What Separates Advanced from Intermediate Pianists??

[@michaeltilley8708]

It is interesting that many pianists do not consider the ability to play by ear, to harmonize a melody, to transpose, or to improvise on a harmonic structure as necessary markers of advancement.

[@PianistAcademy1]

I listed some of those skills you mention in my previous video about advancing to intermediate from beginner level. Of course there are a variety of levels of achievement within each of those skills as well. I’ve always been surprised at the sheer number of multiple degree holding pianists who cannot play by ear, or read a lead sheet, or improvise. In fact, I taught myself those things because, outside of formal jazz studies, it’s almost not a part of any collegiate curriculum. Having and studying those abilities usually leads students more down a path toward professional composition than professional performance, but achieving the highest levels of performance would, I think, still require intimate knowledge of improvisation, harmony, and ear training. I just did probably 30 minutes in my last stream on analysis of cadences and how that impacts interpretation. In short, I agree with you! But I had to pick the top of top of what’s necessary, otherwise my list would be hundreds of points long 😂 You might consider watching another video I made earlier this year called “Should all pianists write music?” It deals with more of the structured side of composition than you reference, but still alludes to needing all of the skills you mention.

[@michaeltilley8708]

@@PianistAcademy1 huzzah! Thank you for the detailed response, i look forward to watching it and apologize for being negative on the first video of yours i have seen.

[@PianistAcademy1]

@@michaeltilley8708no worries! Thanks for being open to watching more!

[@em8714]

I'd say these more align with musical skills as a whole. Not specific to the piano

[@michaeltilley8708]

@@em8714 oh but artistry, efficient practice technique, and pulse are specifically pianistic?

[@ellenweaver9304]

I would add a 6th point. The ability to competently play pieces from the various periods of classical music. I think this shows a depth of repertoire and understanding of how to play and interpret pieces from a wide range of composers.

[@PianistAcademy1]

I agree!

[@aBachwardsfellow]

Very helpful! I'm *maybe* at 3.5 out of 5 - still working on that last one ... :-) 00:17 1. The Beginning Signs of Artistry 02:34 2. A Modest Grasp of Efficient Practice Technics 04:24 3. Clean Use of Pedal Dictated By Ear 06:21 4. An Impeccable Sense of Pulse and Ease of RhythMic Subdivision 07:36 5. Efficient Technique That Is Capable of Performing Most of the Great Repertoire

[@bethanywakim6175]

Great video, I was looking forward to this one! Efficient practice is a difficult one for me. Usually I have about an hour a day to fit composition and practice in, as well as the occasional recording. Most of the time it feels like I’m maintaining, rather than progressing… I need to make better use of small chunks of time!

[@antoniomaccagnan7200]

I don't hit a single pedal marking too. Does it mean I'm as good as Trifonov?

[@PianistAcademy1]

Oh Antonio 😂

[@lettersquash]

Very interesting, especially after the beginner/intermediate analysis, in which I found I was much more of a beginner than I thought, but spotted areas where I'm relatively skilled. Watching this, I felt a little of the same - not that I come anywhere close to advanced level, but again one or two skills I feel I've developed quite well. I've played by ear for a few decades, after a few years of lessons as a young child, and composed, and sometimes been obsessed with the instrument and played for hour after hour. Other times, years went by hardly touching the keys. But that approach, I think, developed my musicality perhaps to achieve moments of artistry. I am listening as intently as I can (not distracted by dots on the page or wondering what the composer wanted) and being as creative as I can. Meanwhile, I can hardly play scales, and read pretty badly. I'm also lucky in being semi-retired and having very few demands on my time, and I'm not aiming to achieve great things, just enjoy the process, so I have little need to fit practice in efficiently. I know this has downsides, and I'm not developing as fast as I could. On the other hand, I'm enjoying playing the piano probably a lot more for it and feel a little sorry for proper students. If I'd continued learning at the age of 10, there would be a reason to maximize my musical potential with a lifetime ahead. At 63, the priorities are different: better than last week is gold.

[@miguele.colonp1567]

Thank for this great video!! I was waiting for it!! Good Job!

[@PianistAcademy1]

Thanks, Miguel!

[@qazsedcft2162]

I've been playing piano for about 10 years and I can learn RCM 10 pieces in about 2-3 months and some diploma pieces in maybe 4-6 months but scales at 160 are still completely unatainable (my limit is around 138). I think starting as an adult it's hard to gain the raw finger speed and fast coordination.

[@PianistAcademy1]

138 is still a great achievement, AND it’s still beyond the 120 “requirement” for RCM level 10, and pretty substantially beyond. You’re at that point where the scale or passage at a faster tempo needs to be less about individual finger movement and more about larger gesture, like feeling one octave in one beat and in “one” motion with the hand, wrist, and arm… fingers lightly tagging along for the ride and executing minimized versions of the slower tempo technique.

[@voskresenie-]

I'd say I'm quite a bit beyond this on most things, including repertoire (and I've had a number of very good pianists, including juries in college, validate that I'm actually playing these pieces well, not just hacking through things ), but I've never really spent much time on scales or arpeggios, and I know that my playing has suffered for it in certain areas. That all being said, I can get any given scale up to 120 with a few days of practice, depending on the scale (6-accidental keys are the worst, the 2-1 (on LH ascent, RH descent) alternating between gap and no gap is tricky), but then I switch to another key and come back to it later and I have to work up to it again. I don't think I've ever worked up a scale to 160 with 2 hands, 4 octaves, asc and desc, although I've done that with shorter segments in pieces. My question is, what is the best way to learn all major and minor scales, such that I can keep all of them in a somewhat comfortable state? Is it best to get one really good before moving on to the next? And how would you rotate between them? Do you pair major and relative minor? Or parallel? Or separate major from minor in your cycle? Do you go through circle of fifths, or chromatically? Do you have a couple going at a time? Do you go through all 24 keys before restarting, or do you periodically refresh them? I have been going through the circle of fifths, all majors first, then all minors, which makes each new scale easier, since it's only adding one accidental, and there's overlap in fingering apart from a few transitions, but the downside is that by the time I get back to where I started, it's been a long time since I played the scale, and so there's more work required to get comfortable and up to speed again. Any guidance would be appreciated! Or, if you have a video that covers this, could you refer me to that? Thank you!

[@PianistAcademy1]

Another great comment! Thanks for watching multiple videos! In my own practice today (which I'll comment on because it sounds like you've also been through at least one degree program in piano performance) I rarely truly practice scales. Scales mainly feature during demonstrations in lessons and always in my pre-performance routine. That said, at the height of my practicing them, I had all major and variations of minor up to 200 in 16ths, in parallel octaves, and in parallel 3rds, 6ths, and 10ths, and would slide between each of those interval relationships without pause during practice. Today, cold, I could play most any of those without practice at about 150 very evenly in both articulation and dynamic. If I wanted to, I could work probably about half of them back up to 200 within a week. That example serves to show one purpose... It's one thing to learn to achieve a certain mastery in technique and it's another to be able to "re-achieve" it on short notice. It took years of practice to first exceed 160, and then more years above that tempo to "solidify" that technique so now I can almost call on it not just for any scale, but for any passage in repertoire that mimics scale technique. In working on scales, I prescribe limited numbers of keys that get worked very hard during the week. For most students the keys correspond to the keys of their repertoire (and their relatives). For me, I go chromatically playing both major and then the parallel (not harmonic) minor. Mine is just a choice that I find fun and enjoyable, not necessarily because it has any specific benefit (like pairing major and harmonic minor does, or running circle of 5ths does, etc). In working them to a faster tempo, for an advanced students, I'd give them around 3 or 4 to work on per week (or per month) and set a very specific tempo goal for them. For example, if you can solidly play them at 110, next week should be 120, the following week 130, and the following week 140. Given about 2 hours to practice everything you have to work on, that leaves 15 to 20 minutes to really focus on those 4 scales, give them many repetitions, and work tempo up AND down as problems are uncovered at higher tempi. Once that has been achieved, another 4 scales will be chosen and the same task given... except during lessons I'll still remind the student that I still might ask for one of the first 4 scales we worked... only up to 130 and not the max tempo achieved, but still... they need to be refreshed on a daily or near daily basis. Once we've gone through 12 or so, there isn't much that changes for fingerings and hand positions, so practice on new scales CAN continue to reinforce the others that you don't have time for.

[@RhodesyYT]

New video amazing work Charles, also how do I get my music released on spotify? I am trying through routenote since the forest suite album release

[@PianistAcademy1]

Until my relatively recent affiliation with a record label, I used CD Baby to self-release all of my original compositions and get them on all of the major streaming platforms. If you don't need mechanical license (for a cover song etc), CD Baby is a great place to look. You could also look at Distrokid, although from what I've heard they don't have quite the right options for a "classical" release.

[@RhodesyYT]

@PianistAcademy1 thanks charles I'll look it up

[@Josepcarrion]

Oh yes please do these next ones videos.

[@mikepasich1972]

Artistry is a great book! Though I’m biased as Robert Hamilton was my teacher in high school and college.

[@PianistAcademy1]

Mike, great to meet you!! He was my teacher for my undergrad and masters! We are trying to make some plans to have him on the channel later this year 😁

[@ST52655]

Hand span helps

[@PianistAcademy1]

It makes some things easier, but some more difficult! Playing Bach and Mozart with large hands is more challenging. But of course, Chopin, Liszt, Rachmaninoff etc can benefit from larger spans.

[@serwoolsley]

metronome precise inner pulse you say? nah bruh i'm a romantic fella, we don't do that here

[@PianistAcademy1]

Ah but the best rubato is all based on that precision of pulse, because without it the phrase becomes meaningless! You know my own playing and composition well so you'll know that I *never* play like a metronome... but I hear tiny linear subdivisions of every beat during every push and pull of every phrase. There's always connection. Liszt himself aspired to Chopin's style of rubato and he characterized it as "Look at these trees! The wind plays in the leaves, stirs up life among them, the tree remains the same, that is Chopinesque rubato." I'd say the "tree" is our "metronome precise pulse" and the "wind" is how we shift that pulse around. Another famous quote, you might already know, but here it is: "In keeping time, Chopin was inexorable, and some readers will be surprised to learn that the metronome never left his piano. Even in his much maligned tempo rubato, the hand responsible for the accompaniment would keep strict time, while the other hand, singing the melody, would free the essence of the musical thought from all rhythmic fetter, either by lingering hesitantly or by eagerly anticipating the movement with a certain impatient vehemence akin to passionate speech."

[@AcousticBruce]

I hear what you're saying and I'm sensing that you're somewhat joking. However, I'm practicing a piece arabesque number one by Debussy. I don't practice with a metronome on this piece - Wait I take that back the two against 3 I used a metronome just to switch back and forth from feeling off of the triplet versus feeling off of the 1&. But pretty much I don't practice with a metronome on that piece. But I do count the pulse and I make sure I'm feeling that pulse. When I practice more classical pieces I definitely use the metronome.

[@PianistAcademy1]

@@AcousticBruceI think you’re replying to Ser Woolsley, but also know that I hardly ever actually advocate the use of a metronome in practice. Yes, we want to be able to count as precisely as a metronome… it’s the development of that skill that leads to true understanding of rhythm and how to build a musical phrase. Because rubato doesn’t throw pulse out the window, it allows pulse to be fluid. But fluid moves easily, smoothly, and gradually in different directions. Often, pianists who don’t have enough of a sense of inner pulse pull and push far too quickly, or too much, and break the phrase in the process. Ritardandos become hiccup-y slow downs rather than linear. Same with accelerandos. When you can hear a perfect 120bpm or 80 or… any tempo… as perfect as a metronome, but without the metronome sounding, then you are able to build phrase and rubato at a very high level, because everything should be built around that pulse.

[@AcousticBruce]

@@PianistAcademy1 yeah, I was replying to Woosley. if you're studying a Bach invention, you wouldn't use a metronome? Currently when studying more classical bass music, I'm using the metronome to get more precision. I'm one of those musicians that can play more advanced pieces, but I have a serious problem with technique with classical. It really shows when I play classical style. So I'm filling in the gaps right now.

[@PianistAcademy1]

@@AcousticBruce Baroque period music is the perfect place to wean yourself off of metronome but still look for the precision. There’s less (almost no) room for “rubato” especially in the romantic sense, BUT, accent and idea was largely created with pause and time in baroque music. In saying pause I don’t mean large gaps, but really just the shortest of catch breaths. When I studied pipe organ for 2 semesters in college, it was those tiny little breaths that were some of the only accent or “rubato” that we could add. So yes, baroque period music will stick much more firmly to the machine-like pulse of the metronome, but it still can have inflection here and there. Because the pulse is so prevalent and because the inflections are so minimal, it’s the perfect place to begin to test your sense of inner pulse

[@bunnyhollowcrafts]

Scales, scales, scales!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[@PianistAcademy1]

😇

[@christiaanveltkamp]

All my pianostudents can do scales at least to some degree. I trust they will develop it over time. What is the real problem is subtlety in dynamics, combined with quality pedaling and using this to create a certain mood that fits the piece. They all play clunky / mechanistic in the beginning and they find it very hard to also have to pay attention to other musical aspects besides the correct notes while playing.

[@PianistAcademy1]

@@christiaanveltkamp Yes, I agree with this. Add to it that you need a very very good practice instrument to learn to shade dynamics properly and not only is it difficult, but circumstances don't always align for a student to even have an opportunity (at home at least) to work on it. One of my better students from over the years fell into this category... he was working a Liszt Transcendental Etude, Beethoven's Tempest, Chopin's 1st Ballade, and some other rep... his home practice instrument was an old upright that could basically do 2 dynamics... loud and soft... and one color... bright. Working on subtlety in phrase and story was an uphill battle because... he could do it given a minute or two in the lesson and on the lesson instrument... but then a week of practicing at home and progress would be significantly halted. If the practice piano IS good, then I'd have another concern: if they truly can't think about the right notes and any more than that, I'd strongly consider their current repertoire to be too difficult for them. When I have students like this, I go back a few levels and introduce some easier rep. They learn the notes in a week or two and then we can spend a month or more really focused on musicality. Some of that starts to work its way into the more difficult rep. But truly, if they are learning RCM 9 or 10 repertoire, this sort of stuff should already, to some degree, be introduced into their playing of a piece before you, as the teacher, hear it for even the first time. Even my very early beginners learn to pay attention to the dynamic markings and phrase markings within their first week working a piece.

[@MrWhiteKeys1]

There is no universe in which one hour per day is sufficient for a serious pianist.

[@myklkay]

Maybe the one where all serious pianists are at intermediate level :)

[@PianistAcademy1]

I’d agree, at least in part, with you here in that ideally we have more than 1 hour per day to practice. But I’d also say that quite high levels of advancement actually can be achieved with one hour per day… a couple of personal stories to share about that: When I was preparing for college auditions, I’d only have about 10 hours per *week to practice, and that mostly amounted to 1 hour per day Monday through Friday and a little more on the weekends. I’d get home from class around 3:30, have between 4 and 6 hours of homework on the docket, and so even doing one hour was really difficult to fit in. I’d get it all done, sometimes at 11pm or midnight… go to bed, get up at 6am and do it all over again. My teacher would urge me to do at least 2 hours per day, but he also understood that it literally wasn’t possible without either cutting into my sleep (and my family’s sleep) or cutting into my class work. So instead of pushing more time, he worked with me to make that 1 hour of practice as productive as the 4 hours my contemporaries were doing. And it didn’t make me just “productive,” but also very competitive against them. I was playing rep like Beethoven’s Appassionata, Liszt’s 6th Paganini Etude, Chopin’s Polonaise in f# minor, Debussy’s Estampes, etc. And when I took auditions, I was top candidate at many of the conservatories I auditioned for. All with *only approximately 1 hour per day of practice. And it was all because I was taught how to use that hour in the most efficient way possible. That’s why, truly, I believe that efficient practice is far far more important than the length of time you spend on the bench. One other, related, short story from personal experience… I was told by Vladimir Feltsman in a private lesson with him that I needed to be able to do *all practice preparation in no more than 2 hours per day. Anything beyond that should be considered a luxury and not expected, especially if I was planning on having a career in music. I was surprised, but I’ve also found that to be very true, and my training in efficient practice has led me to be able to keep up my practice in 2 hours or fewer per day. He approached it from a bit of a different perspective, but basically he said the same thing… you have to practice efficiently because you won’t have time to not be efficient. So yes, more than 1 hour is definitely ideal if and when circumstances permit it. But the luxury of time should never be a replacement for learning *how to practice well.

[@MrWhiteKeys1]

@@PianistAcademy1 When I was in college (as a piano performance major) they would review the practice room logs and if we dropped consistently below 4 hours per day they would tell us to find another school. The average was 6 hours per day, more for preparation for competitions.

[@PianistAcademy1]

@@MrWhiteKeys1 See, I just flat out disagree with institutions like that, because “hours” in almost no way translates to “learning.” One day in my own degree program, I sat next to someone practicing the same 4 bars of Rachmaninoff for an entire hour. And at the end of the hour it wasn’t any different than when they started! 1 hour, completely wasted, and very possibly made the measures worse, mentally, than better because they didn’t know how to spend the hour. Sure, yeah, you NEED 4, 6, 8, or more hours per day if that’s your practice method and you are trying to make progress. And in that same time, I worked multiple pages from multiple pieces with much more concrete results. When an institution enforces a rule like that, they place the emphasis on time above quality. I took one week during my bachelors to try out 8 hours per day. It was interesting. But most importantly, I learned that, at least for myself, anything more than 5 was wasted, and the stretch from 4 to 5 wasn’t nearly as productive as each of the first 4 hours. I never had a desire to spend 8 hours per day again, and even on days with more time, I now knew that truly 4 was the max I should strive for, and preferably spread throughout the day in 1-1.5 hour chunks. The performance major practice hall actually had a LIMIT on time at my school. The rooms all had Steinway O or Ls and there were 8 rooms, but not enough to accommodate all of the performance majors at all 3 levels. We signed up for time, but limited to 2 hours per day in that hall. You could grab an empty room if you wanted, but if the person who had signed up for the slot arrived, they could kick you out. Very frustrating when you walk by and see people doing their theory homework, or talking on the phone, or sleeping on the fallboard, or chatting with a friend and drinking coffee… and it’s “their” slot so you can’t use the room, but they are counting that toward their daily practice time? lol. That was nearly 20 years ago for me now and it still fuels my fire for quality over quantity.

[@MrWhiteKeys1]

@@PianistAcademy1 I agree. My story was 40 years ago. As I get older I get more efficient in my practice. Instead of scales, arpeggios and dexterity exercises (which I used to do 3-4 hours per day), I turn the music into an exercise. Plus my sight reading has improved significantly so I can learn new works faster. I have come up with more efficient ways to work on pieces. So a prescribed number of hours per day doesn’t make sense to me anymore. However, one hour wouldn’t do it for me. I need at least two to make any measurable progress.

[@hshlom]

Ok, we get that you have at least 2 video cameras, but to change the camera every 5 seconds is distracting and annoying. Otherwise, great video!

[@PianistAcademy1]

Hey! I actually appreciate this comment. I mean, it’s a little bit of a bummer because the edit for this video took me literally 20 hours lol… BUT… I actually dread doing edits like this, trying to stick to the “8 second rule” about video content. The only reason I do it is because it’s *supposed* to help viewer retention by keeping attention. But honestly, I’d much rather just have mainly one angle and show a zoom in on something here and there, like zoom in on hands from a different angle for a specific demonstration. It would save a massive amount of time and editing headache/frustration, and if on top of that people would actually like it more than all of the quick cuts, then FOR SURE I’ll change styles lol.

[@hshlom]

@@PianistAcademy1 Thanks for taking my comment constructively. I appreciate your appreciation! 20 hours? Holy cow! I'm sure you have much better things to do with your time!

[@PianistAcademy1]

@@hshlomabsolutely yes!!