“How do you get students to really play the rests in their pieces?”

 

This same question appeared in the Rhythm Department almost nine years ago in the Winter 1997 issue of Keyboard Companion . Three excellent teachers – Linda Poquette, Steven Rosenfeld, and Mary Jane Clarke – presented insightful ideas, and a lot of ground was covered. I invite you to look (again!) at those essays in your library of back copies of the magazine, or click here to view online (filesize, 3.5 MB). I remember at that time wishing that there was more room in the Department so I could throw my two cents in on this broad subject. I also recall that the late Richard Chronister (then the Editor-In-Chief and the founder of this magazine) was enthusiastic about the question and its wording, as well as the fact that it was the first article explicitly about rests to appear in KBC.

Here indeed are my two cents—perhaps slightly more due to inflation. These are observations I’ve made and approaches I’ve developed over the years to help students become more proficient in their playing and musicianship from the perspective of rests. I also invite readers to share some of your most effective and interesting strategies by sending them to our Rhythm Mailbox (write to the editor or e-mail us at editor@keyboardcompanion.com).

I have included some audio clips of my students practicing and playing some of the elementary examples in this article. To hear these while you are reading the article, please log on to Keyboard Companion’s website at keyboardcompanion.com.

“Play” rests? Is that really the right word for it?

I believe it is. While some rests are produced by a resting motion or mindset, many are not, because they require active motions and attentive listening, as do notes. In some situations rests are even more dramatic than the tones surrounding them.

I believe there is an advantage to referring to anything and everything we do at the piano as “playing.” When I ask a seven-year old in his first year of lessons, “Are your feet ready to play?” he knows that I’m not asking him to throw off his wheelies and perform a circus act at the keyboard! (At least not after the first time I say this, when we might enjoy a moment of laughter together). That question becomes internalized and spurs him to adjust his posture on the bench himself in his home practice so that his feet are flat on the floor and his body well balanced. The same thing happens when I ask an eight-year old whether her ears are ready to play. She knows this means that while she plays her two-page character piece with huge and sudden dynamic changes, she should be listening closely to the sound she is actually producing.

The sooner these separate elements and processes are brought under the rubric of “play”, the sooner that the student experiences that playing is indeed all one thing – listening, technique, and music. “ Play” connotes more of what motivates us to be at the piano in the first place , and it sounds a lot more fun and interesting than “practice”!

More than many other elements of music, rests need to be incorporated into the whole as soon as possible in a student’s lessons. Unfortunately there are many forces at work opposing such integration, including the misnomer of the term “rest” itself. Our standard notational system is a bit to blame. Look at almost any piece of mid-elementary music. A dozen or so rests might be sprinkled throughout the page, and many of them inadvertently condition students to ignore rests! How many of them does one actually notice in performance? There may be a few that separate melodic phrases (those are easy to hear), but there are also probably many in succession in a few measures in the left hand where there is no accompaniment for a while. We don’t really notice the “sound” or the effect of those rests. They are there because there is a notational convention that every measure in each hand’s part must contain x number of beats. Therefore, the unwitting message sent to early level players by these inessential rests is that all rests can be ignored! Wouldn’t the lack of accompaniment be notated more easily and accurately by simply having nothing in those LH measures, as is frequently done in many early-elementary pieces? Then the only rests appearing on the page would be essential rests - the ones we hear, and thus play.

Rests are also perceived as second class citizens sometimes because of how and when they’re introduced in the critical first years of study. In some elementary music, the only rests that occur are at the end of the piece, after the last note. While an advanced player might be able to execute that gesture and appreciate its meaning at the end of a long sonata movement, it is unlikely that that makes much of an impact on a youngster in the first year of music study. Also, some method series wait for many months before even introducing rests, presumably so that continuity of music can be experienced first with only sound, not silence. Some students might require such a cautious approach, but I have seen firsthand that most are able to competently handle both the technical and musical aspects of rests right from the beginning. The sooner that students experience that rests are the siblings of notes, and that they both function toward expressing larger structures, the better.

My strategies for teaching rests have evolved over the years to include the following:

• I introduce and treat rests and notes in virtually the same way.
• I choose materials for elementary students that introduce and reinforce rests in dramatic ways so that their musical importance can be experienced right away.
• After inessential rests are introduced in the method series, I have the student first find the essent ial rests (the rests we “hear”) in each new piece to help them differentiate those from the ones that are merely filling out empty measures.
• I evoke students to be physically active in playing audible rests, as well as listening closely for the effect. They count rests out loud for a while in a variety of ways which reinforce that physicality.
• I help students of all levels understand the musical meaning of rests in each situation. Just because a rest represents an absence of sound does not mean it represents musical silence. I also focus students on how rests bolster or hinder the flow, and how they help communicate the color and structure of the music.

Here are some specifics on how I implement these strategies. The groundwork for teaching students about rests, like many other things, occurs during the elementary years of study, but I have also included a few examples from the intermediate and advanced levels.

The different method series I currently use all introduce rests in their first book. When this happens, I have students focus on three things:

• the feeling of letting the key up with the entire hand, wrist, and arm – feeling the rhythm of the rest
• quietly counting or doing something verbal or physical at that moment, which reinforces the feeling part
• listening for the effect of the rest

By the time a student plays the following piece from the Hal Leonard Student Piano Library, three other pieces with quarter rests could have already been played:

Notice how the rests in this piece (as in the first three in the book) are just written-in breaths between phrases , something students can easily hear and understand. I have them either whisper “rest” or breathe in through the nose at each rest; in other pieces I might also have them grunt, click, or nod the head slightly. This provides a variety of ways to respond to rests depending upon the musical context and the personality of the music (and of the student!).

One of my five-year old beginners, Rachel, practicing this piece. If you listen closely, you can hear her breathing on the rests.

In the following week, counting out loud on long notes was eliminated, the piece was sped up, it became more flowing and less vertical-sounding, but the breathing on the rests remained. Rachel could then more easily listen to the silly stuff that happens in the teacher accompaniment when we play together!

Near the end of the first book in this same series is an attractive piece that has only one rest in it, but it’s a doozy:

This rest is a punctuation mark (perhaps an exclamation point) that interrupts the flow of the previous phrase. This is unquestionably a musical situation where the absence of sound is not silence (musically speaking) but is quite “loud” in its effect! To help get that point across, after students learn this piece by whispering “rest” or breathing at the rest, we go further. Since this is a pirate piece (and look at the lyrics right after the rest), I have some students yell out “HO!!” when they play that rest. This reinforces the physicality of releasing the previous key, as well as the rest’s “loudness” when the student performs the piece later with no verbal sounds. It is also a lot of fun!

Please listen to six-year old Greyson play this piece with the CD accompaniment arranged and realized by Phillip Keveren. You won’t have to strain to hear his “HO!!” but if you listen closely at the end, you can hear that he accidentally reverted to whispering the rests at the end of the piece. That’s the kind of “mistake” I can easily live with.

One of my favorite pieces for reinforcing rests at this level is from Piano Adventures , Lesson 1, the second book in the series:

These rests are catch-breaths in the middle of a phrase. The music itself suggests that, but if there is any doubt, the lyrics bear it out – these are indeed two measure phrases. Young students have experienced catch-breaths in their life: when they’re – super excited – trying to – tell you about - something that just happened - at the playground!!

This is a musical situation in which I do agree that initially playing and hearing only sound helps the student perceive the continuity within each phrase. To accomplish that, I have students first ignore the rests, and instead substitute a note in their place – the note following each rest. Then they play each two-measure phrase by itself a few times, with attention given to the legato so that students feel the LH passing the melody to the RH at the bar line. Then they start to combine phrases. Finally, when we put the rests back in, the student can hear and feel for themselves the excitement of each rest helping to propel the music forward. In adult lingo, they are feeling the musical line going through the rests!

I also enhance the physicality of the catch-breaths by helping students pianistically breathe—a pronounced upward movement with both wrists, which then blends seamlessly into the smooth drop in the RH. Notice that the musical effect of these rests, like that in the pirate piece above, is also somewhat loud. I sometimes even write an accent sign above the rests for students who are hesitant to feel them physically as complete gestures.

The piece’s last phrase presents an interpretive bonus. It is four measures long, not two, and so I help students experience that the rest in the longer phrase must be played even bigger/stronger/“louder” than the rests in the shorter phrases. Rests do not function in a vacuum – they are related to the surrounding musical elements.

The score suggests to be “careful” about these rests. I explain to my students that just means to be sure to notice them and do them. However, I don’t want students to be careful about playing them. These rests represent expressive gestures that most children enjoy doing with abandon, especially when they can hear and feel their purpose in the music.

Students who learned “Sailing in the Sun” (mentioned above) in their first year of study may already know how to handle the rests in this Mazurka by Tchaikovsky. The recurring rhythmic gesture in the RH is so standardized in its notation (with a sixteenth rest, rather than the first note being a dotted eighth note) that it is commonly referred to as “the mazurka gesture” by many players and teachers: the light upward movement on the first note, which is the beginning of the breath that leads to the next notes being played in one downward impulse. The “dance” of the playing mechanism surrounding and during the rest automatically affects nuances of rhythm and shaping. I still it find fascinating that a gesture as artistic and sophisticated as this can be taught in miniature to elementary level students if appropriate repertoire is chosen.

By the time students are playing early-advanced music, they usually know that the interpretation of rests, like all other elements and gestures, is context-driven and therefore requires thoughtful examination. For instance, it is common in advanced literature for some rests to represent actual silence, whereas others are pedaled and thus do not. A typical example is found in the opening measures of Debussy’s “Les collines d’Anacapri” from Book 1 of his Preludes .

Throughout his piano works, Debussy indicated pedaling mainly through implication: tied chords or bass notes held over several measures that would be physically impossible to sustain with the hands; French slurs (a misnomer – these are not slurs at all but ties that extend from one note into empty space, often across a barline); commas to indicate release of pedal, etc. Notice in m. 3, the sixteenth rests represent silence due to the comma at the previous bar line. However the quarter rest in m. 4 does not, since the comma at the end of that measure implies that some sound from those two measures should be pedaled until the end of the measure.

A situation like this begs a question from perceptive students: if the final chord in m. 4 is sustained by the pedal, why is it not written as a dotted quarter note (or an eighth note tied to a quarter)? The answer to that question requires another piece of information about the notation of piano music that is so important that it deserves frequent re-visiting: Generally speaking, the longer the note duration, the louder the composer intended it to be played. Although this is not always accurate, it is often true, especially in cantabile and sostenuto passages. This is probably because most of the time the piano’s sound, like that of all non-legato instruments such as guitar and harp, begins to diminish once it has been initiated; therefore longer tones need more starting sound to persist. (For a brilliant discussion on this subject as well as countless others, please consult Joan Last’s Interpre tation in Piano Study, p. 4. Hammond Textbooks, © 1987 William Elkin Music Services Hammond Textbooks . This masterpiece by one of Britain’s leading pedagogues should be required reading for every piano pedagogy or performance student. It was out of print for many years but happily has been re-published. Recently I was able to obtain some copies from MusicRoom.com).

For instance, classical period slur endings that are notated with an eighth note-eighth rest (rather than simply a quarter note) communicate that the last note should be played with an especially light touch (as well as being slightly shortened in a rounded-off way), even more lightly than what we would do otherwise. This example from Debussy follows the same convention. The rolled eighth-note chord needs to be “tossed” off with a feathery touch. If it had been notated as a longer note value, the implication would be to play it slightly louder, and even perhaps with a little more time preceding it. Rests are therefore sometimes dynamic indications as well as rhythmic ones.

This flipside of this occurs when the A section returns later in the piece:

Since the chord is louder and all will be sustained for several more measures (indicated by the French slurs), this chord similar to the one in m. 4 is now notated as a long note. Interestingly, these same two sixteenth rests do not indicate silence as they did previously, but in this passage merely provide the timing of the entrance of the soprano voice.

This article just scratches the surface on the topic of rests, but I hope that it has helped further the viewpoint that students can indeed learn to play rests accurately and meaningfully right from their first few lessons and thereafter.

If so, I rest my case!