Supporting Your Piano Pathway
Reflection by Andrew Eales
Recently, my wife Louise had a minor kitchen accident which resulted in her breaking my favourite tea cup. As she tells the story:
“So I broke Andrew’s favourite teacup.
I felt I should make him a new one in pottery class.
It lists a little bit but it works!
Andrew said that it’s the best thing that anyone has given him. He then went on to say that most people would’ve given up and started again once they noticed the listing.
Clearly I’m not most people!”
As you can see from the photo, my new cup is a thing of great beauty! But as Louise admits, it’s hardly perfect from a functional point of view. The listing perhaps doesn’t look serious, but when pouring tea into the cup it’s quite obvious that when one side is full to the brim, the other is but two-thirds full.
The beauty of my new mug is in its imperfection, its quirkiness, its vibrant personality, and its energy.
Right Notes, Wrong Energy?
The positive energy that came pre-packaged with my new tea cup can likewise infuse our piano playing, and is a lot more important than simply playing the right notes. Yet we too often berate ourselves for the minor imperfections that supposedly mar our playing. We shoot ourselves in the foot by focusing too much attention on one aspect of our playing: the technical.
Technique (‘Musical Body’) is but one aspect of becoming a Three-Dimensional Pianist. Understanding (‘Musical Mind’) and expressivity (‘Musical Soul’) both play an equally important part in our success.
Piano playing should not merely be utilitarian, contrived to get full marks in an exam, win a competition, or to produce a characterless demo. Our playing can be so much more: a genuine act of beauty, love and expression. Will we settle for playing that is merely prosaic, or invoke our technique as a catalyst for true poetry?
We live in a time where, in part due to the easy availability of “perfect” recordings, there’s a pull towards sterility when it comes to interpretive decisions, and a diminution of character in too much of the playing we hear.
In my article Piano Teaching and the Art of Criticism, I wrote:
“To perform a piece with accuracy is not so much to play it perfectly as to communicate its truth.”
The truth of all music goes well beyond the dots and lines written on the page. Obviously we all want to faithfully follow a composer’s instructions, but even when some notes are missed it is still possible to communicate with warmth and conviction the “truth” of the piece behind the notes.
Whether a nervous novice or an amateur player fluffing the notes, we can all make it our aim to communicate from the soul through our playing. But the pursuit of perfection can actually be one of the most subtle and corrosive deterrents to genuine musical engagement.
Drinking from the wonky cup
My new tea cup is a delightful reminder of Laozi’s point (Daodejing) that our concepts of perfection are but an artificial construct:
“One does not walk into the forest and accuse the trees of being off-centre, nor do they visit the shore and call the waves imperfect. So why do we look at ourselves this way?”
If we could have a lighter spirit and be kinder to ourselves and each other, I suspect we might well find that our pursuit of excellence and our appreciation of the beauty within imperfection go hand in hand.
Pianodao offers over 700 articles and reviews that are FREE to access.
If you appreciate this content, please support and follow the site:
