Mp3 Free Download Piano Music
Esperanza Santrizos
In my 35+ years of writing music for piano, I've composed and arranged over 200 works for solo piano, most of them original. A fan who read my advice for pianists article asked if I'd write a similar article for beginning composers. So, I've put together these 12 tips for anyone who would like to compose music for the piano.
You don't have to come to the piano with an entire musical idea already in your head before you start composing. Just start with one simple melodic phrase. That melody will be the centerpiece for everything else in your composition. It's the foundation and the focal point of your piece. As you begin to compose, improvise on that melody and see where it naturally wants to take you. The musical place it leads you to is usually your 'hook', or what I'll refer to in this article as your chorus. Think of your chorus as your melodic destination.
It's not uncommon to find that while you're developing a composition, you find yourself taken into an entirely new musical direction. The question to ask yourself is, does this 'new direction' belong with your original melody? Or, have you accidentally stumbled upon a new, second melody better suited for an entirely new work? A great number of my pieces originated as spin-offs of other compositions. So if you have a great melody and it takes you to a second great melody, consider whether you're might really be working on two different pieces and whether you need to split them apart so they can 'play' in their own separate worlds.
Remember, you're telling a story with your music, so arrange your piece in such a way that it keeps moving in a particular direction. When you read a storybook to your kids before bedtime, you don't read page one, read page two, then go back to page one again, and then read page two, read page two, and read page two once more. Your kids would get really bored! With each new page, the story needs to advance toward the happy ending, in proper order. Do the same thing with your music. Every 'page' of your composition should develop your storyline a bit more, building to a gratifying conclusion.
Do you see the song structure? Every composition is a bit different. The point is, compositions that are memorable tend to be song-like in structure. Even with the great classical works, when you hum them, do you hum the entire piece? No... generally what you remember and hum is one very small melodic hook. In comtemporary instrumental music, at least within my world, the melody is what it's all about. So give your pice a song-like structure and...
The biggest mistake I hear in others' composition is over-complexity. For some reason, beginning composers try to make things complicated - as if bigger is better. Part of this, I think, is the need to impress others, and part of it is the mistaken assumption that the more complex a work is, the more significance it has. No, no no. Simplicity is the key to beauty. Clarity is the key to perfection. Don't write to impress and don't write because you are seeking significance. Just find a simple melody, develop it, give it a twist, and finish it. You should be able to do it in less than 4 minutes. If you have a composition (for solo piano) over five minutes, examine it closely. You might be doing more than you need to.
Finally, keep your phone (or however you prefer to record) near you so you can record your ideas while you're still sitting at the piano. There's nothing more frustrating that having a great idea, getting interrupted, and then forgetting it. With a phone handy you can take the two minutes you need to record a rough-draft or melodic idea and come back to it later if need be.
Forte Piano Recital Hall is equipped with the best acoustics and features beautiful semi-concert grand pianos either by Shigeru Kawai or Schimmel to accommodate even the most discerning pianists. The recital hall can be rented for recitals, concerts, and recordings.
I just wanted to express my gratitude in regards to the purchase and delivery of our Schimmel Piano. The piano sounds wonderful in our home. My children and wife have been playing exciting new pieces on it daily. What a great sight to see my children enjoying themselves while challenging each other to play at a level they did not think they capable of.
I decided to give learning to read piano music another attempt, but this time I changed my approach and I set my metronome extremely slowly (20 BPM) on sixteenth notes, and I kept sight-reading more and more unfamiliar music. What I've found really startled me, because there were two revelations:
After enough diligent reading, the notes eventually stop being notes and start become physical gestures and spatial memory. By default, I look at chords and see chords as their name, because I'm a composer and I see D-F-A-C and call it Dm7, as I think a lot of people probably do. What I didn't realize was that in trying to play sheet music, I was adding extra steps without realizing it, costing me concentration and time. My brain was looking at the music, giving the note or chord a name, relating the name of that chord to my brain now searching for D-F-A-C on the keys, ruining my concentration of the music (and having poor visual coordination, having a hard time finding my place back on the page after my eyes leave their spot). The idea of playing without at least occasionally looking at the keys has always seemed like a pipe dream, but then the thought comes to mind that there are of course a lot of blind pianists, and it is totally possible to physically connect yourself to the piano in a way that note symbols in the shape of D-F-A-C on the page isn't a Dm7 chord, it's a physical gesture that relates in space to the way and place that the hand is going to be shaped to play those particular notes in that particular octave. Being able to stop needing to name in my head what I'm seeing on the page and just playing the notes based on the spatial placement of my hand has made me capable of reading a lot faster than I used to be.
So if you've also always struggled to be able to read piano sheet music well, it might be worth considering that your eyes and physical coordination might need more training than you or your teacher realized or ever discussed. I think that this is an easy point to overlook for a lot of students and teachers, because there's a bit of an assumption that everyone has about the ease that other pianists have or don't have in being able to physically play the instrument in the context of things like hand-eye coordination and visual/spatial memory. It literally never made sense to me how anyone could ever be a proficient piano sight-reader, because I always assumed that everyone had to go through the task of practicing one hand until it was memorized enough to play it while then learning the other hand. So the idea that someone could sight-read difficult piano music literally was incomprehensible, because no one ever told me that it's even physically possible to read two lines as one part. And again, my teachers might have just thought this was obvious enough to not bother bringing up, because it's naturally how they read their music, but until I could start reading both lines as one part, I had no idea that there was any other way to visually bring in the information than what I had always been used to.
I am willing to bet that there are a lot of excellent pianists who happen to have a naturally great ability to be able to quickly look at their hands for help and then return them to the same point on the page, and those players may never realize that their ability to do so is unusually strong. Likewise, I'm guessing there are others like me that are in the other camp, and are better served by improving at playing without looking away from the music. There's a conversational and pedagogical gap about physical abilities like this that is too easy to dismiss by what an impossible task it is to try to imagine what it's like to try to physically control someone else's body and perception abilities and coordination. Even if you are a proficient reader, it might still be worth giving these sort of considerations a thought, because you might be bottlenecked as a player by things that extend beyond the normal realm and into the way you literally process and physically use information that you're given.
I dropped a lot of negativity a few weeks ago about professional music. Today, I am going to give another perspective though not about the same genre. If you are one of those pianists that wants to earn a living in music, I encourage you to read this Rolling Stone article.
As it turns out, I know most if not all of the musicians listed in that article personally and many of them are friends. I like those guys. They are practically all members of Whisperings, a group of maybe eighty professional solo pianists (including me) that is the brainchild of David Nevue. If you get airplay on Whisperings Radio, you are a member by default. A lot of us get together every year, normally in San Diego, but next year in Atlanta.
The music of Whisperings is George Winston-like for the most part. Some would call it New Age and some would call it Neo-Classical. I prefer the latter because New Age has some negative connotations that have nothing to do with what these guys write. Basically, it is relatively uncomplicated music that you might hear at the dentist. It is the kind of music you play when you want to relax while reading a book or studying. Maybe sort of like elevator music. The two albums of mine that play on Whisperings are Solace and Quiet Place if that gives you an idea.
How can it be that musicians you have never heard of are making six figures in music while famous musicians are making almost nothing? How can it be that a guy that almost never does concerts with more than 30 people in attendance can earn more than some that play to thousands? It is not complicated. They have just found a niche: the niche of background music.
f448fe82f3