Piano Blog, Play Piano Techniques, Piano Tips

Chances are, if you’re a piano student, you have spent at least some of your time grumbling about learning your scales. They’re boring. And they’re hard. What an awful combination, right?

Actually, if you can look at them the right way, scales are anything but boring. Hard, yes; they can be hard, especially when you are learning a new one. But anything worth doing is hard at first. And learning your scales is definitely worth doing. Scales provide a necessary foundation for improving your skills.

Why piano students need to learn scales:
(1) Scales are a good way to practice using correct posture and form.
(2) Learning your scales helps your fingers gain speed and agility on the keyboard.
(3) Scales also help you warm up your finger and hand muscles before you start on a more challenging piece.
(4) Familiarity with a scale can also help you “warm up” your ear and your mind to the key, which will help you learn a piece written in that key.
(5) Having your scales “in your fingers” will help you with transposition, sight-reading, and improvisation as well.

How to practice scales:
- Gently stretch the muscles of your fingers and hands before you begin. These muscles are small, but they are about to get a pretty intense work-out!
- Sit up straight; don’t slouch. Always practice good posture at the keyboard.
- Adjust your seat height so that your forearms are parallel to the floor, while your fingertips are in contact with the keyboard. If necessary, sit on a telephone book!
- Curl your fingers into a gentle curve.
- Keep your fingers close to the keys. This may not seem important at first, when you are starting out slowly, but you’ll find this increasingly valuable as you gain speed with your scales.
- Relax. This can be hard, especially for beginners, who tend to tense up when confronted with a new scale. But your muscles will actually perform better if they are loose and relaxed.
- Take it slow. Don’t be in a hurry for your fingers to fly up and down the keyboard like those of professionals! They achieved that after many hours of practice, and that’s what you need to do now.
- Start with one hand at a time. Don’t try to play them together until you can run through the scale accurately with each hand separately.
- Don’t look! Once you have gained initial familiarity with a scale, try to keep from looking at your hands. Your fingers should learn to run their scales entirely by touch.
- Use a metronome. Playing your scales evenly is an important form of self-discipline, and the metronome can help. This tool can also help you speed up once you have mastered the scale at a slow tempo.
- Master one scale before moving on to another. Take at least 1 week per scale. If your piano lessons follow the local school calendar, this will take most of a school year, just to master the 24 major and minor scales! But at the end of that year, you’ll have these scales “in your fingers” for life.
- Keep your skills fresh. Revisit the scales you have mastered even while you are learning a new one.

Once there was a piano teacher whose students practiced at least half an hour every day, never complained about doing scales or theory, and were always on time for their lessons.

And then the teacher woke up.

Kidding aside, there is a reason behind everything your teacher wants you to do. And it isn’t just to make your life hard. From daily practice to scales and theory, your teacher wants you to do these things in order to help you reach your musical goals. Here’s why:

Regular Daily Practice: Quite simply, if you have goals you want to meet for your performance at the piano, there is no substitute for regular daily practice. During your weekly lessons, your teacher can give you some valuable ideas on how to improve your playing. But unless you put those ideas into practice, you will never see any improvement in your skills. Effective practice is the only thing that will help piano students improve their skills and meet their goals. (See my earlier article on How To Practice.) And the foundation of effective practice is regular practice.

Music Theory: Many students become reconciled to regular practice, but still resist completing their theory assignments. How can learning the Circle of Fifths and other silly things like that help one become a better musician? Well, as with many things in life, true mastery of a subject cannot be attained without understanding leading theories behind it.

If you understand about enharmonic equivalents, that will help you learn to transpose. If you understand about different musical modes, you’ll come to recognize a piece that has been written in a particular mode. And this can help you sight-read or learn it more effectively. If you understand the basic structure of a typical musical form (a sonatina, for example), you’ll know what to expect when you encounter one. And so on.

Scales: Oh, those tedious scales! There must be very few piano students on Earth who have never complained about learning their scales. Why do piano teachers insist on this torture system for their students? Several reasons.

For one thing, scales are a very basic means of developing proper form and nimbleness with your fingers. For another thing, familiarity with a scale will help you when you encounter a work written in that key, especially one with lots of accidentals. And this will also help you learn to transpose pieces from one key to another. Having your scales “in your fingers” will also help you in learning to sight-read, and to improvise as well.

Sight Reading: And speaking of sight-reading, why do you need to do it? If practice makes perfect, then why develop the skill of sitting down and playing effectively without practicing? Because, although you should always strive to practice a piece to perfection, there will be occasions when you’ll be called upon to play with little or no advance notice. If you are already accustomed to doing this in your lessons, you won’t be intimidated by such a request.

Improvisation: The same is true of improvisation, or the related practice of playing “by ear.” Especially if you begin playing jazz or rock or related styles, the ability to improvise or play by ear will be crucial to your success. If you have already been accustomed to doing this from your early piano-playing days, you’ll be ready to meet this challenge.

Recitals: Some students are terrified of performing at recitals. They go to lessons all year, they practice uncomplainingly, they make good progress… But they wish they could avoid proving it to all their friends and family members! Why does their teacher insist upon a public performance?

Answer: To give them a chance to overcome this very fear. While one can certainly play for one’s own enjoyment, the ultimate goal of learning to play piano is to share the joy of music with others. Again, if one is accustomed to performing in a recital from the earliest days of lessons, this will become a regular part of life, and the fear can be overcome before it grows overwhelming.

Yes, your teacher asks you to do all sorts of things that aren’t very much fun — at least not at first. But the only reason to do so is to help you meet your own musical goals. So work with your teacher. Surprise her! Come to your next lesson on time, with all your assigned pieces well-rehearsed, and a couple of extra scales under your fingers! Your teacher will be delighted, but the real person to benefit — will be yourself.

This well-known piano work was completed in 1801 when the composer Ludwig van Beethoven was 31. With the lengthy official handle of Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor “Quasi una fantasia,” Op. 27, No. 2, it’s not surprising that pianists over the years have preferred to call it by the much shorter nickname of “Moonlight Sonata.” This is perhaps the best-known and most frequently recorded of Beethoven’s piano sonatas. But did you know that it is not, in fact, a “pure” sonata in form?

The Moonlight Sonata departs from conventional sonata form, whose 3 or 4 movements are characterized by a structure of fast-slow-(fast)-fast. In the Moonlight Sonata, by contrast, Beethoven opens with an Adagio (slow) movement, a quite deliberate break with tradition. Beethoven was experimenting during the time of this work’s composition, and one of his experiments was to place the most important movement of a sonata last instead of first.

The second movement of the piece, Allegretto, is a fairly conventional scherzo, but the third movement, the Presto Agitato, is highly emotional, even stormy, and quite different from a more conventional sonata ending. While the more contemplative first movement may be attempted by an intermediate student, the last movement requires vigorous and energetic — and expert — playing.

The Moonlight Sonata is believed to have been dedicated to the Countess Giuliana Guicciardi, one of Beethoven’s pupils at the time he composed it. The musician and the young Countess fell in love after only a few lessons, and he is even supposed to have proposed marriage to her. By all accounts, she was amenable to the marriage, but because of her aristocratic station, her family forbade the match.

While this romantic mishap is historically accurate, some discount it as an inspiration for the Moonlight Sonata. This school of thought believes instead that the piece captures Beethoven’s reflections on the death of a friend. One of the greatest pianists of the twentieth century, Edwin Fischer, pointed to areas where the Moonlight Sonata’s first movement bears a striking resemblance to Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni, from the first act where the Commendatore is murdered. Thus the melancholy atmosphere created by Beethoven in the Moonlight Sonata’s first movement is associated with the idea of impending death, rather than thwarted love.

Whatever its inspiration, the nickname “Moonlight Sonata” was attached to the piece only after the composer’s death. In 1832, several years after Beethoven’s demise, the poet Ludwig Rellstab described the piano work as reminding him of “a boat visiting the wild places on Lake Lucerne by moonlight.” The name has stuck fast in the nearly two hundred years since.

If you have been taking piano for some time and have mastered popular sonatinas and sonatas by the likes of Clementi and Scarlatti, you may be ready to tackle the Moonlight Sonata, at least the first movement. Any serious student of the keyboard must become familiar with this work. Find a good recording — perhaps by Edwin Fischer or Andras Schiff — and take in the work of this master composer. Then, like Ludwig Rellstab and countless others the world over, you too may be deeply moved by Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.