Loud Playing Compared To Soft Playing

Some pedagogues have claimed that loud playing actually requires greater relaxation and less effort than soft playing. Is that true? Gerhard Mantel made that point in regards to cello playing and claimed that the same (i.e. loud playing being more effortless than soft playing) applies to piano playing. "The musculature holding up the arm is relieved of the amount of pressure that rests on the string; the louder the sound the more relaxed the musculature will be. This rule is easily demonstrated: If the frog of the bow is placed on the string and the arm is completely relaxed, an unnecessary amount of pressure is resting on the string. To diminish this pressure we must use the musculature that holds up the arm. This fact alone shows us how cautious we must be with words like relaxation. If one is forced to practice pianissimo for an extended length of time, the arms tires much faster than in loud playing because the muscles must actively hold up the entire arm, including the bow." In other words, the weight of the arm rests on the keys during loud playing, relieving you of the pressure of that weight. However, in soft playing, you must prevent the weight of the arm from releasing into the keys by employing a certain degree of muscular effort. However, in this article , Horowitz offered a contradictory view. He claimed that heavy playing will tire you more quickly than soft playing. Which view is correct? Could Mantel (and other pedagogues) be completely wrong about loud playing involving less physical effort?

Over the last few years I've come more and more to the viewpoint that there is no such thing as endurance with playing an instrument, just efficient and inefficient movements. I've often found that looking into the efficiency of the component acts of a certain movement or technique allows me to eliminate the sense of fatigue I might previously of had. So I think that while someone might get fatigued whilst playing loudly, it more than likely that they are using too much "effort", without realising that the excess effort is not required to play loudly.

That's a very interesting viewpoint, and it may well be true. Many injury-prevention specialists have claimed that any sense of fatigue at the keyboard is always due to incorrect technique. They claim that injuries and fatigue are never the result of too much playing, but of playing the wrong way. If that's true, then what does that say about Horowitz? If we was concerned with endurance and not getting tired, then were there aspects of his technique that involved unnecessary exertion?

Very difficult to say about Horowitz, hopefully Alan will drop by and let us know what he thinks. I showed a video of Horowitz to my Alexander teacher, and he commented that he was a model of good use - his minimal movements, and also the length and release in his fingers. I always notice that my sound suffers if I allow myself to become inefficient, so maybe it's possible to spot that in certain aspects of Horowitz's playing (although on a much smaller scale than myself).

Horowitz solved the problem in a very elegant way, he learned how to never play loud (see my last chapter in Honing). He created the ILLUSION of great loudness but actually was very incisive and precise in his attacks, creating great dynamic differences and a kind of "shock" that didn't actually have that much volume. The musical reason for this is that a piano loses all its high overtone colours when you play it too loud. The physical reason is as he says: you play too loud too long, you get too tired. The opposing view comes from the mistaken belief that the arm's weight creates tone and moves the key, so the louder you play the more your arm lets go. It's actually rather the opposite: the louder you play, the more your hand has to work to balance the down and up force vectors. There's another interesting phenomenon however: when we play soft, we tend to stop moving the fingers. In soft playing you actually have to work harder to move the fingers than in loud playing, where they move automatically because they HAVE to. In soft playing you must WILL them to do so because we tend to think it's not necessary and get lazy as a result. So in this weird sense, playing loud is indeed easier than playing soft. AFF

Yes, I remember that very interesting observation about Horowitz's sonority from . Does that observation only apply to how Horowitz was playing in the last years of his life, or does it apply to his entire career? I know that in the beginning of Horowitz's career, he could allegedly overpower an entire orchestra, which would suggest that his volume- at least at that time- was not just an illusion. Are you saying that Horowitz actually played softer than most pianists do, but that it sounded louder because of the upper overtones?

Yes. Though I think he did it more in later life, he was probably already doing it to some extent earlier. But we'll never know for sure... AFF

After playing on Horowitz's piano, you discovered that a truly loud tone does not sound as loud to the listener, as the fundamental tone drowns out the overtones? In that case, then I would think that Horowitz's tone, even in his younger years, wasn't as loud as it seemed (even if it was loud enough to drown out an entire orchestra). Those high overtones that you referenced must be the secret to Horowitz's unique, electrifying sonority. It sounds massive, but doesn't really have that much volume. In this recording from the 1970's , when Horowitz plays the three fortissimo chords at 1:40 just before the coda, it sounds like the dials of the stereo were turned up way too loud, but that's probably all part of the illusion. I saw of review where someone was comparing Horowitz's 1953 performance of his transcription of the Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody #2 to Volodos' performance. The reviewer pointed out that at one section, Volodos was at least as loud, maybe a little louder, than Horowitz, but didn't sound as seethingly intense as Horowitz as the Maestro had more than just a big volume. Even without knowing what Mr. Fraser knows, that reviewer seems to have a rudimentary perception of the fact that Horowitz's amazing sound is not really an issue of volume. I guess when comparing recordings back to back, it is more apparent who is playing loud, as opposed to who is creating the illusion of loudness.