One Skill To Rule Them All
On April 13th of 1823, Carl Czerny arranged a meeting between his student, Franz Liszt, and his own teacher, Ludwig Van Beethoven. Despite Beethoven’s aversion to child prodigies, Czerny had insisted that he meet the eleven year old boy. “In God’s name, then, bring me the little rascal!” Beethoven responded with his characteristic temper.
Liszt began by playing a piece by Ferdinand Ries, a close friend of Beethoven. After that, Beethoven asked Liszt to play a Bach fugue, and Liszt played the C minor fugue from the Well-Tempered Clavier. After Liszt finished playing the fugue, Beethoven said, “And could you transpose the fugue to another key?” which the boy was able to do. Liszt recounts what happened next. Beethoven stood up with a smile, put his hand on Liszt’s head and said, “A Devil of a fellow!”
Feeling emboldened, Liszt played the first movement of Beethoven’s C Major Piano Concerto. Franz Liszt was profoundly impacted by that fateful meeting, and in his own words later in life, he shared that:
"This event in my life has remained my greatest pride, the palladium of my whole career as an artist.”
What strikes me about this story is the way Beethoven evaluated the musicianship of Franz Liszt by asking him to transpose the C minor Fugue on the spot. What did that test reveal about Liszt’s musicianship that a display of technical virtuosity could not? My goal today is to focus on this often overlooked topic of transposing, and on how we can use it to radically improve our own musicianship.
Definitions
Let’s start with defining transposition. To transpose simply means to play a piece of music in a different key. We know that there are 12 major and 12 minor keys in Western harmony (with 6 additional enharmonic keys if you want to be technical), and that any piece can theoretically be played in any key. Composers are very deliberate about the keys they choose for a piece based on the range of the instrument, the tone color, and the emotional associations that different keys have.
Going back to Liszt… What transposing a fugue on the spot revealed was that Liszt had a deep understanding of the music beyond the mere technical execution of it. In order to transpose, we cannot rely on the muscle memory of a piece alone. The spatial relationships are different for each key. When we transpose, we must rely on our aural and mental understanding of the piece.
A Music Superpower
That’s all well and good, you’re thinking, but is this skill important or necessary for the average musician to practice? I shared the same doubts when I was at the beginning of my own journey. It was hard enough learning pieces in one key, so why try to learn it in two or even twelve?! The teacher John Mortensen in the opening chapter of his book “The Art of Historic Improvisation” says this about transposing:
“I am painfully aware how much students hate to transpose. They think transposing is difficult. In fact it is not difficult, but unfamiliar. Is it difficult to count to 100 in Japanese? Millions of small children can do it, so obviously it isn’t difficult. But I can’t because it is unfamiliar to me. Initially, transposing will feel difficult because it will be unfamiliar. If you keep at it, you find that you will gain marvelous familiarity with all twenty-four keys. Once you gain the familiarity of transposition, it feels like a superpower.”
I always sensed instinctively from hearing musicians improvise in any key that this was a path of mastery I wanted to pursue. There was a sense of “freedom” in that ability, and I was determined to get to the bottom of it. The goal was to go beyond “playing a song” to speaking the musical language, and I recognized that transposing music was the means of getting there. When I practiced the skill, I recognized the need to slow down and deconstruct the music with a different motivation. It was not about being able to play the music; it was about understanding the music.
To use the analogy of looking at a map, understanding a piece would be like looking beyond the notes to see harmonic functions or “directions” of where it goes. We see the tonic or “I chord” and recognize that as home. We see the subdominant or “IV chord” and recognize that as a different point on the map. We study the roads and tunnels that get us from point A to point B, in the form of diminished chords, secondary dominants, and modulations. Not only do we recognize this mentally, but we also grasp it aurally since we’re talking about music.
Speaking the Musical Language
When we understand the harmonic functions of a piece of music, and connect those to what we hear, we are “speaking” the language of music. Otherwise it would be like imitating the sounds of a foreign language without knowing the meanings of those words. It could be convincing, but you can’t fool yourself into thinking that is the same experience as understanding the word-for-word meaning of what you’re saying.
When I started to apply the mindset of “understanding” to all the pieces I had learned, it was eye opening… or ear-opening? It felt like I had been asleep at the wheel for most of my music learning up until that point. Of course, I had my own conceptions and associations with the music, but no reliable approach that could transfer my knowledge from one piece to the next. Now I could recognize and hear the patterns that helped me learn and memorize pieces exponentially faster.
Transposing different pieces into the new keys also helped me grasp what it is that I loved about those pieces. …Ah! That lingering dominant E7 with the 9 is what creates that deep longing in MacDowel’’s Wild Rose. Those chromatic diminished chords are how Beethoven creates drama in the Für Elise. Slowly but surely, music started to reveal itself to me. I was starting to follow Beethoven’s advice when he said,
“Don't only practice your art, but force your way into its secrets; art deserves that…”
How to Practice Transposing
So how do we get started with this skill, practically speaking? It’s true that we need to get some groundwork in place to start transposing, but it’s not as difficult as you may think. The sooner we can start working on this essential skill, the better! Below are my recommended steps for how you can start to work towards the skill that I believe is the holy-grail of music practice - the ability to play comfortably in all the keys.
Melodic Transposition
A great starting place to work on transposition is to start with playing simple melodies. Don’t try to transpose the melody of “Stella By Starlight” before you can transpose “Ode to Joy.” We need to start small.
The groundwork for doing this confidently is to learn all of the major and minor scales on the piano. This may seem like a lot of work, but within about two to three months of practice, this is certainly attainable. I’m a big fan of “blocking” scales, where you play a cluster of notes based on the fingering pattern for the scale. This allows you to “see” the scale as a group of related notes, familiarizing yourself with the visual layout of that key. You’ll start to see patterns, and again, everything about music is about noticing patterns.
While familiarizing yourself with the notes of a key, you want to look at the notes as “numbers” instead of unique notes.
For the key of C Major with the notes C D E F G A B C, you want to think of this as:
C (1) - D (2) - E (3) - F (4) - G (5) - A (6) - B (7) - C (8)
Then if we are in Eb, we transfer the numbers to those notes:
Eb (1) - F (2) - G (3) - Ab (4) - Bb (5) - C (6) D (7) Eb (8)
The advantage of looking at the notes as numbers is that you will reinforce the scale degrees, the intervals, and the harmonic functions - three essential things to internalize.
As you play the melody of a short tune such as Ode to Joy, think of the scale degrees to yourself “3-3-4-5-5-4-3-2-1-1-2-3-3-2-2.”
Try this in a new key. Perhaps first in G major, and then in C major.
Go phrase by phrase, so you don’t get overwhelmed.
When you can comfortably do this with one hand, you can add the left hand bass note to hear those intervals in their harmonic context.
This may seem very “left brain” and analytical at first, but it’s important to remember that this analytical thinking will become second nature after enough repetition. We shouldn’t be afraid of a bit of analysis. We are moving from “conscious incompetence” to “conscious competence”, with the goal of getting to “unconscious competence.”
You can also use the interval approach and focus on the interval distance from one note to the next. This is helpful for songs that modulate or have surprising interval jumps. If you mess up, that’s OK, as long as you go back and try to identify the cause of the error. Which interval was I unable to hear? Oh… it was a minor 6th. Ok, let me focus on playing just that interval in a few different keys. The question is, can your ear connect the sound with the label?
Harmonic Transposition
Similar to the groundwork we talked about with melodic transposition, we also need to have an understanding of the major and minor scales to work on harmonic transposition. The next step is to play the diatonic triads, or the three note chords that belong in that key. This takes some time, but it is time well-spent!
Start with two keys and explore the pattern of:
Major I - Minor ii - Minor iii - Major IV - Major V - Minor vi - Diminished vii for the major keys.
Take in the shapes of the chords and notice how they overlap with the notes of the scale.
You will also want to explore playing these chords in inversions up and down the scale.
This can become an enjoyable exercise to work on until you have it mastered. View each key as a fun little puzzle to solve!
When you are ready, you can play some basic chord progressions. Let’s start with a simple I - IV(2nd inversion) progression. Can you play this in every key? Add a little rhythm to it to make it a chord vamp. I can’t tell you how many satisfying hours I’ve spent improvising on a simple I - IV chord progression. Doing it in a different key each day can keep your practice inspired. It refreshes the ear and invites you to move beyond habitual fingering patterns.
Some other fun chord vamps you can try include a minor i - IV. Or a I - IV - iv - I. Or try I - I7 - IV - iv - I, which has a lovely sense of voice leading. These short progressions will become addicting and deeply satisfying to improvise over. And remember… if it’s fun, it gets done. As you get more comfortable with this, you can move on to playing 7th chords in each key. Pace yourself. It takes some time, but this is the real work. You will be amazed with your progress a few months down the road, and the undeniable satisfaction of recognizing the notes on the page and understanding their function will motivate you to continue!
Final Notes
It’s important to mention that you don’t need to play everything in 12 keys. The goal here is to check your aural and conceptual understanding of a piece, and you can accomplish this by transposing a piece to 1 or 2 new keys. You can switch it up from week to week. There are no fixed rules. What matters is that you are doing the deep work and making new connections.
Get outside your comfort zone a bit, and find that magic “sweet spot” where it’s not too easy or too hard. Start by just mastering C, F and G. Then venture into the sharp and flat keys. Over time, you may feel motivated with certain songs to try it in all 12 keys. For me, playing a piece in a new key always satiates my need for variety. It can make playing a song you’ve had in your fingers for years a brand new experience each time.
Trust that this process gets easier over time, and that this work is well worth it. Remove all fear of transposing, and remember that it’s “not difficult, but unfamiliar.” With every line of music you transpose, you will deepen your musical discoveries, and you will deeply internalize it so that you can compose and improvise your own music. I really believe that transposing is the holy grail we should aim for in our musical growth.
One of my favorite modern jazz sax players Chad LB has this to say about the value of transposing:
“The elements of musicianship that we often consider "talent" are really just benefits that come from certain practice techniques. [...] There's no magic answer to getting good at improvising, but there are things that you can practice that work magic. The number one thing I find people neglect is learning phrases through different keys. The important thing to understand is that we don't memorize phrases through the keys so we can play Fly Me to the Moon in F# on a gig or a jam session, we do it because the process improves our musicianship massively.”
Whatever style of music you are interested in, now you know the key to leveling up as a musician is to play music in all the keys!
Sources:
https://www.popularbeethoven.com/beethoven-meets-franz-liszt/
https://pianolit.com/blog/a-meeting-of-two-giants
John Mortensen “The Art of Historic Improvisation”