Piano buzzes can wreak havoc!

We all know about the note zinging nuisance that plagues students and teachers at inopportune times. Like getting ready to perform on the big Spring recital.. A run over the 88's has a MIDDLE C blockade. The noise has infiltrated the most celebrated note in the method book cosmos, making the BLACK ones feel cheated…

Piano Practicing: Infusing repetition with imagination

A popular discussion on Internet Piano forums is how to approach repetitions in the context of piano study. For many students the very act of going over a passage, scale, or five-finger position more than once, amounts to meaningless drudgery. In the same vein, “boring” is a rampant description children apply to warm-up routines. But…

Lettin’ go to Presto without crashin’

First, here's my good luck charm: a keyboard bracelet that a former adult student made for me. I have a pic when it looked spiffier but time has taken its toll. Perhaps wearing this wrist trinket helped me advance my Haydn Sonata finale to Presto without a crash and burn, but it's more likely that…

The divine musical comedy of Sid Caesar

Most people associate Victor Borge with comedic antics at the piano, but few know of Sid Caesar's artistry at the grand in pantomime. A devotee of TV'sYour Show of Shows, starring Sid, Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner, and Howard Morris, I recently took a journey down memory lane, revisiting three of my favorite musically framed skits…

Piano Study: Learning in deep layers and loving it

Deep-layered learning should occur at all levels of piano study because it enriches the music-making experience. Taking shortcuts, and constantly reading through a composition, skimming the surface, deprive the player of being in touch with himself and the composer at the moment of creation. One particular masterwork, that draws so many pupils into its gorgeous…

About Coffee, Cats, and Non-legato

This blog mishmosh is as ridiculous as Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, a best-selling children's book title, though it's the perfect segue way to an unmatched set of events that transpired yesterday in Berkeley. Coffee was my first preoccupation after Marta Vago, a long lost "connection" to my late piano teacher, Lillian Freundlich, surfaced…

Piano technique is about flexibility not finger strength

I remember my days at the Oberlin Conservatory pumping out meaningless Schmitt finger exercises, often holding notes down, while a selected persecuted finger had to brave the pain is gain ritual. (tap, tap, tap, tap, and move on to the next unlucky digit) Looking back, it was a wasted effort which had NO relationship to…

Birds invade the Piano/Skype universe, but this one on You Tube stands out!

An adult piano student who continued her lessons by Skype after I relocated to Berkeley from Fresno, brought along her choir of parakeets. Despite a muddy transmission last night, they registered cackles of chagrin and chirps of approval through Burgmuller's "SORROW." But their intuitively musical avian responses were trumped by Frostie the Parrot's feather-ruffling, SHAKE…

Comparing two performances Of Chopin’s Nocturne in Db, Op. 27, No. 2

I had a reunion with a childhood friend over Skype this past weekend, and our conversation drifted to concerts we both attended in the 1970's at Carnegie Hall. For me, one was memorable, the other, not. Horowitz had made a historic return to the concert stage that trumped Maurizio Pollini's scheduled performance in the same…

Video supplements for piano students assist practicing

Whether giving piano lessons LIVE or by SKYPE, sending students video excerpts of their lessons-in-progress, or creating a short film that zeroes in on a particular technical challenge, is always helpful. In the old days when I studied with Lillian Freundlich in NYC, a reel-to-reel tape recorder was the standard for memorializing lessons. No tripod…