How Amateur Pianists Can Sound Like Professionals
1. I Went Outside
This past Friday I took a trip to Roy Thomsons Hall in Toronto to watch Jan Lisiecki play Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1 alongside the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. While I was listening and thinking about the score (like a loser) I had two realisations:
Firstly, I was providing a community service by single handedly bringing the age demographic down by quite the margin.
Secondly, I was listening without any concern for how well he was actually playing the piece of music. Within the first few notes my brain heard that he was clearly a great player and the analytical part of my brain was allowed to switch off leaving me to focus on the musical story that was being told.
Even to an untrained ear it is usually easy to distinguish between the sound produced by a professional pianist and the sound produced by an amateur. But what is it about the learning pianist’s playing that makes it obvious that they haven’t yet reached a high level? Are there certain things that professional players do that amateurs don’t?
The answer is yes, of course!
A large amount of the difference we hear can actually be attributed to the differences in approach to practice and how that time is used. This means that by focusing on the correct things, providing the pieces are of an appropriate level, an amateur can learn to produce each piece of music to the same quality as a professional.
2. Control & Sound
One of the most challenging things to achieve for a learning pianists is to control their fingers and weight distribution across the keys. Let’s say you have a melody at the top of the right hand that needs to sing out but the notes in the rest of your right hand need to be softer. For the professional player, they would be able to use their muscle memory of the many times before that this technique has been required. Whereas for an amateur this may not be such a natural thing to do!
Imagine for a moment that you are a golfer (I realise that this is a random example). Let’s also imagine that you are the best that the world has ever seen at about golf…except for putting! For some reason it just takes you 6 shots whenever the golf ball hits the green to actually get it in the hole. Well then…you are going to lose - every time! So, in this situation you would need to spend most of your time practicing putting, right?!
When learning the piano, the trick to gaining control of your hands is to; identify the problem, come up with a way to practice the problem and then do it more than anything else! It is actually very common for learning pianists to assume that something will fix itself over time. Yet this is why an amateurs pieces often sound like they are “undercooked”.
The aim when learning a piece of music is to play it as close to the final result as you can - as many times as you can. This is because each time you play something, you are engraining that way of playing it into your brain and hands. Many players will attempt to rush through learning all of the notes with the aim of maybe going back afterwards and making those notes sound good…but that never happens and is much harder to do because it then feels like there is a lot of work to do and not as much motivation. The key to gaining control of the sound you are producing is to ALWAYS be considering the sound that you are producing and practicing it as much as you practice pressing the correct keys.
3. Rhythm & Accuracy
Another common distinction that can be made between the amateur and the professional is the fluency of rhythm within a piece of music. Hearing a professional play the piano is a seamless audio experience. Even if they were to play many wrong notes, the rhythm and fluency of the piece of music is very often not affected. So much so that you may not even recognise that they have played incorrect notes at all! Whereas for the learner, depending on how well they know the piece, there may be some stopping and starting that occurs.
This is because, to a professional pianist the priority is not the notes that are being played - but the effect of the notes that are being played. To a listener the experience of hearing a wrong note is much less of a jarring experience than a change of pulse in the music and therefore the pianist will try to minimise the disruption to the audiences experience.
For learning pianists the focus is usually on how well they play this piece. This means that their priorities are very different. The learner focuses on what’s in their own mind and the professional focuses on what’s in the audiences mind.
There are several ways to combat this for the amateur. Firstly a practical tip would be to practice to a metronome once a piece is somewhat comfortable and aim to play through without disruption. However, a more “woo woo” approach is to develop a detached relationship to mistakes. A mistake is a signal for practice, an audience doesn’t care about that…they care about the meaning you are trying to convey.
Imagine giving a speech and saying a word wrong. You would likely get straight on with the rest of the speech, this is because you don’t believe saying a word wrong is a reflection of your ability to speak. This is the same relationship that needs to be developed in your music!
Matthew Cawood
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