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Gareth's avatarSomewhere Boy

My weekend has been piano recital-heavy, not that I would have wanted it any other way. On Saturday I saw Piotr Anderszewski at Peterhouse in Cambridge, and last night I saw Yuja Wang at the Barbican. You can currently listen to the latter recital here. Two very different recitals, but I came away from each one thinking about the same thing: the encores.

Anderszewski gave two, both by Schumann — ‘Einsame Blumen’ from Waldszenen and the Novelette, op. 21 no. 8. Wang gave five (five!) — a transcription of Rachmaninov’s Vocalise, elephantine and spangly by turns, Prokofiev’s op. 11 Toccata, Chopin’s Waltz in C-sharp minor, op. 64 no. 2, the Bizet-Horowitz Carmen Variations, and finally ‘Tea for Two’, after Art Tatum. Tatum is one of those pianists it is foolhardy to try and imitate, but it was a performance of winning insouciance.

What is an encore? It’s…

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This post is inspired by an article on the Terribleminds blog of Chuck Wendig, a novelist, screen writer and games designer, which I found on Twitter. Although the original article is about the habit and practice of writing, I found much of what Chuck says chimes with the musician’s routines and practice of practising.

Practising is a habit. If we are serious about our music, our progress with our repertoire and our technical and artistic development, we need to establish good and regular practising habits, as regular as cleaning one’s teeth. No one, not even professional musicians at the top of the game, is born with an innate talent which negates the need to practice and to hone one’s skills. Regular practice equals noticeable progress.

The days when you don’t feel like practising are the days on which you should be practising. Even it it’s nothing, or it’s awful, or you feel you achieve little, it’s important to do it, to prove you can still do it, and that you are constantly feeding the artistic temperament, whetting the gears, keeping the grass growing.

The activity of playing and practising creates momentum. There is negative momentum in not practising. Miss a day, or two days, or three, and you might start to wonder why you bothered in the first place, whether this activity really for you? You stop being a pianist and turn into Not A Pianist. The more you don’t do it, the harder it becomes to convince yourself that you should be doing it, and the more likely you are to procrastinate.

Fight inertia with activity. Go and practise! Practising is energising. The physical activity of playing the piano releases endorphins, the same ‘happy hormones’ which produce that feel-good glow that comes from a good training session, or a race well run.

You could argue that forcing yourself to practise will be counter-productive. Believe me, it’s not. Even if you’re just doodling, improvising, playing chords, scales, cadences, it’s the act of doing that is important. When I was learning to drive, as an adult in my early 30s, my instructor told me to get as much time at the wheel as possible, whether I was practising three-point turns or simply experiencing the activity of driving. Piano practise is the same – and you don’t have to be working on set repertoire to be doing useful practising.

Practising is an act of doing, creating, living with the music. It defines who we are as musicians and gives us a reason for being. Live and breathe your work, begin every practise session with the question “What can I do that’s different today?”. Feel excited and stimulated by your music. Fall in love with it.

Remind yourself that it is a huge privilege to be allowed to play these great works, works that rank alongside Aristotle and Shakespeare in their magnitude and importance. One can feel like a conservator, or a gardener, taking responsibility for them, sharing them with others. It is a cultural gift, a gift to oneself, and a gift to those who love to listen to the piano.

On the days when it’s hard to practise, that’s when it’s most important to practise.

The days when you don’t feel like writing

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Mick Jagger by David Bailey, 1964 © David Bailey
Mick Jagger by David Bailey, 1964 © David Bailey

A giant blow-up of a young Michael Caine, with his trademark black-rimmed glasses perched on his head, greets the visitor on arrival at the gallery, and sets the theme for the greater part of the exhibition, for David Bailey is most famous for his pictures of the glamorous and famous. In our celebrity-obsessed age, do we really need a large-scale exhibition of portraits of – well – celebrities? Clearly, Bailey and the National Portrait Gallery think so, and, judging by the crowds seething enthusiastically through the rooms, this is set to be London’s most popular museum show of 2014.

Read my full review here

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On Saturday afternoon members of the London Piano Meetup Group met at Peregrine’s Pianos for a masterclass on improvisation with Dr Mark Polishook.

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Generally considered nowadays to the the preserve of jazz musicians, classical improvisation has become something of a lost art, but prior to the 20th century, pianists routinely improvised and there are accounts of Liszt and his contemporaries offering improvisations on suggestions from the audience at the end of concerts. Mark presented the activity of improvising not as something new or novel, or to be confined to the world of jazz, but as the reclaiming of a lost art and a necessary skill for pianists of all levels.

Four members performed works by Bach, Debussy, Menotti and an own-composition, and Mark worked with each person to guide them into improvising from a fairly basic starting point. For example, José, who played the Prelude in C Major from Bach’s WTC, used a basic C major arpeggio for the starting point for a simple, yet rather arresting, improvisation which encouraged us all to think about the sound, and the silences in between, as well as the harmonics the piano can create, which can be used as inspiration for further improvisation.

After David had played Debussy’s Jardins sous la pluie (from ‘Estampes’), he began his explorations into improvisation with a straightforward diminished 7th arpeggio. Mark demonstrated that by placing one arpeggio on top of another, or using scale patterns, some interesting and unusual harmonies and colours could be produced quite simply, creating an improvisation that suggested both Debussy and looked forward to Messiaen and beyond.

Petra then gave us a lively and assured account of Menotti’s Toccata. Mark encouraged her to think about an improvisation based first upon a repeated rhythm deep in the lowest register of the piano, thus demonstrating that rhythmic impulses can be the source of improvisation, as well as melodic or harmonic ideas. At this point, we also had a discussion about the ‘mystique’ of the performer and the idea of creating a ‘performance’ before one has even sat at the piano, playing on the audience’s expectations and “creating magic” within a performance.

Jennie was the last person to play, one of her own compositions. Mark introduced us to an iPhone app called Drum Genius, which allows you to play any number of drum beats, and showed once again that rhythm can be the starting point for improvisation.

This was a fascinating class which left everyone feeling very inspired and energised. It was as if we had all been given permission to go back to our pianos and free ourselves from our rigid classical training and simply enjoy the sounds and colours available from the instrument. Mark’s teaching style was engaging and friendly, endlessly positive and enthusiastic, and his tuition was peppered with interesting anecdotes about jazz musicians which more than added to the overall enjoyment of the event.

Details of other London Piano Meetup Group events can be found here

Dr. Polishook, who is from the United States, has had a varied career as a university professor (composition theory, music technology, and piano), a jazz pianist, and a multimedia and sound artist. He currently teaches through Mark Polishook Studio (http://www.polishookstudio.com) in Leicester and world-wide through Skype . Dr. Polishook writes about pianos, pianism, jazz, and improvisation on his Blog of the Improvised Line, also at http://www.polishookstudio.com.