How Emanuel Ax Makes Piano Less Tedious
Seven-time Grammy-winning pianist Emanuel Ax still practices his instrument for four hours a day – when you play at Carnegie Hall, you don’t just play it. And sometimes, he admits, “it’s kind of tedious work,” especially when rehearsing a new piece: something written especially for him or something that he has never heard. “You understand music and you try to learn it by note.” In an interview with Lifehacker, Ax recommends several ways to make playing an instrument more fun and productive.
Listen to great performances
When you can listen to existing interpretations of a piece, you don’t have to rely on the page to tell you what to do. Tracking a great performer is not cheating.
Ax can learn pieces he has heard before more easily, even if he hasn’t played them, because he can borrow pieces from existing performances. He has been attending Carnegie Hall concerts since he was a child, but is impressed with features such as Spotify and YouTube, which give anyone “the ability to bring up great performances of the past almost at will.”
Find a partner
Ax often performs with Yo-Yo Ma, so they often train together. It’s “very liberating and very helpful,” says Ax. “We exchange ideas. Yo-Yo might tell me: maybe you should try doing less with your left, more with your right, or doing it faster, or doing it slower. This is a conversation. ” It’s also more fun; two love to talk and joke. “If you train alone, you won’t be able to tell yourself too many jokes.”
It is also a way to get to know another instrument and the process of another musician, which is very useful for performing in an ensemble. After working with Ma, he says, “I like to think I know a thing or two about playing the strings.”
Try another tool
When Ax works with an orchestra, most of his collaboration goes through the conductor. But he learns to support the soloists and their interpretation of the piece. “There are many places where, say, you and the clarinet, or you, and the solo cello, or the flute. It’s like you have an unspoken connection. “
Ax does not regularly play any other instruments, but says that playing the timpani is “a kind of fantasy” for me. When he works with the orchestra, he says: “I have always made friends with the timpani.” He recently even played the timpani on the stage of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. If one of the most famous living pianists might be in love with teapots, then perhaps you can clear your palate by taking another instrument for the day.
Experiment
“Practice is never 100% fun,” says Ax. You will inevitably have to repeat some things over and over. “But it takes a lot of time to find new ways to do things. So the laborious process turns into an interesting creative process. ” Sometimes Ax can work on a piece he’s been playing for twenty years and then stop at a specific part that has always given him trouble. What if he used his ring finger instead of the fifth? “Then it gets very exciting! Then you don’t mind saying it over and over again to get it into your head. “
Try to do more than one thing at a time. Ax is rehearsing one show this weekend and another in October. This is due to the fact that he is “rather slow”, he says, but it also looks like a defense against the fact that the same piece is working all day. If you have the freedom to choose what to practice, you may find two contrasting parts or something that is easy to balance with something difficult.
Go back to the old parts
“One of the difficulties with a new piece is that you don’t know what will be the problem for you,” says Ax. Even an old familiar piece takes practice before performing, but it has the advantage of giving it time to make new choices and hone his performance, play certain parts louder or quieter, or emphasize a different voice, or emphasize a different hand.
It’s easier to tackle more complex problems when they don’t catch you off guard. Ax likens going back to an old piece like playing tennis against a familiar opponent: you know he has a strong right hand, so you make him take a backhand. “Not that Brahms is my enemy!”
Use the app
At 69 years old, according to Ax, he “is afraid to play Bach from memory. It’s getting too difficult. ” Therefore, he uses Tonara , a workout and performance app for Android and iOS. (Tonara arranged our interview with Ax.) Ax uses the app on stage and in practice to read music without relying on a page-turning tool. The app can hear and follow Ax, so it knows when to turn the page. “Until this year, I would have had to ask someone to take a chair and turn the pages for me.”
The application, of course, is not primarily intended for famous pianists, but for ordinary people who play any instrument. “Even if you play the wrong notes, it seems like he knows where you are,” says Ax. It tracks your work, records incorrect notes and gives you feedback; Teachers can even assign assignments in the app, and it can track students’ practice times and measure their progress.
Play Bach
Ax teaches at Juilliard, usually one-on-one. He tries to get his students to play Bach a lot because Bach is “very difficult” and Ax wants his students to get more early Bach practice than he does.
“Every voice in a Bach play is an individual voice,” he says. “So you really don’t have a situation where the melody is playing at the top and everyone else is accompanying it. Everyone has different things to do. If you can play Bach well, then you are really good. ” He is happy for the current generation of music students. “They will be much better than us.”