Making Friends With the Notes – Together!

23 Feb 2025 @ 15:00 GMT

It’s so enjoyable to have an underlying feeling of physical comfort and security at the piano. Not only does this enable us to play ANY piece of music freely, expressively and spontaneously, but it can also lead to technical breakthroughs.

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, William describes “Making Friends With the Notes” 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 comfort, 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

• A clear game plan for taking things apart in practising and to discover the satisfaction and freedom of “trusting the body”
• How to free up the head and shoulders and to release tension using a technique called “wallowing”
• Creative ways to solve specific problems in pieces you’re playing, how to invite natural errors and deal with them intelligently
• What “learned helplessness” means and how it can be useful for maximising the sense of freedom and trust
• How to maintain a healthy “technical bank account”

How it works

William will demonstrate concepts based on this practice strategy using Debussy’s Clair de Lune as an example. A series of fundamental exercises will then be offered, all of which are easy and approachable. The reasoning behind them will be made clear and participants will be given a few minutes to privately try each one, followed by ample opportunity to report back on their experience and ask questions.

Participants are also invited to bring to the session 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. William will guide them through “making friends” with these notes, showing how to integrate them more fully and to learn to trust them in a more natural way.

This excerpt from one of the Making Friends With the Notes videos provides an illustration of the approach:

Ticket options & prices

Tickets for each 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!)

Don't miss this opportunity to discover a fun, liberating and rewarding approach to mastering any classical piece!

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