SIX TIPS: Facilitate emotional connection for expressive playing
HELP PIANO STUDENTS BE READY FOR AN UPCOMING PERFORMANCE
The next of my Six Tips to Ensure Your Student is Ready for a Performance is to facilitate the student's emotional connection to the piece so that he or she can play expressively. This is my favorite of these tips!
WHAT IS MUSIC?
Without embarking on a long philosophical discussion, I think this is a great point to stop and ask the question - what is art? The definition I like to work with is:
Art is the creative expression of the human condition.
Music, therefore, is a live embodiment of organized sound, performed in real time, that is one form of art — one way to creatively express the human condition.
(Let me know if you have a different definition! My head quickly starts to swim when I get this abstract and metaphysical!)
WHAT MUSIC IS NOT
“Music” is not dots and lines on a page inside a book.
“Music” is also not the practice of playing a series of prescribed notes without mistake.
Unfortunately, many of our students think that getting through a piece with no mistakes is the goal in any given performance. In my mind, this is not music. Performing music is about sharing something expressive and allowing an audience’s imagination to travel to new places upon hearing new sounds.
IF OUR STUDENTS ARE PERFORMING PIECES OF ART IN REAL TIME…
…then they should probably have an idea of what each individual piece is expressing.
There are many ways to help a student consider what a piece is all about, and therefore what they might want to express through it. Here are some starting points:
The title of the piece. If the title is descriptive, such as Crocodile in the Nile or Barcarolle (boat song), then the composer has given an indication of what he or she was thinking when it was composed. Other titles, such as Allemande or Scherzo might not trigger for students so easily what the composer intended, but they still indicate certain ideas of character and tempo.
The indicated key signature and harmony. Harmony is one of our best ways to make expressive choices. Is this piece primarily in major or minor? Does it ever switch to the other mode? Where are the most dissonant chords? Where does the harmony feel resolved?
The indicated tempo and rhythmic content. Fast pieces elicit a very different feeling than those that are more static and slow-moving.
The dynamics and other expressive marks. What has the composer chosen to highlight? What does the composer’s overall dynamic plan tell us about the narrative of the piece?
FEELING VS. ACTING
Sometimes students wonder if they actually need to “feel” the emotions that they think a piece is expressing. I would argue that that is not necessary. Instead, pianists are like actors — we adopt a character and then create sounds that express that character. You don’t have to feel sad to play a melancholy piece by Chopin.
We as teachers can guide students by asking questions to help them relate their experience to the the character at hand. My go-to questions include the following:
What mental picture does this piece create for you?
Do you already have an idea in your head for a story that goes with this music?
Does this music remind you of anything from a book you’ve read or a movie you’ve seen?
If this music was the soundtrack to a scene in a movie, what would be happening?
What kind of character might be represented by this theme?
(Most American students over a certain age are familiar with at least one of the following popular movie series: Star Wars, Harry Potter, or Lord of the Rings. The composers of these film scores assigned specific melodic themes to individual characters or settings, such as Hedwig’s Theme. This is an easy way to help a student understand the idea that a musical theme might represent a particular character.)
Younger students who have had limited experience or students who are more reticent to use their imaginations may have difficulty brainstorming stories or connecting with certain characters. Hopefully over time our continued encouragement in this area can help them develop in this area.
Why is this important for performance?
The more our students can view performance as sharing something expressive with their audience, the more they will focus on the music while performing. This can only lead to a more engaging performance for the audience.
Students who have used their imaginations and built an emotional connection to the piece at hand are more likely to enjoy playing the piece and invest themselves while playing. This enjoyment and investment can again only lead to a more engaging performance for the audience.
As I said above, most students will default to thinking that performance is all about playing their pieces from start to finish without a mistake. This is a narrow view of what is possible, and one that I think we as teachers must combat regularly in lessons. By focusing on expressive matters in lessons, we communicate to our students that we value that over accuracy. (Don’t get me wrong - I value accuracy too. But once a piece is learned and ready to be performed, I remind students that they are likely to play at least one wrong note. It’s more important to me in performance that they play expressively than that they play correctly.)
Focusing on expression solidifies memory! Having a imaginative narrative for a piece is just one practice strategy in the memorization process and helps students move towards a unified, organized performance.
Are you familiar with my YouTube playlist all about how to teach intermediate piano repertoire? If not, click the image to the right. In each of these videos, I give suggestions for how I have helped students connect in ways that help them play expressively.
Here’s another sneak peak of what it looks like inside my course called Preparing Confident Performers. You can see that in Module 3, “Training Students to Perform Historical Repertoire,” I start off with a lesson titled Building a Foundation for Expressive Performance. I firmly believe that teaching our students to play expressively is the basis for confident, dependable performance.
Click the photo below to grab your spot for access to this course which
helps you set vision for what you want performance to look like in your studio,
gives you loads of practical tips on how to implement that vision, and
supports you as you help your students know the joy of sharing beautiful music with others:
(And if you’re one of those people who notices things - yes, the Baroque lesson is not yet uploaded! It will be soon!)
