Off the beaten path.

As piano teachers, we often relegate the piano duet and two-piano repertoire to a back seat. Practical issues, such as a lack of teaching or rehearsal time, having only one piano or not being able to pair up students without causing a sibling war or some other volatile partnership, can hamper our best efforts. However, the challenges and fun of two pianists in tandem can bring an added dimension of musical understanding and creativity to our students that solo piano may not. The piano duet and duo are an incomparable aid to introducing even very young students to musical concepts often reserved for higher education levels.

Stylistic interpretation and creative musicianship are two piano teaching areas where I have found piano duet and duo works to be extremely helpful. In terms of the former, duets have long been used by composers and music students alike to study instrumental works--particularly before the advent of recordings. They are still useful in that regard today. I also have found that using a piano ensemble as a creative medium adds a richness to a student's musical experience and can encourage a love and awareness for music that goes beyond the pleasure of piano playing.

STYLISTIC INTERPRETATION

Having students play duets brings to them a critical awareness of both their own musicianship and stylistic demands. It almost goes without saying that two pianists must agree on matters of interpretation, or both the music and ensemble suffer. As a teacher, I have found that the duet is an excellent way of encouraging students to put into words their interpretation of certain passages. As solo pianists, we are not often required to verbalize our thoughts, but doing so greatly helps secure key concepts in the music. With students new to ensemble playing, I find it helpful to say, "John, you play this phrase as if the last note is the destination. Jill, you play your part in the same phrase as if the destination is this note here and then you round off the phrase. Which one of these interpretations might serve the music itself better? What do you think the composer intended? What clues can we find in the score?" To come to an answer, the pianists are forced to discuss--or at least examine--the measures, the surrounding musical material and the overall form of the movement.

Along the way, tone color and sound quality are addressed, since these directly impact the interpretation. Students learn to listen to their partners and to themselves when they are encouraged to match, complement or contrast each other's sounds. The duet is a wonderful way to introduce the idea of a sound palette, since the onus is not on the pianist to constantly both play and listen. There is even more benefit to having them verbalize their perception of the sound, going beyond piano and forte to such descriptive words as "melting," "warm," "heavy" and so on. This also is excellent preparation for accompanying other instrumentalists or vocalists and for composition.

Interpretation, style, tone color and sound concepts translate easily from duet into solo playing. This can be encouraged by having students learn a duet and a solo piece by the same composer. For example, the 12 Pieces for Big and Little Children by Robert Schumann can be learned alongside Scenes from Childhood Op. 15. Ravel's Ma Mer L'oye can be paired with and compared to Petite Suite, Debussy's early duet. One fun pairing is playing both the duet (or duo) and solo versions of Bartok's seven pieces from Mikrokosmos. This is a particularly good exercise for examining the method by which Bartok arranged these pieces. Comparing other arrangements of original works also provides valuable exercise. When learning both duet and solo pieces by the same (or comparable) composers, concepts in the interpretation of the duet can be reinforced. Since students have learned to hear and discuss style matters in the duet, they can more readily apply it to solo pieces.

CREATIVE MUSICIANSHIP

The two-pianist combination has untapped potential in the realm of creativity. By this I mean leaving the written score and traditional Western musical sense and leaping headfirst into the world of imagination and soundscapes. For most of us, this is a terrifying experience. We might go there secretly, when no one (we hope) is listening and tiptoe back, red-faced, because we're not sure we liked what we heard! Going there with a duet partner halves the terror and cements the partnership in a positive way.

The following exercises are a few I use with this goal in mind. These activities, or variations, have met with varying degrees of success in terms of inspiring students to produce something musically intelligible. The activities have been greatly successful getting students to listen, think, have fun and communicate. The trick for teachers and students is not to pass judgment on the final result, but to enjoy the journey. The point is not necessarily to create a masterpiece, but to stretch the boundaries of our musical experience and that of our students and, most of all, to have fun doing it.

One of the easiest ways to start venturing into this unknown territory is to have an improvised musical conversation. First, show how a conversation takes place in music by demonstrating antecedent-consequent phrases, or by the use of two "voices" in different registers in existing works. Using pieces the students have worked on is a good way to approach this exercise. The object is getting players to listen and respond to each other musically.

You can begin on the purely rhythmic level. Very young students love to be "big and little bears" with flat palms on the keyboard (Notes don't matter.) at opposite ends of the piano. Simply, the big bear "says" something to which the little bear responds, or vice versa. To start with, students will tend to imitate each other's rhythmic patterns. These rhythms can be made up by either student, or you can use rhythm flash cards that only one student can see, doubling as a great sight-reading exercise. Move on from the copycat stage by "scripting" the bears, or staging a question-answer type discussion. The script can be a series of pictures or an actual script, or it could be just a general verbal outline of a scene. Here is one example:

Big Bear: I love to go out in the sunshine--it makes me so happy I skip.

Little Bear: I love to go out in the sunshine--it makes me run and jump.

Big Bear: Do you like to smell the flowers?

Little Bear: No--they make me sneeze! Ah-choo! Ah-choo! Ah-choo!

If you allow them, students will respond with alarming diversity. Some will illustrate musically the action words, or play a rhythm true to the syllables of the text, while others will take an initial impression and play whatever comes to hand. Your students' maturity level will determine how much freedom they can handle. More advanced students can be encouraged to create snippets of melodic material, with or without accompanying harmony, with the rise and fall of notes and dynamics often corresponding to a vocal expression. As students get more comfortable, the musical dialogue can become much more expressive and animated.

In another exercise I put a picture on the desk and have the students "play" it--one creating background and the other playing the foreground. Again, even little children can do this. This usually is a relatively simple picture, such as a child at the beach on a sunny day with the sea in the distance. The secondo plays "sea" music, while the primo plays the child; I also have had the primo playing "sun" music, while the secondo played the child and/or sea. Following the single picture exercise, a picture series might have a sunny day becoming a cloudy day, then a rainy day. This exercise requires one of the players to change his or her music appropriately to signal to the partner that the music has moved from one picture to the next. The pianists must determine how to achieve this without verbally discussing it, only by listening to each other as they play.

This can open up some wonderful discussions with students about different styles and musical periods; how music and visual arts, including films and cartoons, are interrelated and how we, as pianists, can try to portray those style differences to an audience on an aural level. Drawing parallels between music and other arts is one of my favorite ways of encouraging a student to reach beyond playing the notes to putting meaning into the music.

The same thing can be done with a poem or a story. This can be lots of fun, especially if you have an expressive story reader. Choosing a simple, funny story with a few obviously different characters and scenes, your pianists need to create a musical interpretation, or a backdrop, as you read aloud. Divide the characters between the pianists and then have them create other background motifs together, such as weather. This is fun at a recital, especially if you have a story with many animals. You might find your students become a menagerie, but it is worth the fun. In addition to opening up the way for creative playing, this is a great introduction to opera, film scores and other music-story productions.

As a result of our field trips into the creative, one of my students created a score for a musical she co-wrote with friends in her eighth-grade class. A busy student, she did not devote much, if any, time to practicing the piano, but because of these and other exercises, she was not afraid to be musically creative. Though she was not an adept pianist, she understood much about music, form, musicianship and the use of motifs--concepts not usually addressed in piano lessons--and could discuss her pieces in this manner. She created and recorded this music using a computer and a keyboard in her home.

Obviously, as this example shows, the same exercises can be done with a solo pianist, but there is something already fun about being one of two pianists, and having a "partner-in-crime" makes it easier to be free with ideas. In addition, although the teacher can double as a partner, I have found that students spend more time trying to please the teacher and "get it right" than they do when sitting with a peer.

Although teachers often say they do not have enough time in lessons to do these things, I argue that taking a little diversion is a welcome change of scenery for most students, and there is still musical purpose and pianistic intent behind the fun. In my experience, this can be an effective short cut for many students from playing notes and being well-behaved to being a listening, musically aware pianist. I have found that a student taking little adventures in creative musicianship becomes a more sensitive listener, a more imaginative player, a more fluid improviser and a musician who is more expressive and adds more to a partnership--whether as an accompanist or as a duet partner. And, after all, isn't that what we want our students to become?

Karen Workman has conducted private lessons for fifteen years in New Zealand, her home country, and in the United States. She graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Music with a D.M.A. degree, majoring in piano solo and piano duo. Workman also holds degrees from the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.