Canadian Musician November / December 2019 | Page 26

PHOTO: CLAUDIA ZADORY
KEYBOARDS
Aside from touring internationally as a concert pianist, Daniel Wnukowski is also the founder and artistic director of
Piano Six, a pan-Canadian outreach program to bring music to remote, rural communities (www.pianosix.com),
the Collingwood Summer Music Festival (www.collingwoodfestival.com), and runs a blog that follows his trials and
tribulations as a musician (www.bagatellen.com/blog).
By Daniel Wnukowski
10 Commandments
for Professional Pianists
Part 2
Picking up where we left off with part one in the September/October 2019
issue…
5. Don’t Kill the Music (Through Over-Practicing, Over-Indulging, or
Binging on Liszt)
C.P.E. Bach certainly had a few words of novel advice in his “Essay on the True Art
of Playing Keyboard Instruments” when he remarked: “Play from the soul, not
like a trained bird!” – and that was after using over 50,000 words to explain how
to play the instrument! Over-practicing is just as harmful as not practicing at all.
Experts have often remarked that four daily hours of practice is considered the
optimum amount, but take this with a grain of salt. Listening to your body and
the quality of your interpretations is a far better way to gauge musical fatigue.
To be most rewarding and successful, practicing the piano requires three
elements in three equal proportions: research, practice, and play.
“Research” involves everything from active listening to staying abreast of the
latest discoveries in musicology; “practice” is self-explanatory; “play” is probably
the most underrated, yet ironically the most widely spoken of. After all, we call
it “playing piano!” The “play” factor involves letting go of yourself entirely and
immersing in less fastidious pursuits, such as improvisation, jam sessions, book
readings, poetry, film, etc.
As for Liszt...Well, a few “consolations” are fine after a mojito-laden party
that involves your ex, but too much Liszt is simply detrimental to maintaining
a kosher relationship with the core of piano literature.
Approach: Add the following three Bs in equal proportions to your daily
practice regimen: C.P.E. Bach for research, J.S. Bach for realtime-practice, P.D.Q.
Bach for recreation. Respect the Sabbath day!
6. Honour Your Music Teachers (But then do your own thing!)
Finding a wonderful music teacher that you can truly connect with is only half
the battle; working through years of misunderstandings commonly makes
up the other half. In a field as complex as mastering the piano, it requires a
great deal of courage to truly let go and honour your teacher’s pedagogical
methods and artistic insights. Letting go entirely and trusting their approach
can sometimes be the only way to fully understand it; however, understand-
ing an approach – as much as it can add intellectual depth to the learning
process – is not the same as accepting it later on in your career. Ultimately,
each pianist develops his/her own approach to music interpretation over
time, while developing a third eye on what to take in and what to leave out
from the past.
Leon Fleisher once remarked in an interview that he had to do everything
the opposite of what Arthur Schnabel had taught him in order to reach a
new level of interpretative insight.
Approach: Honour your mother and father. If they disapprove of your in-
terpretation, that music will be jinxed for life; otherwise, your music teacher
can become a healthy alternative.
7. Don’t Engage in Sloppy or Muddy Pedaling – Ever!
It begins seemingly innocuous: a touch of pedal here, a touch of pedal there,
and before you know it, the whole piece is swimming with pedal. There is a
rigorous science behind optimal pedaling that can take years to master and
it has very little to do with the variety of piano available. A well-trained pianist
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can get used to a foreign instrument’s pedal within minutes, but fine-tuning
the precise proportions can take decades! To complicate things further, some
composers, such as Debussy, rarely indicated pedal markings, while others,
such as Chopin, painstakingly marked every pedal action in some works, often
playing with our expectations of how one would instinctively pedal the music.
See Ex. 1 for a snippet of Chopin’s “Prelude Op. 28, No. 5”:
Approach: Use a calendar to master the fine art of pedaling. Set one day of
the week where you can reset your pedaling back to an absolute minimum,
then set one day of the month where you can gush out to the extreme!
8. Record Yourself – a Lot!
Kristian Zimmerman does it obsessively and so does Mischa Maisky. There are
simply no excuses today. Even an iPad can make a decent recording – enough
to find any potential deficiencies inherent in one’s interpretive approach.
Invest in a quality microphone if budget permits. Before the advent of such
portable recording technology, even the greats yearned for feedback before
important recitals: Sviatoslav Richter allegedly had to play everything through
for a trusted friend before each public performance.
Music interpretation can be so complex, it is literally impossible to be able
to hear every layer of sound structure reaching our ear drums while perform-
ing at the same time. We never truly know what we sound like until we stop
performing and give the resultant recording an honest listen.
Approach: If you are an intellectual egghead, your recordings might help
you to relax and learn to simply enjoy the music from time to time. On the
other hand, if you are an egotistical eccentric, your recordings may get you
into counseling quicker.
9. Take Good Care of Your Neck
Not only for health reasons. A bad neck can thwart the natural flow of vital
energy, also known as “chi” in traditional Chinese medicine, throughout your
entire system. These blockages are detrimental to achieving that natural flow
and sense of spontaneity that we musicians strive for.
Approach: Just take a break every now and then; for example, immerse your
hands in ice-cold and warm water alternately while reciting your favourite
Tibetan mantra.
10. Don’t Be Afraid to Look Outside the Box
One of the greatest tragedies of the internet, YouTube, and social media is
an urge to find the “best” interpretation of a particular work.
Don’t ever lose sight of that curiosity that got you hooked on piano in the
first place. What was “best” in the 1950s can remain legendary, but a modern
public is always yearning for ravishing, new interpretations of the same work.
Approach: Go vinyl! Carve out your own niche! Perform every concert like
it will be your last!