The Piano Pod meets Madeline Bruser: some common difficulties she encounters in her students.

16 Dec 2020 · 3 min

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This content was created by The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song. This content was uploaded by The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song. This is a YouTube video titled "The Piano Pod meets Madeline Bruser: some common difficulties she encounters in her students" (posted 2020-12-16) containing an instructional/talk segment by Madeline Bruser. In the excerpt Bruser discusses piano pedagogy—how emotional intensity often leads to physical tension in pianists, the need to balance passion with ease, teaching anecdotes (a student with an injury working on Chopin's First Nocturne), references to her chapters 8–9, and feedback from Manhattan focus groups about conveying emotion without tension.

Chapters

I've been thinking about this recently because I'm kind of trying to boil things down for different purposes of presenting things and writing about things. And for instance, in terms of piano technique, I think one of the most universal problems is that people react to emotional intensity with physical tension. So it's really great to be passionate about music. I mean, if we weren't passionate about it, we'd have nothing to say. That's like core. You need that passion to be a musician. It's like number one, you have to have that, right? But it's kind of also got a flip side. It's like any, any positive attribute a person has has another side. So the passionate person, and I consider myself one of them, can easily overdo it. That's actually in chapter 8 and 9. Chapter 8, I talk about the 3 styles of struggle and what we do with passion. And I give the example of you meet a new person and you're excited to meet this person. You want to meet, and so you go nuts, you know. Oh, I'm so happy to meet you. Oh, I can't believe I'm going to shake your hand. Right, right. Right, so I'm exaggerating, but there is this kind of overkill thing. And when we— I just taught a student yesterday who's been working with an injury, and just playing the opening of Chopin's First Nocturne, which you actually did with me, Clara, you know, the tightness gets into the mechanism, into the whole body. You know, everything is overdone, and nobody has pointed it out. You don't have to work so hard. There's something internal that you could tap into and then you could just release the tension and make music in a bigger way, right? More give it some space to breathe. So I think, in fact, at the focus groups at Manhattan, one of the most important things that was said is this pianist said, "I want to know how to convey emotional intensity without physical tension. And I've always, I always use that phrase in a lot of the things I've written. It's, it's a really universal problem.