That's exactly what you do because you can't support much weight when you're going very quickly. But in a slow melody, you certainly want to have a sense of line. And the best way to get that is to use the weight of the arm.

So you could hear the sound and the fluidity. Now, if I were to play this a different way, play it just with the fingers, without supporting the weight of the arm. Let's see what happens then.

Now, I think you could probably hear a big difference there. Naturally how the pedal comes into play also affects the tone tremendously. When to engage the soft pedal. So there's so much to it and I can tell you this, there are certain pianists, who I hear just a little bit, and I know who the pianist is just from the sound, which is amazing. Because the human voice, you've got the whole inside of the body and the vocal chords and the intonation of the speech. On a wind instrument, you've got the lips and you've got also the throat and the vibration. You've got so much more. What do you have in the piano? The tone productions is a hammer hitting a string. How the heck do you get a different sound? Well, just like I told you now, growing up, I had very small, weak fingers, and yet I grew up hearing my father and some of his spectacular students. And I always would strive to get that beautiful sound. In fact, I contorted my body trying to make my spaghetti fingers, produce anything close to the sound that I heard in my ears.

But I made it happen in slow music. Fast pieces, it was a little bit tougher for me having weak fingers and I didn't practice a great deal as a young child. So on slow music though, even from the youngest age, I have some recordings, I've got to dig up one of these days. I was able to produce the sounds that I heard on the keyboard just from making it happen. So that's really the lesson for today. The sound of pianists come down to the, what they hear in their heads and how they're able to achieve that sound, the connection of the hands to the ears. And that's what you want to strive for in your playing so you could express your voice at the piano. I'd love to hear from all of you. This is a really fascinating subject. And any of you who has ideas about how to produce a beautiful sound of the piano, there's more to this and I can produce a whole series on this, which I may do on my Patreon channel. Thanks all you subscribers. I'll see you next time. Robert Estrin here at livingpianos.com, your online piano resource.

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