Music Video Lesson: Why You Must Slow Down Your Counting on Long Notes

Welcome to LivingPianos.com. I'm Robert Estrin with such an important subject, which is why you must slow down your counting on long notes.

You might think, if you do that, it's going to be out of rhythm.

Well, it's possible that if you take this to heart, you could overcompensate. But the reason why this is so imperative is that there is a natural tendency, when nothing is going on on the piano, to rush your counting. I'm going to give you an example with the last movement of Schumann's Kindersenen, scenes from childhood, the poet speaks, and there are these long notes, and I'm going to play it with the correct rhythm, then I'm going to show you the danger of what happens if you don't intentionally slow down your counting.

Watch.

Gorgeous music.

So if you were playing this and not really elongating the counting on the long notes, it could easily come out like this.

Three, four.

Now, of course, there I'm counting, so you can hear where I'm speeding up the counting, but when you're counting in your head, it's natural when you're just playing a long note, like in the beginning. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One. You must feel like you're elongating the counting, otherwise you're probably going to do this. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One. I hear it all the time, not just with students, even professional pianists. Sometimes they lose that pulse on the long notes, so you must accentuate the length of the notes of the counting so that you can hold the long notes long enough, and the difference it makes in the sheer poetry, apropos of this piece of music, is profound.

You ever find yourself when you listen to one person play a slow movement, it seems like it just is interminable and it drags, and another person plays it, and it's just as ethereal? Strangely, it's the one that seems like it's dragging that they're not holding the long notes long enough, because oftentimes what they're doing is they're taking such an interminably slow tempo, they can't possibly hold the long notes long enough, and the whole thing bogs down and it becomes just a pain to listen to. But when the correct tempo is chosen and the long notes are long enough, that's what makes a great musical performance.

So, take it to heart in your playing. Of course, you can always check your work with a metronome to make sure you're not overcompensating, as I made reference to at the beginning of this video. Again, I'm Robert Estrin. There's just another tip at LivingPianos.com, your online piano resource with thousands of articles and videos for you. Go check it out for yourself.

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Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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