We've had many threads about what particular aural skills are required to perform to a high standard, and what constitutes 'being a musician', but the discussions have often come to grief for various reasons. Some contributors are talking about classical playing, others are talking about jazz and improvisation - and we're all talking about different instruments including voice. And some propound their views without fully reading the other posts in order to take on board what's being said! So I'd like to keep this question very specific.

What sort of aural perception do you feel is required to play classical piano well to a performance level equvalent to, say, a Performers' Diploma of Associate, or higher?

What I am NOT asking is what is required to pass exams - we all know what the exam requirements are! I'm also not asking what your considered 'minimum requirements to teach' are! But I would be interested to hear what you may feel is NOT particularly relevant to being a classical pianist.

A very interesting question.

I think that the two most important skills, and I shall not separate the two, are the ability to read the score intelligently so that you see at a glance what is going on, the structure and make up of the piece, and secondly the ability to listen and to really hear what you are playing to make a musical performance. On a superficial level a pianist might play the notes correctly, following any performance directions in addition to that, and still make a very poor performance. A more skilled musician would be able to add subtle nuances of shade, tone, timbre, phrasing etc, the list is long, and would bring the music alive. All of this would be done with a good and thorough knowledge of the style needed of course but that really goes without saying.

And it is not important for a classical pianist to be able to play in tune!!!

Interesting question, Dulciana. Here is what I think I as a classical soloist, need in terms of aural perception:

• The ability to listen properly to the sound I am producing and to adjust the touch when this is not good.
• The ability to 'pre-hear' the sound a split second before actually playing each note - gives my moving bits guidance on how far to move in order to produce this sound.
• A sense of structure to give the performance an overall shape.
• A memory of where my interpretation has taken me up to that instant, and a clear sense of subsequent direction.

As an accompanist, I need to add to the above:

• The ability to listen to the soloist; to know when merely to provide backing, when to take a lead and when to engage in dialogue.
• To read their score so I know when they have gone wrong and I need to adjust to them. Especially children under stress.
• To hear singers and wind players breathe. Few amateurs breathe properly, so that audible, snatched breath just before the make an entry is a dead giveaway when they are about to enter early; or, having missed the entry, when they are about to launch.
• Be able to tune the 'soloists' instrument for them, or at least tell them which way to move a moving bit to make it in tune.

What don't I need? Pretty much everything else.

Apologies for being


This is one of the things my oboe teacher is always saying and I have spent a lot of time working on taking a breath to give the accompanist the tempo. When he's accompanying me in lessons he always starts playing at the speed my breathing has set and at my first attempt, this is rarely the speed at which I intend to play.

Petrat's right, obviously, that we don't have to play in tune in the way that, say, a player of a stringed instrument does. How important is it, though, to be able to hear an interval when seeing it on the page? If sightreading, or playing something fairly new - or accompanying - how much does it help to combine the aural awareness of the sound of a dominant chord (for example) with the muscle memory of where one's fingers go to play that chord within the key of the music being played? Does this make certain types of music quicker to learn? One occasion which I remember with curling toes was when accompanying a violinist, I managed somehow only to have one sheet of the score in front of me when I should have had three ; it wasn't difficult to play and we had only run through it together once, and I hadn't practised it on my own at all - and didn't know the melody well at all. The only way I could get by was to sort of feel where it was going and play chords and broken chords of the dominant and relative minor, for instance, as I blindly guessed what was coming next. This may well be something others do on a regular basis, but I'm very much a 'reader' when it comes to getting the notes right. I'm not used to doing this sort of thing! Is this a learnt skill, or an aural skill - or a combination of both? Or is it simply knowledge of key signatures plus muscle memory?

Another thing - I have found that pianists with perfect pitch seem to much better sightreaders too. Is this just by chance?

I think it's invaluable to be able to look at a score and to 'hear' how it should sound in one's mind. And it's absolutely vital to listen whilst performing to ensure one is actually playing what one intends.

I find that organ pupils can be the worst at listening to what they are playing. I wonder why this should be. Could it be something to do with having most of their mental faculties taken up with trying to operate ten fingers and two feet at the same time?

I don't actually think so. (In response to the second paragraph.) I think it's just more of an enigma that there can be a delicacy of touch in something that is potentially so loud and so uniform in volume and which allows no room for tentativeness. Phrasing is different from on the piano in the way that it is executed, and yes, I think some do forget to listen to the sound produced; they're just so used to doing what they do on the piano and keep on doing it on the organ. Which is where the last sentence of your first paragraph comes in! As with any instrument, you have to know what your intention actually is, beyond playing the right notes in more or less the right places. The organ probably suffers even more than the piano in that it is all too easy to hit the right note (well, most of the time... ) so the musician may listen less to the quality of that note - or how it relates to the other notes around it.

Not sure what you mean here, Dulciana. How can there be delicacy of touch on an organ? Surely the note is either on or off, which is why the technique is so different from piano. I agree that one has to be much more careful about how long the note is held, but I'm not sure this is what I'd call delicacy of touch.

Not sure what you mean by the quality of the note either. Sorry.

Yes, I must admit to having been rather confused too. But that happens to me quite frequently!

What I mean is paying attention to articulation rather than simply playing like a pianist whose sustaining pedal just doesn't happen to be working. Legato/detached/staccato. (Is touch not the right word? ) Very often we hear notes that are overly legato when the fingering happens to suit, and then too jumpy in places where a pianist would use the pedal. And it all depends on accoustics too, which we should get to grips with wherever we're playing. Surely touch doesn't just refer to how hard we press the note? (Which obviously makes no difference on an organ!) Take Haydn and Mozart on a piano, for example; forte means strong more than it means loud or heavy.

By "quality of a note" I mean how it relates to those around it. Is it a fraction short, thus emphasising the next one? Is it held a fraction longer to emphasis a dissonance produced by what's happening in another part? Maybe I should have said 'quality of a phrase/series of notes. But the point is that one needs to listen. It's too easy too assume that on an instrument on which we don't have to 'make ' the note, our aural requirements are lower. They're just different - and possibly more subtle. It's possible to 'make no mistakes' on the organ, and the majority of listeners will say 'well done', but I'm talking about what makes a good organist, as opposed to a pianist who plays the organ. The more difficult the instrument, technically, the more impressed people tend to be by 'getting it right', without even looking for subtlety. So you may have a point about the ten fingers and two feet after all! Now, do you know what I'm on about, folks, or am I still shooting in the dark here?

This may be taking the topic so far off course as to merit a new thread but I shall add it anyway as it follows on from this discussion. I find that so many pianists play with their foot on the accelerator all of the time; no articulations to speak of and so boring! This pianist hates it!

Showing how aware you are of the need to listen to yourslef.


Showing how unaware these pianists are of the need to listen to themselves. Perhaps they do not as a matter of self-protection.

In the car the other day, I allowed myself to be subjected to a horrible experience. I had the thinking person's wallpaper station playing and the first movement of the Moonlight started up.

The previous version the station was playing is horrible - the one that travels at warp speed and sounds like a concerto cadenza.

This one was a reasonable speed, but all quality ended there. Those gentle lh octaves in the first few bars thundered out to start with, then got louder.

We all know the melody needs to sing gently. In this performance, the melody screamed at me. At times, the soloist was merely hitting the melody notes with as much force as he could muster - and that was considerable. The passage at the end where a thoughtless pianist will do nothing but make the repeated bass motif sing and ignore the rh broken chores? You could have heard the motif on Mars - and would not have needed the radio.

This player clearly needs to be taught to listen to himself properly. I was stunned; he is responsible for some of the best live playing I have heard, yet he can't have been taking any notice of what he was doing.

The pianist? Kissin.

I have a friend with perfect pitch who is a perfectly lousy sight-reader! But that's not to contradict your point, which I agree with. I think it definitely helps to be able to hear internally the sound or pitch which you intend to produce and, subsequently, to recognise when you haven't produced the correct note. Not that that would ever happen, of course...

Nope!

You're winding me up.

"Quality" is a comparative word. We can only judge the quality of something with regard to other somethings. So the "quality of a note" depends entirely on how it relates to those close by - before and after, above and underneath. In the Moonlight, the melody needs to be cantabile in relation to what else is going on at the time - cantabile, but not molto marcato. And the notes within the melody need to be phrased so that there are appropriate rises and falls in appropriate places.

(And back, briefly, to the organ, cos I'm not letting Holz get the better of me! ) Let's say you're playing a two-part invention, fugue, or something like that - and want one particular part to dominate at a given point. Let's say both parts are played on the same manual. You can't play one part louder, but you CAN make one part dominate. So you have to LISTEN and adjust the 'quality' of the notes according to what your ear dictates. Slightly more legato here? A bit more detached there? Shorten the note before the one you want to be prominent as it's the entry of the subject, or whatever? Now do you agree or not? )

Yes, I believe I heard that too.

It actually made me feel pretty good because I know I can play it better than Kissin!

Mole

Sorry, further

He is not the only big name pianist that is capable of playing extraordinarily badly at times.

But come to Chet's Summer School and I'll play it properly for you.

You start the more important note a few milliseconds ahead of the less important one. I don't know the range of delay over which this works. Make the gap too long and listeners can tell what you are doing, which is not the intention.

Yes, of course I agree with that, more or less!

Hey, we have A Sort Of A Consensus.

Doesn't happen often here.

This probably applies to a lot of what a musician does - ie create a particular effect so that the listener will hear the effect without hearing the technical process. What PianoDoodler described about Kissin's performance of The Moonlight Sonata is the reverse of this!

I think two things are key - aural realism and aural imagination. Aural realism means you have to be able to hear exactly what you are playing in reality not in your head - which note or line is too brash, disappearingly subdued, too early too late or just too wrong. Also to hear specific real difference between your own performance and those you may be aspiring to play like, in all the areas that we bracket together with words like style, execution and structure. To do this you have to listen studiously to great performances too.

Aural imagination is the ability to hear an ideal interpretation in your head before you sit down to play at all - and while you play to be able to hear moments before the sound you would like to produce next - or possibly to imagine a line played by a bassoon and how to deliver something of that sound at the keyboard - and afterwards, comparing imagined perfection with real performance without losing sight of the reality of either.

I agree with you about aural imagination. You need the ability to project what you would 'like' to hear through your fingers and out of the piano. However, what sounds good to one person, may not sound good to another. This is where education is important also (not so much aural skills). For instance, I have a Scarlatti piece I'm doing. Theres one part which I love to slow down and turn into incredibly expressive - but no, this is too romantic for Scarlatti, I'm playing in the wrong era! My aural skills may be good, but my education or lack of knowledge let me down. So education on quality performances is important, as well as aurally remembering the parts you liked.

I agree with aural realism, but the only way to facilitate this (in my experience) is to have perfect muscle memory of the piece. Without this you are not free to play with feeling, completely all ears. It is my personal experience (which may be different to others) that if I memorise a piece I can perform it much better because I can somehow disconnect myself from playing and listen as the audience would.

Also education of true aural awareness is important - for instance, listening to yourself playing while you are playing, and listening to a recording of what you played. Mistakes which were thought to be huge may be just a blip when listening back on a recording - similarly, a technical difficulty unheard of during playing may be clearly apparant on listening to a recording of what was played. So educating oneself on how your playing actually sounds rather than how it sounds to you while you are playing and concentrating on many things at once, noticing the differences and bringing those differences closer together so you know how you sound while you play!

woa...my brain hurts.

[quote name='muse' date='Apr 18 2009, 07:42 PM' post='817150']
[quote name='Hils' post='816094' date='Apr 16 2009, 02:14 PM']
[quote name='Dulciana' post='813724' date='Apr 10 2009, 11:26 AM']

What sort of aural perception do you feel is required to play classical piano well to a performance level equvalent to, say, a Performers' Diploma of Associate, or higher?
[/quote]
I agree with you about aural imagination. You need the ability to project what you would 'like' to hear through your fingers and out of the piano. However, what sounds good to one person, may not sound good to another. This is where education is important also (not so much aural skills). For instance, I have a Scarlatti piece I'm doing. Theres one part which I love to slow down and turn into incredibly expressive - but no, this is too romantic for Scarlatti, I'm playing in the wrong era! My aural skills may be good, but my education or lack of knowledge let me down. So education on quality performances is important, as well as aurally remembering the parts you liked.

[/quote]
'Good Taste', I suppose, is a combination of education and aural awareness. Professionals like Alfred Brendel seem to get away with Romanticising Classical and Baroque music much more than exam candidates do.

EDIT - Sorry for the complete hash I've just made of quoting. Unfamiliar computer! Which makes me think of something else - playing on an unfamiliar instrument requires a very quick, on-the-spot physical response with regard to playing and listening!

Yes, in these circumstances we can be all to aware of what we need to achieve yet be unable to come to grips with The Beast quickly enough to be able to achieve it.

As a solo recitalist, I am in the position to dictate the amount of warm-up time I have.

As an accompanist, I do not often have this luxury. Exam centres do not usually allow a couple of hours warm up before accompanying a grade 2 flute exam. When the piano is reasonable, this is not a problem. When it is a monster, it does not matter how clearly I can hear the difference between what I want and what can be achieve. I am still stuffed.

Ho hum.