Music Video Lesson: The Magic of Fractal Practicing

I'm Robert Estrin and this is LivingPianos.com. Today we're going to talk about the magic of fractal practicing.

Fractals are when one part of something is the same as the whole, no matter how small you go, it's just a replication of the bigger part. You've probably seen pictures that are fractal. You keep zooming in and no matter how much you zoom in, you keep seeing the same patterns or out.

In your music, it could be thought of in the same way. I'm going to demonstrate with a little piece of Kabalevsky fairy tale and I'm going to start at the beginning and I'm going to play a little bit and each phrase I'm going to lineate for you.

So I played two nice four measure phrases with a nice rise and fall.

Now I'm going to do it and I'm going to put those two phrases together as one long phrase and see what that sounds like.

Now here's the thing.

It isn't just four measure or eight measure phrases.

In fact, you could take a whole section of music and think of that as one big phrase.

Ultimately, the entire piece is one statement, one big idea. As Rachmaninoff said, the bigger the phrase, the bigger the musician.

Now here's where it gets really interesting. If you're playing a program with several different pieces, for example, you play a sonata which has three or four movements.

At first, each movement is its own concept, its own large phrase, its own unit. Eventually, the whole sonata becomes a coherent whole thought, a one big phrase.

Then half a program can become one musical statement, one big phrase and then an entire program can be one big phrase. If you start thinking of these larger units in your music, it becomes true storytelling on a personal level.

It's not just each little individual phrase. It's how the phrases build into a coherent whole that's greater than the sum of the parts.

So go through your scores, whether it's Mozart or Chopin, and first identify the smallest unit that makes sense as a phrase with a nice rise and fall, assuming it's a melodic piece of music. There are exceptions, of course, to this with more percussive oriented music.

But with melodic music, then try joining two phrases and making one long phrase out of that. Then maybe even four phrases or take an exposition, the whole first section of a sonata movement, and see if you can make one coherent whole out of that to figure out where the climax is, where it's going to and where it's receding from.

Do that with all your music and all these different fractals, all these different levels, all these different sizes of phrases, and you can have a coherent whole that has all the nuances within it of these smaller phrases but doesn't lose sight of the whole, and that's what makes a great performance.

I'm wondering how you feel about this. Leave it in the comments here at LivingPianos.com, your online piano resource. Again, I'm Robert Estrin.

Thank you.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/the-magic-of-fractal-practicing/

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