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Pianist, teacher and writer Catherine Shefski studied at Smith College, Massachusetts, and at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in London, where she was taught by EPTA founder, Carola Grindea. Catherine has performed as a soloist and chamber musician, has taught “virtual” piano lessons, and writes an informative blog, All Piano, with the mission to “make piano lessons relevant for the digital generation”.
During my piano playing “formative” years, age eight to seventeen, I studied with four piano teachers. Two teachers at college and four post-grad brings the total to ten. Each teacher contributed something to my growth as a pianist and as a teacher. I find myself passing along choice tidbits of information to my students, clearing up confusion about musical terminology and offering practice tips.
I’d like to share just a few lessons I learned along the way, in addition to all the repertoire, which made certain teachers (and lessons) memorable.
- Piu means “more” and peu means “little.”
- Piu mosso means more motion and meno mosso means less motion.
- Accidentals do not affect the same note of a different octave, unless indicated by a key signature.
- Senza means without and sempre means always.
- To shape the melodic line it usually makes sense to go to the long note.
- If there is no fingering written in the score, follow the “next note, next finger” rule.
- Una corda means use the soft pedal (one string); tre corda means release the soft pedal (three strings).
- When you have two phrases with identical notes and rhythm, make them different by dynamic contrast or a change in touch.
- Grace notes in Chopin are generally played on the beat.
- F# minor melodic scale is the only scale that changes fingering on the descent.
- m.d. (main droite) right hand and m.g. (main gauche) left hand.
- With a ritardando at the end of a piece pay attention to the space between the notes. Should be incrementally longer with the longest wait before the last note.
- When working on very soft passages, practice “excavating the pianissimo.” In other words, begin from nothing and then gradually you’ll get to the softest sound possible.
- Before playing extended octave passages, try flipping your arm over and reaching an octave with your hand upside down, fingers pointing to the floor. It a good stretch!
- Sopra means above.
- Sotto voce meas “under voice”, or soft.
- A staccato note under a slur is a portato. Think of it as a “plump staccato.”
- When working for dynamic contrast, practice stopping and preparing before the change.
- When working with large complicated chordal passages, practice squeezing the chord to shape the hand. Your muscles will remember.
- Sightread chords from the bottom to the top.
- To play a passage of thirds, fourths, fifths, etc. legato lift the finger that is to be repeated while connecting the rest.
- When in doubt sing the melody.
© Catherine Shefski
At the weekend, I hosted a piano masterclass for a group of my students with friend and colleague Graham Fitch, a pianist and master teacher. As I explained to the participants, six of my students who are around Grade 2-3 level, a masterclass is a wonderful learning experience as it offers the opportunity to have one’s playing critiqued by someone other than one’s regular teacher. I was also at pains to stress that the event was absolutely not an exam, nor a competition. I have attended a number of masterclasses, both with my teacher and other professional pianists, and I have always come away from the experience full of ideas.
As a child in the 1970s, I well remember music masterclasses being broadcast on BBC Two, notably with the French cellist Paul Tortelier, who was always rather emotional and shouty, and pianist Daniel Barenboim. The students would sit in an anxious, awestruck semi-circle around the master, while he made the “victim” in the hot seat repeat a section of a Beethoven sonata 10 or more times until it was correct. These seemed very nerve-wracking affairs, yet even as a child and a very early piano student, I could see how beneficial they were.
The children duly arrived and we all trooped outside to do some warming up exercises. Some of the older ones were a little embarrassed at being asked to swing their arms around in full view of my neighbours, but most of them entered into the exercises with enthusiasm, while we discussed the importance of warming up the body before playing.
Back in the piano room, there was a little bit of shyness about who was going to go first, before Eli announced he would kick the afternoon off with his Mazurka (ABRSM Grade 2). It was lovely to see how quickly his playing of this piece was transformed with just a few suggestions from Graham. Some of my students are learning the same pieces and Graham was able to offer helpful general remarks about the music, while also giving each student some concentrated one-to-one tuition. We all listened attentively to each performance, and I encouraged the children to comment afterwards on what they liked about the piece they had just heard. Graham showed them how practising to train the muscle memory uses different parts of the brain to, say, answering factual questions by playing the slow movement of Beethoven’s Pathétique Sonata while the children fired questions such as “What’s the capital of France?” or “what’s the tallest building in the world?” at him. We also talked about balance between the hands, where one hand has a very strong melodic line, or there are different textures and articulation in each hand, and how we bring out different characters and moods in music, and Graham used inventive and entertaining analogies to illustrate his points. For me, it was instructive to see another teacher at work, highlighting aspects that I may have missed or skimmed over in our weekly lessons. At the end of the session, the parents arrived for tea and music, and some of the children were happy to perform, while the others went in search of my famous homemade chocolate brownies! It was a very enjoyable afternoon – most definitely a fun way to learn, and I hope I will be able to run a similar event next term.
Chinese pianist Lang Lang in a masterclass with Daniel Barenboim
Cello masterclass with Paul Tortelier
The rain was hammering on the roof of the conservatory as I practiced Chopin’s First Ballade ahead of my piano lesson yesterday. Some would argue that it is not a good idea to practice on the day of the lesson – like last-minute revising outside the exam room (something I never did!), but I find it helpful to run through the pieces I am taking with me to a lesson. And a run-through is all it is, for at this point there is no time for any further finessing or tweaking, and whatever rough edges or problematic areas remain are there for discussion with teacher. I packed my Orla Kiely briefcase (a “thank you” gift from my adoring students), dropped in my Moleskine notebook and iPod and set off for the station in the pouring rain. Because I had to be in north London for 10.30, I caught the tail-end of the morning commute, and because of the rain, there seemed to be many more people on the train and the tube. There were patient queues of damp commuters at Vauxhall where I plunge into the Victoria Line which rattles up to Finsbury Park in about 15 minutes. But when I stepped out of the station to catch a bus to my teacher’s home, the sun came out and I felt positive and excited about my lesson. Which was good, because the day before, I played so badly, I felt like giving up, and actually lay on the sofa and wept copiously afterwards.
During the journey to Finsbury, I try to avoid all distractions: I do not read, preferring to listen to my repertoire on my iPone, and I ignore my email. As I arrive at my teacher’s house, I switch my phone to “airplane mode” which makes me completely unavailable and undisturbable for the duration of the lesson. After a brief preamble chat about programming the recital for my Diploma (which I am hoping to take next winter), we started with Debussy’s ‘Voiles’. I have blogged before about this wonderful impressionistic piece. When I presented it to my teacher in July, I had only learnt two pages. Now, I have the entire piece under the fingers, and with all the notes learnt, the really interesting business can begin of shaping it and bringing out its many subtleties, nuances, layers and textures. This is the really hard part, and, as I keep telling my students, it is this ability to convey the work’s “personality” to the listener that makes one a musician rather than a ‘typist’! What is so interesting about this work is the dual definition of the title ‘Voiles’: it means both sails and veils. A sail is something that moves and billows, when the wind catches it, while a veil is static, a covering of the face, suggesting a mysterious and hidden eroticism. So how do you make the mechanical box of wood and wires sound billowing, mysterious, erotic….? The opening direction asks for a touch that is “caressant” – caressing – and in recent weeks, I have been working on a different angle of attack at the keys: literally stroking and caressing them (rather as I stroke my cats), and allowing the fingers to float away or glide across the keys, rather than a straight up-down movement (which is completely inappropriate for this piece – and indeed, much of Debussy’s piano music, I would think).
My main weakness with this piece is rhythm, and if I allow the pulse to become too slow, the music gets bogged down, as if the boat has run aground in mud flats and needs a hefty shove to set it afloat again! But overall, I feel I am making good progress with this work, and it was gratifying that my teacher agreed with me.
Next up, Chopin’s First Ballade, a piece which, two year’s ago, before I started having lessons again, I would not have had the confidence to tackle. I used to look at the score of works like this and think “Oh no, I couldn’t possibly…!”. Lately, with the confidence my teacher has instilled in me and a far greater level of judgement about my pianistic abilities, I tend to look at a score now and think “All right, I’ll give it a go….”.
I was so excited about playing the Ballade for my teacher that I feared I would muck it up from the outset. I don’t know how many times I’ve practised the opening measures – that rather grandiose Neapolitan arpeggio and the plaintive reply that seems to hang in suspense, awaiting resolution. I’ve listened to my recording of Kissin playing this (and the other Ballades) and while I would never attempt to imitate him, or indeed any other pianist, his reading of this piece has given some useful food for thought. Midway through my “performance” (and note here, I have only learnt the first half of the piece), I realised that I was still in awe of it, and the fact I was actually playing one of the “greats” of the repertoire, and at that point it all went to pieces, momentarily! Fortunately, I had recovered my composure by the time I reached the great, iconic second theme and now I was really enjoying it, playing for myself rather than for Penny. Even the big, hand-filling chords and the octave runs when the second theme reappears did not daunt me (as they do so often when I play this at home). I lifted my hands away from the keys and awaited Penny’s response…..
Usually, at this point she takes me right back to the beginning and we do an exhaustive and detailed bar-by-bar study, but on this occasion she sat back and said how much she’d enjoyed the piece, how I’d caught the character of it very well, that I’d evidently learnt it very carefully. “There are one or two points of interpretation I don’t agree with” she said, “but overall I thought you played it extremely well. Now, let’s go back to the opening……”.
A suggested change in the fingering on the opening C’s immediately gave a greater sense of forward motion in the opening measures, of that figure rising grandly up the register, yet all I did was switch from a third to a fifth in the left hand, and a third to a thumb in the right. Almost metaphoric rather than physical, and yet I could hear the difference. The Moderato section was deemed too slow: I’d been rather cowardly when practising it because I can play it quicker. Think two-in-a-bar instead of six and immediately the music moves forward with purpose, waltz-like, with a sense of gathering elements in anticipation of the fioritura, which fell from my fingers with surprising elegance. A little bit of nit-picking about tempo where the second theme appears and then over the page to………..
…………And this is the section that has proved most problematic for me: the stately reappearance of the second theme. Those big chords and fast octave runs are very perilous for my unstable right hand, and indeed, practising it the other day, I could feel the familiar ache through my third finger and into my knuckle. Penny identified the problem, although I could feel it anyway: my hand was rigid, solid, with no “bounce” or softness in it at all. Exercises to alleviate this were set, with a few stern words about being “very careful” when I practice this section. I am so fearful of the tenosynovitis returning with a vengeance that I will take on board her invaluable advice, and practice this section less frequently.
I left feeling I had been awarded a huge gold star for effort and achievement, and grinned manically all the way to the bus stop. I was only sorry that we did not have time to look at Debussy’s Pour le Piano. But there’s always next time….
Opening the new Grade 2 piano study book yesterday to check out the repertoire for the 2010-11 season, the name Felix Swinstead leapt off the page at me, and took me straight back to Mrs Scott’s pink and mauve piano room in Sutton Coldfield, circa 1973. I remember learning quite a few pieces by Swinstead as a young piano student, and F
elix Gerald Swinstead is one of those composers, like Dunhill and Markham Lee, that those of us who learned the piano as children associate with our early studies. Many of his pieces were studies, or genre pieces, easy enough for children from about Grade 1 onwards, with winsome titles like ‘Cornfields’, ‘In a Playful Mood’, ‘Day Dream’, ‘Masquerade’, ‘A Tender Flower’ and ‘Malvern Hills’, and evoke a pre-war golden time. ‘In a Playful Mood’ rings a bell with me: I probably played it when I was six or seven, and I probably didn’t enjoy it that much as my then teacher had a tendency to make me play the same piece week after week, until I was bored witless with it.
Recently, returning to Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, I opened my old ABRSM edition and saw another teacher’s annotations, including her diagrams explaining the construction of the fugue form (Sue Murdoch, Rickmansworth, circa 1980-1985). It brought a great rush of memories and nostalgia: of cycling to her house for my lessons, of playing her grand piano with a dog across my feet and a cat staring at me from the lid, of exams taken in the studio of a local professional pianist (a room devoid of all furniture except for the vast black Minotaur of a Steinway), and of being told off by her husband (a prof at the RAM, who was scarily tall with a huge booming voice) for saying I was about to play “only some Beethoven” (it was the Sonata Op 10/i).
I like to think my students will enjoy similar reminiscences of their lessons with me when they are grown up. What will they remember, I wonder….?
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