YOUR “VOICE” AT THE PIANO.
It is well known that each pianist has his (her) peculiar, individual, sound. One can tell the sounds of Alicia de Larrocha, and Horowitz right away (to mention only two). It is also known that sound engineers can manipulate recordings to give them a particular “tone”, but that is beside the point.
Do you devote time to build/cultivate your “voice” at the piano? If so, what do you do? After all, your sound is your “building blocks” with which you interpret music; no less, no more.
Cheers to all.
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Seymour Bernstein in his book "with your own hands" recommends to do a series of exercises using cuff weights. Because the additional weights force you to learn to support the weight of your arm over the fingers of the keys you press and thus root yourself in the base of the keys. This ability, in turn, is extremely helpful in improving tone control. While everyone's preferences and physical constitution are certainly individual, within the range of possibilities to let the piano sound as intended as possible is certainly a desirable aspect of the individuality of one's own voice.
At first one shouldn't overdo it and maybe start with just 5 minutes of this training. From there build up your ability to do longer sessions within a while. Once your body learned to transfer the weight of your arm into the base of the keys and what sounds are created as a result, voice control greatly benefits from that ability and you have more choice to intentionally form it.
A completely different aspect that has helped me personally a lot when practicing polyphonic (i mostly practise Bach these days) pieces is to imagine that there are people who sing the melodies with their voices. This idea brings a kind of micro-timing and phrasing into my playing that - although still far from where I would like it to be - makes a lot of sense. It leads to coherence of the individual voices and great overall musicality in their interplay.
Having a goal while listening carefully to yourself playing is very helpful in making better progress in your practice. So however you practise, on your journey your individual voice evolves. Maybe from being an accidental byproduct of you being yourself trying to press the right keys in the right sequence towards a fine and nuanced play that - ideally - you intentionally create.
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Listening and being able to determine if what I hear I like or don't like is key for me. I do sing melodies in my head and of course a quality instrument in an acoustic environment is ideal and inspirational.
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Just found this: https://www.tonebase.co/piano/courses/chelsea-guo-finding-your-voice-at-the-piano ... i'll chose this next :) Thanks for reminding and inspiring.
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Rainer wow!! Thanks for sharing; I will be sure to watch it. All the best!
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This is a very interesting topic. I don't seat to practice thinking how do I want to sound. But, maybe, if we start exploring the subject, one could say there is something us musicians naturally have which is like an inner ear that allow us to adapt the quality of the sound according to the composer,composition period and style. But there is also a natural personal sound, like a birth mark, that for many musicians is what makes them what they are.
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Mariela indeed, Mariela, we are all guided by our inner ear. The way I think about it is: the inner ear provides you your “ideal” of sound for such and such passage or piece, and we strive to train our playing mechanism to attain such “sound image” using our external ear. Be it said, all require training: the more we know about style and performance, the better our inner ear will provide the ideal model; the better we train our external ear, the more accurately it detects how we actually sound; finally, the better trained our playing aparatus, the better it projects our musical intentions. And YES, all of these are individual; thus, we all sound different. Cheers!!
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