Playing your music wrong... on purpose

Play the notes right. Okay, now play them differently...

I talked about something called "Controlled Imperfection" on the last edition of "Piano Thor'sday", so I figured I would cover the topic here as well. As I mentioned during the broadcast, not all musicians know how to read music (many of them don't), but those who do were probably taught, originally, to play the music exactly as it's written on the paper, in the most accurate and best manner possible. If you're playing a piece by some other composer, this is generally true (sort of). Well, at first anyway. I tell my students this at the early stages of my Beginner Course. Then, if the student ends up being with me for a number of months, I tell them not to.

Sheet music is perfect for showing you which notes to play, and what the beat is. It also gives you a general idea of what the tempo is (the speed of the song). But, as any seasoned musician knows, many things about how to perform a piece are subjective. These subjective elements about musical performance are, in my opinion, grossly understated by most music teachers. I'm one of those teachers who has no problem telling a kid a bunch of rules about note-reading, and then telling that same kid to bend those very rules, just for effect. If the kid knows which rules he or she is breaking, and knows why they're being broken, what's the harm? It's the good old Mark Twain effect. The famous author certainly knew the rules about English grammar when he wrote Huckleberry Finn, but he deliberately broke a variety of rules in order to use a dialect that was common in that geographic region.

As many people know, performers who play the correct notes in a piece but have their own "style" (they play it at a certain speed, they perform at a certain volume, they play certain parts gracefully and other parts aggressively, etc.), it's called a performer's interpretation of a piece. The fun part about learning music is how free you can be to interpret pieces in your own way.  During the broadcast last week I covered four ways that you can vary your interpretations of a piece, which I've summarized below.


Four ways to explore your interpretations 

1. Vary your tempo (a.k.a. change your speed)

Pianist Valentina Lisitsa concentrating on interpretation
while playing a Nocturne

When playing a song, speed up in some places and slow down in other places. There is a healthy balance between doing these two things at just the right time. This technique normally only applies to music that doesn't have a consistent drumbeat, like most rock and pop songs do, so if you're in a band and writing a song that involves a drummer, this might be an exception (but not necessarily). For any kind of solo performance, though, whether it's a flute, a guitar, a piano, a violin, etc., I typically suggest using this technique fairly regularly. The beautiful part is that you can actually master this to the point where the listener almost-sort-of doesn't know there's an actual beat, even though there is one. The listeners can hear the beat, but they can't. Or the beat (even the time signature) can just change completely during a song.


2. Create a delay

So, wait. You're playing certain pairs of notes together, just like the sheet music tells you to do? What are you, crazy? ;)

In printed sheet music, notes that are to be played simultaneously appear to "line up" so that if you took a ruler you could draw a line and the notes would both touch the line. It's generally good to play many of these pairs of notes together, but occasionally it's also very effective to play them so that there's a slight lag, or "delay," meaning you play the lower note a split-second before the higher note. I do this frequently and deliberately, and it creates a very nice sentimental effect, thus showing this so-called "controlled imperfection". It shows that you're human and not a robot, making the song sound far more emotional and touching. This is very common among soloists and vocalists alike, and again you can see examples of it on my broadcast from last week (you can watch a recording of it here).


3. Vary your dynamics

The musical notation for a crescendo (getting louder)
and a decrescendo (getting softer). The 'p' signals you
 to play quietly, while the 'f 'signals you to play loudly. 

One of the things I tell people often, especially students, is that playing music is one of the only times in life when it's acceptable to be a complete drama queen. In music, "dynamics" refers to the loudness or quietness of the notes during a piece. Most instruments allow for this, with some exceptions (i.e. the harpsichord apparently has a fixed volume level). The harder you bang on a piano, however, the louder the note will sound. The harder you dig your  bow into a string on a violin, the louder the sound will be that comes out. It's wonderful. This dynamism and variation in the volume of an instrument allows for a huge range of potential for emotional expression.

Sheet music does, actually, have symbols for changes in dynamics (i.e. there are symbols for a crescendo, meaning to "play louder", as shown above) but the measure by which how much louder you play and the decibel levels are not exact, so it's still pretty subjective. This subjectivity is what makes it fun to be a performer -- you can interpret the song how you want.


4. Let some of the notes linger

A fermata symbol, used in music to indicate
that a note needs to be held longer than its value.
A soloist can play the next note at his/her discretion,
whereas a musician must wait and play the next note
at the conductor's discretion.

Many pianists and other instrumentalists will occasionally play a note for a longer duration than what's written on the sheet music, causing a certain note to "linger" before playing the next note. I demonstrated this during my live stream last week, but you can certainly see more examples of it from other performers. There are symbols for this as well, such as the "grand pause" (two diagonal lines directly after the note that's supposed to linger) and the fermata, illustrated to the right.


Since I know that examples always help, I attached a video of world renowned pianist Evgeny Kissin below. He's playing a piece by Chopin (from memory, of course, hence he no longer needs the sheet music) but if you listen to it and watch him you can clearly seem him using the techniques of interpretation I mentioned above.

Hope this helps. Beethoven said it best in his famous quote, which I feel really pin-points this entire discussion: "To play a wrong note is insignificant; to play without passion is inexcusable."