Picture the scene. You’re alone. In the cinema. Watching your number 1 most terrifying film ever for the first time.
How do you feel?
Scared?
I would think so.
What else do you think you’d notice about your physical stance?
You’d be tense, certainly - especially in those suspenseful scenes as you anticipate the inevitable coming of the “jump-scare”.
And what else?
Probably…and I say this with not 100% conviction as people can be different…but probably, you’re holding your breath. Until you reach a ‘safe space’ (i.e. the next scene comes on and it’s nice and sunny - or you leave the cinema!) your breath is well and truly held!
What’s interesting and very likely been studied in the past by people much more qualified by this self-confessed not-a-psychologist typing this, is that there seems to be a direct - almost learned - link between actually holding your breath and being tense. Does one feed the other? Does holding your breath actually cause the tension or vice versa? Can you alleviate the tension simply by noticing your breath and starting to breathe normally?
Many people suggest that YES - you can!
And when it comes to performance, particularly in “high pressure” situations (a term I use loosely as ‘high pressure’ can be as little as recording a fun 30 second video for TikTok - it doesn’t have tp be an exam or a competition or a recital at the packed out Royal Albert Hall!) our tension translates rather similarly: hold your breath and don’t breathe until it’s over!
Now, music is an abstract noun - I grant you that. However, imagine for a moment that music is, in fact, a living, breathing organism (metaphorically speaking, it is alive after all!). Imagine that the most beautiful piece of music you know had the ability to ‘hold its breath’ throughout its performance. How would it sound different?
Well, similarly to how you might, really…it would struggle and strain and trip over itself. It would be tense and on the whole rather stressful to listen to.
And you as the performer are the person who can control how this music flows. How it rises and how it falls! But to do so, you need to be in control of your own breathing too! Remember that you are the one thing that can channel the music from being an abstract noun in thin air through to your fingertips and turn it into something that can be heard and felt. And what we feel also comes out!
So - remember to train your breathing…
Where to Breathe When Playing Piano
I don’t wish to spoon-feed you an obvious answer here, but if you wish to breathe properly when playing piano then you can do so easily enough by following the natural flow of the music. We can do this in a few different ways.
Method One: Breathe In to Rise, Breathe Out to Descend
One such way we can consider our breathing is by following the overall direction of the music. It is very logical to our senses to breathe in when the music goes higher and breathe out when it goes lower. Here, I’m talking generally about phrases. You don’t have to breathe sharply for every individual note that happens to be higher than the previous and then out again for every note that appears to be lower than the previous or else your breathing would be all over the place, you’d be exhausted, playing badly and stressed! Square one, much?
But if you can identify that the overall direction of a bar or phrase is rising, then rise with it. Breathe appropriately enough with the music so that you don’t reach the peak of where you can breathe in ahead of the descent and end up holding your breath anyway - make sure it is controlled in such a way that you can rise and fall perfectly naturally as if you were breathing whilst reading this blog (unless you find this blog to be a particularly gripping thriller, I assume your breathing is steadily up and down).
Bear in mind, however, that this is one method and can only really be applied to pieces that have clear direction in their phraseology, clear distinction between the rises and falls and also have a steady tempo. If you attempt this way will something very lively (vivace) then you might just faint before your reach the end of the piece. Read on for alternatives…
Method Two: Breathe Between Phrases
When we start to increase the speed, it’s not practical to assume that every single rise and fall should be apparent. Hereby, method two comes into operation!
This method encourages you to identify the individual phrases and breathe between them. This is not quite the same as my third method (read on…) on the basis that we’re assuming the tempo and phrasing here is not of a singing style, but we can certainly assume that there will be equivalent idea of this phrase lasts for this many beats, so it has to be done in or around one breath.
The difference with this method is that because the piece is not being sung and is quicker, my phraseology of breathing between phrases may be a tad misleading. If you did this literally, you’d find yourself quickly snatching a breath between beats which isn’t quite what we’re after. Because we’re not physically doing the whole phrase in one breath, we can start our rising a few notes before the end of a phrase and still continue breathing out for a couple of notes into the new phrase. This creates that relieving of physical tension so that each phrase is still able to stand in its own right but the whole piece of music flows as you would want it to.
Method Three: Sing Along! But Don’t Forget to Breathe…
In pieces of music that have melodic phrases that could be considered lyrical or vocal, you can absolutely sing along! This way, you naturally input the breaths in yourself because you realise at what points you need to take them to ensure that you don’t literally run out of steam partway through a phrase, thus disrupting the flow of the music.
Simple la’s and da’s are great, but the more creative amongst you might like to insert your own lyrics to really get the point across;
If you do this, it can also be a great tool to assist your dynamic control as it can help you to hear the difference between the types of attack or stress you wish to achieve (for example, the word ‘the’ would probably not fall on a particularly strong note, so you’d start to identify the notes that you wish to take priority. Similarly, you could play around with how hard consonants and soft consonants affect the flow of a phrase, such as how the same three notes would sound with ‘the big bird’ vs. ‘The big one’; identifying which work best for you can help you put the right amount of attack and velocity onto the right notes!).
Additional Note: Practise Rests With Breathing
This isn’t a tip that will help you particularly when it comes to your overall performance, but sometimes it can be a struggle to identify note lengths correctly and we can be tempted to play them for well over the duration that is written. This is especially true in rapid passages where we are using quavers or any note value smaller than.
‘La’ or ‘Da’ your way through, and treat rests as physical breaths (snatch them if they are short rests such as quaver rests) and you’ll start to put together a sense of how they should sound.
This is a great tool for practising, but don’t overdo it. You don’t want to practise it so well that you incorporate it into your performance!
Jack Mitchell Smith is a piano teacher based in Congleton, Cheshire. Click here to find out more.
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