The Song of Twilight: Artistry

Hello and welcome back. I'm Joseph Hoffman, and in this lesson we'll be talking about ways you can play "The song of Twilight" by Yoshinao Nakada with artistry. Let's come to the piano to get started. When I'm working on artistry with a piece, one of my first steps is to think about the mood that the composer wanted to create. So when you think of "The Song of Twilight," what kind of mood words come to mind? The composer often gives a clue here in the tempo indication. Now, I think we can do better than just quietly. That's a good start, but what other feeling words come to mind? How do you feel as you listen to this piece? I'd like you to pause the video and at the top of your music write in a few mood or emotion words that come to your mind as you think of this song. Choose two or three, write them down, then press play and I'll share what I come up with. The words I came up with were peaceful, gentle, and loving. Now you might have come up with different words and that's totally fine. Being an artist is making some choices about what this piece means to you. Now let's come down to the B section. Here I kind of feel a change in the mood here. how does it change for you? Can you think of a different mood word? It might be similar to what you had before, but I do feel a bit of a shift here that I want to think about as I play. So pause the video and see if there's one or two words that come to your mind as you play the B section. Then press play and we'll go on. Now this time I'm not showing you the word that comes to my mind because I want you to be the artist here, and choose what this part means to you. So now that we know what mood we're trying to create, let's go on to another artistic element. And the element I'd like to really focus on today next is tone. What is tone in music? Well when we talk about tone, we're talking about the quality of the sound. Is it a beautiful tone? Or is it a harsh tone? Tone is so important to a pianist. What is the quality or the nature, the inner beauty of your tone? We want in "The Song of Twilight" a beautiful round and clear tone. Not harsh at all. We absolutely don't want a harsh tone for this piece, but we also don't want a wimpy tone. Sometimes when I hear a pianist play at a piano dynamic level, the tone is too wimpy for my taste. Listen, here's a wimpy tone. See, that just makes me bored, and I want to just walk away or fall asleep, right? We still want an interesting, beautiful tone even when it's marked piano you can still make it exciting in its own quiet way. Whoops, let me start here at measure one. Hear how my tone still has some energy to it even though it's soft, I still make those 16th notes come alive. I can do a little crescendo there. One thing that will help me do that is use some arm weight, some arm motion. So I kind of lean into that a little bit with my arm. And then I think of floating up on that last note of the phrase to soften it. So I think lean in, then back off. I'm going to lean in again, and then I'm going to back off a little bit. Okay, now all of these things help create a beautiful tone. We're thinking about arm weight, we're thinking about phrasing. I find the most important way to learn to play with a beautiful tone is to listen. Listen with big wide open ears. Think, imagine you have elephant ears. They're so big they take in all the sound you're playing, and you're always asking yourself as you play, how does this sound? Is this beautiful? Is there anything I would change about this? Let your ears experience the sound as you play it, and then you can shape that sound. You can mold it into the beautiful phrase that you are imagining. I'd like you to pause the video and try maybe just right hand alone for a little bit, and work on a beautiful tone using some arm weight, some arm motion to help you shape each phrase. Remember, crescendo to the high note, and then back off. Pause to work on your phrasing and tone right hand alone, then try left hand together maybe also add in the damper pedal, and then press play and we'll work on another artistic element. Another artistic element that I'd like to focus on today is voicing. Voicing is so important to pianists because it helps the listener really enjoy that melody. In most pieces that you play, one hand will be playing the melody and often the other hand is playing the accompaniment. Which hand has the melody in the song of twilight? It's the right hand. And the left hand is just playing these repeating chords. So whatever dynamic level you see, I like to think of the accompaniment as one big step below that. So since it's marked piano i'm going to play my left hand pianissimo, maybe even pianississimo, which would be three P’s, and the right hand I'm actually going to put up a notch maybe to more of a mezzo piano. Now, one way that I like to practice voicing that I've shown you before, but I'd like to remind you, is to play the right hand as loud as you can, fortissimo, while the left hand just touches the notes. This is not how we want it to sound this is just for practicing voicing. So try this once, where right hand it's going going to play fortissimo while the left hand just touches the notes. Pretends to play without actu ...