Getting Music To Flow

Getting music to flow

One of the most common problems with the playing of many less experienced players is that it is littered with pauses, stops and stilted phrasing. Nothing quite spoils the excitement, lyricism or beauty of a melody like a gap halfway through caused by the player s feverish attempts to try to read the next chord and twist their fingers in to shape in time.

There are, however two useful ways of combating this problem:

1. Make the most of the time you have by learning to look ahead.

2. Learn to practice phrases rather than bars.

These both seem fairly simple suggestions but they are actually quite fundamental to how the music comes across and can improve a musician s playing considerably.

I have lost count of the number of times I have seen a pupil happily playing through a couple of easy bars of repeated notes or, even worse, a held note, content in the knowledge that they can play this bit, only to get to the bar line and instantly panic when they can t work out the next tricky note in time.

Piano playing in particular is full of challenges created by trying to do two different things simultaneously, whether that is each hand having to play a different rhythm, fingers of the same hand having to play with different articulation or weight, or just that while one part of your brain is fully occupied in playing the music that is being created in real time, other parts are thinking, that bit where my left hand jumps up an octave comes next , there s one more bar of C7 and then its two lots of F7 , or even I shouldn t play this 2^nd subject too loud or there won t be anywhere to take it in the recapitulation .

The ability to detach on one level but be fully involved on another is, like everything else, something that comes with practice but there needs to be a conscious attempt to look forward. When working on a difficult passage this means visualising the awkward jump or tricky chord in advance, when sight-reading something new it means trying as much as possible to see what is coming. In both cases it means taking advantage of any moments where you are comfortable for a while. Two tied semibreves? Time to check what happens next!

The second suggestion refers to the fact that the playing of many pupils is far too dominated by the tyrannical rule of the bar line. In reality a huge number of phrases do not begin or end at the beginning of a bar and yet bar lines are given far too much importance. This is a shortcoming of written music. Of course bar lines and note groupings make everything much clearer on the page and allow for astonishing amounts of information to be taken in at great speed. For an accomplished sight-reader written music is a magical thing but for a beginner it can create problems of phrasing that someone playing by ear or improvising does not have. When notes get played as, this one, then that one, then this one , and bars are plonked one after the other it is no surprise that the melody can get lost and the phrasing disintegrates.

All that s needed to get round this however is a little preparation and thought about how a phrase should sound, and a willingness to listen as you play. When practicing it means going over passages from the beginning of a phrase, not the beginning of the bar, being aware of the tension and resolution of one chord to another and smoothing the joins whenever tricky fingering is needed.