This charming and haunting piece by Japanese composer Yoshinao Nakada blends eastern and western culture in musical form. A spacious right hand melody is hung over the steady, almost hypnotic pulse of left hand chords. Separate hands practice is crucial in this piece. You want to achieve a sense of the melody floating over the… Continue reading How to Play….. Song of Twilight
Category: Performing
Listening and Hearing
If you can't sing it, you can't hear it. And that means we [the audience] can't hear it either." This is what my teacher said to me at my lesson last week. I was working on one of Chopin's Nocturnes, the Opus 62 no. 2, the last published in his lifetime. In bars 20-22 the… Continue reading Listening and Hearing
Telling stories, painting pictures
Music is all about story-telling and painting pictures. Pop music helpfully has titles and song lyrics to tell us what it is about, but Classical music can be more difficult to interpret unless the performer or performers give us "signposts" to help us understand the composer's intentions. The simplest "signposts" in the score are tempo,… Continue reading Telling stories, painting pictures
Describing and imagining music
My students will remember we did an exercise earlier in the year called The Musical Adjectives Project, where we each wrote down 5 words to describe a piece of music we were studying. You can see the results of this fun exercise here, together with the Word Cloud I created from the all the adjectives… Continue reading Describing and imagining music
A Piano Teacher Writes... 