Music is painted on a canvas of silence

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Music is painted upon a canvas of silence.

Mozart said ‘rests are just as important as notes, silence is the greatest effect in music’.

The virtuoso, whose existence depends on moving great audiences knows that a skillfully placed rest or perhaps a grand pause knows that rests and pauses are of vital importance in a performance. Often times the effect of the pauses in the music is greater than the notes. They serve to attract and prepare the mind and can have a powerful effect in your performances.

Poise, in music is often largely a matter of the correct observance of the full value of rests. The composer in creating the composition did so with a very distinct sound in mind. The balance and symmetry of sound or notes and then pauses. So take time to breath in your performances, take a breath between the phrases and be sure to always observe the full value of the rests in a composition.

To improve the artistry in your piano performances please contact us for piano lessons and learn the finer details of making art on the piano not just playing notes.

Chopin Ballade Manuscript Opus 23 g minor

We look forward to hearing from you.

A True Artist

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“I never neglect an opportunity to improve, no matter how perfect a previous interpretation may have seemed to me.  In fact, I often go directly home from the concert and practice for hours upon the very pieces I have been playing, because during the concert certain new ideas have come to me.  Those ideas are very precious , and to neglect them or to consider them details to be postponed for future development would be ridiculous in the extreme…A real artist is someone who has formed the habit of stopping at nothing short of his highest ideal of perfection…”

Ferruccio Busoni

http://www.theartofpianoperformance.maison/

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Ferruccio Busoni Pianist/Composer Extraodinaire

 

Busoni-Pianist / Transcriber Extraordinaire of JS Bach Music
Busoni Ferruccio Buson

Mastering Piano Artistry-Each Note is a Jewel/Star

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The Art of Piano Performance
The Art of Piano Performance

‘Each note in a composition should be polished until it is as perfect as a jewel…those wonderful scintillating, ever-changing orbs of light.  In a really great masterpiece each note has its place just as the stars, the jewels of heaven, have their places in their constellations.  When a star moves it moves in an orbit that was created by nature.

Great musical masterpieces owe their existence to mental forces quite as miraculous as those which put the heavens into being. The notes in compositions of this kind are not there by any rule of man.  They come through the ever mystifying source which we call inspiration.  Each note must bear a distinct relation to the whole…’

Vladimir De Pachmann

 Frédéric François Chopin the Artist

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Frédéric François Chopin
Chopin Ballade Manuscript Opus 23 g minor

“Chopin comes before us, then, as a man of extremely complex make-up, and there is no easy solution to the problems which his personality and the music through which it was expressed present to his modern interpreter.  

One can only approach him by sweeping aside the clutter of trivial romantic legend which has accumulated around his name and his works.  When all the sentimentality, pathos, patriotic fairy-takes and garbled ‘memories’ have been cleared away he appears in simple dignity as Thomas Carlyle saw him in 1848-a great artist and ‘a noble and much suffering human being’.  He was more than any other musician of his period the ‘artist’ in that word’s most absolute sense.  His mind was never diverted from its single, absorbing preoccupation by any chasing after will-o’-the wisps in the field of literature, the visual arts, politics, social questions or abstract theorizing.   To some it will seem a weakness that he should have lived in a world of upheaval and rapid change without ever allowing himself to be ‘committed ‘or ‘engaged’, as our modern jargon puts it. Yet it was therein that his strength lay.  

He was dedicated to the one task of exploring the world he new best -that of his own heart and imagination; and in giving shape to what he discovered within himself it turns out that he was embodying in his music those unchanging essentials of feeling which ordinary inarticulate humanity recognizes  but cannot express for itself.  In limiting himself to the piano he in no way crippled or tied down his genius, for by his natural affinity with his instrument he was provided with a sufficient outlet for the wealth of sensibility with which his double inheritance had endowed him…”

Arthur Hedley

Toccata BWV 915 by Johann Sebastian Bach

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The Art of Piano Performance

Toccata BWV 915

The toccata an extensive piece intended primarily as a display of manual dexterity written for keyboard instruments reached its apex with Johann Sebastian Bach in the eighteenth century. Johann Sebastian Bach’s seven Toccatas incorporate rapid runs and arpeggios alternating with chordal passages, slow adagios and at least one or sometimes two fugues. The Toccatas have an improvisational feel to them analogous to the fantasia. Unlike the Well Tempered Clavier, English suites, French suites and other sets, Bach himself did not arrange them into a collection. When JS Bach left Weimar the Toccata at that time was out of fashion. They became in vogue again after his death and were organized into a collection. The g minor Toccata is one of the more obscure of the toccatas and has rarely been performed partially due to the extensive second fugue with its many thorny passages of the contrasting gigue…

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Virtuosity & Piano Artistry

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In the sphere of piano performance or piano artistry there are few human activities where the necessity for extraordinary physical prowess is so closely aligned with the greatest intellectual and emotional capacities.

The virtuoso must possess a memory capable of maintaining thousands of pages of music in the mind and fingers, under the stress and distractions of public performance; the virtuoso must be cultured and self-aware, musically able to convey the great range of meaning embodied within a chosen repertoire; the virtuoso must project both physical excitement and emotional communication; and the virtuoso must experience life to the fullest while remaining cloistered with an instrument in a relentless quest to maintain his or her craft at its highest level.

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Attributes & Depth Required to Interpret Chopin

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A capricious, even morbid, temperament is demanded, and there must be the fire that kindles and the power that menaces; a fluctuating, wavering rhythm yet a rhythmic sense of excessive rectitude; a sensuous touch, yet a touch that contains an infinity of coloring; supreme musicianship-Chopin was a musician first, poet afterwards; a big nature overflowing with milk and honey; and, last of all, you must have suffered the tribulations of life and love, until the nerves are whittled away to a thin sensitive edge and the soul is aflame with the joy of death’
James Huneker

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