Jiayan Sun on score reading, and why a quarter note isn’t as long as you think
The Leeds prizewinner on unmarked notes, staccato dots and wedges, slurs, old editions and why score reading is not about policing the text.
Jiayan Sun is a pianist who has won prizes at the Leeds, Cleveland, Dublin and Toronto international piano competitions and also studies historical performance on early keyboard instruments. He teaches piano at Smith College in Massachusetts.
Here are twelve of his best tips, from his Piano Star Masterclass on score reading on Piano League.
1. Play as if you don’t know what comes next
We know the music so well, we memorized it, so we know how every note goes. But when we present it, when we perform it, when we play it, we should feel: oh, what’s going to happen next second?
Jiayan Sun
2. A note with no marking is not held for its full value
I remember that with my earliest training I was told when I see a quarter note I have to hold for a whole beat, or a half note, maybe that I would hold for two full beats. … Interestingly, if we read the treatises by Bach and Mozart, that’s not what they said. According to C.P.E. Bach, a note that’s not marked with any articulation marking is usually held for half of the note value.
Jiayan Sun
3. Let the character decide the length
Leopold Mozart said something along the same line, but added that the duration, the length of the note, is dependent on the effect or character of the passage in question.
Jiayan Sun
4. Tenuto is a clue
When the composer wants a note to be held for the full value, the composer is obligated to supplement that note with the marking tenuto, or in abbreviation, ten.
Jiayan Sun
5. Score reading is not policing the text
Score reading is not a dry task, or a task that’s about pointing [to] every dot on the page to become a text police. That’s a misunderstanding of what musical notation is all about.
Jiayan Sun
6. Read the score like an actor reads a script
When I interpret a piece of music, I’m like an actor on stage. … I get the script that Shakespeare left to us, and of course it’s my job to study every word. So I have to know how to pronounce every word and then the meaning of every word. But as we know, that’s only a starting point.
Jiayan Sun
7. Listen to the rests
These rests, yes, we have to count, but it’s much more important to listen for the silence. … The musical notation, as we were discussing in the earlier talk, is much more sophisticated than a mathematical approach, like four beats in a measure and we just play according to the beats. Rather, we have to hear the silence.
Jiayan Sun
8. Staccato is about weight, not only length
As we all know, the staccato marking is meant to make the note played shorter, but actually it’s more complicated than that. … More importantly, it’s the quality of the execution. It’s not only the length that’s affected by such markings, but also the weight of the notes.
Jiayan Sun
9. In Chopin, dots and wedges are different
For Chopin it was clear that the dots signify the kind of staccato that’s short and light in terms of execution, whereas the chords with the staccato wedges are meant to be played with more weight and more force, and perhaps with a sharper attack.
Jiayan Sun
10. Read every marking in context
What I want to suggest here is much less categorical, to say that one kind of staccato marking is shorter or the other kind is longer. Rather, we have to understand all these markings in the context of the whole phrase, the whole passage and perhaps the whole piece.
Jiayan Sun
11. A slur fades as it goes
There is another add-on to that element, which is talked about in the treatises: that the notes under a slur imply a diminuendo, meaning the first note or first few notes under the slur should be played with a sense of emphasis, and as we go with the slur, the notes later would be played lighter, and perhaps by the end of the slur, shorter.
Jiayan Sun
12. Know when your edition was made
By the time that Epstein edited this edition in the late 1800s, I would say that the taste changed drastically. A hundred years earlier, Mozart’s style of playing is more of the detached one, with more shorter articulations, whereas by Epstein’s time the long legato and sustained sonorities became the norm, with the music, for example, by Richard Wagner.
Jiayan Sun
Quotes are lightly edited for length and clarity. They come from Jiayan Sun’s 2020 Piano Star Masterclass on score reading. You can watch the full masterclass on the Piano League YouTube channel.
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