Piano Technique: Chunking and Continuity

Lesson Goal: To appreciate the profound significance of playing in meaningful, continuous chunks, not just strings of meaningless dots…

Did You Know?

That one of the biggest mistakes a student can make is to read, think, listen, and play one-note-at-a-time…

One can never overstate the importance of thinking and playing in meaningful musical chunks… never as isolated, unrelated notes.

Chunking & Continuity YouTube

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Chunking & Continuity Video Highlights

Unfortunately, most students are taught to read and play notation, not music: one-note-at-a-time. But if you want to play like an artist you have to think about and play in meaningful musical chunks, not as a sequence of disconnected isolated notes.

We use chunking all the time when we speak in everyday conversation. We don’t do this: “I” space think ponder “l-o-v-e” space “t-o” space “p-l-a-y” stop space “m-u-s-i-c” period. We want to play music just like speaking a complete flowing sentence: “I love to play music!”

Let’s define two concepts:

• Chunking: the process of thinking about notes in meaningful musical groups.
• Continuity: the integrated physical execution of those meaningful musical groups.

Fluent performers don’t have some superhuman capacity to think about, remember, and perform enormous strings of unrelated data. Fluent performers always play in meaningful chunks that are easy to internalize and perform.

Chunking is accomplished by zooming out and seeing the music at a higher level where we can see the larger musical patterns. And the ability to read and hear and understand these meaningful patterns is enable by studying the fundamental building blocks of music: scales, chords, chord progressions, meter, Solfege, etc. (music theory). By the way, learning how to chunk music is no harder than learning to read and say these words.

There are at least three huge benefits of learning to play in musically meaningful chunks:

1. Memorization becomes easy. In fact, you’re no longer merely memorizing at all, but understanding.
2. You will express yourself using unified physical gestures and complete musical ideas, just as you can read and speak these words.
3. You won’t have to try to play like an artist. You’ll play like an artist without even trying.

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