Making Friends With the Notes – Together! (Part 2)

17 May 2025 @ 15:00 BST (GMT +01:00)

Experiencing comfort and security with every note makes piano playing a joy – and brings technique to higher levels. It also allows us to be musically spontaneous and trust that naturally expressive artist within!

To achieve mastery, "small muscle" athletes such as gymnasts and dancers learn to separate the process from the result and to trust their bodies from the outset. This also works beautifully at the piano and can be applied by thoroughly integrating the physicality of a performance into our bodies BEFORE we set out to refine or interpret.

In this interactive workshop series, William Westney presents a series of simple exercises to help you implement this powerful, proven approach in the practice room. These workshops serve as a practical enrichment to William’s video lecture series and will show you apply its concepts to achieve remarkable comfort and accuracy in pieces you’re working on.

Passed on to him by his teacher, "Making Friends With the Notes" is described by William as "the single most helpful concept I’ve ever been able to impart to hundreds of students over the years". It’s a simple idea that can be transformative, replacing hesitancy and shakiness with security and enjoyment.

Many musicians will find this concept new or unfamiliar even though it does in fact have a long heritage in European pedagogy. In any event, these workshops provide a rare and wonderful opportunity for participants to get to know it first-hand following a step-by-step approach in a supportive setting.

What you’ll learn

The first workshop introduced a set of concepts for achieving an underlying sense of comfort, freedom and ease at the piano. In this next session, William will delve deeper into these concepts and help participants apply them to specific areas of their playing.

Participants will learn how to "make friends with":

• Counterpoint: finding flow and a deeper level of familiarity conterpoint that confuses the fingers.
• Keeping the hands together: this can be trickier than it seems!
• Very soft dynamics: too often, pianissimo notes are timid, colorless, shaky, or don’t sound at all. Making friends with them in a certain way eliminates these problems.
• Very loud dynamics: are too often harsh. Making friends with these notes restores their human warmth and communicativeness - while eliminating tension.
• Jumps: learning to trust their accuracy while making a good sound.
• Chords: Mastering accuracy without excessive tension or needless "preparation".

There will also be further review and practise of essential techniques based on truly trusting the body, such as dropping the arm and freeing the wrist.

How it works

Participants will be guided through a series of fundamental exercises, all of which are easy and approachable. There will be opportunities to try out each of them in private and then to obtain individual feedback on your success in applying the techniques.

Although no advance preparation or practice is required for this workshop, participants are also invited to bring specific "problem passages" in pieces they are studying - places that have gotten "stuck" in practice, or that persist in feeling shaky or awkward or unreliable. Westney will guide them through “befriending” these passages, showing how to integrate them more fully and to learn to trust them in a more natural way.

Click here to watch an excerpt from one of the Making Friends With the Notes videos to see an illustration of the approach featured in these workshops.

Ticket options & prices

Tickets for this second session cost £50 (or £30 for Online Academy subscribers) and include William’s lecture series (featuring four high-quality videos), live participation and access to recordings after the event. Click here or on the "Buy" button below to sign-up (please sign-in first in order to obtain your discount if you are a subscriber!)

If you missed the first session, you can also purchase combined ticket which includes access to the recording for the first workshop here for £100 (£60 for Online Academy subscribers) here.

Don't miss this opportunity to learn how to apply a game changing approach to befriending problem spots in your pieces!

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Other ticket options

Making Friends With the Notes – Together! (Combined Ticket)

17 May 2025 @ 15:00 BST (GMT +01:00)

£100.00 Buy now