Chopin used them extensively. So did Beethoven and Mozart. Arpeggios are beautiful and are perfect for the New Age piano style too!
You can hear them in George Winston’s music. David Lanz uses them in many of his compositions, and of course, I use them as well. Why? Because the piano is well suited for this technique!
The left-hand is used mostly to create this cascading flow of notes. For example, in the lesson Wood Thrush we use over 2 octaves of the keyboard. This creates a very nice background over which we can improvise (or compose) our melodies.
I have this great Japanese flute and koto CD I listen to. It’s called Satori and I put it on every once in a while, not to relax, but just to be reminded of what music for music’s sake sounds like.
There is no planning here. No forethought. It is pure improvisation and frankly, there is nothing that compares with it as far as being in the moment improv is concerned. You can really feel the moment here. It’s as if time is suspended and there is nothing but the player and the music.
As I sit here writing this listening to Mozart, I can’t help but think of musical form. That sometimes but often not discernible quality to music that makes it art. And when I say art, I’m not talking about improvisation or free form. I’m talking about composition.
Most students are baffled as to how a piece of music is constructed. It’s as if learning how to compose is something only gifted individuals do. And while the intuitive sense behind creating melody itself can not be taught, the craft can!
I don’t know why, but I find the idea of interpreting nature musically to be very appealing. Maybe it’s because I’m attracted to nature’s beauty, but the notion of communicating that beauty musically has always intrigued me.
Not being a very patient person, I wanted to find a way to capture a musical idea very quickly and sketch out an entire piece all at once. Visual artists do something called a thumbnail sketch and I wanted to do the same thing for music.
If you’ve been playing piano for some time, you may come upon periods where you forget yourself and only the music remains. You might even have had a spiritual experience. A phenomenon where emotion and intellect become one and the outside world disappears.
This experience is what we all want, whether we admit it or not. This is a very important part of making music - especially new age music. We want that moment where we can stop thinking and start feeling.
Imagine being able to sit down at the piano and create your own unique music without years of study. Now imagine being able to do it within 1 hour! It’s possible when you learn how to play the open position piano chord!
The OPC is a special way of forming chords at the piano. You use both hands right away to create a modern sounding chord that’s perfect for today’s contemporary styles. It’s called open position because of the way the notes of the chord are spread out.
While it probably doesn’t seem like this would help - let’s face it - if you are unwilling to play a lot of wrong notes, you’re never going to learn how to do anything hard. And improvising is hard! It isn’t something that you can do safely, with the assurance that you will look good while trying to get good at it. You won’t look good. You won’t sound good — and the sooner you realize this, the sooner you will be able to do something of real value.
There seems to be a substantial body of evidence in support of the Mozart Effect. While skeptics advice us to take the whole Mozart Effect thing, with a very large grain of salt. Whatever the truth, maybe there are other effects that have come from studying Mozart that have had tremendous influence on whole music learning, piano playing through the study and research and practice of new methods and technology aids. And it does seem to work for many people, similar to the Mozart effect.
Many families are now purchasing digital pianos to learn on. And why not? They’re relatively inexpensive, take up very little space, and produce high quality grand piano sound. But there are certain drawbacks to owning one.
For example, it’s a good idea to play an acoustic instrument before trying a digital one. Why? Because no matter how well the piano sound is sampled, it will never match the pure acoustic sound and richness of a live piano. This factor is very important to some because they want to experience that organic sensibility only a true acoustic can give them.
Some people think composing is this miraculous thing that only genius’s do. What a myth! It’s a skill that can be learned. What can’t be learned is the intuition that guides the creative force. What can be learned is the technique. And the most important part of composing technique has to do with THINKING IN PHRASES.