Piano Lessons for Design
So, I’m somewhere around a year 2 piano lesson taker (as opposed to player). For three weeks, I’ve been learning a piece that’s kind of complicated. This is a plateau piece, like the Bach Minuet in G (in the picture), so my teacher told me it would take some time. It’s got some distinctive features:
- 6/8 time
- lots of broken chord accompaniment
- left to right hand phrasing and vice versa
- little grace notes
- a complex melody (doesn’t trip off the fingers like the minuet)
As I had my third lesson dealing with the piece, my teacher told me the next step was to start being expressive with the piece. So, there’s a process, leading up to that last expressive piece:
1) Break it down — most songs have different sections requiring different moves, fingerings, techniques. With most songs, I break it down into component parts, such as a tough left hand position change, getting the grace note in before, after, or on the beat, a long finger reach, contrary hand movement, and the like.
2) Add it together — after breaking it down into component parts, you start to pull it together and adjust the pieces so they flow together, and so you can prepare your hands to lead into or out of sections.
3) Clean it up & Understand — smooth out the edges between sections, and then start to look at the harmonies and music ideas. Once my hands are moving through it OK, my teacher starts to point out the tensions, resolutions, harmonic moves, the vertical harmonies, the Is, IVs, V, V7s.
4) Make it Expressive — once I have the component parts mastered, flowing, and have digital memory (digital as in finger) and a deeper sense of the music, I pull it together as something expressive. Then I can get all Ray Charles or Ashkenazy at the keyboard.
Of course, these phases aren’t completely separate or sequential. Even as early as when I’m breaking it down, I find exciting musical moments that will be part of the final expressive phase and I’m constantly refining the basic key striking throughout. It’s also interesting, because some of the adding it together (which has a lot to do with flow) will change in order to accommmodate some of the musical understanding in step.
Feels like a design process: break it down, add it together (repeat as needed), look at the whole and get the bigger picture, and make it sing.