(part 2 of 20)
Why Piano?
The piano encompasses the full pitch range of the symphony orchestra, from contrabassoon to piccolo. It’s the most versatile instrument when it comes to playing multiple musical lines at once, large chords, and melody with accompaniment–all dynamically and expressively. Learning to play piano and improvise will help train the ear to hear and understand harmony intuitively. It is an invaluable tool for inventing and developing musical patterns, accompaniment textures, melodic ideas, harmonic outlines, and so on. There’s a reason it has been the composer’s instrument of choice since its invention 300 years ago. Composers should learn to play other instruments too, but the importance of solid piano skills cannot be overstated.
The greatest composers were impressive improvisers as well. Most developed the ability to compose in their heads, but really that is simply improvising in the mind, playing around with and developing musical ideas as one might do at the piano. It takes considerable skill to think through even simple music in the mind–an excellent sense of relative pitch, of harmony, and musical memory. No matter how skilled a composer might be in these things, the piano is still a powerful tool to speed the process and streamline work.
Many of the greatest artists sketched before painting. Sketching enhances the artist’s ability to “see” as they play around with their visions, just as the piano enhances the composer’s ability to “hear” as they play around with their auditory “visions.” So it’s no surprise that most of the famous composers preferred to compose at the piano. Beethoven, in order to continue composing as he went deaf, went to the extreme of sawing the legs off his piano to better hear his music vibrating through the floorboards. Did he need the piano to compose? No, he composed some of his best works when he was deaf, but it’s clear that he desperately wanted to use his piano for composition. Even Mozart, legendary for his ability to compose huge works in his head, is recorded to have strongly preferred composing at the piano.
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Index
- Introduction
- Why Piano?
- Improvisation:
- Notation:
- Related Skills/Knowledge:
- Composition: