Creativity
Preventing Overplaying the Piece
Overplaying a piece happens when a piece is already learned, your attention weakens, your ear becomes dull from repeating the piece many times and you begin to play all MEMs at 1/2 quality. This mistake leads you to begin playing less comfortably every time, and you begin playing automatically and stop controlling your playing.
To avoid overplaying, it’s necessary to put aside the played piece for some time (1-2 months). After the break, remember the piece by the following plan and “purge” all MEMs that you imagine while playing.
Assignment 1
Imagine and play all MEMs more accurately, in relief, finer and deeper while completing the assignment.
1. Sound texture with movement and intonation with weight
Imagine both hands in sound texture with movement. Gather weight and play the piece. Pay attention only to sound texture with movement and correct technique (play without pedal).
2. Harmony
Attentively listen to harmonies of the piece. Imagine both hands in sound texture with harmony and movement. Gather weight and play the piece. Pay attention only to sound texture in harmony with movement and correct technique (play without pedal).
3. Dynamics and balance
Imagine both hands in sound texture with harmony, dynamics and balance with movement. Gather weight and play the piece. Pay attention to sound texture in harmony, dynamics and balance with movement and correct technique (play with pedal).
4. Musical speech
Gather weight and play the piece with musical speech. Pay attention to sound texture in harmony, dynamics and balance with movement.
5. Phrasing
Gather weight and play the piece with musical speech and phrasing. Pay attention to texture in harmony, dynamics and balance with movement.
Creativity
Creativity is a stage for which you’ve learned to correctly analyze and learn a piece. This is the stage when all ideas and movements are learned so well that you can turn your attention to those feelings that are the deepest and most secret for you. Those feelings that reflect your life: your desires, aspirations, hopes, joy, love, frustrations, low spirits, depression, new hopes, new happiness — in a few words, what Your Life consists of.
You can tell about all of it when you play a piece and make all MEMs serve the main idea. It’s similar to painting: you’ve got all necessary paint colors (ideas of MEMs), all brushes and an experienced hand (performance of MEMs). Now you can close your eyes and imagine the painting that you want to paint. You pick the right colors in the right quantities for your painting. You make movements with your brush to reflect your idea.
And this is the meaning of creativity: finding the balance and correct dose of each MEM so that music sounds and lives in harmony. Dive deep into your world, concentrate all of your attention on it and simply follow the movement of your soul while performing all MEMs. Forget about the score and concentrate on your spiritual world.
Assignment 2
Feel how music may reflect your life to allow music to flow from your heart completely opening up your soul and creative potential. Add your feeling of inspiration to the piece’s emotional image. Tune in to emotional image as you’ve done earlier, and now enrich this image by your inspiration. Thereby, you’ll as though merge with emotional image and tell the story of your own life. Thereby, image-inspiration — is immersion into maximally bright emotional image of a piece. It’s necessary to learn to arouse inspiration with the power of your soul and learn it by movements of hands and touches of fingertips in order to feel comfort while playing with inspiration on stage.
1. Image-inspiration
Tune in to image-inspiration, gather weight and play the piece paying attention to sound texture in harmony, dynamics and balance with movement and phrasing, feeling how you express image-inspiration through musical speech.
2. Form
Tune in to image-inspiration and the part of the composition scheme, gather weight and play the piece paying attention to sound texture in harmony, dynamics and balance with movement and phrasing,
feeling how you express image-inspiration and form through musical speech.
3. Meter
piece paying attention to sound texture in harmony, dynamics and balance with movement and phrasing, feeling how you express image- inspiration, form and meter through musical speech.
4. Artistry+image-inspiration+form+meter
Tune in to image-inspiration, a part of the composition scheme, meter and artistry, gather weight and play the piece paying attention to sound texture in harmony, dynamics and balance with movement and phrasing, feeling how you express image-inspiration, form and meter by the means of artistry through musical speech.
Optionally, you can repeat the Assignment 2 from Lesson 47 (p. 149) and the Assignment from Lesson 48 (p. 150).
Thanks to “purging” all MEMs, you perfect your internal ear ideas and your physical movements — you reach a new level of dexterity and strength of fingers that seemed impossible to achieve before.