Noa Kageyama, Ph.D., performance psychologist and musician teacher, shares his take on rhythmicity and performance.
Like every other instrumentalist, I had to take piano lessons in grad school. I had a very thoughtful student-teacher who observed that I had a tendency to play at a tempo which matched the most well-learned sections of the piece. So when I was playing parts that were comfortable for me and felt secure, I sounded great (not “great” in the literal sense, but you know, passable, for a non-pianist who practiced maybe 10 minutes the night before the lesson). But when I got to the sections which were less secure, I’d often fumble around in a panic or even flat-out stop while I organized my fingers for the next phrase. And even if I got the general rhythm of the music ok, played the notes mostly at the right time, and kept things going, the rhythmicity of my movements was off.
He acknowledged that it’s fun to hear ourselves playing the good parts in tempo, but encouraged me to put my ego on hold, and play at a more sustainable tempo, based not on the best-learned sections, but on the weakest passages. So that when I played through the piece, I would be able to comfortably play the most difficult parts without feeling quite so rushed and frantic when I got there.
To be clear, this is not about practicing with a metronome per se. Because you can still play in time, but with herky-jerky shifts that have poor rhythmicity. The idea, is that if faced with a difficult shift (as an example), it’s probably not enough to just practice the movements involved in the shift, and functionally getting from note A to note B. If we really want to maximize consistency and accuracy, we may have to practice the rhythmicity of the shift as well. So that whether we are practicing slowly, at tempo, or even above tempo, the rhythm of the shift is itself a target of our practice efforts.
Photograph by Hugo Enrique Garcia Ximenez.
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