Why The Simplest Pieces Are Often The Hardest
Information
Many players believe that pieces become more difficult with more notes. As you get better at the piano, pieces contain more and more notes and are more technically challenging to play. And technically speaking, that is true. The more notes, the bigger the chords and the more technically demanding a piece will become. However, the technical challenge is actually a relatively small part of the equation.
Technical challenges in a piece can (for the most part) be systematically fixed. By slowing down and repeating small isolated sections over multiple practice sessions, technical challenges will improve.
However, something that won’t improve without more deliberate consideration is the musicality and interpretation. In this respect, simple pieces are significantly more demanding. This is because complex pieces contain vast amounts of information, whereas simple pieces require understanding and interpretation.
For example, if you have a piece that has a thick texture with dramatic harmonies, rapid movement and an obvious peak, these things will naturally create excitement, tension, momentum and a build in the music. So the music is giving you a lot of information about the story that you’re trying to tell.
However, if we have another piece of music that is much simpler, perhaps it’s one melody and perhaps you have sparse accompaniment in the left hand, then suddenly you have much less information to help you determine how you are supposed to interpret that piece of music. So, in this situation, the performer has to create more of the meaning, as opposed to the piece providing the meaning.
Interpretation
So how do you interpret a simple piece?
Well, simple pieces can be interpreted in many different ways. Let’s say you have a slow melody, some quiet dynamics and simple chords. What does that mean? It could mean loneliness, peace, nostalgia, grief, defeat or many other things. And unlike other forms of art where the meaning is much more explicit, in music the sheet music often doesn’t tell us. So, simple music requires more decision-making.
Let’s take the song “Happy Birthday” for example. That is a song that pretty much everyone knows and would probably be regarded by most people as pretty simple. Yet if I asked you to play “Happy Birthday” in a way that genuinely moved someone emotionally and really reflected the sentiment of the music, then that would actually be very difficult. There are very few notes, the chords are simple, there are no dramatic textures and very little information in the music itself to help your interpretation. Everything comes down to how you shape the phrases, which notes you emphasise, how you use timing and what kind of character you give the music. In many ways, this makes it more demanding than a much more complex piece because so much of the meaning has to come from the performer rather than the music itself.
Whereas if we have a piece that’s much more complex, for example, “Une Barque sur l’océan” from Ravel’s Miroirs. This piece is intended to depict (as the name suggests) a boat on the ocean. In this piece, the left hand has a series of flowing up-and-down arpeggios and the right hand has a rocking set of chords. It’s written very quietly (pp) and the notes much more easily reflect the very specific concept that the piece is trying to depict.
So this means that, although “Une Barque sur l’océan” is a more technically demanding piece, it’s much easier to understand what the music is asking you to express than “Happy Birthday”.
This is why music, to me, is somewhat of a bell curve. At the very beginning of learning the piano, we play simple pieces through necessity because of the limited technical demand. Yet these are some of the most musically demanding pieces that there are. As we get better, we play pieces that are much easier to comprehend musically but much harder to play technically. Then eventually we can swing back around to playing much simpler pieces of music but with much more depth of expression.
Distillation
Simple music is often the most emotionally impactful music because it distils emotions so well. Very much like language, sometimes one sentence can be much more powerful and impactful than a long speech or essay (except this one, of course).
When someone says “I’m sorry”, for example, it carries much more emotional weight than if someone were to ramble through an apology. Or when someone just says, “I love you”. That can be much more impactful than someone saying the same thing through a 5 minute monologue.
Music works the same way. A simple melody is very exposed. It doesn’t have all of the bells and whistles that a more complex melody might have, but when played well, it can be incredibly impactful because it distils such universal emotion. Every note matters, every phrase matters and each dynamic change matters. The way that you play an individual key can change the feeling of the piece.
This is also part of the reason that, for beginners, it becomes much more obvious if they don’t have complete control of their fingers at the piano. Because each note has much more importance when there are few of them, whereas if one note is slightly uncontrolled in a big arpeggio in Clair de Lune by Debussy, it’s going to be much more easily hidden.
The interesting paradox in music is that, as you get better, the challenge is typically not in finding more technically challenging things to play, but instead in finding more meaning in fewer things.
Matt