It’s audition season at my university and, if this year is like previous ones, very few of the applicants will be strong sight-readers. Without question, it’s challenging for most teachers to regularly incorporate sight-reading during lessons, what with technical studies, theory, musicianship, and repertoire—let alone harmonization, transposition, improvisation and other keyboard skills. But since one [Read more...]
Author Archives: Fred Karpoff
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For many years, it was believed that today was Edward MacDowell’s 150th birthday, but the evidence points to it actually being his 151st. MacDowell was the first American composer of international stature, although it seems increasingly rare to hear his music today. For several years, I championed his beautiful Sonata Eroica, and recorded it along [Read more...]
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As we drove up, the clashing sounds of two out-of-tune upright pianos greeted us. We were fifteen minutes late, but Rebecca, my wife, and I were the only ones who seemed to notice. We got out of the truck and entered a two-room building where thirty students were waiting for me to present a master [Read more...]
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“The secret of rhythmic playing” [I pause briefly, for emphasis], “is to be as late as possible while still playing in time.” This is a maxim I have repeated hundreds of times. In fact, it is the only verbatim quote I knowingly use in my teaching. And I credit my source: Leon Fleisher. Although he [Read more...]
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My recent post “Imagery, Emotion, and Imagination” elicited many wonderful comments. In particular, Seymour Bernstein’s opening statement is especially consonant with my thinking: “This advice of listing adjectives can be extremely helpful to students. But unless one makes a physical connection to musical feeling, all the adjectives in the world and spoken metaphors at lessons [Read more...]
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In his opening address for the National Conference on Piano Pedagogy (NCKP) this past July, Pete Jutras told of the great number of adults he encounters who say, “I used to play piano.” He said that this really translates into, “I was a renter.” Pete exhorted us to get our students to ‘own’ the process of making [Read more...]
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Cultivating vibrant performance through descriptive adjectives and metaphors Karl-Ulrich Schnabel once shared the story of his work with a very fine pianist from the Pacific Rim. She was technically accomplished and musically well-informed – “but her playing was dull.” He assigned her to create a list of one hundred adjectives and to experiment with applying them to [Read more...]
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Nolan came for a first lesson and explained how he habitually learned music: he put the metronome on and played a passage “in time” with it, gradually speeding up along with the steady click-click-click. He felt good about this approach, feeling that he could learn fairly quickly “up to about two-thirds of the real tempo” [Read more...]
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Alan, a young man with a Bachelor’s in piano performance degree from a small college, recently contacted me. (He’d be in central New York for several weeks staying with family—could he take a couple of lessons with me?) He said he was eager to gain a new perspective on how he was playing. After he [Read more...]
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In a few days, I’ll perform a recital (“Preludes to The Preludes”) that includes preludes by Prokofiev, Scriabin, Benshoof, Kabalevsky, and Rachmaninoff; Beethoven’s Sonata Op. 101; and Chopin’s 24 Preludes, Op. 28 at the Everson Museum in Syracuse. It’s been over two and a half years since I played a full solo recital. Among the [Read more...]