Music Video Lesson: Why You Must Peak Later in Your Phrases

Welcome to livingpianos.com, I'm Robert Estrin and today such an important subject, why you must peak later in your phrases.

What am I talking about? Well, you know, in most lyrical music, that is music with melody, you have a line that has a rise and a fall. And you may have noticed that oftentimes when you're trying to make those decrescendos to have beautiful phrase endings, it's difficult to control it.

I'm going to give you an example here, there's a beautiful little piece of Alexander Tonsman, Vacation is over, end of vacation, depends upon how you translate the French. And I'm going to play it, and I'm going to play with a rise and a fall, I'm going to try to make it absolutely even to the top to the bottom, and listen how difficult it is to control this. I was able to execute it and all the notes managed to play, but man it was hard.

Not only that, by having the peak of the phrase later in the phrase, you'll get a more intense expression. Listen to it making that crescendo of the phrase almost to the end and then tapering off and listen to how much more musical it is, and it's technically so much easier to execute.

Wasn't that more musical? I talk about oftentimes musical solutions to technical problems, and that's exactly what this is. The music and the technical execution are perfect alignments, and this is what you must look for not only in this aspect, which is fundamental to melodic music, but in all your technical challenges in music. Find musical solutions to your technical problems.

I want you to go through your music, all your lyrical music, and it doesn't matter what it is.

And let me just think of another one, the B flat minor nocturne of Chopin. I'm going to try the same thing. I'm just going to be the opening phrase. I haven't done this yet, so I'm challenging myself, and I'll try to make it perfectly round first. Then I'm going to try to peak later and see what the difference is in this.

That's really hard to do. Now I'm going to peak later in that opening phrase.

So the idea of round phrasing is fundamental to music, but remember to make the peak of your phrase later. It propels the phrase forward and makes it easier to control the phrase ending until you have a nice expressive, delicate phrase ending.

It's much akin to a wind player or a great singer, how they use the air and they don't run out of air before the end of the phrase. You've ever heard a singer who just doesn't have enough air support and they get to the end of the phrase and it's just lacking? Or a wind player and the pitch goes flat at the end, you hear a clarinetist or an oboist and they can't quite sustain the end of the phrase? And this is exactly the same idea here in your piano playing. Try this, let me know how this works for you in all your lyrical music. Leave the comments here at livingpianos.com, your online piano resource, as well as on YouTube. Again, I'm Robert Estrin. Thanks for joining me here. See you next time.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/why-you-must-peak-later-in-your-phrases/

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