I love to be able to play badly alone – pianist Mitusko Uchida (from an interview with journalist Joshua Barone)
Confined to our homes during the widespread lockdown to try and slow the spread of coronavirus, many of us are enjoying a period of enforced practising (a few of my pianist friends have teamed up using the Acapella app to play duets or 2-piano works, but it’s quite tricky to do this with successful results). Pianists are very used to being alone; solitariness is a natural state to the pianist, unlike other musicians who may be missing their ensemble partners and orchestral colleagues during this time of social and physical distancing. However, this period of enforced sequestration, while offering extra time to learn new and finesse existing repertoire, may not be ideal for the professional pianist whose working life is so closely allied to a busy diary of concerts for which music must be learnt and prepared. “I’ve only dabbled at the keyboard” a concert pianist friend wrote in a recent email to me. Another pianist friend complained that without concerts to prepare for, there was “no point” in practising, and, sadly, I know she is not alone in feeling this.
Amateur pianists meanwhile are rejoicing in this extra time and “dabbling” at the keyboard – snatching precious time to practice in between the commitments of work and family life – has been replaced by, for some, serious amounts of practising. For me, and I am sure others like me, one of the great pleasures of sitting at one’s piano with a stack of music on the lid or in the bookcase, waiting to be explored, is the opportunity to ramble through music and, to quote Mitsuko Uchida, “play badly alone”.
When it’s just you, the instrument and the music, there is no one to judge, critique or comment – and if you liberate yourself from the pressure to play perfectly and the toxic inner critic, you can play with abandon and as badly as you like. Curiously, I find being given to permission to play like this often produces surprisingly encouraging results: I cruise, seemingly effortlessly, through sections which previously seemed intractable; particularly finger-twisting passages are executed with technical ease, and the music comes to life surprisingly imaginatively. It’s as if by not overthinking the music and letting go, we can actually bring greater creativity and expression to it.
Playing badly might be regarded as negative practising, but I believe any time spent at the instrument is useful, so long as one is not playing mindlessly or mechanically. Playing badly alone also gives one the opportunity to play purely for pleasure – and even concert pianists of the calibre of Mitsuko Uchida need to feel less than perfect on occasion and to be reminded of the pleasure of playing the piano, without the burden of deliberate practising.
And finally, playing something badly alone is the first step towards playing something well in performance…..think about it 🙂
3. visualize a recital you would have given before the venues closed – imagine 4, 5, 6 encores! well with a little luck it might have gone that way!
4. imagine the dress you would have worn – consider it with different earrings
5. go to your music stacks, pick anything and start sight-reading (hopefully it won’t be Islamey!)
6. listen to a recording of yourself in recital to remind yourself that yes, you know how to play
7. brew more coffee
8. consider learning new repertoire
9. daydream about a tour of China when this is all over
10. brew more coffee
Brooklyn-based pianist Beth Levin is celebrated as a bold interpreter of challenging works, from the Romantic canon to leading modernist composers. The New York Times praised her “fire and originality,” while The New Yorker called her playing “revelatory.” Fanfare described Levin’s artistry as “fierce in its power,” with “a huge range of colors.”
The author Umberto Eco had a library of an astonishing 30,000+ books, most of which he had not, and probably never did read. Nassim Nicholas Talib (author of TheBlack Swan) calls this an “anti-library” and believes it represents an ongoing intellectual curiosity and thirst for knowledge, for all those unread books contain what one does not know yet. The more one reads, the more one’s knowledge increases; the books one hasn’t read are a research tool, a means to extend one’s knowledge further.
The same can perhaps be said for musical scores. On the bookcase in my piano room are many scores of music which I may never play, but I have acquired those scores out of curiosity, and many of them represent, for me at least, an acknowledgement that my musical knowledge continues to grow. Some scores are also research tools, purchased for their detailed notes and annotations rather than the music itself; others I bought because I simply wanted to possess them. Some I have been sent by composers, hopeful that I may play their music. All of them are the music I haven’t played yet.
Years ago, long before I started writing this blog and interviewing musicians on a regular basis, I went to interview a concert pianist at his home in the leafy suburbs. One wall of his piano room/office was filled with scores, floor to ceiling – dusky blue Henle, brick-red Weiner Urtext and pale green Peters editions and many more. This collection, including some very well-thumbed, much-used editions, represented a lifetime’s work in the profession, but I suspect there were more than a few scores that may never be opened, yet they had their place in this library as the music he hadn’t played yet.
In the world today, knowledge can be accrued incredibly easily and quickly via the internet, and this accrual of knowledge becomes a compulsive need to enable us to rise in the hierarchy of perceived “intelligence” or “knowledgeability”. I am always rather suspicious of people who tell me they have played all of Beethoven’s piano sonatas, this completist approach suggesting a certain lack of humility, as if to say “that’s it, I have mastered the instrument and its literature!”. I prefer to subscribe to a more humble approach, based on the knowledge that a piece of music is never truly “finished”. People who lack this humility may enjoy a sense of pride at having ‘conquered’ Beethoven, without acknowledging that learning is an ongoing process.
The music we haven’t played yet may well be the most interesting in our repertoire, for it offers new possibilities in broadening our musical knowledge, extending our technical and artistic facilities, and widening our cultural horizons. It is a sign of an ever-expanding understanding of our competence and a necessary spur to mastery.
In fact, all the music we haven’t played yet represents a wondrous opportunity – it is just waiting to be explored!
a large keyboard musical instrument with a wooden case enclosing a soundboard and metal strings, which are struck by hammers when the keys are depressed
The pianist Ivo Pogorelich is right: the piano is “a piece of furniture”. Not simply a musical instrument, it’s fine furniture, often the most expensive piece in a home and the focal point of whatever room it’s in. Browse through glossy interiors magazines, Pinterest or sites like Houzz and you will find beautiful grand pianos in beautiful settings, the instrument not intended to be played, but to bring elegance, class and grandeur to a room. My 1913 Bechstein A, bought for a song (relatively-speaking), the most I could afford at the time, is a thing of beauty with a polished rosewood case, turned legs and a fretwork music desk. Visitors to the house gasp in admiration when I throw open the door to my office-cum-music room and there she crouches in burnished antique splendour.
Your wonderful Bechstein has afforded me great joy.
Sviatoslav Richter
While upright pianos were two-a-penny in Victorian and Edwardian homes, as ubiquitous as the smart tv is today, the grand piano has always been a status symbol. A Picasso on the wall and a Steinway on the floor, the grand piano is an indicator of wealth and cultural cachet, for the grandest, most desirable pianos are as sleek, highly-engineered and expensive as a Maserati, owned, but not necessarily played, by those who value image and exclusivity above ultimate usability
The piano is also a machine, a miracle of invention, this contraption of metal, wood and wires capable of sustaining twenty-two tons of tension on its strings. Despite its industrial, apparently inaminate, construction, one is regularly reminded that this instrument is, like a violin or clarinet, created from materials which were once living: the slightest fluctuation in humidity will send my antique Bechstein into a stroppy fit of out-of-tune-ness as wood and ivory contract and expand.
You become elated, invigorated, and inspired….all through something built by a factory
– Menahem Pressler
The piano is a machine but it usually has soul, and a history too….. My Bechstein is Edwardian drawing rooms, overstuffed sofas, looking glasses, brocade and lace. It might have been sold out of the Bechstein piano showroom on Wigmore Street, next to Bechstein – now Wigmore – Hall, in that golden year when a carefree generation was teetering on the abyss of the First World War. A few years ago, I played a Steinway D with a special heritage. Formerly owned by the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester, it had been played by Sviatoslav Richter and Daniel Barenboim, amongst others – “and now you are playing it!” said its owner, for whose music society I was performing. I’ve also played a square piano owned and autographed by Edward Elgar, and a Pleyel said to have been played by Chopin, but one can invest too much in these associations, believing that the spirit of former owners and players haunts the keys and strings, and can influence the player. In fact, it is whoever is playing the piano now which sparks the soul of the instrument and brings it to life in sound.
As a pianist, one has a special relationship with the instrument one plays most often (usually the piano one owns), but unlike other instrumentalists, the pianist cannot carry his/her own instrument to concerts (though in the old days concert artists might travel with their piano, taking it across the ocean to a concert at Carnegie Hall, New York). Thus, while it is true that most concert instruments are pretty much the same across the international venues and halls, one must also be adaptable or lower one’s expectations – not all pianos as are well looked after and cossetted as a concert Steinway…..In such situations, a true professional will accept the situation and work with the instrument they are given. The pianist Gary Graffman, in his bookI Really Should be Practising, relates an occasion where he arrived at a concert to find that one of the notes on the piano when depressed sounded with all the subtlety of a gunshot: to remedy this, Graffman simply replaced the action of that note with one seldom-used from the top of the register.
The piano ceases to be a piece of furniture, or a machine, when it is played. The player brings it to life, and the great thing about the piano is that even the most novice player can get a pleasant sound out of it (unlike the violin for which students (and their long-suffering parents and teachers) must endure years of scraping and screeching before a beautiful sound is mastered).
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The sound the pianist produces is determined by touch, by the finger’s contact with key. We call this “attack”, a curious descriptive word which suggests an aggressive connection with the instrument, when in fact the type of touch employed is often subtle, controlled, refined. Every pianist has a personal sound associated with their individual touch. Other instrumentalists, and physicists, may scoff at this, claiming that the only factor that determines the tone intensity and timbre is the speed of the hammer hitting the piano string, but studies have demonstrated that the subtleties of individual touch do influence timbre and quality of sound: pianists use a vast palette of timbral nuances to colour their performances and, importantly, to create a distinctly personal sound. Why else do we seek out the performances of certain pianists – Cortot, Lipatti, Gould, Lupu, Hough, Uchida – and can identify these pianists from a blind listening?
Arm weight, wrist flexibility and suppleness, lack of bodily tension – all these effect the sound, the mood and interpretation of every note and passage. A tense body creates a tense sound, for the music one produces inevitably imitates the state of the body. And the body responds to the mood of the music too: during passages of raging fury (Beethoven at his most declamatory), the heartbeat quickens and the body tenses.
A kind of synaesthesia comes into play (forgive the pun) in the most expressive and compelling performances. Timbre, an essential factor in the expressivity of performance, combined with touch and the pianist’s own temperament, their musicianship and intelligence – that is where the true magic occurs, a potent reminder that the production of sound is not simply mechanical nor technical. This is the great power of the pianist – to conjure sounds, and images, from that machine, that box of wood and wires, that piece of furniture.
And when the music is over, the lid is closed, and the piano returns to its somnolent position, silently crouching in a corner of the room, once again a piece of furniture.
Oh, but what a marvellous, magical piece of furniture!
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When it’s just you, the instrument and the music, there is no one to judge, critique or comment – and if you liberate yourself from the pressure to play perfectly and the toxic inner critic, you can play with abandon and as badly as you like. Curiously, I find being given to permission to play like this often produces surprisingly encouraging results: I cruise, seemingly effortlessly, through sections which previously seemed intractable; particularly finger-twisting passages are executed with technical ease, and the music comes to life surprisingly imaginatively. It’s as if by not overthinking the music and letting go, we can actually bring greater creativity and expression to it.
The Cross-Eyed Pianist 