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:
At the beginning of every bar
When the chord changes
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:
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.
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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