Writing For Piano

This is a Guest post by Chip Michael of Interchanging Idioms

Since I am not a composer  myself, I found it a most interesting insight on the workings of composing.

A couple years ago I wrote a series of 12 piano preludes, pieces that were an exploration of the prelude first explored by Bach. While Bach wrote 24 preludes, one in each key major and minor, I opted to write a series of bi-tonal pieces, where each hand was playing in a different key. Both hands start in C, but then moving around the circle of fifths in opposite directions until they have each explored the twelve key signatures. It was an interesting compositional process resulting in some entertaining pieces of music, and I discuss the concept in more detail in a previous post on my own blog.

However, not being a pianist myself -only dabbling on the piano at a grade 4 level, I took the pieces to a good friend of mine for review. Simon Coverdale is an excellent pianist, one of the best in Edinburgh, and really understands what it means for a piece of music to be pianistic - to feel as if the piece were truly written for the piano, rather than just putting notes on a page on two staves and calling it piano music.

One of the first things he pointed out was the difficulty for a pianist to “think” in two keys. This doesn’t necessarily preclude the music from being pianist, but it will cause the typical pianist to hesitate at the notes as the struggle with how to place the hands. Perhaps this is a good thing - causing pianists to think - but, in some cases, where the keys are enharmonically similar, getting the pianist to play a C-sharp in one hand while they play a D-flat in the other can cause some confusion (even if the notes are not in the same octave). It has to do with the way pianists think about music. Again, I’m not sure this is a bad thing. However, I don’t strain the musician enough in this manner to establish a frame for the pieces. So, in this regard, the two keys is not necessarily a success.

Another comment Simon made was in reference to how the hand moves along the keys. In Prelude 6, for example, the figure in the right hand is just a bit awkward for the hand to naturally reach, so it has to move in an odd way in order to play the figure. The movement is not natural; there is no easy way to reach the octave notes and then pay the top pair of notes in the repeating figure, play the next octave separation and still return to the final note of the figure without causing the hand to shift in a funny way. As he played it for me, I immediately realized how jarring his hand movements were in order to accomplish what I’d written. This figure isn’t pianistic (particularly since it’s suppose to be played at 320bpm). It doesn’t feel as if it should be played on the piano because it doesn’t flow.

Prelude 6

Simon then played a half dozen other examples of composers who’ve written repetitive figures for the piano, Bach, Chopin, Liszt, Debussy… All of the examples shows how flowing the hand movement was. For the music to feel pianistic, it needed to feel as if the hand would naturally move across the keys to hit the notes on the page. This “requirement” is particular true of preludes, which should have a sense of improvization to them. Listening to my pieces, the improvizational sense is there, but not when you see the hands moving across the keys.

There were other comments Simon made about the pianistic nature of my preludes, but these two were the major ones. Even with that not every prelude failed. Some were actually quite lovely and very pianistic - Prelude 8 and 10 were a couple of Simon’s favorites.

I have yet to return to “fix” the broken aspects, where the various preludes don’t succeed in terms of being music written for the piano. Now, at least I have some sense of what the music needs. As I said at the outset, I am not a pianist, but I can play enough to know if either hand can be played comfortably, if the music flows across the keys. There are only three or four that need this sort of “fixing.” The bi-tonality will probably be scrapped as a general rule. I will likely write the pieces with no key signature and alter enharmonic notes to keep consistency between the hands. As a concept, it helped me focus on writing the music, but as a pianist it just gets in the way.