Music Video Lesson: Will Playing by Ear Hurt Your Classical Playing?

I'm Robert Estrin, you're watching LivingPianos.com.

The question today is, will playing by ear hurt your classical playing? There are many, many teachers I have encountered over the years and students who have studied with teachers who tell them, you mustn't play by ear because you will mess up the precision of your classical playing. You must play faithfully to the score and if you play by ear you're going to ruin your playing and the integrity. Is there truth to this? Well, the only ounce of truth to this is if somebody is learning classical repertoire and they're doing so by listening and trying to do it by ear and not studying the score or even referencing the score, they're never going to be able to play Beethoven or Chopin or Schumann or Bach really as intended doing it all by ear.

But the question is, is playing by ear intrinsically bad for you? If for example, playing other styles of music that have swing feel or groove based music, whatever the style may be.

And I think not only does playing by ear not hurt your classical playing, I'll go so far as to say that all playing is by ear.

All playing is by ear? Yes.

Now you may take it from the sheet music initially but ultimately all the music you play you're doing by ear.

You first learn it from the visual aspect of the representations but then you hear it and create it on the piano.

So playing by ear is essential for piano playing.

Not only that but for certain styles of music, in fact for most styles of music, it's absolutely necessary to play by ear because the written score is not how the music is conceived to begin with.

You'll never be able to play blues faithfully or jazz or rock or pop or new age or so many different forms of music, maybe new age or some written things but you have to be able to play by ear.

And ultimately when you play your classical music, even though you're playing the notes faithfully that the composer wrote, you should be essentially playing it by ear. In fact one of the biggest fears when playing a memorized piece or program is having a memory slip. It's like you learn it while everybody's watching you and it's like oh my God what happens if I forget? Well you know if you can play your classical music by ear, if you hear it and you can play by ear, how can you possibly have a memory slip? Because you think about music you know, you can sing through it. If you know what it sounds like and you can play by ear, it's virtually impossible to have a memory slip because even if you forget where your hands go for a moment, you'll know where you are and you can make the sound on the keyboard and get back on track instantly because you know what it's supposed to sound like.

So I encourage all of you to play by ear and play your classical music by ear. Even though you've taken from the sheet music, you must transcend the visual and turn it into an oral experience that you create for your audience.

I wonder if any of you disagrees with this assessment about playing by ear and how it affects your classical playing. Will playing swing rhythms in jazz or blues affect the integrity of the evenness in your classical playing? Well I think that the difference between how do you approach 19th century music compared to 18th century music is stylistically extremely different and if you get those styles different from one another, the give and take of Roboto in 19th century music and the clarity and clean playing of classical area music like Mozart, well why not be able to expand into other styles that have different rhythmic feels? And I think in my personal feeling is that the more the merrier. If you can play more styles of music, you will enjoy music more and you will be a more well -rounded musician and it's all for the good.

I'd love to hear all your opinions on this. Let's get a dialogue going here at LivingPianist .com where you have comments and articles for you as well as here on YouTube. Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin at LivingPianos.com, your online piano resource.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/will-playing-by-ear-hurt-your-classical-playing/

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