Playing the piano expressively is something a lot of pianists find challenging. How often does it happen that you diligently learn all the notes and rhythms for your piece, but then still feel that the music you are making is just not as musical or expressive as you wish it were?
This blog post is about a surprisingly simple way to learn to play the piano more expressively, using information contained in the time signature to help with shaping and phrasing.
Beat Pattern
When we first learn about time signature, we are taught that the time signature is a ratio, and that the top number indicates the number of beats per bar and the bottom number indicates the value of the note that gets one beat.
What often gets missed, however, is the fact that not all of the beats in a measure are of equal importance. Each key signature implies a hierarchy of beats, where some beats get a stronger emphasis than others.
This hierarchy is consistent throughout a piece, and the specific beats that are stressed or weak are different depending on the time signature.
Therefore, we call the hierarchy of beats in a piece the beat pattern.This pattern is the default pattern of strong and weak beats that is in effect during the piece.
Composers who wrote Western classical music understood this convention, and they therefore composed in such a way as to exploit this strong beat-weak beat pattern. Often you will see expressive dissonances land on a downbeat, for example, or perhaps a composer will accent a beat that is typically considered a “weak” beat, in order to interrupt the pattern that has been established in the piece up to that point.
Emphasizing some beats more than others is an unwritten rule of expression and shaping. Composers expect the performer to emphasize the beats within each measure differently. Not only does it “sound” more musical to our ears, but we also know this because although there are no recordings before the twentieth century, composers, performers and teachers wrote treatises where these conventions are explained. One such document is Leopold Mozart’s Treatise on the Fundamentals of Violin Playing, which contains information about performance practice of the time.
Four Essential Principles to Understand Beat Pattern
- The first beat (downbeat) is the strongest beat in the bar
- The middle beat (when there is an even number of beats) is the next-strongest beat in the bar.
- The last beat in the bar is considered to be a “weak” beat, but it has a leading quality to the next downbeat.
- The second beat in the bar is usually the weakest beat.
Using the time signature to understand the hierarchy of beats and the beat pattern for your particular piece will quickly enable you to be able to play more expressively and with much more understanding of why and how you’re going to shape the music. This translates into a more musical and assured performance to the audience.
As a performer, when you emphasize the strong beats and de-emphasize the weak beats, you’re supporting the composer’s vision of that piece and what the composer was trying to communicate.
There is a simplicity to this approach. All you have to do is look at the time signature, which tells you the meter. The time signature will tell you how to figure out the beat pattern, and from there, you just have to establish which beats are strong and which beats are weak. Once you have a good understanding of the overlying beat pattern, then you can use that to play more musically by consciously emphasizing strong beats and de-emphasizing weak beats.
In this video lesson I go through these four principles, using Bach’s Invention No. 1 as an example, and I show you how to use the beat pattern to shape and play more expressively. For the full lesson, click here or on the video below!