Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum After learning all the notes and fingering...

Hello
I am loving the act of learning to play new pieces. I'm at an advanced beginner or intermediate-ish level of playing so it can take me several weeks to get to that point in a piece. My problem is that once I feel like I've learned the notes, I think I'm "done" with the piece. My teacher naturally thinks that is the point where I can finally really "turn it into music". Unfortunately, this is the point where I lose some interest and my practicing gets more difficult and less fulfilling. I love Bach and perhaps that's in part because there is less of the need to interpret and (at least for me) it's mostly learning how to play the notes smoothly and to get the fingering down. Anyway is there any advice for me to get to that next level and to keep my interest going? My teacher is helping me with specific instructions about where to place accents, crescendo, having the music go toward a particular cadence, etc but the practicing of this is just not anywhere near as fulfilling or interesting as just the thrill of learning the notes. Any advice would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!

Hmmm..... Take a Bach piece and listen to two different pianists play it: Glenn Gould, and somebody else. There's lots of interpretation possible with Bach. (Frankly, I never much cared for Bach until I heard Gould....)

Listen to different performances of the things you play, record yourself and listen. It sound like you're at the point where you're ready to start creating your own interpretations, it's a beginning, not an end.

Gosh, working through the part of learning the notes and the rhythm to me is the painful part and I rejoice when I can finally work on just making it sound like I want it to sound

My advice is to record what you have just learned. We often hear in our heads what we think we want it to sound like until we listen to a recording. I think once you listen to yourself you'll become more motivated to work on getting the 'music' to really sound like music. Since you really like Bach, Record that. And ask yourself if you could really hear the voices interplay in the way that Bach intended? Are there are subtle changes that need to be made to bring out the beauty of the music?

And I never cared much about Gould, until I started watching interviews and listening to him speak.
Then I knew who he was, and what he was doing. And now he is God when it comes to Bach.

To each their own.
I'm the exact opposite.

Like other said, record your performances and listen to them. Then listen to many performances of the same piece by professionals. Find one or two that you like the most. Then try to spot the differences between your rendition and theirs. Work gradually towards your "goal rendition". Record it again after some weeks, to find out where you improved and where you need more work.

It's a bit time consuming, but it worked for me.

Learning all the notes and fingering is a big task, but perhaps you should try incorporating the accents, crescendos, phrasing and voicing from the start, or nearly from the start. Your teacher can help you figure out how to practice this way (hint: work in very small chunks to start with).

For me it was, having not played enough pieces and not played enough (quality time input at the keys).
It takes some work to get your fingers to play with full control (volume, tempo, length of notes), also to develop the musical ear.
Now I can play the simplest thing, e.g. a couple of arpeggios in two bars, followed by some variation to a really simple LH. And it sounds beautiful to my ear.
After learning the section/phrase well, the fingers do what the mind wants them to.
And this might be where the music starts.

Maybe you should try other composers where just playing the notes smoothly will make you sound very mechanical and even robotic, whereas with Bach you can get away with minimal 'interpretation' (which is why Walter/Wendy Carlos was such a great hit). After all, harpsichordists can't play with any tonal nuances.....

You could start with Mozart, with the slow movements of his sonatas perhaps (like K545). There are a lot of interpretative nuances you need to put in, to make it sound 'musical':

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gj4LjyTOmD0

It's a really good idea to record yourself and compare it to some professional recordings. Sometimes you don't even know what is possible until you hear it. And as others have said, you don't really listen well when you're playing, so recording might be eye-opening to you.

It's great that you are enjoying the part of getting the "nuts and bolts" down, but personally I don't think it's ever too early to start playing as musically as possible. So in the process of learning a piece, not all of it is equally difficult. Some parts will be easy to play and not need much work. These parts you'd be able to add musical elements to them almost right away. Some of the more difficult areas, however, might have to wait a bit for playing musically, or there will be some parts where you're not sure what to do with them musically speaking. It's OK for these to come later.

If you work on playing musically where you can in the whole process, however, you won't be spending as much time on actually completing a piece, which will keep your interest going.

Bach & Handel are the few composers in the 18th century who wrote music with keyboards as solo instruments while most composers focused on music for small ensembles with a keyboard in the back.

Bach wrote quite a few suites including the English & French Suites for keyboard. Today these are mostly played on a piano but there are still recordings of performances on a harpsichord. As you know, a harpsichord is not touch-sensitive. Every note has exactly the same volume. The only way to give the impression or playing louder / softer on a harpsichord is when you play more or fewer notes. On a piano, phrases that appear to rise you can play gradually louder (just a touch) and phrases that appear to fall gradually softer. Something you can do to give music more character. A piece like the Italian Concerto was originally written & performed on a harpsichord. If you look at the score, Bach wrote a few Fs & Ps (loud & soft) into the score. On a piano, you can vary your playing volume easily but it is quite possible Bach wrote the piece for a specific harpsichord that allowed for some volume control with mechanical leavers? (just guessing).

And for the Bach Suites you will find ornaments (trills, mordants, turns, etc). And usually each dance movement is divided into top & bottom halves. A piece like the "Minuet in G" by Christian Petzold found in the Anna M. Notebook most students tend to play the top & bottom halves with the repeat exactly the same way. Beginners tend not to play with any ornament while intermediate & advanced students will add a few. You hear recordings of the French Suites played by Keith Jarrett (the Jazz improviser) you will find that the top & bottom repeats are played in slightly different ways. In 1 specific spot you can play an ornament as a mordant the first time and a turn the second time to give variations to a piece. Otherwise doing both repeats exactly the same the music would sound boring. You can even put ornaments in different places that were not written into the original score. There is room for some improvisation.

Finally the foot pedals (especially the right damper or sustain pedal). In the days of Bach & Handel, keyboard instruments did not have foot pedals so some pianists would play pieces without using any. Other pianists would use the right pedal occasionally to give long sustained notes a touch more resonance. Whether you use the right pedal or not when playing Baroque music is a matter of choice.

I agree that this might well be an approach worth trying for you. Rather than learning the notes and fingering for the whole piece, and then going back and trying to add the interpretation and musical elements, you could take a more sectional approach.
Some people like to get one smaller section really polished before moving on to the next. I'm a bit too impatient for this, but I find it really helps sustain my interest if I work on smaller sections at different stages of readiness. So I might have one section where I am working hands separate and trying to get the notes and fingering really solid (without ignoring the musical details), another where I have the hands together slowly and I'm trying to get it more smooth and musical, and another section where I'm polishing all the details.

This way, by the time you do have all the notes and fingering, most of the piece will already be a lot more fluid and a good bit of it should be really polished, so there's less left to do to bring it all to a more polished level and (for me anyway) having polished some sections you have a much clearer mental idea of what you want to achieve with the piece as a whole.

Er, um, the thing that makes Bach and other music from that era MORE difficult to interpret is that the scores are plain: you need to have a strong background in musicology and music history to apply interpretation this this era of music. Quite the opposite of what you are implying with your statement.