Piano Video Lesson: How to add color to your music - Part 1

Welcome to Virtual Sheet Music. I'm Robert Estrin. Today's subject for the video is "How to add color to your music." This is part one of a two-part series. All right, when I first got this question from a viewer my initial response was, "Well, the most obvious way to add color in your music is with the pedals." Yes, there is so many ways in which you can impart color, so I thought of the impressionist music of Debussy and Ravel and I thought of all the potential things I could show you, but then I thought, "Wait a minute, there are other ways to add color, aren't there?" So this video is going to explore all the ways you can add color in your music without using the pedals at all. The second part is going to explore how to add color to your music with the pedals.

So I've chosen a piece that you can play without the pedal, which is Mozart. In fact, Mozart's piano did not have any pedal, so it's a perfect way to demonstrate how you can add color to your music. I've chosen the famous "C major k545 Sonata", but I'm going to be playing the second movement. First thing I'm going to do is play it totally straight and then I'm going to show you several different things you can do to add color even without using the pedal.

[music]

All right, everything was accurate there. Pretty much exactly the way it's written, but it's a little lifeless, isn't it? Well, first of all, one thing that you can do is just simply change the balance between the hands, playing the melody stronger than the accompaniment immediately adds flavor and, yes, color to the music. I'm going to only add that one element of balancing the hands with more weight in the right hand.

[music]

So already you can hear it's better, because the melody comes through and you don't hear all those notes in the left hand it just supports the melody, but there is still something missing. Well, you know, one of the aspect about the piano is the fact that it is imitative of voice and string instruments, but you know of course that the notes fade out as you play them. Now, I learned a lot from my wife Florence Estrin listening to her play the flute and we perform together and when she plays higher notes she uses more air, takes a little more time, also having a little bit more volume as you play higher is a natural thing when you're playing a wind instrument. And one of my great piano teachers Ruth Slenczynska showed me how you can simply take a melody and the higher the notes go, play them louder as you go higher and softer as you go lower. So I'm going to do three things now, I'm going to have the balance between the hands like I had in the last performance, but I'm going to also do two things in addition, I'm going to play higher notes louder and lower notes softer, and I'm going to take a little more time when I get to the top notes.

[music]

It sounds much more fluid. It sounds much more like "a real instrument", not that the piano isn't a real instrument but an organic instrument that uses the breath or the bow, something that has a living tone, not just the attack of the note as the piano is subject to with the exception of the pedals which we're not using today. Now, what else can you do? Well, what about the left hand? Now, if you were using in a pedal you would probably sort of get the left-hand notes to meld together, but interestingly just because they're written as sixteenth notes in the left-hand doesn't mean that you can't bring out the bottom note. By holding the first note of each group longer, you get this kind of sound. Now I'm going to combine all the elements: the balance between the hands favoring the right hand, playing louder as you go to higher notes as well as taking more time with the highest notes and lastly holding the first note of each group in the left-hand longer than the sixteenth gives you this quality.

[music]

Now I know this was a slow progression of adding expressive elements and color to the performance. You may want to rewind and watch the beginning of this again and compare the drastic evolution by these elements. Try this with this piece as well as others and see what colors you can add with your music. Next time we're going to introduce the possibilities of the pedals which are very exciting. Thanks for joining me. Robert Estrin here with virtualsheetmusic.com, until next time.

[music]

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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