Dear Friends,
We have all of next week off for Thanksgiving break: a welcome break for both of us in our two-professor household to catch our breath before the final push of the semester. This week (in addition to trying to catch up on email), I will be doing a lot of note-learning: I’m working on the Tchaikovsky piano trio in preparation for a performance in mid-January. This is a trio I played about 12 years ago, so it will involve re-learning (and hopefully improving) this massive piece.
Today I want to write about a “breakthrough moment” from a recent lesson with one of my students.
She had been working on the same piece for a while, getting it ready for a performance. The notes were solid, she had memorized it, the tempo was close to the performance tempo.
She is an excellent musician with a great ear and practice ethic. And yet, in every lesson on this piece, we worked on shaping and dynamics. During the hour she was able to make changes: bringing out the melody over the accompaniment, making significant differences between dynamics marked piano or forte, identifying high points and low points and connecting them to emotional characters.
But then by the next lesson, everything was pretty much back to….mezzo forte. What had improved in the previous week’s lesson had disappeared in the intervening six days of practice.
Despite going over it, writing things in the score, having her review video from her lesson and articulate takeaways, the dynamic plan we had discovered and implemented in lessons was never quite making its way into her playing.
At this recent lesson, we finally figured out what was going on: in her practice sessions, she was going over notes and rhythms, accuracy, fingering and speed, but had never realized she could practice the dynamics themselves.
It's tempting to look at practicing an instrument as something where we can follow a plan and achieve our desired results. Accurate notes and rhythms are quantifiable and easy to determine. Hands separate practice, slow practice, practicing in small sections, drilling are all concrete strategies to reinforce notes and rhythms.
But dynamics, voicing and phrasing often live in a different category in students’ minds. It involves a different kind of iterative practice, where you listen actively to yourself and evaluate the quality of your sound, and must discern in the moment what the next best practice action will be for you.
Once my student realized that dynamics can be reinforced through intentional repetition and careful listening, her eyes lit up and I could see the "aha" moment happening in her brain. She said, “Oh wow, I didn’t realize I could actually practice dynamics!”
And then, when she performed this piece in studio class five days later, there it was: she played with so much more expression and variety in her sound.
Even advanced players can fall into the trap of thinking of practicing as a two-step process: get the notes and rhythms right, then add the musicality later. Dynamics, voicing, color, phrasing, character all live in the hazier category of “expression.” Expression is harder to teach, and it's tempting to assume it will "just happen" once you know a piece well enough.
But expression is made up of skills, and skills can be practiced.
Here are a few examples of ways you can practice dynamics:
- Play a passage marked "crescendo" several times in a row until your ear and your hands know exactly what it sounds and feels like to grow from soft to loud.
- Practice "placing" the notes at a subito piano dynamic over and over until it feels natural. ("Subito" means "sudden" and is a moment where the music abruptly goes from loud to soft with no warning.)
- Find a major "arrival" or climax in a piece, and practice starting right on the loudest moment until you have memorized the sound and character, along with the physical feeling you have when you play that spot. Then back up and practice approaching it until you can consistently replicate that sound and physical feeling at the climax.
- Find every dynamic marking written in the piece, and practice starting right on it to determine the sound and touch you want in that spot. Then (and most importantly), practice recreating that sound and touch several times at that spot before moving on to the next dynamic marking in the piece.
Notice that I keep referring not only to the sound, but also the feel of your hands, when you are practicing dynamics. Just as your fingers learn the geography of the keyboard, your ear and hands can learn the feel and sound of dynamic contrast, character, and expression.
If you’re working on a piece right now and you are struggling to make your dynamic contrasts “stick,” try some of the exercises above.
This kind of practice turns dynamic contrast into a habit that you start to do automatically, because you’re training your hands and ears to actually expect it and do it consistently. Over time, you will build an aural repertoire of sounds your ear can expect, along with a physical repertoire of possible touches you can use.
The real breakthrough for my student was that it's not enough to just discover things once in a lesson when her teacher (i.e., me 😊) points them out. She had to take ownership of those things and learn to patiently practice those ideas daily until they became automatic and incorporated into her playing.
As I work on Tchaikovsky this week, I’ll be working on the dynamics too - I’ll be practicing with you in solidarity!
Happy practicing (and Happy Thanksgiving to my US readers)! 👋 🦃
Kate