For Bernhard, on listening

[mound]

Ok, barring any arguments over the worth of listening to various recordings of a piece you're going to learn.. (I know Bernhard praises it's worth, and I agree..)

My question is - is it a good idea to continue listening to recordings while you are learning it, or only to ingrain the piece in your head before you hit the piano?

thanks
-Paul

[bernhard]

As I start to truly master a piece, I find that I go through a phase of not listening to CDs of it at all. I naturally loose interest in other’s playing as I get more and more interested on my own.

However, I often go back to CDs at certain intervals, and I am often surprised that I had not noticed certain details before.

So, at first (during score work and work away from the piano) I tend to listen a lot to CDs. My main aim at this point is simply to get the sound ingrained. That is what the music sounds like, and how different performances bring/fail to bring the music alive. At very first my listening is mostly uncritical – I just want to get acquainted with the piece. With repetitive comparative listening, criticism comes naturally into it and I start to develop likes and dislikes and predilections for a interpreter(s) over others.

As I start working at the piano, I tend to listen less and less to CDs and at some stage not at all. This is not planned – it just happens.

As the piece comes together, I find that I start listening again to CDs – but at much wider intervals than in the beginning – to check things out so to speak. At this point, having actually experienced the piece, I find that the quality of my listening improves tenfold.

Sometimes I get quite sick of the piece (from so much listening) – how fast you can get sick of listening to a piece is a sure measure of the inferiority of a composition. If this happens, than it is a very good idea to drop listening to it for a while so that it can regain its freshness (if it doesn’t than that’s definitely an inferior composition). Alternatively, there are pieces that I first hear and seemingly cannot get enough of it. These are the pieces that go in my future repertory list.

In my experience, it is far easier to get sick of listening to a piece than it is of playing a piece. I guess this shows how passive listening is an inferior way to truly appreciate music.

It is only in the last 15-20 years that a truly formidable repertory has become available on CD, so I doubt not listening to CDs has too much of a negative effect – the great majority of pianists and composers from past times did well without CDs.

I also think that for an advanced pianist with good sight-reading skills, listening to CDs may not be necessary at all.

It is for intermediate and beginners that CD listening can make a huge difference, and cut learning time dramatically.

Best wishes,
Bernhard.

[rlefebvr]

I tend to agree.

It can be very useful at the beginning, but especially at the end when you think you are playing well and then realize from listening that certain notes are held too long or too short. A passage you thought you were playing fast is actually slow or the other way around. 

Of course a teacher will notice these things, but for you to notice them on your own is much better and you can this decide for yourself if you are playing with style or simply playing it all wrong.

[ted]

I find it pretty well impossible to make rules about this, even for myself. I quite often find that I am very impressed with somebody's playing of something at first but then after I can play it myself I frequently lose interest in the recording I used to like. By way of example, I was initially very impressed with Frank French and David Roberts playing their own works but now, whenever I play their CDs I usually just listen to tracks I do not play myself.

But then there are several exceptions to this rule. I never tire of Waller's solo recordings. I can only assume this is because he was essentially unique in the sense that there are not thousands of people all making CDs of his solos, as happens with the classical masters. I was just playing his "Gladyse" on the piano this afternoon but I still listened to his recording of it afterwards because of a perceived lack of something in my own playing.

I guess I could summarise the situation by saying that I want to be better at playing something, or at least to feel that in some ways perhaps what I do is more interesting, but it has to be more interesting in a completely different way to the interpretation on the CD. 

Generally speaking I "notice general things" about good players and try to absorb these principles into my own playing. I do not simply imitate. For instance I noticed how wonderfully clear some of Jarrett's fast fingerwork is, and how important this clarity is to the rhythmic effect. Listening to him showed me how mushy some of my own fingerwork was. So I worked towards getting this effect as a general option.

Even if do not like a complete performance of a piece and even if the player is not considered to be first rate, I often hear little things which I like and I store them up for future investigation. Likewise I often hear things I do not like, or things I think the player has missed and make mental notes of these too. Sometimes the absence of a quality can be just as obvious as its presence.

So overall, yes, I do seriously listen to recordings of pieces I play before, during and after learning them, but the relationship between them and my own playing is pretty complicated.

[jlh]

Personally, I don't think it's a good idea to listen to too many recordings as you're starting to learn a piece, especially if you are an intermediate level pianist.  This can cause the pianist to rush through learning the piece and not solve basic technical problems first. 

Recordings are definitely beneficial in the fact that in listening to them, you can hear how other pianists interpret the music, and perhaps adopt some of the ideas into your own playing.

One of my teachers used to make tapes of good recordings of the music I was working on for me to listen to, but only after the first couple of weeks learning the piece.

[mound]

Thanks everybody.. Good thoughts.. I'm in the "I just kinda stop listening once it's in my fingers" camp.. perhaps go back now and then to refresh my memory with others interpretations.