Art is the communication of emotions.
Musical art is made of sounds, and the presence of someone to make them is necessary, someone who can give life to these sounds, to these notes, successfully communicating through these sounds the infinite range of emotional nuances that music evokes. That person then has to tend to create sounds that are not only “beautiful” or not only “correct”, but which are above all capable of transmitting emotions.
There are many pianists whose objective is a correct execution or simply faithful to the score (the right expression, the right speed, the right sound, the right timbre, the right techniques used, the right style, et cetera), and they don’t realise that the musical notation is symbology, and that the correct execution of and faithfulness to the score are empty values, for which no one can say anything realistic, as has been demonstrated by the history of piano interpretation.
Most pianists manage to successfully express real musical emotions through the sounds. The listener, on the other hand, usually does not notice, does not receive anything; he becomes bored, he takes his mind off it, attracted to exterior aspects of the execution and thus loses motivations even with respect to other artistic expressions.
In general, the pianist, while “trying” a great deal, cannot express anything through sounds, and his satisfaction remains sterile and solipsistic, giving the unpleasant sensation of being “detached” from the instrument and not a unique entity with it, and falling back more or less consciously on facial and gestural imitations.
The ideal condition instead is the spontaneous flow of the music, as if the emotion came directly out of the soul of the player, without the mediation and the remainder of cerebral reflections resting inside the sound.
What impedes emotion from being expressed through sound? Or better, to the sound that contains it? Put more simply, each sound can be “full” or “empty”, that is, capable or not of communicating. It’s the blocks: the psycho-physical blocks, the tension blocks, that impede both the control of the sound and the communication of expression.
As we shall see below, these blocks can and must be completely eliminated, through learning techniques that permit the creation of the correct muscular mass movement and the correct relaxation of the joint tendons.
Can we change the timbre of the piano? The answer to this question is positive and it can be seen in the difference between the sound “of the piano” and the sound “of the pianist”. The timbre is the quality that for the same frequency distinguishes one sound from another, and it is determined not only by the nature of the source of the sound but also from the way in which this is set to vibrating. Every pianist can act knowing the timbre of the piano, becoming in that way “different” and distinguishable from all others, as every man or woman is different one from the other, different for sensitivity, for training and for culture. To act on the timbre and on the acoustics means creating music, expressing one’s own sensations, one’s own personal world, in a word, derive joy from the music.
My way of playing and teaching how to play the piano is based on the liberation of these emotions, on the capacity to express them and communicate them to the listener.
How can one successfully modify the timbre of a piano? In an instinctive way, certainly, but also with methodological and technical bases which allow the 11 mm. of the range of the descent of the key, or better still, the rise of the hammer.
More precisely, controlling the action of the mechanical lever means acquiring the techniques for stabilising the most suitable mass/weight, height, speed, angle of strike parameters in each single sound; in short, controlling the impact of the hammer on the chord.
The so-called “tied” sound is more than anything else the emblem of piano utopia since the time of Bartolomeo Cristofori (1655-1731), the successful reproduction of vocal singing through the keyboard, whose evident limits are represented by the percussion of the chords and the length of the sound with respect to those of bel canto.
The “tie” is not something that unites two sounds, but it is the same sound that is “tied”, to create the illusion of vocal union between the sounds. It is the resulting acoustic obtained by the abatement or reduction of the “noises” of the impact of the hammer on the chord, the change of the fleeting nature of the strike, through controlling the impact and thus controlling the quality of the sound emitted.
