The Issue of the Ear and Mental Rehearsal

Liszt’s Ballade in B minor S. 171 has been a centerpiece in my repertoire since age 14 when I spent about 8 months learning it. After two years, I brought it back for a run of competitions, and now I have resurrected it for my upcoming time in Europe and a series of five concerts in Germany and Italy. One of the recurring causes of frustration in my pianistic life, and one I have yet to see any other pianists write about on the innumerable blogs I follow, is the issue of cultivating my ear – learning to hear exactly what this ballade could sound like, if I could play it any way I wanted to. In other words, how do I know if I am following the score, and how do I learn to hear, evaluate, and criticize my own interpretation with all the discernment of a great artist? It is through the ear that a pianist becomes a great pianist.  Neuhaus and Gieseking talk at great length on this without ever actually proposing comprehensive solutions. So, we continue to flounder around a bit.  I’ll write more on this.

The problem with a too-good ear is that you become frustrated with your own playing, but an ear that is only one step ahead of your playing or right on the same level with it is one that won’t do you much good either; you become satisfied with your playing and run out of things to practice. Although my days of running out of steam on a piece are slowly coming to an end (at last!), I still find myself constantly swinging back and forth between total, unhealthy satisfaction (arrogance) and total, unhealthy dissatisfaction (depression).

Today was one of the dissatisfied days. Having spent most of last night listening to recordings of great yet still totally unknown pianists really took its toll on me this morning as I tried to practice and found myself confronted with more of my own weaknesses than ever before. I remember times when I used to have to force myself to make up criticisms in order to push myself to continue practicing, but today the new level of realization was debilitating. I gave up practicing after about two hours and hopped on the city bus for a change of scenery. After several hours of clearing my head and thinking deeply on issues mostly unrelated to music – namely the world population, God, and ice cream – I pulled out my score of the Liszt Ballade, which has been sitting untouched in my bag for about a week now, and started to do some mental practicing.

I was re-exposed to the extraordinary powers of mental rehearsal the other day by a recent study which showed that people who were given a piece of music to study away from the piano for two hours made basically equal progress to the ones who practiced it at the piano. Gieseking was known to study an entire piece by a composer, run through it a couple of times at an instrument and then record it – and these aren’t shabby recordings either! Take a listen to his Debussy Preludes. 

There is power in mental practicing. I have learned entire sections of pieces like Scarbo this way, but lately I had given it up for whatever reason. Well, picking it up today led me to have to deal with a principal issue in the beginning of the Liszt Ballade, one which I had always glossed over: the pedal. I’ll have to go into detail on my thoughts in another post.  The point is, mental practice has the power to improve your ear.

I sit down, make sure my posture is good and I am relaxed, just as I do when I practice normally, I breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth several times, and then I visualize the piano and my hands as clearly as I can. I often face difficult-to-surmount mental blocks, and I can only see a few fingers at a time. Over the course of a few minutes, I gradually broaden my point of focus until I can see my entire hand in detail. I view the keys from different angles, and finally I set into the challenging and sensitive opening of the Liszt Ballade. There is no autopilot in mental practicing; you can’t just let the fingers go! They don’t move until you can see the key and visualize your finger depressing it; so everything goes slowly. I work on one hand at a time, I try to hear exactly how the sound of the string will peak and decay, and exactly how I play the note that comes after it in order to make them connect perfectly. I do it again and again until it’s perfect! Then I work through my plan for how I am going to make it perfect, every time.  It’s powerful, and it forces you to decide note-by-note exactly how you intend to make that note sound. For me, it is much more useful than sitting at the piano, but it is thus much more exhausting. There’s no pushing more than half an hour at a time at this method of practice, but I think you’ll find, as I did, that that half hour on the bus was more productive by far than the two hours this morning staring at the piano in the pits of despair.

The True Confessions of a [Justified] Self-Deprecater

I have always struggled with overly-harsh self-criticism.

I feel that one of the reasons I become so depressed when I perform or record is that I teach myself to ignore certain mistakes when learning the notes to begin with; those rose-colored glasses are then stripped off once I am aware that people are listening critically to me.  Then I run back to the shelter of my practice room and try to play the piece; I am shocked; I hold the fragments of a shattered masterpiece; the optimism is gone; I wonder what happened; all enjoyment found in playing the piece is lost.  I try in vain to correct one problem - if I could only play that one measure right!  But my patience is too short-lived and I leave the practice room to go for a walk.

I have two options at this point to overcome this temporary aural trauma and move on.  First, I can remove or lower my self-determined standards, turn off my ears when I go before an audience or a microphone, and simply play without allowing myself to feel disappointment or disgust at the result: it is what it is.  This option sickens me - it seems contrary to the fundamental principles of art.  The second option is to open my ears still wider in the practice room and expose myself to the painful realities of all my technical and musical shortcomings from the very beginning.  I am not perfect, but I do not allow myself to be content with imperfection; I assess where I am, and I set attainable goals for that day's practice session.

This negative experience happens less and less frequently these days, thankfully.  Partly I'm developing the instincts to predict what will fall apart in performance and how to prevent it, but mostly I'm just focusing on smaller segments of music and playing them precisely from the get-go.  I'm learning that there is a feeling of total control and comfort that fills up the hands when you really get a piece under your fingers; you feel that everything you do is intentional; silly mistakes, fobbles, and wrong notes don't scare you, because you're still in control.  Having gotten a glimpse of what that feels like, I now strive to attain that within the first weeks rather than two years down the line with a piece.

Today is an excellent example.  It was a remarkably productive practice session, despite some rather uncomfortable interruptions.  I spent a little over an hour on the A section of variation 1 of the Goldbergs, just looping it a little under tempo.  It's about a 45 second section.  I find more and more that it doesn't matter how I practice, but rather that I am focused.  I can control the piece well enough that if I fumbled a little or played a wrong not, I kept going and when I got around to the section again, I corrected it.  Each time I played through the section I set a different goal and gradually worked the entire piece up by degrees. About 40 minutes in I experienced the major crash in finger coordination, dreams about which happening on stage wake you up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat!  So I stopped, slowed significantly down, and worked out the finger movements again from about 40 beats per minute all the way back up to about 90.  And now, with minimal upkeep, I can keep that section from ever going haywire again.

After the incident I took up looping that section again until playing it gave me that feeling of total control I desire.  Of course, I only achieved 95% of the feeling I was looking for, but the last 5% will take another few months to settle in. Sadly, that's the way it works.  Now that I know what that feels like, however, I will not perform unless I experience that total relaxation and freedom when I play my program.  It's dangerous to do otherwise; why would I go into the lion's cage not having mastered the whip I'm wielding against the beast?

This seems unrelated, but it's the first step to becoming more confident and overcoming the shock of hearing yourself perform or record in a positive way.

"Let me try this out on you..."

Tonight, on our way to Denny's, I dropped by my practice room to drop off some unnecessaries.  The two young ladies with me, having just learned that I play the piano, wanted me to try something.  Well, the only thing I've been working on seriously solo-wise lately is Scarbo....  why not?  It sounds great when I play it for myself.  So, I set out into it.

As any of us could have predicted, it was a trainwreck.

I've thought more and more lately about why we as humans can play something so well when it's just us around and totally blow it the moment others show up.  It's not always the case, and in fact (I'm only speaking for myself on this one) I observe that the trainwreck is worst on the first run and aligns to what I do alone in the practice room more and more as I play the piece more.

This is all very obvious, still.  Let's get down to some deeper thought here.  Identify the problem and the answer will resolve itself 9 times out of 10.  What exactly happens?

• First, those repeated notes at the beginning were starting to sound like something out of a Dusapin etude... impossibly erratic, never more than 3 out of every 4 notes sounding, as many different dynamics and tone qualities as there were notes.
• It was at least 20% faster than I have practiced it.  Some parts were probably even faster than I intend to ever perform them in concert.
• There were innumerable wrong notes, particularly when the hands are crossed or on top of one another (which is, to my great frustration, more than half of this piece).
• I got lost twice, had to backtrack a measure or two, and keep going.

Much of this was to expected in any case.  You don't perform Scarbo after working half-heartedly on it for a month.  Also, the repeated notes were obviously not together because I hadn't warmed up.

Tempo is a different issue, and its cause is different in different people.  The two main reasons I observe, for example, when my students will bring a piece to their lesson and play it way faster than they have obviously been practicing, are nervousness and pride.  The nervousness comes in both from a feeling of shyness and the "this piece is really hard...gracious sakes I hope I can get through it..." attitude.  If a piece is hard, it gets over faster if you play it faster; also, at least with me, I find that if I don't know a piece of music, it's not going to sound good at any tempo.  So I might as well play it fast.  The pride is not a bad kind of pride; instead, it is that you have worked hard on the piece for a good while and you want to show to your first audience how much progress you've made so far.  This combines with the understanding that it's just a casual run-through, creating the perfect storm.  Sloppiness takes over. Tempo flies off the charts as you try to give your new audience a sense of the piece, and you yourself are incapable of taking it at that tempo... yet. But hey, they all say that if you can play a piece slow you can play it fast as well, right?  Wrong (well, to an extent).

I feel perfectly comfortable playing for myself when it's just me in the room, and sometimes when there are only other pianists there too.  When non-pianist friends drop by to hear my poundings, I somehow lose my mind and end up playing the music the way I played everything four years ago.  Old habits die hard, though.  Especially when the piece is as through-and-through-awesome as Scarbo.

Steps to preventing a repeat offence?  I can't say there's a magical series of cures.  Speaking for myself, I can make some comments.  In my playing, when it's just me who's present, I strive for absolute correctness, clarity of tone and touch, and intelligent structure to the section I'm practicing, regardless of tempo and to a degree regardless of dynamic and other, more polished expression.  There are plenty of times when that alone is my focus - those aspects of music are just as valid as the black dots on the page - it's just that I don't have the mental capacity to critically focus on every aspect of playing at once. So I limit myself somewhat, when I am in the practice room, mostly to just playing the notes well.  Once another person shows up, however, my extreme social nature urges me to focus on communicating.  Well, the mind is like a small plate at a Thanksgiving feast, and so in order to communicate with these fellow human beings, things get pushed off the plate: note accuracy and control/moderation of tempo, first of all.

The important thing this early in the game is to become accustomed to playing well in front of other human beings.  I can communicate naturally, in most circumstances, and I have also learned how to practice that alone.  Maybe I'll post on that someday.  The point is, I need to tell myself that since accuracy and control/moderation of tempo are my greatest difficulties in my art, that these must be my primary focus when I have the opportunity to "try out" a piece on someone early on in the process of learning something.

The ladies left, chuckling to themselves and pointing out how interesting and cool the piece is; they avoided commenting on the execution altogether.

The Doldrums

I have learned enough pieces at a university level (whatever that means) by now that I can recognize a pattern I go through every time I start a big new project like Gaspard, the Goldberg Variations (posts coming soon), or a larger sonata like Waldstein, Rachmaninoff Op. 36, a Schumann sonata, etc.  It always begins with the initial excitement; I pull the piece out of my bag for the first time, open it up to measure 1, set it on the piano.... the thrill!  I start to sightread it, and gradually I'll get the notes under my fingers.  (I may post something later on about learning notes, since that seems to be the single biggest frustration a lot of young pianists face, including myself, up until two or three years ago.)

I learn the notes, and if I'm smart about it (and patient, which isn't frequent), I'll work through the piece at a slower pace but focus not only on the notes but also on developing a good structure, developing a rich sound  that is appropriate to the piece, and resolving technical problems right when I first meet with them.

In a piece like Gaspard, however, the problems I face require me to develop new technique in addition to implementing the skills I have already acquired.  This means I cannot resolve the technical problems in the piece as quickly as I can learn the notes.  And as I am forging through entire oceans full of physical challenges, that is exactly when the engines give out, my excitement at learning the piece leaves me, and I find myself in all-too-familiar doldrums: able to sloppily plow through the majority of a movement at half-tempo with no motivation to do what it takes to play better.

I hit this point with "Scarbo" about a week and a half ago.  I would run through the piece twice and then call it quits, moving on to something new and exciting or something I can already play smoothly.  Last night it came to a head as I resolved to select a couple of specific spots in the 400+ measures I have already learned  and "woodshed" them, as Rombach says.  The first was the fast repeated notes at the beginning of the movement, and the second was the return of one of the themes in mm. 256-312.  I had the time to spend two or three hours on them, at the end of which I felt productive, rewarded, and satisfied.

To be clear about my practice methods, I do not condone pure repetition as a means of acquiring technique and certainly not as a means of learning a piece of music.  Every time I run through a section, when there is no way to learn it except by repetition, no matter if it is five notes or five hundred measures, I intentionally focus on something different each time; it must be interesting.  I also find that sometimes it is helpful to clarify to myself exactly what I am trying to accomplish rather than just telling myself, "it's not right yet. It's not right yet."  So I will write down my goals or simply say them out loud.  It forces the brain to recognize completely what it is I am working out.

The arpeggio

A new installment of the Gaspard de la Nuit Saga.
Having very successfully performed Ondine Tuesday evening having picked it up less than three weeks beforehand after several months' hiatus, I undertook Scarbo Wednesday morning. I've never even sightread through it before, so this has been a challenge. So far, since I haven't had anything major going on Wednesday through today (except Thanksgiving, when I didn't play the piano at all, thank God), I've moved relatively quickly through it. I have the first 435 measures of the 627 measure piece more or less learned. Today, I thought I would devote a post to a specific passage that is troubling me.

Every time I listen to this piece, the moment that overwhelms me is the arpeggio in mm. 228-234 (pictured) and its sequence transposed down a fourth in mm. 249-255. A perfectly-executed diminuendo as it flies up literally the entire span of the keyboard sends chills down my spine again and again. Needless to say, I have a sense of responsibility to pass that impression on to my audience. When I first arrived at that moment in learning the piece, Wednesday (day 1), I worked at it two hours at a stretch. It's Saturday and I am only slightly less dissatisfied.

The principal issue is that the arpeggio is simply awkward to play. It fits too well into the hand in some places, and once it comes time to shift up to the next octave, there is nothing natural about the movement. Furthermore, Ravel has both hands shifting up together, landing in the new position on each beat. This makes it easy to have a pulsing effect rather than a gentle "whoosh" up to the pianississimo A7.

A second main issue is that the forte D#1 at the bottom of the arpeggio doesn't decay quickly enough for the arpeggio to be heard in the last two octaves. This means that this already-awkward arpeggio must be playable completely smoothly with no pedal at all. Then I can clear the pedal after, say, C#5 and have the control over the sound I need to finish effectively.

Ondine's Return

I was working hard at Ondine from Gaspard de la Nuit through the end of the summer, but I had to set the piece aside, both to maintain my own sanity and to prepare for a small handful of competitions.  I ended up only applying for the two, both of which accepted me - the International Keyboard Odyssiad and MTNA.  Now that MTNA is finally behind me and, through a silly trick of luck, an unusually mediocre pianist is representing New Mexico at the Regional Level (I received Honorable Mention), I am free to learn new pieces.  Of course my first project was to run right back to Ondine.  I discovered to my delight that I had done a very good job learning the notes before; the piece came right back into my fingers and after a week and a day was completely memorized.

My junior recital is fast approaching.  I'll be giving it sometime next fall, preferably as early in the semester as possible.  I have some ideas for a program:

• Rachmaninoff, Variations on a Theme of Corelli.  I performed the majority of this work in 2007 or 2008.  I did a horrible job, and I am grateful that no one remembers my performance anymore.  Nowadays, however, I am much better-equipped to tackle such a piece and perform confidently, comfortably, safely, and musically.
• Beethoven, God Save the King Variations.  A really fun little piece of music.  Like everything Beethoven wrote, it's brilliant and fits the piano.  Unlike most of what Beethoven wrote, it's short enough to be played as an encore, weighing in at about 4 1/2 minutes without repeats.
• Bach, Art of Fugue.  Not the whole thing, probably, but certainly a large chunk thereof.  I never cease to be amazed by what Bach is capable of.
• Beethoven, Piano Sonata in A, Op. 101

I will also start work on the fourth piano concerto of Beethoven as soon as this studio recital is past.  I love learning new pieces!  I am really looking forward to this.

Living Music?

I've spent the majority of the last two months of silence reflecting on how to make my performances still deeper.  I want to deal with the same life issues that the composer dealt with while and by writing the music.  I listened to a friend of mine playing a piece of Mozart awhile back, and all I recall thinking at that performance was that everything was very beautifully played, but it had no life.  Instead, I saw lots of visual expression.  He moved a lot.  Once I closed my eyes, the life seemed to flee.

What puts life into the music?  My piano teacher tells me about crescendi and diminuendi and pedaling and creating a good sound, but I feel like these aspects of performance, while important, only serve to be successively thicker layers of sophistication heaped upon the piece, further disguising the basic lifelessness of the pianist.

My friend felt the music very deeply, but that feeling was not transferred into the music.  I would even say he understood the music deeply, but he failed to convey that understanding to me.

What I consider to be great composers are the ones who deal with serious issues of life with their music (of course, there is still a prerequisite level of skill to be attained): take Beethoven, for example.  The last five piano sonatas are perhaps his most profound response to the difficulties of life, and one can certainly not convey that meaning in the music without first dealing with the same issues (real or imagined) and, as they say in the theatre world, becoming Beethoven.

I can't speak for how well my friend did this with his Mozart sonata.  I don't know if "being" is all there is to it, but it seems to be a major part of imbuing life into the music.

I'm going to stop there, let it soak into my own soul for a few more years, and then maybe I'll have an idea of the next step to take.