Utilising the Power of Intervals on Piano

When we talk about intervals, we are merely referring to the distance between two different pitches. It’s a fun bit of music theory that ultimately makes sense, but the problem is that people tend to learn intervals in so much as what they are that they forget to recognise the powerful context they give that can help us become a better rounded musician. Recognising intervals can massively help out all aspects of music: performing, improvising and composing, sight reading, playing by ear etc.

So let’s take the basic intervals and work them out.

In this blog, I shall be using the C major scale:

C

D

E

F

G

A

B

and finding the intervals from the root note (C) to demonstrate the different intervals.

Because we are using the C major scale, we can assume that all of our intervals from this root note will be major. This is with the exception of perfect intervals, which I shall come onto, but to give you a quick rundown:

C - D: major second

C - E: major third

C - F: perfect fourth

C - G: perfect fifth

C - A: major sixth

C - B: major seventh

C - C: perfect octave

Before I take on each of these, let’s firstly talk about the ‘impossible’ interval to play on a piano:

Unison

Unison is generally used when two or more instruments play the same pitch, such as Middle C. Alternatively, some instruments - such as bowed or some plucked string instruments like violin or guitar - can play two notes together at the same pitch as they can manipulate the pitches of two separate strings to allow them both to play.

The piano, however, is strictly one pitch per note, so you can’t play unison on piano unless either:

• You tune it that way (why? Surprisingly not as uncommon as you might think amongst 20th century piano composers, but certainly not conventional!)

• Much more likely, you have a second piano to double up on the pitch (such as if you and a fellow pianist are performing a duet or a “piece for four hands”).

Why is it important, then, for us as pianists to be aware of unison?

Well, it’s purely because of the way it affects how we might approach a certain passage of music and it relates back to voices. Suppose that you have an arrangement whereby you want a middle C as part of the melody but also a long middle C held on in the background of the bar. This is easy to arrange with a small ensemble, but on a piano you might have to get creative:

In the above examples, both bars are technically the same, however the first bar suggests that the middle C is purely an accompanying part. In the second bar, having two notes of the same pitch but different lengths right next to each other isn’t a print error ‘nor uncommon to see in music, but what it suggests is that the middle C quaver is as much a part of the melody as the subsequent quavers but also needs to be held on for the semibreve duration as an accompaniment. As a performer, you might just want to give a touch more emphasis on the middle C if you saw it notated as the bar on the right to allow the note to be an equal member of the melody!

Let’s now focus our attention on the individual intervals from C in the C major scale:

Major Second

C - D is our major second.

It’s worth playing intervals two ways to get used to their sounds:

• Harmonically: this means to play the two notes at the same time.

• Melodically: this is simply playing one note after the other.

When working through these intervals, play them all both of these ways but listen to how they sound and take note of how they are notated as well:

Note that our second is any note on the stave to the note directly above it, whether this be a line or a space.

Major Third

C - E is our major third.

Try playing the major second followed by the major third.

What you will hear in doing so is what we call ‘resolve’. Resolve is where we create a sense of incompletion in our music, but then rise it up (or lower it down) to make it sound more complete. A major second to a major third is a classic example of resolving.

On notation, we’re just shifting the distance by one space or line each time, so whilst our root note of middle C is in the same place, the second note has just raised up to the next line or space. In this case, it shifts it up to a line to reach E. Therefore, a third is separated by one whole line or space:

Introducing the Power of Written Intervals and Sight Reading

I am a big believer that the best sight readers don’t read note for note so much as they read using patterns or logic, and now you understand what a second and a third look like in notation, we can actually use these to dramatically improve our instinct.

You will have noted that when referring to notation for the second and third, I didn’t specify that the distances represented a major or a minor second.

This is where we need to bring in another aspect of our musical understand and theory: scales and key signature!

Using C major as our more basic example, we can draw up a scale of thirds and use this to exemplify our point:

Note there is no key signature, therefore we know there are no sharps or flats. This is obviously important!

Now we have established that this is in the key of C major, we can be certain that our first third on the scale makes a major third. Now, irrelevant of what types of thirds (major or minor) the others make, you can still work them out on the keyboard easily enough because of the distance between the notes in the scale.

In C major it is easy because with thirds you just leave a white note between your two notes, so find any white note, leave a white note above it and play the next white note and there is a third, so learning to identify the physical distance between notes in the scale and upping your instinct in the scale itself will benefit your sight reading greatly.

To further exemplify, here is the same thing but in the key of D major:

We can already spot that they are exactly the same intervals - all thirds - but now we have to take into account our F♯ and C♯. Once we get into this mindset, it becomes a whole lot easier to be able to work out the distances.

Perfect Fourths and Fifths

It’s important to understand why fourths and fifths are called ‘perfect' and don’t fall under the major or minor category.

The simple answer is because they both fall under the root note’s major and minor scale.

There is an exception to the rule here in as much as the second we have learnt (major second) also falls under them both because, well, it wouldn’t be music theory without a few exceptions to the rule! But more on that later...

However, the following C major scale:

C D E F G A B

and the following C natural minor scale:

C D E♭ F G A♭ B♭

Only share the F and G otherwise, aside from the root note. Therefore, a fourth or a fifth does not make a major or minor tonality, hence why we call it ‘perfect’.

Notating a fourth is as simple as taking the distance of the third we have already learnt and moving the top note up by one line or space. In the case of our third (C and E), this shifts the E up to the first space on the stave from the bottom - F. So conclusively, a fourth is three lines and spaces apart:

Try playing the perfect fourth followed by the major third. This is another example of resolve!

By shifting that F up to the line above, we create our perfect fifth. In this case, moving F up to G:

Fifths are nice and easy to spot because they create symmetry within the space. Both notes will either be on a line with one line and two spaces between, or both will be in a space with two lines and one space in the middle.

When playing perfect intervals, note how they sound a bit emptier than the two major intervals we started with. This is just on account of them being not tied to any tonality. That’s why they’re perfect!

Major Sixth and Seventh

C - A is our major sixth and C - B is our major seventh:

Major Sixth

Major Seventh

Play these harmonically and melodically as well and hear the difference compared to the other intervals.

Needless to say, if you take our notated fifth (C - G) and push the G up to the space above, you get our sixth:

Then, push the A up to the line above (B) and you get the seventh.

Perfect Octave

And now we reach the octave. Again, this is perfect because it doesn’t subscribe to major or minor seeing as they are just the same note, different pitches!

Perfect Octave

Despite octaves being officially ‘perfect’ and sounding nice and clean compared to a major seventh, it is worth mentioning that the notation of an octave is a little asymmetrical. If the top note is a space, the bottom note will be a line and vice versa:

It is useful to get used to this, however, because in many pieces of music you will find that you need to read octaves and passages like this:

…will be infinitely less challenging to read because you will recognise the shape of the interval and only really have to read the top notes, which are comfortably within the stave.

Minor Seconds

I suppose I’d best address my earlier point about minor seconds!

Whilst it is a major second that appears in both major and minor versions of a scale (such as C - D in both C major and C minor), if we reduce that second note by one semitone (i.e. flatten it) then we create a minor second. This creates C - D♭. A minor second is a distance of just one semitone and they appear twice in a typical scale:

• Between the 3rd and 4th (E - F in C major)

• Between the 7th and octave (B back to C in C major)

Which one you play depends on which key you’re in. For example, if you see E - F notated in the key of C major, it’s that. However, if you see those same two pitches notated in D major, it’s E - F♯ - thus a major second.

Intervals Within Chords

We don’t just have to recognise intervals as being two notes.

Take the following four chords as an example:

We can identify each of these chords far more quickly by choosing maybe one note or interval to start with and just using distance to work out the rest, rather than working out each note separately.

Let’s firstly acknowledge that the passage is in C major, thus no sharps or flats. Important to remember!

Note in the first chord that the top two notes are a second. Note also that the top and bottom note is a fifth.

Using this logic, we can choose either note - top or bottom - and work the rest out.

For example, F is the bottom note. One fifth up is C. The note below it is B: F - B - C.

In the second chord, you may choose to acknowledge the extreme ends of the interval, which is one octave. These are both E. The middle note is a third from the bottom: G.

The third chord has a consistent third approach, so using your understanding of how thirds appear on the C major scale, find the bottom note - A - then work up the next 3 notes - C - E - G.

For the fourth chord, you can already recognise the bottom 3 notes are thirds. Starting on G, this means that they must be B and D rising up. However, the top note appears to greater than an octave from the very bottom, so just use the top note - D - and find the interval, which is a perfect fifth. All in all, therefore, G - B - D - A.

Training Your Ear

Here are some notated examples - all transposed into the key of C major for ease - of some pieces that use each of these intervals. Have a play through and listen to the interval as you do so. Much as you should be able to identify them by now, I have marked the intervals on the score with a slur!:

Just for reference, the pieces are:

• Happy Birthday

• Spring (from "the Four Seasons")

• La Cucharacha

• Can't Help Falling In Love

• My Bonnie Lies Over The Ocean

• Take On Me

• Over the Rainbow

Conclusion: Learning Intervals on Piano

It has to be said that learning intervals is an incredibly useful tool as they will massively help you pick out parts of melodies and harmonies - thus developing your ear - as well as helping your sight reading, which I hope I have started you on your way to doing above.

For my video recap watch below:

Be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel to never miss a video like this!

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Jack Mitchell Smith is a piano teacher based in Macclesfield, Cheshire. Click here to find out more.

Weekly blogs are posted that may help you with your musical or piano journey. Click here to sign up to the mailing list so you never miss a post!

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#musictheory #pianolesson #learnpiano #beginnerpiano #musicintervals

The Art of Making Up Your Own Technical Exercises for Piano

Technical exercises for piano are a drag, it had to be said. Who else loves sitting there practising scales, arpeggios and other such technical exercises?

Not me!

However, the tragic truth is that they are amongst the most important types of ‘generic’ practice that we can do - that is, practice that doesn’t lead to a specific piece of music by the end of it.

And whilst exercises such as the scales and the arpeggios etc. are great as a standard, it has to be said that arguably the strongest thing that you can do whilst you are learning a piece of music is to work out your own.

Why?

Because you know your limitations, and it is your limitations that are holding you back!

Certainly Schmitt, for example, is there to help with finger independence and strength, but you may find that certain pieces still allude you if you practice his exercises all day every day because you’re not considering the context.

Firstly, identify what needs strengthening up and then work out your own exercises to try to better it.

Let’s create a few of our own to get you started!

Example One: Strengthening of Fingers 4 and 5

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: fingers 4 and 5 are the weak fingers! Not only that, but they always will be weaker than the rest, no matter how hard you try to improve.

However, half of the problem from trying to bring them up to the standards of the other three comes from the idea that exercises such as Hanon and Schmitt work on each finger in a non-discriminatory way, and so everything improves relatively, meaning 4 and 5 still lag behind.

When creating an exercise, you need to consider two things:

• Can you do it? Even if you can only do it slowly, you need to be able to do it otherwise the whole thing will not work.

• Can you feel it? You don’t want to encourage pain, but you want to be able to do an exercise and feel the benefit. A bit like a good run causing a stitch and sweat, your fingers need to feel like they’ve been ‘worked out’!

Exercises can be built up using simple rhythms to start, and we can stick to a couple of notes before bringing in extra notes. Try to incorporate stretches into your intervals as you progress through your exercises as well - adding that extra layer of initial discomfort really helps you get used to working through the awkwardness!

Once you feel confident with these, we can incorporate what we may recognise as the ‘Schmitt’ element which is that we can strengthen these fingers even more by simple keeping down another note at the same time as fingers 4 and 5 play through theirs (replaying on every repeat):

The final step that we could incorporate into these exercises is that of rhythm, adding variations. They don’t have to be extravagant - we could just mix up the crotchet we already have with the odd two quavers instead. These can either be the same note doubled up, or we could rise and fall back down to our starting note. Take a look at some examples below for some inspiration:

Example Two: Tightening of Rhythm

The most desirable results from rhythmic exercises such as those that follow come from understanding a little about harmony i.e. what sounds good with what. Although rhythm is the principal focus, it will help you feel better about what you are creating if it sounds good.

Therefore, we will use our left hand to find a chord. Let’s choose D major this time for variety, and make a simple triad comprising of D - F♯ - A.

Our right hand now needs to find a suitable pattern to repeat. Let’s choose a four note pattern and choose four notes in the key of D major. For this example, I am going to choose D - F♯ - E - A.

I am going to play this pattern along with a broken chord of D major in the left hand - a broken chord being structured 1 - 3 - 5 - 3 (D - F♯ - A - F♯). We will assume that these are crotchets, as when we have performed these well we can start to double time one of our hands. The easiest one to start with is the right hand, thus we keep the left hand playing the crotchets and our right hand will play our pattern at double speed (quavers) - which means we will play the pattern twice over the top of the left hand.

Of course, the next step is to semiquaver it, meaning we will fit four runs of the pattern over the broken chord in the left hand! :

Let’s continue with the idea that the right hand is the one building up its momentum each time and explore how we can just strengthen up our performance of rhythm in the left hand too.

One simple idea would be to double or quadruple each individual note so that it directly corresponds with the rhythm that our right hand is playing, therefore when the first two quavers of our pattern play in the right hand, two quaver Ds play in the left as opposed to one crotchet D. This type of exercise can also help to build up strength of individual fingers in the left hand:

But for even more of a challenge, we could add a slight bit of syncopation. Until you have mastered a very tight discipline using simple rhythms, don’t worry about this so much, but use dotted notes followed by half of their un-dotted value to fill (for example - a dotted crotchet followed by a quaver):

Needless to say, rhythm exercises require an extremely disciplined pulse. Make sure you practice these slowly to begin with, and with a metronome! When you feel ready to ditch the metronome, try recording yourself and listening back to see if you can ascertain as to whether or not your pulse is in check or not. If not - bring back the metronome!

Example Three: Speed

Speed is one that comes very differently to us all. Some of us have naturally looser fingers than others, some of us have more tension through our arms than others etc. - and so this is yet another example of something that may be a personal journey.

However, one example of something that works extremely well by way of building up speed is to build up the individual relationships between fingers. If you are struggling with a particular bar in a piece of music and find yourself constantly hitting a completely wrong note, a lot of the time it is because the relationship between the fingers needed isn’t as natural as the one between the note of origin and the one you end up hitting. Needless to say, these are the ones you should focus on when creating your exercises.

Otherwise, we can still consider developing speed using the build up of staccato notes.

Let’s pretend that you wish to play this at roughly the tempo it says - 180 BPM:

How could we break this down?

Firstly, let’s identify the two main parts that require extra attention with speed - the semiquavers:

• In the first bar, our semiquavers are a straight run down the C minor pentascale starting from C.

• In the second bar, we effectively have a semiquaver trill between C and D.

Let’s make up an exercise to build up to the first one - and remember, we don’t take things like this at speed to begin with. We build up!

I’m going to start the run in bar 1 on finger 5 in the right hand and for the following examples, I will focus on right hand only. Let’s work a slight strengthening exercise for finger 5 into this exercise and keep it fairly staccato by repeatedly striking that note - G.

When we feel comfortable with this, we can alternate our crotchet Gs with a quaver flick from G to F, keeping the F at its full length and then repeating the pattern with another staccato G. By keeping these crotchets staccato, we get used to playing continually but allowing tensions in our hands and wrists to ease.

When you feel ready to continue, we repeat using finger 4 on the F doing crotchets, then alternating between crotchet Fs and quaver F to E♭ using fingers 4 and 3 to continue that pentascale down.

When this feels a bit more comfortable, put the two together and see how the natural progression down feels. Keep working down in this way:

Now that you have been building this up nicely, it’s time to start putting it together. One very strong way to thing about building up rapid passages of music is to keep some of it rapid and keep some of it at a steadier tempo, which we can easily achieve by distributing note values across the bar, as in the following examples:

As you can see, there are many ways to build up your dexterity.

Conclusion - The Art of Making Up Technical Exercises for Piano

Sadly, there is no way I can write a completely concise blog subject on the matter of covering every possible eventuality when it comes to you creating your own piano exercises, however I hope it has given you some inspiration to move forward and some ideas as to how to practise some of those problem areas.

The key things to remember are as follows:

• Focus on what you need to focus on.

• Keep the pulse going (including through all your repeats - try not to hesitate when you get back to the beginning!)

• Be patient.

• Don’t strain. A little a day goes a lot farther than a lot a day but with completely destroyed hands!

  
  

• Remember that positions of our hands affect our flow. Try playing your exercises across the keyboard in different registers and / or transposing the key to get a good mix of black and white notes into your practising!

And always…enjoy!

Watch my video recap of the exercises I created above and be inspired to try some of your own:

And to make sure you never miss a piano based video update, make sure you subscribe to my YouTube channel as well!

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Jack Mitchell Smith is a piano teacher based in Macclesfield, Cheshire. Click here to find out more.

Weekly blogs are posted that may help you with your musical or piano journey. Click here to sign up to the mailing list so you never miss a post!

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#pianotechnique #pianoteacher #learnpiano #pianoexercises #beginnerpiano #pianolesson

Adding the Human Touch - Playing Your Piano Music With Emotion

We’ve done the bulk of the work! You can play the exercise from your book. Perhaps a study piece. Or maybe you’ve been working on an entire sonata and can play it note perfect, pulse perfect and rhythm perfect!

But there’s something missing.

You head over to YouTube and listen to Barenboim play that same Beethoven sonata or Lang Lang play Debussy and it evokes something within. It creates…excitement and thrill. Tears. Maybe even laughter (mentioning no Mozart names…)…and you go back to play yours and it sounds…

…wooden. Lacklustre. Boring.

What have you done wrong?

Let’s dispel your first fear immediately:

You have done nothing wrong. In fact, you have done everything right!

Getting the notes and the rhythm engrained and performing a steady, even pulse is essentially the most important thing for performance - even for music from a later period such as the romantic period (Chopin, Schubert etc.) where rubato (a very loose, non-strict tempo and pulse) is the way forward.

Many pupils learn pieces of music from a book to begin, and these pieces of music are usually simple and designed to focus on a technique. However, they can also be great for helping develop a second nature in adding emotion to your music. So, for this blog I am going to use my own arrangement of a piece that is every pianist’s dream.

No…not Hammerklavier. Not La Campanella.

It’s… ‘Old Macdonald’s Farm’!

Have a look at the score below and try playing it through, keeping steady notes and a steady tempo.

Note how there isn’t much on the score in terms of direction of playing. We have the notes and rhythm as standard, and as for tempo and dynamic we just have our ‘starting command’ and no direction from thereon out.

Does this mean that there is no wiggle room?

Absolutely not!

Before you even try performing the music with a little more oomph, why not try filling in the score with a pencil (or on your tablet if you’re cleverer than I!) and draw in some dynamics, articulation and tempo markings of your own?

Recognising how music rises and falls from a purely visual aspect is a very strong key to this. Naturally, we already know how this fabulous song goes but if we were to look at the score purely visually we can see that the first two bars generally fall downwards and then there is a sudden rise in pitch on bar 3 - the highest pitch yet, in fact. Dynamically speaking, the most natural complement to this movement is to increase volume (crescendo) with notes or phrases ascending and vice versa. Similarly, if we were to incorporate some tempo without playing through the music first and using purely the visuals of the score to assist us, the natural response would be to accelerando (speed up) as the pitch rises and vice versa.

This, however, is not set in stone.

Play through the piece with your own sketches of dynamics etc. and see if they suit your own musical interpretation well and adjust as necessary.

Perhaps you will end up with a score that looks something like this:

So, how (and why) did we reach all these conclusions, I hear you cry!

Let’s break it down into points of consideration to help you progress to playing your own piano music with more emotion:

Dynamic

We are clearly told mezzo-piano in our original score, and this is generally the dynamic that we therefore assume throughout. However, as I always tell my pupil, dynamics have a range. It is not a staircase of dynamics where there is one level of mezzo-piano, one level of mezzo-forte etc. Consider that there is only one dynamic mark between mezzo-piano and forte, yet those dynamic ranges are quite drastically different, so there has to be more than one step!

Consider it more a sliding scale.

Therefore, without dishonouring the arranger’s (in this case it’s only me, so fear not!) original intention, we can stay well within the realm of mezzo-piano but add a swelling effect that we call, aptly enough, a ‘swell’. This is achieved by creating regular rises and falls in the dynamic - in this case a crescendo followed by a decrescendo (as implied by the ‘hairpin clips’ on the score).

Note we have broken the aforementioned logic of following the direction of the music and rising and falling with that. That’s a nice habit to get into for sight reading, but now I’ve played through the song a couple of times, I feel that these swells would (and do) work better. It’s fine to experiment!

Further to the overall dynamic of the piece, I feel that the phrases in bars 3 and 4, 7 and 8 and 15 and 16 (‘EE I EE I O’) should have a bit more prominence than the preceding phrases. Accents will help with this (the upside down triangles above the notes). I may need to practice this a few times as this requires a stronger velocity to create stronger dynamic, yet I want to try and resist pressing so hard into the key that I push into a more mezzo-forte (or even forte) dynamic as that would sound out of place!

Pedal

If you ask 99% of pianists from across all styles and standards how they add more emotion to their playing, the pedal is almost always the answer!

In particular, the sustain pedal.

Sustain pedal is often notated on music, and quite often it isn’t any more than just a ‘ped’ marking at the beginning of a piece. More advanced pieces of classical music may show a continuous line to show the exact points of rise and fall, or more basic pieces - such as this one - may use a star symbol to show when the pedal is to be lifted and then kept up - until otherwise notated.

The pedal is a very personal thing, but I always have a rule of three in my mind in that pedalling comes into its element in at least one of the following for almost every piece in which you wish to incorporate it:

1. At the beginning of every bar

2. When the chord changes

3. When the score tell you

Number 3 is our moot point here, of course, so that leaves us with 1 and 2.

Pedalling at the beginning of every bar is a great when-in-doubt approach as it will create a blank canvas at very regular intervals, meaning that discordance from resonating notes is minimised. However, the problem here is that many pieces of music change within an individual bar meaning that - fair enough, you might clear that discordance quickly enough…but - you still get the clashes!

And so, point 2 comes into play.

It can be a lot harder to pinpoint where chords change in more advanced pieces, but if you do build up your understanding of how chords work together and are arranged it can really help you later on down the line. For pieces of music such as ‘Old Macdonald’, however, the chord changes are very clear. Not only do the left hand parts look notably different to one another anyway, but the chords are actually written along the top line so we can see where we want to raise the pedal.

Now we have established this, we want to skim through and ensure there are no times when playing with the pedal would disadvantage how the music should sound.

And sure enough, bar 3 is our first example of this.

Note how in the left hand we have a crotchet chord followed by a crotchet rest, then another crotchet chord and a crotchet rest. Forgetting anything that’s happening in the right hand for a moment, if we had the pedal down for this whole bar - or even had it down with one rise for the chord change - we’d effectively (and unwittingly) change these crotchet chords into minim ones.

Is that a bad thing?

Not necessarily, but just bear in mind two things:

1. Things are scored a certain way for a reason. Whilst I am very open to interpretation, it is always best to try to honour what a score says in terms of notes, note lengths and rhythms.

   
   

2. Perhaps more importantly for this blog, we’re trying to ‘humanise’ our performance. Contrast is an incredibly strong tool. If you play with the pedal throughout the whole thing, sure it might sound nice. But by removing the pedal and giving some phrases a little more ‘breathing space’, the contrast does, in fact, have a very powerful, human effect.

Phrasing

Note how I have put slurs over some of the phrases?

This is so that I can try and keep those ones together as well as possible.

Slurs and phrase marks are interchangeable. As phrase marks they show notes that ought to group together as one and as slurs they suggest that they should be played with a certain jointedness.

But how do we help our phrasing?

Think lyrically.

This piece - and many practice pieces from beginner books - are deliberately either well-known songs or songs that lyrics are put to.

And why is that an advantage?

Because you can put some context to them and ‘sing’ them. Except you don’t want to sing them - you want the piano to!

Consider where you would join notes together, where you might not and where you would breathe (that’s right - even if a slur ties 100 bars of consecutive notes, you’re allowed to give the odd little pause providing you do so at a time that suits your interpretation of the music!)

Taking bars 1 - 4, the phrase ‘Old Macdonald had a farm’ is one phrase that all joins together beautifully. Sing it - it flows. However, ‘EE I EE I O’ I would like to interpret more as a chanted, slightly disjointed effect, therefore the phrase finishes at ‘farm’ and no phrase mark is assigned on bars 3 - 4. Because I finish my phrase at ‘farm’, I am entitled to a quick snatch of breath here - just as if I were actually singing it - and so my fingers can get away with letting go of that minim slightly early. Not so much that it reduces to a dotted crotchet, perhaps, but enough that it creates a distinction between the phrases.

Remember that I am also using the pedal on bar 1, so this will help me recognise the first half of this phrasing. Try and remember to still let your fingers do the work. Remember if I lift the pedal at the beginning of bar 2 then it’s all down to my fingers anyway, so I might as well start as I mean to go on. Remember it’s easier to just remove the pedal than it is to remove the pedal and change my finger technique.

Fingering

This isn’t necessarily one that you can do on a whim as using the correct fingers has to be learnt. You can’t effectively learn a piece of music without using the same fingers every time. And which fingers you use isn’t necessarily what feels most comfortable or natural.

Why not?

Because you can get different results by changing the fingers.

In my opening phrase, I have assigned the first 3 notes of the right hand to fingers 3, 4 and 5, although our usual instinct would be to play them all with the same finger. By doing this, I adjust the shape of my hand to allow for each finger to take it in turn to effectively stroke the note (because standard depression of the key wouldn’t be as elegant). Therefore, I get a nicer sound anyway, but consider now that I am working from a slightly stronger finger to a slightly weaker one, which will affect the tone of the notes coming out (not to be confused with the dynamic - I still want this to swell and crescendo).

Tempo

Again, we were given one very general direction - ‘allegro’. Allegro is quick. In BPM it’s quite broad, however, so we can say between 120 - 168 BPM. I would opt for around 150 personally, but remember that if we are playing this piece as an instrumental piano piece then we can also swell the tempo like we did with dynamic - pulling back and then pushing forward into and out of bars and phrases - without destroying the interpretation of it being allegro.

Before attempting this technique, it’s very important to ensure that you have a steady pulse and are able to incorporate all other techniques effectively. Try playing with the metronome first and incorporating all of the above before turning it off and trying a bit of rise and fall. You may find - quite understandably - that other things falter a bit at first. Maybe in trying to get some nice swells in tempo your dynamic struggles or your pedal is forgotten or inconsistent, but - providing you can do each thing effectively individually - it is far stronger to start bringing it all together sooner rather than later.

I have no reason to put a pause sign (fermata) on the very last note, but I felt that - as a solo piano piece, at least - this piece would ritardando (rit - slow down) very effectively. Despite a continual tempo decrease to the end, I feel that a swell in the dynamic would still work nicely for the phrase and so I shall keep this in. The fermata will justify the slowing down nicely.

Conclusion - Playing Piano Music with More Emotion

Remember that it’s essential to get the basics down first, and the basics are - quite simply - the notes and rhythm. With this, you have to be able to play your music with a good pulse, so metronome practice is essential. When you are ready to move on, try incorporating a step at a time. But remember, the sooner you start bringing it all together the easier it will be!

For a video recap, watch below:

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Jack Mitchell Smith is a piano teacher based in Macclesfield, Cheshire. Click here to find out more.

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