The Secret to Expressive Piano Playing
1. Practicing Like a Robot
Around 10 years ago I spent the vast majority of my week teaching students how to play the piano. One lesson would be a 4 year old that just wanted to run around the room. The next lesson would be a 75 year old that has some spare time and has always wanted to learn the piano. Yet over the past 15 years, one thing I have consistently noticed is that at some point, most people start practicing like a robot!
In some respects a 4 year old is much freer, telling them that 120bpm is twice as fast as 60bpm would be meaningless. They probably can’t even count to 120! Yet, asking them to run from one side of the room to another in time with a metronome could easily teach the same concept. Whereas the 75 year old would learn much less effectively if I asked them to run across the room and no doubt their knee pain would be “forte” (this is a high quality music joke).
The problem is that once a concept becomes predictable and mathematical (as much of music learning does), it becomes something that is practiced in the same repeated way and this means it becomes procedural and robotic. There is no greater example of this than note reading. Reading the rhythms and notes in a piece of music is a difficult skill to acquire, but the concepts are quite easy to understand. One note on the stave above a D is an E, a quarter note (crotchet) is twice as long as an eighth note (quaver). These pieces of information are relatively simple, but to actually use the information in real time on the piano - is not so easy.
So, the average learner will attempt to learn a new piece of music by throwing all of the other features of music out of the window in favour of pressing the right notes, maybe sometimes with the right rhythm.
2. The Meaning of Features
There are a lot of features that make up music other than the notes themselves. Learning the notes makes up 40%-50% of music, but the remainder is made up of HOW you play those notes.
Imagine for a moment that you are watching a movie; it’s a rom-com, sci-fi, marvel movie (whatever you are into to). Yet, there is something odd about this particular movie. Everyone in the movie seems completely emotionless! They are delivering the lines with a pretty high degree of accuracy, but they clearly aren’t expressing anything remotely close to what the dialog suggests. I would argue that the dialog itself is much less important than the emotions that are conveyed by the actors. They could have the lines “flib flob fibidy flob” but if expressed in a deeply meaningful way, it would be much more pleasing and relatable to watch.
This is exactly the same in music, the features that tell us how the music is supposed to feel and the story the music is telling is much more important than pressing he right keys with the right rhythm.
So that begs the question; what tells you how the music feels?
Well here is a few features!
Dynamics - On the face of it, dynamics tell you how loud to play. However, it is much deeper than that. The volume that you play tells us the temperament of the music and gives us some indication of the type of feelings that we are trying to produce. You probably won’t be playing aggressively quiet or solitarily loud. Along with the other features of the music, this can help us develop the story we are trying to convey.
Articulation - Articulation refers to how we actually play the notes, the most common being legato (joined up) or staccato (detached). Playing notes staccato might indicate playfulness of nervousness.
Tempo - The speed of the music is similar to the dynamics in the sense that you probably won’t have a slow piece that sounds manic or a fast piece that sounds calm.
Chords - Chords are by far the biggest indication of the feeling of a piece of music. The different qualities of chords and the way those chords are voiced elicit very specific and unique feelings. However, to keep things simple it’s always easy to think of a minor chord as negative emotions and major chords as positive emotions. The changing of chords is what helps move the narrative along.
There are of course lots of features in a piece of music that can help us pinpoint the story we want to tell (that’s why I’m doing a live class on the subject! - 29th March 2025 😏). However, the key here is to find anything within the music that you can personify and relate a human feeling to.
3. But…What Do I Physically Do?
So you have an idea of the feelings and evolving story of feelings that you are going to tell within the piece of music. How do you physically create the sound?
This is actually both much easier and much harder than you may imagine. The easy advice I can give is to embody the emotion and use body language. Yet this is actually a difficult skill to learn in practice. There’s a reason that many pianists move around at the piano so much, its because they are trying to feel and embody the sentiment of the music so that when they press the keys, the keys are expressed in that way.
Let’s say you have a piece of music that is “p” (quiet), it’s relatively slow and it’s a legato single melody line. In this case “p” might feel “introverted”, “slow” might feel “cautious”, “legato” might feel “still”, the “single melody line” might feel “lonely”. So in this case the story I might imagine is someone that is sad and lonely in an empty room feeling introverted and unsure. When playing this on the piano I would therefore try and embody how this might feel and stay incredible still, playing the keys slowly with little movement. I also might use rubato (the stretching of time) in order to make time feel like it’s slowing down.
These decisions I make about the piece of music are a direct consequence of what is written on the page. While the notes that are being played are somewhat important (40%-50%), it’s much more important to express something meaningful because that is not only much more fulfilling for yourself, but you may also have a deep impact on someone else!
Matthew Cawood
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