Piano Pandemictivities: Things I Wish I Had Known (Part II)
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 21 ก.ย. 2024
- More on the question of how we use our time in music study: repertoire, memorization, technique, sight-reading, collaboration, and improvisation.
Article: keyboardpedagog...
Improv Resources:
Learn historic keyboard improvisation:
improvplanet.th...
![[FULL EP.16] เซียนพาลุย "เผือก-ฟรอยด์" กรี๊ดลั่น จนปูหนี | เฮ็ดอย่างเซียนหรั่ง | One Playground](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/FsqUvwS3b-Y/mqdefault.jpg)
Your point of view is amazing. I really like it.
Dr Mortensen: please may I cite your article in my Masters research? The concept of a 'narrative of failure' is perfect phrase to describe what you describe and your article is ideal to cite in part of my dissertation. I am studying an MA in Education here in the UK. Best wishes.
Yes, of course.
cedarvillemusic Thank you
The diagram you suggest not only makes a lot of sense but it also resembles the beauty of the Vitruvian man
Thank you so much for all your videos John. They are INVALUABLE learning resources and we are lucky to have them at our disposal completely free(!). I consider you my 2nd piano mentor.
Love and respect from a UK undergrad.
Great help for an adult learner - your time is appreciated...
Great video. I love how you give a complete honest take on the whole music thing. Musicians never talks about. So many light bulb moments!
I used to try to master a piece, then memorize it. For some reason, I found this almost impossible.
Then I read a couple of valuable insights from 2 separate sources:
- Chaun Chang's "Fundamentals of Piano Playing"
- William S. Newman's "The Pianist's Problems"
They suggested that you memorize while learning a piece. Newman states flatly to keep the score lying open on top of your piano so that you are forced to mentally digest the music each time you look at the score. So if you sit back down and forget the notes, you have to stand back up again to read the music.
This has been extremely helpful and I now memorize every piece I set out to learn. The thing is, it's easy when you do it from the beginning. The hard part are the technical challenges. So the "memorization" and "technique" slices are flipped for me.
By "score lying open on top of your piano" you mean not on the music stand, right?
@@Angelo-z2i Right. Lying flat on top of the piano, out of sight. I'm telling you, it works.
Thanks a lot, this really is top notch advice
09:00 You are missing a percentage of the pie for musician personal safety. Nearly every older musician I talk to privately has admitted to having permanent hearing damage due to unsafe behavior at a prior time in their lives. Piano professor even told a class one time about prior massive tinnitus he had in one ear due to a single vacation of scuba diving (luckily he said it went away after 1-2 years). Audio class professor told a story about massive tinnitus for several weeks when he had to intervene after students accidentally created insane feedback through mic and monitors in the control room. I have brought up this safety topic to multiple musician educator panels and zero have had any comment or interest in addressing ear safety. Jazz/Pop ensemble instructors violate dB safety guidelines at every rehearsal and give no training or guidance (horns too loud, drums too loud due to lack of technique then leads to louder guitar amps which leads to louder vocal PA etc etc, all could be handled with a mandatory $99 dB meter to be required in the room). Go visit any college Chemistry lab though and for sure 100% of them have a safety training and mandatory safety quiz before beginning any work at all. And all this doesnt even touch the smaller safety topics of ergonomics & relaxation otherwise leading to tendonitis etc. It is not suitable to address under 'technique' because it gets ignored or glossed over.
Wow, this was a really interesting video. And I totally agree with you on improvisation!
Pure gold! I wish I knew this 20 years ago...
Love listening to these videos in which you share your knowledge, really appreciate it. I have no ambitions to make a career out of music nor join a conservatory, although I do aim to hopefully learn music at a fairly high level and maybe do some advanced diplomas at some point (now just aiming to get to grade 8). Your videos have helped me understand the importance of each block and how to become a better overall musician :) Thank you again!
Concerning technique and improvisation: i think a good standard for seeing wether you've mastered a technique or not is wether or not you can use it in improvisation and sight reading.
Liszt actually said something that sort of hints at this / connects with this which is that whenever you encounter a new technique you should make it into an exercise and transpose it into every single key.
I really appreciate your videos. I had private classes but everytime I felt it wasn't a good approach. Then, I quit but I've been keeping bad habits and it's difficult not to get rid of them because you see an acceptable result at the end of the day. But for a long-term goal, I need to strive and change my approach before it's too late.
I would want to make money from composing. (which I know that is very hard). it would make me happy to sell one single copy. But I work 50% improvisation and 50% memorized repertoire. The more I improve my improvisation the more fruitful and complex my ideas are. I am very grateful for your videos.
Everything here makes sense and I appreciate it. I have a tough time with memorization with little real return.
According to Jan Swafford’s biography of Beethoven, he loved to improvise, was brilliant at it, and his father tried to beat it out of him as a youngster (it didn’t work).
I don't even know how you could compose without improvising first. It's like trying to write an essay but can't speak.
Thank you for the resource materials. You are correct about the failure story thing and it is a definite problem/obstacle. I no longer do music seriously. My direction in life has changed. However, I find your videos most interesting. Thank you.
Chart 2: Mortensen's circle of fifths
Noice.
Very interesting, as always.
As an Amateur, a lover of music, memorizing repertoire seems pointless. I like the idea of technique, improvisation and sight-reading makes much more sense.
Thank you for the observation about having 'narratives.' As notes becoming scriptural, when I would go off the rails while playing a violin study , my teacher would ask , 'what are you doing now , composing?' It's a different point because it's a study you are trying to learn though. Interesting that she didn't ask, 'are you improvising?'
It seems to me that the lack of focus on improvisation is also partially to blame for the lack of modern composers. Chopin and Liszt and Paganini weren't famous for how well they could play Bach or Mozart, they were famous for their performances of their own music! How many brilliant musicians alive today will be forgotten in a century because they were never taught how to make their own music, just told to spend all their time memorizing other people's? If they were taught how to improvise, maybe this newfound understanding of how music *works* would lead to new compositions being written down, and new masterworks being discovered that will be loved for centuries to come.
Thanx, Maestro. (Your Jazzer Subbie).
I totally agree, I've been lucky enough to play at a restaurant for tips through high school so "faking" is something I can do somewhat, I feel bad for those who get set up for a narrative for failure, it feels unfair
As a pupil of music who had been constantly working on serious repertoire, feeling like a puppet over the course of years, thus, avoiding to enter a conservatory because of the old-fashioned mentality that you mentioned in some institutes and some teachers (and I absolutely overheard them as well), I deeply and absolutely agree with you sir. It is true, being able to perform a certain repertoire perfectly has become a necessity. But, as you stated, it should not be the only necessity. I have had such vision ever since my childhood as I began playing the piano, and because of the mentality my teachers had, and thus the braindead mentality students assumed, I let them kill the vision I had (and surely I allowed them to do so), and quit the piano. That was five years ago.
A fire broke out in our house last year, exactly from my own room. My dog died in there. My dusty piano, little compositions I scribbled, a wide range of sheet music archive and all the other stuff that I will leave to your imagination, (because I can't remember all of them, and because it is a long list) burned to ashes. There were many other unfortunate events I faced throughout the year, but I shall leave it here. In short, during that time, I came to a total state of abyss itself, devoid of truly anything.
Until I met a certain person who reminded me the beauty of music again. She didn't play the piano, but she was a good singer. A chorister, to be exact. So I returned, from scratch, day one, changing my whole way of thinking of music from ground up. I bought a new piano (a better piano!), started working on repertoire, with the vision that I had ever since I could remember, and became even more concrete thanks to the wisdom you lend over this miraculous platform that is TH-cam.
Once I enter a conservatory, I will shed a little bit more light over everyone in order to remind them what brought us here in the first place, the power of music. I will tell them that not only I want to play certain pieces, I want to create as well, and maybe change them in one manner or the other for the sake of creation. Some will agree with my approach, some will try to shoot me down. I am ready for it all thanks to you. And knowing teachers such as yourself exist sparks me even more (yes, pun intended, yes, I make fun of it). Keep up the good work, I wish you the best. And more partimento please!!! Thanks.
Heartwarming share...hope things go well for U
I love this. I often make a couple of hundred bucks a night playing fake Chopin followed by boogie and scott Joplin in restaurants and bars. I couldn't play a real Chopin well enough to be admitted into any music school. But drunk people don't care. If classical students had just a tiny bit of confidence, bravado and a three hour program (which is almost impossible to do without being able to improvise to fill space), hackers like me would be put out of business. Amateur audiences would be delighted!
I aspire to be like you!
Would you say its important for pianists to have at least a rudimentary grasp of period keyboard instruments? It's compulsory for all classical piano majors to take a historic keyboard module at my university, where they get to pick clavichord, harpsichord or fortepiano. I can see the advantages of learning period keyboards, from learning to improvise figured bass, to demonstrating an historic awareness of 18th - early 19th century rep to getting oddball gigs (for harpsichord especially).
love my boi Dr Mortensen
Who has ever made money out of playing Chopin etudes in here? Show yourselves
My mother gave me $5 for playing the "Raindrop" prelude for her when I was 16. Does that count? LOL
@@jasonkleps4395 Yes, it does.
And, on another tack, is GREED all one can think of, when doing music? If that's what students are thinking about when they come into my studio, I tell them, "Go be a plumber or an auto mechanic- you'll always be employed and make good money- and you'll deal with a lot less sh*t" - and you don't need a degree for it. Leave the Art to those of us who can do nothing, BUT music." After dealing with eight weeks of Zoom/Teams pseudo-teaching, isolation, and all the rest, I've had it. This argument is not for the students, but for the Professors.
Turning music departments into 'business model paradigms for [sic] Art'' (adding courses on how to have your own website, social media, etc. to push your reciprocal lack of talent, AND as part of the music MAJOR?!) is NOT doing Art service- it's merely prostitution of the Craft of Music. And mindsets such as this gives weight to the concept of church/aristocratic patronage; it almost makes monarchy make a lot more sense. An U.S. undergrad music dept. does not have enough time to teach even the RUDIMENTS, these days, when our science is so inept, we can't even decide what this 'flu' is! Why bother whining about memorization, if ALL music students aren't able to play the piano at a Suzuki Book 5 or 6 Level, for their Entrance exam... in Voice!? And this is even more the case, especially when the culture around us deprecates the decade or more of INITIAL study of this kind (including theory, history, theology, poetry, etc.), PRIOR to even beginning one's Freshman year, that pianists such as Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann, Garcia, Malibran, Viardot, etc. had- heck, even Bernstein, Flagstad, Sills et al., and that era, had that 'common consensus.' I'm old enough to see the tragedy of this post-modernist trajectory of reducing Art (and education) to a [cheap] commodity; or the fallacy that 'everyone deserves a college education.' (They don't -and they shouldn't) And as one can see -if this is Cedarville University, even 'Christian' colleges are willingly embracing this form of musical antinomian/universalist heresy- just witness the 'praise band' culture, infecting every [sic] 'worship service' in Protestant assemblies, that then trickles down to almost every music school, across the world (Courses not on Bach's counterpoint, or Renaissance polyphony, but 'How to develop a CCM' (cough, hack) ministry' at your sos. [Rev. 3:9] The dictum of St. Paul [Phil. 4:8] applies to art even more than other disciplines; but try telling that to NASM... or the college's accountant, who's only concern is warm bodies, and not scholars, coming through their institutions, in a post-Covid/Trumpian era. Sorry for this rant.... just call me Eudard Hanslick... or Beckmesser.
This is so embarrassing, but I've made hundreds of dollars in tips by faking Chopin and then segwaying into boogies based on Charlie Brown. Of course, I couldn't play a real Chopin anything in front of a college jury. But drunk audiences love it.
@@heidikuzma3605 Close enough?
Aren't variations on a theme simply improvisations?
Thank you for your content! As an adult amateur who has around 2-3 years playing classical piano (with no prior schooling in music/theory), where should I start with classical improv?
Are your courses on improv planet geared towards someone like me? Or are they more gear towards a more advanced student who hasn't yet explored improv?
They are for anybody! There is an amateur level and a professional level, the amateur is more suitable for those with little music theory knowledge. :) source:I’m on improv planet :)
The book "The Art of Partimento: History, Theory, and Practice by Giorgio Sanguinetti" was reccommended in one of his other videos to learn the fundamentals of classical improv however I'm unsure if it's suited for someone of my level (I too am an adult amateur with 2 years of experience). The book is a little expensive and I'm unsure if I should buy it or not. Would appreciate some insight on this, if anyone has any.
@@derpyhooves5795 Thank you for the suggestion! I signed up for improv planet and will check it out today!
What is lateral stretching in piano playing and why should you avoid it (I am a small woman (5'1") and have very small hands, by the way)?
Watch his videos on "the four pillars of piano technique". Lateral stretching is covered particularly in his video on "centering", but there's info about that topic in every video.
(Short version, separating the fingers makes them weaker and uncoordinated. It should be avoided because it's completely inefficient.)
even people like Glenn Gould made that terrible mistake, i.e. not doing their own thing too. 'I don't want to add to the bad music already in the world.'. But music isn't a contest, unless one is a genius and CAN keep a high standard. It's like saying that family cars should not exist because F1 cars are the fastest ones.