Piano playing

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Wilhelm Busch: The Virtuoso , 1865

All playing styles of the piano are summarized as piano playing or pianistics . In the music history of Europe , special piano music has developed since the invention of the gavel piano around 1700 . In close connection with this, various piano schools and a variety of music-pedagogical concepts for playing the piano have emerged since around 1800 .

Instrumental conditions

Musical instruments allow the player to have complex musical expressions that he would not be able to achieve with only his body, voice and limbs. The two-hand playable piano enables structures such as polyphonic chords , clusters , polyphony and polyrhythmics thanks to its large pitch range . Its sound volume allows great dynamic differentiations and contrasts.

It is ideal for playing spontaneously without any prior knowledge, as even a light press of a button produces a sound without any special effort or training and this can be repeated at any time. At the same time, it demands and encourages musical imagination, since the notes that are struck cannot be changed and fade away quickly. The player has to imagine the desired sound before hitting the keys in order to be able to playfully implement it.

It limits the available tones to twelve different, non-modular pitch of at least a half tone spacing, includes so vocal expression such as vibrato , portamento , continuous glissando , micro-intervals from so. Even a continuous flow of notes is actually just an auditory impression here, which merges individual notes played closely one after the other to form legato .

When playing the piano, touching and grasping the keys, seeing the key combination and the position of the fingers, possibly the notes, and hearing the sound produced all happen at the same time. Musical structures can thus be grasped by the senses, imprinted in the body as a feeling of touch and thus later retrievable. Musical expressiveness and memory are trained equally by playing, but also standardized in some respects, so that tones, scales and sounds (such as noise ) that cannot be played directly on the classically played piano are latently excluded as inferior or false.

The structure of the keyboard reflects European tonality , in which the heptatonic scale called A minor or C major (seven adjacent white keys starting from A or C) forms the starting point and reference point for all other scales. On the other hand, the keyboard also allows immediate access to the pentatonic scale (five adjacent black keys) and the quick capture of all keys as conductors and as three or four notes , each with its own tone and handle combination of black and / or white keys. Already optically it suggests the equivalence of all church modes (seven white keys each with seven different basic tones ), as well as all twelve partials of an octave ( chromaticism ).

The piano is therefore ideally suited for the practical teaching of elementary music theory as well as for composing , improvising , accompanying songs or playing the score . It is both a concentrated product as well as a source of inspiration for a stringent music-historical development from the modality to the major-minor tonality and the enharmonic interchangeability of tones made possible by the equal tuning up to twelve-tone music and beyond. As a result, modern electronic and virtual instruments are also operated using a keyboard that is actually not necessary for them.

Areas

Areas of piano playing that are also taught in modern piano lessons are mainly:

  • the improvisation , so the spontaneous invention of musical ideas from the cuff ,
  • the literary game, i.e. the reproduction and interpretation of composed music, usually also fixed in a notation .

Here a distinction is made between playing prima-vista (Italian: “first look”, translated as “sight reading”) and playing by heart from memory , where the musical text can in turn have been learned through hearing or seeing.

Areas of play for professional pianists include:

In the jazz piano there are other forms of interaction, such as:

Other fields of work of piano players are

When rehearsing for a choir , dance choreographies, operas and ballet , the piano can be used as a substitute for a polyphonic orchestra. Such piano accompaniment is called a répétiteur .

education

You usually learn to play the piano in piano lessons (privately, at a music school or at a conservatory ). A piano school often serves as a textbook . Vocational training takes place at conservatories , music colleges and / or universities .

An autodidactic course is possible, but only leads to modest technical ability.

history

Ernst Oppler's painting "Prelude" (before 1892)

The early hammer pianos with a bounce mechanism are smooth and delicate; The focus is on finger play, because neither raising the arms nor moving the upper body is practical; Above all, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his student Johann Nepomuk Hummel have a school-building role . Even the first fortepianos with impact mechanics did not require or allow any pronounced physical activity; Ludwig van Beethoven and his pupil Carl Czerny educate schools . The pianist, composer, publisher, piano teacher and piano maker Muzio Clementi and his student Friedrich Kalkbrenner have an international and lasting influence .

By 1830 the instruments had already become significantly more resilient. With Frédéric Chopin , Franz Liszt and Sigismund Thalberg , the supple wrist, the movements of the elbow and shoulder joint, the more or less dosed use of mass and weight as well as the play and expressive movements of the upper body are emancipated. This “modern” form of piano playing has since been practiced in various forms and worked up theoretically and methodically.

literature

Web links

Wiktionary: Piano play  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Popova Deniza: Piano as a musical medium , in: Christoph Kammertöns, Siegfried Mauser (Hrsg.): Lexikon des Klaviers. Laaber 2006, pp. 404-406
  2. ↑ Roland Böckle: Free design in instrumental lessons . In Handbuch der Musikpädagogik (Volume 2). Kassel / Basel / London 1993.
  3. ^ New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians . London 1980. Article Piano duet .