8 Tips for Learning Music by Living Composers
Thanks to tradition, scholarship, and recordings, pianists are given helpful interpretive instructions when learning established repertoire. Even if the composer left few suggestions in the score, generations of performers and musicologists offer helpful trails through the music. These instructions assure us that this interpretation is more satisfying than that. They remind us of each composer’s performance practices, and offer explanations regarding intricacies of form. This doesn’t make the music easy, but it does provide guidance.
Unless it has been widely performed and recorded, music by living composers offers no such assurance. The form/rhythm/harmony/notation may be something we’ve never encountered before. Many times, the piece has yet to be recorded, leaving us with a MIDI recording, or none at all. More than one fine musician has peered at a page full of the unfamiliar, closed the score, and scurried back to the safety of known music. As a pianist who was raised on classics and the predictable security of 4-part Protestant church hymns, I’m intimately familiar with this sort of fear. It took me 15 years to progress from my panic at the sight of a George Crumb score to premiering a partially improvised piece that required me to sing a whole-tone version of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” while playing something completely different on the piano.
As with everything, familiarity creates confidence. And, thankfully, playing brand new music doesn’t require anything more specialized than creativity, flexibility, and a willingness to experiment. With the wide diversity of music available today, there’s (literally) something to suite everyone’s tastes. There are, however, special challenges to playing brand new music, and these 8 tips are things that I’ve found make it easier:
Read all the composer’s suggestions
This reads like an obvious suggestion, but how many times do we skip over the introductory remarks in a score and dive straight into the music? The composer suggestions are invaluable. Not only do they give guidance on how they wish us to navigate the music, they offer a hint as to how much flexibility they want us to take with the score.
Ask what’s required of the music and what’s required of the performer
This is where we look at what’s physically required to execute the music, and how much collaborative interpretation is needed to bring the music to life once the notes are in our hands. Before we devote months of our time to a piece, it’s best to know whether or not we’re capable of accomplishing both tasks.
Map out the piece
Which sections are similar? Which are different? What is the form of the piece? It helps to “hear” as much of it as possible in our minds before playing a single note. This way, we know where we’re going and how the composer plans to get us there before begin learning to play it. This gives context to the notes, which helps us retain them.
Begin with rhythm
Truth: be prepared to sub-divide like mad. Most concert-level new music requires pianists to have a fundamental grasp of syncopation, unexpected rhythmic gestures, and to possess a thorough grounding in the pulse of the piece. All of this will be compromised if the ear learns the rhythm incorrectly.
Embrace non-standard notation and throw out perfectionism
Most non-standard notation is there to shake us out of our comfort zones. It pushes us way “outside the box” and the sensation can be either freeing or terrifying. I think we, as players, get to choose our response. If we frame it as freeing, we can see it as throwing off constraints, and we can embrace our role as co-creator with the composer. In my experience, this sort of notation asks me to think less about notes, and more about sound.
Consult the composer, if possible
One of the best things about playing new music is that nearly every composer has an online presence. A simple Google search will pull up a website, a social media page, a YouTube channel, or a Soundcloud account. Stuck on something in the score? Try contacting the composer and ask about it. Not every composer I’ve contacted has responded, but most have—and several have become close friends through our online exchanges
Focus on transitions (help the composer, if necessary)
Most composers have strong musical ideas and do a good job building them into forms. The cracks, when they appear, are usually found in the transitions between ideas. We don’t think about this very much when we play established pieces, because recordings and familiarity offer ideas on how to traverse those difficult moments. When playing brand new music, however, performers must be acutely aware of these transition points and (at times) help the composer make them musical through how we move from one musical idea or phrase to the next.
Allow extra time to learn it
Because we don’t start learning the piece with it already in our ear (or, sometimes, in our musical language), even the seemingly simple pieces require more time to learn and to make our own. If learning a piece by a brand-new composer whose language we don’t know, it’s wise to give ourselves even more time to learn the composer’s style. I always think of this as getting to know the composer’s mind, because until we can get inside a composer’s thinking, we can’t get inside the music.
Thankfully, each new piece we learn gives us confidence and competence. What once felt alien and unfamiliar becomes, through practice, as comfortable as any other performance practice. The best thing? The effort of stretching the ear and the musical intellect allows us to hear all music differently. In this way, the music of the present frees us to play the music of the past with a fresh perspective. And, through learning the music of today, we participate in the creation of the music of the future.