Improve your piano performance control
Improve your piano performance control
Working towards properly controlling a piece constitute’s one of the pianists’ main concerns. Now, how can we achieve that? Well, that’s a very complex question to answer…
Each piano paradigm proposes its own way of addressing the matter. I personally follow the Vicente Scaramuzza way of facing this challenge. This method was passed on to me by Sebastian Colombo, director of the “Centro de Estudios Pianisticos” of Barcelona, in one of his visits to Argentina, close to the year 2000. He basically showed me how to work on developing the five memories involved in learning a piece and performing it on the piano. The one I saw it was being most helpful is the one I call the “memory of the name of the notes”.
By memorizing the name of the notes we also reinforce our perception of the rhythm of a piece. Why? because we will are supposed to say the name of the notes in the right rhythm to ensure we can then control the tempo properly. I insist my students they should be at least saying the name of the notes unpitched, in this way they can take advantage of their speaking skills while they experiment with the pieces dynamics.
One of the greatest graces of this method is that the pieces become portable. Yes! portable 🙂 If you truly now the name of the notes of a piece you might find much easier to recall any passage from any section of it. While you do this, you can experiment with different dynamics and intentions applied to different phrases. Working on the speech dimension of music can open a new whole world of possibilities.
I go deeper on these subjects in my last article. You can find it at