Going at Speed

Without errors....it is difficult for everyone!!!!!! 😳 As for the arm, perhaps a stiffening of the forearm and especially the wrist occurs.

You achieve relaxation when you have the correct position of your body and hand on the piano. Stool adjusted to the right height... For example, being very tall, I have great problems when playing on other pianos because my legs do not fit under the keyboard, so by playing further away, I cannot rest my hand on the keyboard. At home on my piano, to which I have added some plates to raise it, the position is very relaxed. First of all, therefore, evaluate that the height of your stool and the body-keyboard distance are correct. Do not let only the fingers play; let the whole arm play. The primary energy to exploit must be gravitational force. If your arm weighs 3 kg, to exaggerate the example, it shouldn't be difficult for you to depress a key weighing 60 g at worst! For the notes, take apart the portion of the piece that does not form phrases, and if the period is too long, divide it into smaller parts and study only those, perhaps for a few times also hands separately, slowly, to understand the fingering and the positions that the hand must assume when playing at speed. When you feel sure that you have acquired the right technique to overcome that passage, try it again at speed. Keep in mind that often the brain assimilates and stores in memory the new information it has acquired during rest; it is therefore very easy that after some perhaps uncertain repetitions, the following day the passage you were practicing will be assimilated.

The brain also wants its rest.

To play with weight when you try hands separately, touch your triceps with your hand and pay attention to contractions. There must be none; the weight must be transferred from one finger to another (it always depends on whether you are playing a portato, a non legato, or a staccato at speed). In these cases, another type of technique might be necessary. For staccato, the wrist and arm participate; for non legato and portato, you can articulate; for legato, you must be well-supported and work with weight. The right technical solutions are those that allow you to tackle a certain passage without muscular fatigue of the hand and the arm.

With the increase in speed, errors are generated for several reasons. Just to name a few:

1) The time available for each thought/movement contracts and, if it is not well coordinated, information relating to previous/subsequent thoughts/movements overlaps.

2) The time available to show oneself the outcomes of the moves about to be made, before actually making them, is reduced, resulting in a decrease in control.

3) The anxiety of not being able to do it increases, and anxiety and fear are classic (!) generators of errors.

4) ....................

5) ....................

The list is enormous and it would be impossible to compile it all, also because things that represent a difficulty for one person are a breeze for another, and even things that are difficult at a certain moment then, with practice or conscious effort, become easy (the opposite can even happen!).

For example, some time ago, without realizing it, I based part of my memory on fingering and, at the same time, on sequences. The two conflicted, because the former is lost as soon as you miss the synchronization of a finger, while the latter tends to make you change fingering depending on how you group the sequences. The solution? There isn't just one; you can also adopt the tactic of considering fingering secondary, you just have to not let yourself be distracted by the fact of discovering a finger on a note when we would prefer there to be another one.

Since I am not very good, I initially opted to prioritize fingering, which, however, tends to disappear from the mind if you do not play a piece for a long time. Now, being a little more prepared, I am approaching things differently, through phrasing.

So, what can I tell you: try to understand which aspect is bothering you.

In your case, I cannot understand if it is the scanning rhythm or the number of notes per second (or position changes) that is bothering you. These are two different things and require different remedies.

In general, I have found that many problems are solved by doing something else!

For example, a problem of errors in the sequence of notes can be solved by returning to solfège and re-reading the score, rather than repeating the offending measure (because, let's say, it wasn't a problem of incorrect memorization of the sequence, but of placement of accents, etc.).

In general, it is useful to have an adequate level of self-awareness and, for this reason, practice helps, but observing symptoms such as fatigue or anxiety also helps immensely; playing should be fun, not a torment.

Bye

Speed is the last thing, but one should not always play slowly. What does that mean?

Before running, I must learn how to walk well, otherwise I risk falling or overexerting myself. Walking well means knowing where I must place my feet (fingering) and why I must place them there (awareness of the text). Observing my coordination is fundamental while I walk. Observing my coordination is fundamental while I run. If I have to cover a great distance, I can stop after covering short stretches, quickly. A stop, but one that is organized and established beforehand, allows me to catch my breath and observe what went wrong in the short stretch (that is, studying with stops on every unit of time, playing fast).

..Playing slowly and without stops is totally different from playing fast with organized stops. Playing always slowly is incorrect; that is not the goal. Playing always fast is incorrect; you cannot examine the fragments. The two types of study must alternate. It will be discovered that the situations are totally different and also the relative coordination of movements is different.

I will provide some examples in subsequent videos

Great Paolo!! This is how you talk! In fact, the famous appointments....are exactly these that you are talking about. As far as I am concerned, I also feel a certain tension when playing fast and everything seems to complicate things but....the most important thing is to set appointments or strategic points where one can, so to speak, catch one's breath and the job is done. It is normal for the arm to be suspended! But it must not be rigid. As for blurring the notes, that is a bad habit that the brain generally memorizes very well...and...in my opinion, pianists cannot afford this and must not allow themselves to do so. If you make a mistake one, two, three, etc. times, your brain memorizes it and you are forced to reset. I usually went back to playing slowly and repeated. The advice, quoting Paolo, is that until you have perfection in your hands, you cannot let go of the leash. As usual, however, the temptation to bring the piece to its resulting "finished" state from an auditory and musical point of view makes you forget the rest but......it would be better to be patient. Do you know what I devised some time ago? If, for example, I had to perform a presto or anyway an allegro, I would mentally modify the idea of the piece by trying to play it as if it were an adagio, thus eliminating that tremendous frenzy one feels when playing slow pieces that we hear and are, fast; so after doing it several times I had results in speed but....do not rely too much on this personal method of mine, rather..I ask Paolo for confirmation, could it be useful? I hope I have been of help.

Yes, everything is correct, but we must not forget one important thing... Namely that many things change at speed! We were also talking about fingering in other posts; can the fingering be correct when playing slowly but not at speed? This is just one of the reasons why it is necessary not to dwell forever on slowness but to start trying at speed immediately. The 'appointments', as they have been affectionately called, are very important. One must make stops when there are entire measures that need to be studied and memorized; one must break down the phrase into small periods and memorize them individually; once the first is memorized and brought up to speed, one moves on to the second, then both are played (first and second to join them) and one proceeds to the third, playing second and third to join, and first, second, and third to glue everything together, proceeding in this manner. With this method, I have studied several studies in very little time. I remember the first Moscheles study, or the Mendelssohn Prelude, or even Les Cloches from Saint-Saëns's works, mastered in record time (respectively): 1 day, 2 days, 2 days. Each person must then find the method most suitable to them that allows them to make great strides in a short time. One must also consider the psychological approach to the piece. If you sit at the piano thinking that the piece is too difficult, you will never come out alive. The thought should be: every section of the piece must be approached with a particular technique; let's discover it, memorize it, and use it when needed... Everything becomes simpler!

Right, Simone. I would like to use a metaphor to make it understood that in speed everything changes... even the sound image, the blend of sounds and the sonic planes. Something comes out... "not well defined", meaning in the "background" and within the hierarchy of parts. Imagine painting a picture, a landscape.

By painting separately the parts of the picture that represent the foreground (for example, a cart) and then a road and trees in the distance and the mountains... by painting and then placing those parts close together, according to the actual composition, we will get....a mess. And yet we have painted everything we saw with care... with care. Why doesn't the union work? Because the whole of that mess does not take into account the hierarchy of visual planes. I cannot see the cart and the background mountains with the same level of detail; it would be unnatural.

The same thing happens in music. If one insists on always studying by fragmenting and demanding maximum definition, slowly for example, we will become increasingly unaccustomed to inserting that part into the general sonic context and, in fact, we will refuse to accept, at speed, what we can no longer hear so detailedly. It will seem to us that we are imprecise and "slapdash," and we will always refuse the final stage of study. Instead, it is the overall image that changes and contributes to the formation of that "whole" which cannot be the sum of its parts.