Notes on the Piano

Ernst Bacon, Sara Davis Buechner

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780486310855
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

`Should be a bedside reader for every author, composer, singer, critic, or layman interested in music.` — Critic's Choice
An accomplished composer, pianist, writer, and teacher presents an easy and entertaining guide for players at all levels of expertise. Ernst Bacon offers valuable tips on working, listening, and playing habits in five sections that cover `The Performer,` `The Learner,` `The Player and Writer,` `The Observer,` and `Technically Speaking.` This edition features an informative Introduction by virtuoso pianist and professor Sara Davis Buechner.

THE LEARNER

vii

Of Study

Work alone will efface the footsteps of work.

J. McNEILL WHISTLER

Learning to play is learning to practice. Only the consummate performer fully understands the art of practice. Thus do study and achievement mount in turn on each other’s shoulders along the formidable grade up Parnassus. Contrarily said, if a man’s playing suffers from bad practicing, then his practicing suffers from bad playing. A chicken, said Samuel Butler, is an egg’s way of making another egg.

The study of a work should begin like an oil portrait. You sketch in the main outlines; you add then certain tones perhaps; then comes the laying on of paint, the large labor; and finally there is the critical appraisal with last modifications. The important thing is to progress from the general to the particular, returning finally to the general again.

Begin with an over-all reading and a formulation of the work’s musical qualities, tempos, climaxes, characteristics, and its general plan. Then settle down to a successive mastery of every one of its details—the plumbing, carpentry, masonry, and electrical wiring, so to speak. No need to involve the larger emotions for these lesser tasks, wherein one detail after another is laid away in memory and habit, each needing reassembling into successively larger units, thereafter. Finally play the work in its entirety, being careful not to exceed a tempo allowing for correctness and a realization of all that was intended. After that, many repetitions and, in time, with a lessening of solicitude comes a growing freedom. If then the work can be put to rest and taken up again at a later date, it will have been absorbed by the personality until author and player have become one.

Since nearly all music for the piano moves in rhythms, contained within regular beats (no different from those of the conductor), it is proper that the exercise of scales, arpeggios, and other elements of technique be compassed by these same beats. In short, all exercises should be done in rhythm. This not only realizes a metrical fact, but it encourages the development of an inner pulse, and exploits the driving force of rhythm in promoting dexterity, while encouraging the grace of the hands.

Toward this end, the metronome is less than useless. Nothing is so unrhythmic as the metronome. Rhythm is a human and not a mechanical thing. It springs from bodily movement, which is never perfectly regular, but the regularity of which is enhanced and humanized through the ever-present need and possibility of slight deviation. What could demonstrate this better than the pianola, whose timings are as lifeless as they are mechanically exact? If it has any attraction, it is that of the robot. Note values are ever an approximation. “We could almost think of music as being a perpetual rubato,” remarks Casals.

Many have the futile habit of commencing practice on a work at its beginning, at every rehearsal. They forgot that any one portion of a work may need the same separate attention as any other, and deserves the benefit of a fresh approach. Starting always at the beginning usually leads to an eventual blemish or breakdown which, even if corrected, results only in the double habit of error plus correction. To overcome this practice, the player would do well to mark off the main sections of a work, and its subdivisions; then take up in turn each one of these portions at the beginning of successive practice sessions, mastering and even memorizing it, if possible, with no regard for other sections, for the time being. Later, the smaller sections that have been learned will be joined into larger sections; and in time these larger sections will be assembled to make up the whole. The final result is a large habit made up of many small habits.

The study of rapidity suggests two approaches. One can begin slowly, and then gradually increase the speed, as is commonly done. Or one can begin with the smallest manageable fragment played in full tempo; then follow with another such small fragment; presently joining these lesser fragments into a larger group; and ultimately joining the larger groups into a totality. Not to disparage the importance of slow practice, it is manifestly impossible to learn to play rapidly by playing only slowly. Slowness gives the feel; rapidity the gesture. By coupling ever-growing fractions of a passage in full tempo, it can be brought to a high state of perfection.

In general, the faster a passage goes, the lighter it should be played. Speed and loudness affect each other, not only as regards the capacities of the hands, but as they affect the quality of sound.

Continuous loudness does not require constant heavy playing; but can be produced through an accumulation of pedalled sound together with strategic accents. The ear also pedals, in that it carries sounds and sound-levels beyond their actuality. It resonates intention. Power is an effect, and not a fact; an impression and not simply force.

In the development of a student, fluency is usually his first ambition and accomplishment. Later there comes a sense for power and tone. Rhythm is the last to be achieved, and with it a sense for timing. Many go through life thinking that music is only a matter of making good and fluent sounds, and to them the notion of saying something never occurs. Poetry, speech, singing, declamation and eloquence have no counterpart in their pianism. Every sonata, nocturne and fugue is turned into an etude, the mastery of which does not go beyond correctness, smoothness, proper tempo, and memorization. “What is there more to say?” they may ask. And indeed there is no easy answer to one putting such a question.

The method of accenting beats in practice, to acquire steadiness, may not be amiss, but it should be supplemented by a de-accenting discipline, wherein the beat remains, but in sublimated form. The beat originally comes from the body. But singing, even in its primitive form, tends to subdue this beat in striving for smoothness of line. Music mostly combines song with the dance, therefore the beat must be modified in accordance with the flow of melody.

Interestingly, a Hindu remarked once that all Western music, including even such works as the symphonies of Haydn, seemed militant by comparison with Eastern music—had the savor of battle and conquest. A Westerner could hardly be expected to notice such a tendency in his own music, least of all in the friendly, witty, and benevolent inventions of Haydn.

Fatigue of the hands is not necessarily a sign of stiffness. It can be the result of playing too heavily or too rapidly, even in a state of relaxation. Metals, too, have a “limit of elasticity” and suffer “fatigue.” A distance runner will tire the moment he goes over his cruising speed, and even a well-oiled automobile engine overheats when it is overstrained.

Like a clean score, a clean keyboard is conducive to clear musical thinking. Once accustomed to a clean keyboard, the person with sensitive fingers gains an abhorrence for keys encrusted with polished dirt and sweat. A keyboard should be as appetizing as the sounds it is meant to produce.

When Buelow observed that his technique was no better than his trills, he was saying that in the degree of sensitivity of the fingers lies the measure of preparation for performance. The trill being the narrowest of all piano figurations, it can well be used as a test of, as well as medium for, the fingers’ sensitization.

Since fear can sometimes paralyze play in public, one must not only “shore up” every weak point in a work’s preparation (the anticipation of or stumbling through which, is perhaps the chief reason for fear), but one should deliberately practice nonfear, forbid the intrusion of anxiety. Self-assurance can be practiced. It is the elimination of stiffness in the will.

Just as it is important to know how to play deeply into the keys, it is important to know how to stay on their surface. Few works call for a continued pressure or weightiness. Much playing tends away from the keys. The persistent down-player is as maladroit as is the persistent down-beater among conductors. Of Alfred Hertz, a conductor much given to a continuous heavy down-beat, Eugene Goossens once said, “There’s the old pump-handle.” Solidity is but one element in music. Much of the dance is a gesture against gravity; in music it is the same.

The moment you approach technique in the musical spirit, it will begin to yield, and its obstacles will resolve into music, in which spirit they must have been conceived. It’s the difference between Sir Edmund Hillary, whose life-dream was climbing Everest, and a Sherpa porter for whom climbing is but a livelihood. The end gives wings to the means.

“Empty display,” people often say of Liszt’s bravura passages. Knowing what he was, the most generous of men no less than princely virtuoso, I can only surmise that he invested these with some fine magic that many living artists have either lost, or else, prompted by some culturine spirit of superiority, will not deign to recover.

Ask yourself if you do a certain passage with pleasure, and you will know whether you have, or are on the way to have, learned it. If it remains an unpleasant thing, you may think you can put it down to a shortcoming of the author’s. But you can, and indeed must, learn to like it , if not for itself, then for what you will have done with it. How many a man you have shunned until you took courage and spoke with him, and then discovered him to be good company.

The tempo of learning is as personal as the tempo of playing which with no two persons is or need be the same. How fast can you assimilate what is to be done without losing spirit and control? Ultimately, the quickest road is to take your time. Not another’s, but your own time. This means not only not practicing beyond your controls, but it means learning to await a certain ripening of realization, and a bodily feeling of fitness. It’s like wine, which isn’t improved by shaking up the bottle, but which nevertheless took plenty of hard work to produce before bottling. Put your work for a while into the cellar of the subconscious, and you may enjoy the same eventual surprises over what will seem a spontaneous perfection, as does the creative artist. (Learn to know there is no real difference between the two anyway—many composers are far less creative than some musicians who do not compose at all.)

But taking your time may not be the best course at all times. A new work wants to be, and perhaps should be, devoured whole at first. The point is not to trust to extensive honeymoons.

As to what editions to use, the answer is not simple. Some say, work only from the original unedited editions, if available; but this presupposes experience in their elucidation as regards tempo, dynamics, phrasing and fingering, the more so with works predating Beethoven. I have witnessed the widest divergence of opinion regarding, for example, the C Minor Fugue (Vol. I, Well-Tempered Clavier) of Bach, Czerny conceiving it as an allegro (doubtless reflecting Beethoven’s view), and Ernest Bloch conceiving it, with some justice, as an andante sostenuto. There is no doubt that polyphonic music, which by very nature is less dramatic, less imbued with human characterization, and more inclined toward abstraction than homophonic music, allows more latitude of construction as to tempo, coloration, and character. And so, if two masters may conceive such a work of Bach quite oppositely, since Bach left no indications whatsoever, the less experienced person will surely be left to flounder in indecision.

While the making of decisions plays a large role in the growth of the personality, the cultivation of self-assurance requires authoritative help at an earlier stage. Phrasings, for example, are variously indicated by the masters. Chopin will often place an entire page of music under one bowing, signifying a legato, leaving to the player the discovery of the natural vocal convolutions within such a long arch of melody. Beethoven, contrarily, will often dismember a phrase into the small slurs characteristic of violin-bowing; and Mozart will sometimes indicate an isolated dynamic or a phrase, raising the question whether this marks an exception to, or a pattern for, the neighboring dynamics or phrases.

But editors presume too much when they incorporate in music already edited by its author, if not actual note changes, their own personal dynamics, tempos, and phrasings, even when they distinguish these from the originals with smaller type. For optional signs are impossible to ignore and prove to be as authoritative to the inexperienced as they are gratuitous to the experienced. It is a useless vanity of the virtuoso or pedagogue to believe he can transmit to posterity his readings of the classics. Greatness shows itself in modesty toward the masters. Tovey’s editions of the Beethoven sonatas are accurate, faithful to the author, and add only a few very helpful fingerings. They are what editions should be. No one had more to say about Beethoven and yet had the wisdom to say so little.

Modern authors tend, if anything, to overedit their scores. But this too has its reason, stemming largely from orchestral practice. The skill of professional orchestra players and the cost of rehearsals make it usual that new works are today read rather than learned, necessitating the most precise and complete editing of all the parts. Only the conductor need fully know the work. There is little time for experimentation. And so the composer must be sure and lavish in his markings, and leave nothing to chance. This practice of overexplicit editing he translates then into his piano-writing, forgetting that the pianist is not merely following instructions, but creating an interpretation which requires and should allow some latitude.

Some like to begin the day’s work with exercises and leave the interpretative labors to a time when they are warmed up. Others prefer to attack the music directly, leaving the exercises for a time when the mind is not so fresh. It is a question of the hands or the mind getting first choice. Some, like Kreisler, play no exercises at all, a privilege retained from early precocity.

Stridency results from an unyielding attack on the keys, as well as from an improper apportioning of the simultaneous tones within a chord. A harsh treble is often relieved by a resonant bass. Nearly all high sounds fall into some overtone relation with a deep sound, or at least with a sympathetic relative of such a sound. Thus a higher sound, unpleasant for its loudness, can become more agreeable by actually increasing the total sound through the increase or addition of a bass.

Only by the controlling of enthusiasms can they be directed toward the realization of their end. In taking up a new work, a brief initial fervor may be indulged, just enough to give the work impetus. But overindulged, this fervor quickly turns into satiety, and even revulsion. The salient lesson is patience. Watch any workman building a skyscraper. There is no haste, yet the building keeps going up, unbelievably fast. “The man who could write a work of a passion so sustained as Tristan,” said Strauss, “must have been a man of ice.”

It is a matter of fire in the heart and ice in the mind.

There is no music the learning of which does not gain by underplaying. Quiet sounds are heard more transparently, and can be better apportioned, than loud sounds. The ear gains as the muscles labor less. Then, too, physical effort beyond a certain point defeats the elasticity and rhythm of movement. And when it comes to performance, it is always easier to add strength than to subtract it.

Fingering is as much habit as any other feature in the learning of a work. Thus there should be as little change in fingering as possible— better none at all; and this presupposes the mos...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright Page
• Introduction to the Dover Edition
• Table of Contents
• Introductory
• THE PERFORMER
• TECHNICALLY SPEAKING
• THE LEARNER
• THE PLAYER AND WRITER
• THE OBSERVER