Ross Salvosa on why you shouldn’t need endurance at the piano
The pianist and teacher on energy, momentum, how you leave a note and why choreography beats endurance.
Ross Salvosa holds a Doctor of Musical Arts from the University of British Columbia and recorded the album Phoenix Rising for MSR Classics. He is the director of Concordia Arts Group in the Seattle area.
Here are fourteen of his best tips, from his Piano Star Masterclass on effortless playing on Piano League.
1. Replace endurance with choreography
There’s something negative about that, because endurance means you’re enduring something painful, or you’re enduring something that you shouldn’t be enduring. So my answer to that is that if you choreograph it properly, we don’t have to endure anything, really.
Ross Salvosa
2. Keep the energy moving
Energy always flows. It’s like a water hose, like a garden hose. Once you turn on that faucet, the water will flow, and if you step on the water hose, it will get clogged there. Any stopped energy will constitute tension, and so that energy needs to flow freely if we want effortless playing.
Ross Salvosa
3. Plan how you leave each note
It matters not only to think how are we going to attack and how are we going to approach it, but it also matters how we’re going to exit. That exit movement from one note to the other will determine the entrance movement of the next note.
Ross Salvosa
4. Don’t start from a standstill
You cannot start from static. Imagine trying to push a car that’s not moving, or a car on a stoplight would waste a lot more gas to move forward than when it is already running.
Ross Salvosa
5. Use the lift to set up the drop
There’s that drop and lift and drop and lift, and the drop should be very effortless. Like Chopin said, your hand just falls onto the key naturally, because gravity can take care of that. Now the lift is necessary to choreograph, because without that lift you cannot drop again.
Ross Salvosa
6. Check whether it feels easy
You have to feel your touch. Does it feel easy, or it feels difficult? If it doesn’t feel easy, it means that you’re not using the correct motion, or you’re landing the notes in the wrong spot of that wave.
Ross Salvosa
7. Feel the music through motion
What is musicality, anyway? Musicality is the ability to feel the music, and what best way to feel that music? Through motion. We are dancers, actors and musicians at the same time. We act the character of the music, but we dance it too.
Ross Salvosa
8. Exaggerate slowly, shrink at speed
The concept is really the same. The physics of it doesn’t change. It’s just that when you play faster, the movements get smaller. When they’re practicing slow, we exaggerate the movement so they can feel the movement, and then when they start playing a little faster, those movements shrink.
Ross Salvosa
9. Don’t use too many downbeats
If we have too many downbeats, what happens is the music becomes a bit fat and heavy. Then it can’t really dance as quickly, because it’s too heavy.
Ross Salvosa
10. Start a crescendo small enough to grow
Crescendo means to grow. If we need to do a crescendo, should we start the crescendo already grown up, or let’s start it little baby, and then let it crawl, let the sound grow.
Ross Salvosa
11. Practice the left hand blind
You want that left hand to be very, very independent. One way is to really feel how far the notes are, practicing blind, with your eyes closed, so that later your right hand can be more free.
Ross Salvosa
12. Use your body for a bigger sound
If you want a bigger sound, you can use the momentum of the body going forward to get that sound more effortlessly, without banging.
Ross Salvosa
13. Plant your feet
If your feet are dangling, your energy will be unstable. You need your foot firmly planted on the ground, and if it’s a very tiny student, a five-year-old, then we need a footstool.
Ross Salvosa
14. Sit toward the edge of the bench
You want to make sure that your buttocks are not completely sitting on it. You want to be slightly on the edge. Why do we do that? It’s because it provides us with proper leverage.
Ross Salvosa
Quotes are lightly edited for length and clarity. They come from Ross Salvosa’s 2020 Piano Star Masterclass on effortless playing. You can watch the full masterclass on the Piano League YouTube channel.
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