Weekend Repertoire: Teaching Fugues

April 30, 2011 Jennifer Boster

For this week’s Weekend Repertoire feature I’d like to discuss teaching (and learning!) fugues! Fugues can be some of the most beautiful and rewarding pieces to learn as a pianist, but are also some of the most challenging to learn and to perform well. A pianist who is able to learn a fugue well is a pianist who is a careful and efficient practicer and a musician who has trained their ears well to listen to the sounds and dynamics coming out of the piano. One must possess good independence of hands and fingers to play a fugue well. All of these more advanced skills are difficult to learn, but are so important to the development of a fine pianist. I’d like to share a few tips on how to teach (and to learn!) fugues; hopefully some of them will come in handy, and hopefully others will have tips of their own to share!

First of all, what are some good, easier fugues to start out with? Although not necessarily fugues, the Bach Two-Part Inventions and Three-Part Inventions are excellent to start with! Because many fugues have four or five parts, it is great to begin with only two parts to keep track of. I started learning inventions in junior high – I’d say they are probably late-intermediate (depending on the invention!). Some collections of Bach’s Inventions:

Listen: Bach’s Two-Part Invention No. 1, performed by Glenn Gould

Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier is an excellent collection of preludes and fugues that every pianist should be familiar with. I would say that a good one to begin with would be either Fugue No. 2 in C minor (Book 1) or Fugue No. 21 in B-flat Major (Book 1). Of course there are many other fugues out there by Bach and other composers.

Tips for Learning a Fugue

Analyze – find the theme and mark it whenever it appears in any voice with a colored pencil or highlighter. You may also want to mark any thematic material that is similar to the theme, but not the theme exactly. Since there are so many different voices going on at once, it is imperative that you know which voice to bring out at any time. You want to be able to hear the theme whenever it appears, not just the top voice in the right hand.
Listen to recordings – I always find this helpful when just starting out learning a fugue. I like to listen to a good recording while following along in the music and marking different voices and statements of the theme.
Write in the fingerings! – I like to go through the piece and decide from the very beginning which fingerings to use. There will be so much going on during the piece that you want to have solid fingerings right from the beginning. This will help you to learn the fugue so much faster and more efficiently. Always use the same fingerings, each time you practice!
Start learning the fugue! – Oh yes, did I mention that it is good to have all of these things done and written in before you actually start to practice the piece? With a fugue especially, it’s good to have a solid plan before getting started.
Learn in very small sections – this will help you to learn correct notes, fingerings, rhythms, and phrasing as you go. A fugue can be a little daunting to learn, but if you take it in very small bites it is very doable!

Analyzing a Fugue

So, for the purpose of this post, I made a copy of Bach’s Fugue No. 2 in C minor from the Well-Tempered Clavier (Book 1) and pretended like I was about to learn it (I actually learned it years ago…). Here is what I might do if I were to start learning this today. Here are the first two pages for your enjoyment 🙂 Oh and my analysis is, of course, very technical (not!) – but I basically just wanted to give you some ideas.

First, I have highlighted the theme, every time it occurs in its full form, in yellow. I want to bring that out so you can hear it in each voice.

Next, I bracketed or highlighted other thematic material in blue. Sorry it’s a little hard to see – there is some on the last line of page 1, some on line 2 of page 2, and other random bits of it scattered throughout. These are sections that are very close to the theme, but that vary a bit.

Then I discovered this little secondary theme made up of eighth notes in a pattern of three notes slurred and one note staccato (know that this articulation will vary a LOT depending on your edition or on the pianist who made the recording you listen to!), and marked it with a purple star whenever that occurred. Although secondary to the main theme, this stuff is also important and should come out a bit, especially if there is no theme going on as well.

And lastly, there is a bunch of other stuff going on, such as long sections of sixteenth note material, which I marked with a brown bracket. At a lot of these sections, I would probably bring these sixteenth note phrases out with some graded dynamics and nice phrasing of some sort.

Anyway, you get the general idea! I would listen to several recordings of this to hear different interpretations, because they will vary so much depending on the pianist.

What fugue-learning-tips-o-awesomeness do you have to add to the list? 🙂

think about it.

July 28, 2010 Jennifer Boster

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One of the big problems that piano students face in memorization is that they only memorize by muscle memory. They play a piece over and over and over, hoping that their fingers will catch on and do the memorizing for them. Often this gets alright results, that is until the student is in a stressful situation (such as a recital!) and their nerves get the better of them. Their fingers get a little mixed up, and suddenly they are completely lost! Muscle memory is definitely useful in memorizing a piece, but we should not rely solely on it. As was written in my college pedagogy notes, “Don’t take chances!! Don’t just say, ‘good luck, fingers!! I hope you make it.‘” As teachers, we need to teach our students to actively learn and memorize pieces with their mind, not just their fingers….we need to teach them to

THINK.

In the book How to Teach Piano Successfully, Bastien says, “The student should think while practicing, not just play by rote.” (Bastien, p. 246)

Now that is some great (albeit somewhat obvious) advice – think while you practice! If your students learn their pieces thoughtfully and thoroughly, they should have no problem when it gets to the memorizing stage. Here are a few ideas to get you thinking…hehe…

Ways you can encourage thinking while practicing:

Saying letter names out loud

Counting rhythms out loud

Forcing your brain to learn the notes, not just your fingers

Not letting your mind wander while practicing…

Writing out the chords

Looking for patterns in the chords or in the melody

Knowing the form of the piece

What do you have to add to the list?

Piano Teaching Q&A: Teaching New Pieces

July 19, 2010 Jennifer Boster

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Occasionally we will be featuring questions from readers, and will do our best to answer them and to give some ideas 🙂 We’d love lots of comments to see what you think as well!

I am very interested in this topic. Can we discuss a “syllabus” lesson, maybe where we set everything up for the semester for goals? What about metronome markings for goals?

I have thought a lot lately about practicing and how I can make goals each week with my students on what to hear the following week. When I have a student learn a piece with FERN, do they do it just 5 times hands alone per day for a week? When do they start putting hands together? I have run into problems with how much each student can handle and sometimes when I write the metronome marking I would like to hear a section at the following week, they can’t get it. Do I just rely on them to make their own tempo marking?

Many of these questions depend greatly not only on the level of the student, but the particular piece being learned and the student learning it. I would like to share some thoughts on some of these questions, though!

Goals for metronome markings:

I think that the key is to start your student out on a slow enough tempo. If you give them a tempo that is too fast, they will just get frustrated! It’s better to start out too slow and to have your student perfect the piece or the section very slowly than to start out too fast and result in a discouraged student. Once the student can play it perfectly at that slow tempo, you can increase the tempo a little at a time. I also think it’s helpful to have them practice hands alone with the metronome.

Weekly goals for students:

I usually break any piece into smaller sections, and challenge the student to learn a certain section (either hands alone or hands together – depending on the difficulty of the piece) by the next lesson.

Practicing: a certain number of repetitions per day?

I think this depends on the personality of the student. Some students do well with this type of practicing, while others do better simply with the assignment to learn a certain section by a certain day. Some students practice better when recording all of their practice hours, and others not so much. I think it is best to get to know the strengths and personality traits of each individual student, and then decide which way would work best.

When to put hands together?

I usually have a student learn a short section of a piece hands alone, and then put it hands together before moving onto a new section. Although it really depends on the piece! In general though, I think that a lot of students don’t do enough hands alone practice! Even after it is learned hands together, it is still very beneficial to continue to practice hands alone.

I found this great quote from Gina Bachauer about the benefits of practicing hands alone –

“To me, the essence of study is to acquire at a young age the habit of slow practice. Not nearly enough emphasis is placed on this important point. Practicing slowly enables one to control everything one does on the keyboard. The simplest scale, practiced slowly and with concentration, puts one in the position of having to control each finger, and of testing if the resulting sound is right, if one is articulating enough, if the two hands are exactly together. I also advocate practicing with the metronome; this, too, helps toward perfecting that high degree of control which is the goal of all practice…”

“From the very beginning the aspiring student should learn to play each hand separately. In my view, one does not really know a composition, long or short, until one can play it through without the score, taking each hand separately from start to finish. Among the students to whose playing I have listened, all too few can do this and almost none make a special point of it…The two hands cannot gain complete independence until they grow accustomed to working separately, the right hand bringing out the melody, without the support of the harmony, and the left hand asserting its values without the help of the melody. Working through the day’s tasks in this way brings great gains in balance.”

-Gina Bachauer, from “The Education of a Pianist”

If you have a question you’d like to ask, leave it in a comment or submit it here!

FERN is your friend. Or, teaching new pieces to intermediate & advanced students.

July 19, 2010 Jennifer Boster

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The ways you can teach new repertoire to students are as varied as the vast amount of piano repertoire available. But, I would like to share some general ideas and suggestions, as well as some ways of teaching FERN, using four different pieces to illustrate. Ready go…

Pick pieces that your students love. If they don’t like their pieces, they won’t practice. Period.
Divide the piece into smaller sections (have your student help you – a great way to teach form!).
Teach good practice habits – practicing a short section many times is so much better than playing through the entire piece once. You may want to have them practice until they get certain assignments done, instead of for a set amount of time – they may learn repertoire faster (and better) that way.
Hands alone practice! Helpful in learning notes, rhythm, and fingering really well – one hand at a time.
Slow practice = your friend. I like to pick a good metronome speed for my students – just make sure it is not too fast, that it is a speed at which they can play the section comfortably. You can always speed it up later.
Help your student find patterns in the piece. Help them analyze what is going on. They will learn it so much better and more easily when they recognize melodic patterns, chords, etc.
FERN – make sure they learn the four important elements of the piece. Give them specific practicing instructions to help them learn these elements. For example:

F (Fingering)

In Chopin’s Nocturne Op. 72 No. 1, help your student find a good fingering for the left hand right from the beginning. Have them write it in and use the same fingering each and every time. Encourage lots of hands alone practice in small sections (for example, one line at a time) in order to learn the notes and make the correct fingering a habit.

E (Expression)

In the Minuet from Bach’s Anna Magdalena Notebook, teach your student to produce a lovely, graceful sound as they are learning the notes of this piece. Help them decide where the phrases should be (if not already written in the score) and make sure they learn to play them legato with a relaxed lift of the wrist at the end of each phrase. If you wait to add in these important details after the notes, rhythm and fingering are learned, the student will have already formed habits of playing it with the wrong expression.

R (Rhythm)

In Chopin’s Fantasie Impromptu, the four-against-three rhythm usually poses a problem. Once the student has the right hand and left hand learned separately and is ready to put them together, spend some time on the tricky rhythm. I find it helpful to have them beat out a four-against-three rhythm on their lap, with their left hand beating three and their right beating four. It should go like this (try it!): together, right, left, right, left, right, together, right, left, right, left, right, together, etc.

Or, you can use this amazingly helpful sentence, taught to me by one of my dear teachers, which somehow magically solves the rhythm problem and helps you to play it perfectly: “My mother had a duck.” Seriously, try it. On “My” you will be playing the right and left hand together. On “mother had a duck” you will play the right and left hands alternating, beginning with the right hand. It will seem a little rigid as you learn it, but once you get it down (with lots of slow practice, my friend!) you can easily smooth it out and even out both hands. To this day, I cannot play Fantasie Impromptu without saying (in my head….usually…) “My mother had a duck, my mother had a duck, my mother had a duck, my mother had a duck……”

And, last but not least:

N (Notes)

Hopefully your intermediate and above students will all know the notes on the staff very well, and won’t need to say them aloud (as is very helpful for beginners). However, there are still some things you can do to help your student learn the notes quickly and efficiently. One such way is to have them look for patterns – in the melody, in the chords, whatever. When there is some kind of pattern to latch onto, note-learning is much easier.

When teaching Bach’s Prelude No. 1 from the Well-Tempered Clavier, I always point out that each measure is basically made up of one chord. One chord, that’s it! And usually only a note or two changes from measure to measure. I actually like to have my students learn the notes of this piece by playing each measure as a block chord – so instead of playing the broken chord pattern all you are doing is playing a C chord, holding it for four counts. I have my students look ahead to the next measure to see which notes change, and then play the next chord. I find that this can be so helpful in learning the notes and getting your hand to be in the right position to play the entire measure. It eliminates any pauses and searching around for notes. And it is super easy to add in the real rhythm once all of the notes are learned.

The End. I hope some of these suggestions were helpful, or got you thinking about ways to teach other pieces!

p.s. Please share any great insights into teaching FERN – I’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas.

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Teaching New Pieces: Beginners

July 15, 2010 Jennifer Boster

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There are so many things we could discuss in the topic of teaching new pieces! I think this is an important topic and I hope to get lots of input from you! I think today I will focus on how to teach new pieces to beginners. Since beginning pieces are rather short and very simple, I think it is a good place to start 🙂

Four Elements of a Piece

Basically, there are four elements which need to be learned in any piece. Each element is important and should be learned right from the beginning. A good way to remember these elements is by the acronym FERN:

F – fingering

E – expression

R – rhythm

N – notes

(I actually sometimes like to use the acronym NERF instead – especially for students who may be familiar with or into Nerf toys!)

I think it is a big mistake for our students to learn the notes and the rhythm, and then only after they are learned to add in dynamics and expression. We need to teach our students to play musically right from the beginning, to make it a habit to play slurs, staccatos, and dynamics as they are learning new pieces.

Teaching New Pieces to Beginners

Here are some techniques to teaching new pieces that I have used in my studio. I’d love to hear what you do in yours!

Look the Piece Over

Before a student begins a new piece, it is important to look it over with them (just like the first step of sight reading) and help point out all of the important elements of the piece, including key signature, time signature, accidentals, dynamics, etc.

Hands Alone Practice

Practicing hands alone is an important way of practicing a new piece, no matter what level the student is! Students should become comfortable with playing hands alone before putting hands together. For beginners, many pieces are not hands together anyway, so you won’t have to worry about this. When students first learn how to put two hands together, it can take some coordination and getting used to! Hands alone practice will make this a lot easier.

SLOW Practice

Pianist Rudolf Firkusny says this about slow practice: “I do advise practicing in a slower tempo. I think it’s a good idea because…you can overcome bad habits which can creep into your playing.” (The Well-Tempered Keyboard Teacher, p. 356) This is true at any level! Let’s help our students develop good habits in their practicing and playing.

Show Them How to Practice: FERN

In order to help our students learn the four elements of their new piece, it is helpful to give them specific practicing instructions. Here are some ideas:

Notes

Have them name the notes before playing
Play and say letter names (When learning new pieces, I find it so helpful to have the student say things out loud as they play, such as note names or counting – it helps keep their minds active in the learning process and, in my experience, helps to learn a piece more accurately!)
Play and say “intervals” – step, skip, or repeat (helpful in learning relationships of notes on the staff)

Rhythm

Clap and count rhythm (is helpful in learning the rhythm without needing to worry about playing the right notes)
Play and count rhythm (depending on the student, you may want to have them count “1,2,3,4” “1, 1, 1-2” or “quarter, quarter, half-note”)

Expression

Dynamics: have the student practice the piece, focusing mostly on dynamic contrast. I always tell my students to exaggerate the dynamics – make forte really loud, and piano really soft. Make a big deal out of how musical it was and how fun it was to listen to with such great dynamics! We should teach our students to listen to the sound and dynamics they produce from a young age.
Slurs: If the piece has simple, two-note slurs, you could have your student say, “down, up!” as they learn the correct wrist movement used in a slur.

Fingering

Although fingering is important at all levels, I like to be careful about not stressing finger numbers too much to beginners. Yes, it is important to teach them the finger numbers and help them play in the correct position with the correct fingers. But, I have had too many young students who rely way too much on the finger numbers and not enough on the actual notes. As a result, some students do not learn the notes well enough. This illustrates the great disadvantages of playing pieces only in C major position for too long. I think we need to get our students out of C position as soon as possible, get them playing notes all over the keyboard, and get them to realize that, although fingering is important, you can actually play any note on the piano with any finger (what a concept!! hehe). I like to have my students find the correct note first, and THEN look at the finger number.

Polishing Up a Piece

Whether or not a piece is going to be a future recital piece, the end goal should be for the student to be able to play it with correct notes, rhythm and fingering, with good expression and musicality, with no stopping and at a comfortable tempo…right? What are some ways you help your students achieve this?

If the student has learned the piece well, focusing on each of the four elements, and has practiced it efficiently, there should be no problem polishing it up!

If the piece needs some polishing, try breaking it into shorter sections (one line at a time) and challenge the student to play that line three times in a row, perfectly.

Teach the student to evaluate their own playing and to identify spots where they have problems. When my students play a piece for me, I like to ask them to evaluate their own playing. If they learn to be aware of when they mess up in a piece, they will be able to better fix it in their practicing.

Using the metronome is something that needs to be learned by young students, and can be very helpful in keeping a steady tempo. I try to pick a good tempo for them that is not too fast, one that they will be able to play the entire piece at comfortably. Once they are able to do that, we may raise the tempo a bit, depending on the piece.

I hope these ideas were helpful. I would love to hear ideas of how you teach beginning pieces in your studio!

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New topic: Teaching New Repertoire

July 13, 2010 Jennifer Boster

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I hope everyone is having a wonderful summer!

For this week’s topic I thought we’d talk about how we teach our students new repertoire. When your students begin a brand new piece, how do you introduce it to them? What strategies do you use to teach it, and what practice techniques do you encourage? If it is to be a recital piece, when do you have them start memorizing it? What are the important elements of the piece that you stress right from the beginning? Do you have them initially only work on it in smaller sections, or do you encourage them to sightread the entire piece right away? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic!