There is an addendum to last week’s post regarding rhythms that I failed to mention.  It is so important, in fact, that it deserves a post of its own.

Rhythms are basically a multi-step process:  get yourself to the first long note, lallygag (as my mother would say--now there's a word you don't hear often enough!) there letting go of all tension and anticipation, then---and here’s the important part---as you are preparing to flip through the next set of short notes to the next long note, you must---YOU MUST!!---mentally think through this process first so that you know very concretely where you are about to land.  This sounds obvious, but in my experience, both in my own practicing and in monitoring that of my students, it isn’t obvious at all. 

In fact, this is the more common scenario:  

We are sitting comfortably on our long note, happy as a clam to be there, and then without any forethought whatsoever, (except for perhaps a vague, “the next long note is out there somewhere, I’ll know it when I see it”) we go flailing through in hopes that the next place we are supposed to land will mysteriously rise up to greet us.  My friends, it usually doesn’t.  Or at least it doesn’t in any kind of way we want to rely upon.  

So instead of landing intentionally on our next long note, we overshoot it, or fall painfully short, which is, if nothing else, certainly indicative of how compromised our knowledge is of the passage at hand.  When I ask students to name the next long note before they fling themselves at it, they often stutter and stumble, which does give us a good idea about what is about to happen with their negotiation of the next set of notes.  When they can confidently name the next long note, they can usually always get there safely.

Really it comes down to finding that delicate balance between staying firmly in the present and thinking ahead, which has plenty of implications outside of piano practice as well.  But then most things---good and bad--that we do sitting on the piano bench teach us something about how to live once we walk away from the piano. It’s just the small matter of learning to pay attention to the lessons our practice teaches us, which, of course, is the real challenge.  In the end, the rhythms and all the steps involved, well,  that is the easy part.  

 My students are convinced that the answer to every practice question I ask is “rhythms.”  This is not actually the case, but the “rhythms” that they are referring to do solve a whole host of technical and musical problems.  We owe a lot to their magic.

I first encountered rhythms in college when I was studying with the formidable Jane Allen, who was widely recognized for her ability to turn an otherwise sloppy technique into something to be reckoned with.  Her favorite way to teach scales was using rhythmic patterns of various kinds.  “The ‘Longs’ should be very long, and the ‘Shorts’ very short,” she would lecture, gazing at us with her stern, unforgiving gaze.  She was, once again, right.  However, after years of work with various teachers, I would add another corollary to the Jane Allen Law of Rhythms:  The very long ‘Longs’ should be so long that you are able to completely let go of any physical tension AND any sense of inner anticipation to the next note.  In other words, sitting there wallowing in the long note, you should simply be present to that place, not racing ahead mentally to the next tricky passage.  After finding your complete unattachment to whether or not you will ever finish the passage, (or even leave the piano bench) there is a moment of preparation and then you flip through the next short note (or notes, depending) before settling on another long note.  There you begin again, repeating the process of letting go.  It’s all very organic and deceptively simple.  But, like any form of meditation, it isn’t really easy at all.  

My teacher and good friend William Westney makes this concept the basis of his “scale exercise,” which is simply Jane Allen’s rhythms with a new and more holistic twist.  It is just like Bill to take the old and make it suddenly not only fresh, but Zen to boot.

My students have plenty of trouble controlling their impatience while sitting on a long note.  I must confess, so do I.  It feels so much more productive to race onto the next grand thing at top speed, polishing off our practice tasks in record time.  When my students demonstrate rhythms for me in their lessons, I have to constantly nag at them, “Longer long notes.”  “Longer long notes.”  “LONGER LONG NOTES!”  and still their idea of long is not the same as mine.  I sympathize, but nevertheless together we struggle on, trying to reign in our fast-paced lives.  Or at the very least, our fast-paced practicing.

So what, exactly are these mysterious “rhythms”?  Rhythms are an imposed pattern of long and short notes that can be used in any technical passage or exercise to help erase tension,  to assist in physically learning the patterns of notes, and to stabilize one’s security of a given passage.  All that, and they have a built-in savings account, too.  Every time I practice rhythms, I feel like I am making a deposit into a musical bank account; every performance is like a withdrawal.  Enough rhythmic work and I stay safely in the black.  Too many run-throughs without recovery time quickly puts me in the red.  No wonder I swear by this practice technique so strongly.  

Rhythms can be in patterns of two, three, four (or more), but don’t be in too big a hurry to jump into bigger rhythmic groupings.  The smaller the grouping the more challenging it is on my patience and stamina, but the better the passage in question gets learned.  Depending on the situation, these can be done with either hands alone or hands together (I suggest having great familiarity with the former before rushing into both hands).  I have used these with scales and arpeggios in traditional Jane Allen fashion, with LH stride bass passages, and with complicated RH licks.  The possible situations in which these might be applicable are endless.

Here’s our studio short hand for rhythms:  

Long-Short or Short-Long (LS or SL)
Long-Short-Short or Short-Short-Long (LSS or SSL)
Long-Short-Short-Short or Short-Short-Long (LSSS or SSSL)

The trick is knowing which pattern to use.  Groups of sixes are especially tricky--you have to decide if the notes are really in groups of three or two.  I can always tell an intermediate student hasn’t yet grasped the concept of rhythms if they suggest a three pattern for what is obviously a two grouping.  I know there is a school of thought out there that claims that grouping notes in unnatural rhythmic patterns is helpful to the learning process, but I disagree.  I match rhythms with their most natural musical grouping according to situation at hand, and save the bigger challenge for finding my inner breath when practicing them.

Just because you might not be a pianist, doesn’t mean that rhythms won’t work for you.   I have used them coaching all kinds of instrumentalists and singers to boot.  There is nothing like them for cleaning up those long melismas in Handel’s Messiah.  

The answer to every practicing question may not be “rhythms,” but as my kids know, its not a bad place to start.

I think this is great, because it allows me to use a third party to enforce careful technique practice. (“I know this is hard, but the judge is going to ask for it and it is part of your score, so you need to be ready....”)  Anything sentence that begins with “The judge” gets their attention, and I milk it for all its worth.

For my students, their prepared technique consists of 5 Finger Positions or Scales, chord progressions with set-ups, and Arpeggios---either traditional arpeggios or what I call “Cartwheels” or “Cross-over Arpeggios.”

Piano “Cartwheels”  work like this:

Playing either broken chords or blocked chords, students play Do-Mi-Sol patterns alternating the LH and then the RH, topping off the whole sequence with a cross-over LH “Do” and then coming back down to the original position.  I teach these in simple two-octave patterns with the added cherry of the top Do---LH, RH, top Do---or in four octave patterns--LH, RH, LH, RH and then top Do and reverse.  We do blocked chords and broken, major and minor.  For the most part, students like these exercises---they love any drill that allows them dramatically lurch up and down the keyboard.  

Cross-over Arpeggios or Cartwheels have been around forever in my studio.  But one day, Sam came in with a composition entitled “Monkeys” that used a variation on these exercises.  Always looking for new patterns to use for technique work, I asked him I could steal his idea.  He, of course, was thrilled (They always are, loving the concept that their inventions might be worthy to be used with other students.).  We have named these patterns “Sam’s Monkeys.”

Sam’s Monkeys:

77.  LH: broken Do Mi Sol then RH: blocked Do Mi Sol

Reverse Monkeys:

78. RH broken: Sol Mi Do then LH blocked:  Do Mi Sol

These, of course, can be done in either major or minor keys, and are a great preparation step for the trickier traditional Cartwheels or Cross-over Arpeggios.