Hanon and Other Excerises are VERY IMPORTANT

[lostinidlewonder]

blah .... blah blah..... blah blah blah... bler blue bla.... ammm... blah blah blah... ber blue berr blue baaa beee bii..

That what it sounds like when I'm reading previous post. Man what are you on lol.

[leahcim]

That what it sounds like when I'm reading previous post.

It sounds like you're still reading out loud.
Hanon didn't help with your listening skills?

Man what are you on lol.

A chair.

"Oh you can't just call it a chair! That is like saying the bible is a book! Heck, it's a diffusion of seating paradiddles interpreted by the backside" 

[bluthnerboy]

Message to String overstrung: Do you know where I can buy Marguerite Long exercises "Le Piano" in English. It seems we can only get hold of the French version!

Also, as my Russian teacher has since lost her Russian version, does anyone know where I can get  a Russian version too!?

PS New to this site and using fora, is there an easier way to directly send a message to another user?

Thanks,

[crazy for ivan moravec]

as mentioned before, yes, hanon can be useful if it is used properly... and so is true with other exercises. but i tend to think that it CAN be useful for the more advanced students, and NOT for beginners.

what makes hanon not so appealing to me as a young teacher is its repetitive-"drill"-exercises. it can mislead the students to practicing mechanically. even the best teachers cannot control how the mind of students work in these boring exercises at home, it simply results into a MINDLESS AND MECHANICAL work. and if they do it incorrectly, bad habits happen... bad habits which will be very hard to undo because it's been done in repetitive patterns. (one example is making the fingers run mindlessly during a performance)

i believe that hanon or any other repetitive exercise is harmful because teachers are not there the whole time to be able to guide a student during practice.

i also think beginners should learn how to move those 4th and 5th fingers with their little pieces and not with something non-musical like hanon. it gives a very bad concept of piano playing and practice. suzuki method has a good line up of simple pieces for beginners, if taught by a suzuki teacher coz they (myself? hehe, not yet..) should know.

sometimes, hanon is useful FOR ME (a sort of advanced piano player), simply because i know how to address a technical problem by using a hanon exercise as the medium to solve that problem... say, i was recently said to have a bad habit of automatically lowering my wrist when doing staccato (just an example, not true), and so, i correct it by practicing the correct position using a hanon exercise with 200% concentration on my part, watching my hand.

ok, you can direct your students to do specific hanon exercises to address a problem as well, BUT, why not use the repertoire passages themselves, right? i wouldn't want to risk  them using the hanon incorrectly... simply because i don't believe in REPETITIVE EXERCISES for those who don't know any better, especially beginners. it misleads them to think that it is a very good way to make fingers stronger. actually, playing anything makes fingers "strong".

and really, to play hanon simply as a repetitive exercise, say, to warm up/make certain fingers or hand strong is really dangerous for students. even myself, a very careful mind during practice, very seldom use hanon... if ever i do, in a very slow tempo, like 90 to a 16th note, listening very carefully that i put the same weight on each note... a practice with great focus/concentration, and control of muscles/weight.. very mathematical.

so generally, i keep it out of my students. no hanon for them AT ALL. the risk is not that worth to take coz there are other ways to achieve technique improvement.

all the best.

crazy

[michael_langlois]

Personally, I find Schmitt's exercises to be better than Hanon's, and useful for pianists at almost all levels.

They really serve different purposes.  Schmitt's seem to be more for finger indepedence (possibly warmup), whereas the first 30 of Hanon are useful as warmups.  The second 30 really are of a different, more specialized importance.

Michael

[wyndwood]

Yes I agree, but what is most useful here, exercises or warm ups?  Personally I find warm ups better as most instrumentalists or singers warm up before practising.  Exercises are great but ther's just so many of them both hanon and Czerny wrote hundreds so which ones do you use?  Surely more time is being used learning new exercises than practising pieces here.  I have found some great warm ups for teaching purposes and personal use with the Essential Piano Warm ups by Philip Cunningham Pub. Spartan Press.  These are organised into days of the week and are in keys associated with relevant music grades.  They promote a regular and short warm up for the developing pianist whilst book 3 is for the more advance pianist developing more finger independance.

Have any of you tried these?

[abell88]

PS New to this site and using fora, is there an easier way to directly send a message to another user?

Click on the username you want to send a message to...you can view their profile, and further down the page you can click to send them a personal message.

[lostinidlewonder]

i believe that hanon or any other repetitive exercise is harmful because teachers are not there the whole time to be able to guide a student during practice.

The same could be said for practicing pieces. The teacher of course cannot always be there to guide the student and that is a very important step for a student to undergo. A teacher should not spoonfeed the student every step of the way, the student must explore, make errors and then readjust their method, this is something we do even when we are experienced at playing! We are always changing the way we physically play as we discover the "best way to play".

what makes hanon not so appealing to me as a young teacher is its repetitive-"drill"-exercises. it can mislead the students to practicing mechanically. even the best teachers cannot control how the mind of students work in these boring exercises at home, it simply results into a MINDLESS AND MECHANICAL work.

You CAN control how the mind thinks about excerises. By giving the student an understanding of balance,control, centre of gravity of the hand. Where exactly does the balance come from, how exactly does it feel when we control a group of notes with one hand posture. Excersises are not there for you to just play notes, that is the big misconception. Most people who play excerises think they are doing it sucessfully if all the notes are played evenly and all are hit, this is WRONG. Excerises are played correctly once you can feel groups of notes played with ONE action of the hand WITH balance, control and centre kept in mind. We should strive for this balance even when we play pieces, so hanon and other excercises set us up for that understanding as Beginners (since they have not learnt many pieces), not so much advanced musicians who have had experience with playing a lot of pieces.

i also think beginners should learn how to move those 4th and 5th fingers with their little pieces and not with something non-musical like hanon. it gives a very bad concept of piano playing and practice. suzuki method has a good line up of simple pieces for beginners, if taught by a suzuki teacher coz they (myself? hehe, not yet..) should know.

Utilisation of 45 in pieces are usually very brief and for the beginner if a piece is only 45 it will OVERWHELM them. To play 45 musically is not important for the beginner, to play it with ease is a lot more important, so using excerises will train that action and develop the muscular control (not strength) with repetition. The balance playing 45 is essential, most beginners will turn the hand to compensate for the discomfort that they get when playign 45, the key is to balance around the 3rd and forbid the hand to turn, we train that with excersies which continually focuses on this.

sometimes, hanon is useful FOR ME (a sort of advanced piano player), simply because i know how to address a technical problem by using a hanon exercise as the medium to solve that problem... say, i was recently said to have a bad habit of automatically lowering my wrist when doing staccato (just an example, not true), and so, i correct it by practicing the correct position using a hanon exercise with 200% concentration on my part, watching my hand.

Hanon or other excerises should not be used as an antidote to our technical problems but rather as a prophylactic tool. Understanding balance and control of excerises should prevent us from disbalancing our hands when we play pieces, at least we should feel the disbalance when it occurs because we know what the ultimate balance feels when we play simple excersises. Pieces are not as simplistic as excersises so to try and directly solve them with excerises is making things difficult for us (however sometimes it might act as a catalyst to solve difficult technical problems we might face, eg thirds scale runs), rather we use the concept of control we get from excersies to transfer that same feeling to our piece playing.

ok, you can direct your students to do specific hanon exercises to address a problem as well, BUT, why not use the repertoire passages themselves, right? i wouldn't want to risk  them using the hanon incorrectly... simply because i don't believe in REPETITIVE EXERCISES for those who don't know any better, especially beginners. it misleads them to think that it is a very good way to make fingers stronger. actually, playing anything makes fingers "strong".

But a beginner cannot learn peices fast enough, it may take them 1 month to learn a piece, and the most simple pieces with both hands. In the meantime they can develop their control and fingers with even simpler exercises as well. The more experience the better, if you only give them pieces they will have nothing to warm up with, they shouldn't warm up with pieces because there is a lot of musical things happening, excerises at least take away the musical side and asks us to focus on comfort and control of our hands. This is an essential realisation for early players of the piano, to know that we must feel at ease and comfortable with everything we play. Excersises are very quick to learn but difficult to completely master, that is what makes them so attractive. Pieces are slow to learn and difficult to master for the beginner.

and really, to play hanon simply as a repetitive exercise, say, to warm up/make certain fingers or hand strong is really dangerous for students. even myself, a very careful mind during practice, very seldom use hanon... if ever i do, in a very slow tempo, like 90 to a 16th note, listening very carefully that i put the same weight on each note... a practice with great focus/concentration, and control of muscles/weight.. very mathematical.

Hanon is not there to only strengthen fingers, that is only one part of its aim. CONTROLLING A GROUP OF NOTES WITH A SINGLE HAND POSTURE, this is the secret to all piano players and what amazes people when they hear the piano played. How on earth do you memorise all those notes! How often have pianists heard that? It is simple, the hand can control heaps of notes with one unmovable position, so the mind can play a great deal of notes with only a single realisation of hand position. The pianist simply controls these MOVEMENT GROUPS of the hand not the individual notes. Of course this concept is very difficult to understand for the beginner because they are tied up thinking that they must press each individual note of the piano, excerises hopefully push them to realise that a group of notes can be played without even thinking about the notes, but simply controlling one posture of the hand.

[pianistimo]

raises my hat to lostinidlewonder.  my daughter is doing a chorus girl dance right now with her sister's heels, very little on, and a wooden spoon for her 'stick.'  don't know why i say this except this thread and her are making me laugh, because the obvious is not to make things more difficult than they are.  for very beginning students, i don't see the problem with hanon.  it's easier to concentrate on one thing at a time (instead of three) - but some students want more - so you give them more.  it kind of varies, don't you think, according to the abilities of the student?

[crazy for ivan moravec]

The same could be said for practicing pieces. The teacher of course cannot always be there to guide the student and that is a very important step for a student to undergo. A teacher should not spoonfeed the student every step of the way, the student must explore, make errors and then readjust their method, this is something we do even when we are experienced at playing! We are always changing the way we physically play as we discover the "best way to play".

with beginners and intermediate level students, i think we should spoonfeed them. a good solid foundation is what we need so that everything else will follow more easily when they become more advanced, that's the time to make them independent. using hanon for beginners, like what i said, is risky.

You CAN control how the mind thinks about excerises. By giving the student an understanding of balance,control, centre of gravity of the hand. Where exactly does the balance come from, how exactly does it feel when we control a group of notes with one hand posture. Excersises are not there for you to just play notes, that is the big misconception. Most people who play excerises think they are doing it sucessfully if all the notes are played evenly and all are hit, this is WRONG. Excerises are played correctly once you can feel groups of notes played with ONE action of the hand WITH balance, control and centre kept in mind. We should strive for this balance even when we play pieces, so hanon and other excercises set us up for that understanding as Beginners (since they have not learnt many pieces), not so much advanced musicians who have had experience with playing a lot of pieces.

that's why it's risky, because most people tend to think they are doing it sucessfully if all the notes are played evenly. what i said about eveness was just one problem that i had to work on, but it wasn't the sole purpose of my using the hanon..

Utilisation of 45 in pieces are usually very brief and for the beginner if a piece is only 45 it will OVERWHELM them. To play 45 musically is not important for the beginner, to play it with ease is a lot more important, so using excerises will train that action and develop the muscular control (not strength) with repetition. The balance playing 45 is essential, most beginners will turn the hand to compensate for the discomfort that they get when playign 45, the key is to balance around the 3rd and forbid the hand to turn, we train that with excersies which continually focuses on this.

hand positions concerning 45's vary in different pieces. exercises can't generalise it. again, i suggest that we should work it out from the repertoire- take out that passage and isolate it and make it the student's exercise. it should come from the music, but it doesn't have to be musical.

Hanon or other excerises should not be used as an antidote to our technical problems but rather as a prophylactic tool. Understanding balance and control of excerises should prevent us from disbalancing our hands when we play pieces, at least we should feel the disbalance when it occurs because we know what the ultimate balance feels when we play simple excersises. Pieces are not as simplistic as excersises so to try and directly solve them with excerises is making things difficult for us (however sometimes it might act as a catalyst to solve difficult technical problems we might face, eg thirds scale runs), rather we use the concept of control we get from excersies to transfer that same feeling to our piece playing.

there is no such rule (if it were a rule, it would have been a bad one) NOT to use any piece or exercise as an antidote to our technical problems. i just happen to be creative with solving my own technical problems, and this i have to be coz as a late beginner, i have to know and continuosly discover stuff that made a pianist's technique better.


now, i wouldn't go as far as using hanon as a preventive measure. maybe you have a point here but i have yet to think about it. but what i believe in is that with piano technique, we really can't avoid encountering NEW and UNIQUE problems for everyone everyday. solving a technical problem is not as simple as opening a treasure chest full of technical exercises that you've mastered and taking your pick to solve a certain problem. like in math, one will have to go through a process in solving. ok, there might be similar processes and with this case, things will be much faster but you cannot attempt to cover all processes.

But a beginner cannot learn peices fast enough, it may take them 1 month to learn a piece, and the most simple pieces with both hands. In the meantime they can develop their control and fingers with even simpler exercises as well. The more experience the better, if you only give them pieces they will have nothing to warm up with, they shouldn't warm up with pieces because there is a lot of musical things happening, excerises at least take away the musical side and asks us to focus on comfort and control of our hands. This is an essential realisation for early players of the piano, to know that we must feel at ease and comfortable with everything we play. Excersises are very quick to learn but difficult to completely master, that is what makes them so attractive. Pieces are slow to learn and difficult to master for the beginner.

like i said, i consider hanon to be a big risk for beginners because it can be practised the wrong way at home. and if that happens, the WRONG technique is learned so quickly and so well (because it's repetitive, right? it becomes a habit)--- and that is a really bad foundation.

i treat beginners as beginners. i take my time on them with learning the proper way because beginners, especially kids, learn things as they are taught it. once you teach them a certain movement, it sticks in their head really well, although once in a while you might have to correct it. it's wonderful to teach children coz they are in their LEARNING PEAK. i suggest "ONE PROBLEM AT A TIME". if they can't learn pieces that fast, well, i just have to keep up with that pace. no hurry.

Hanon is not there to only strengthen fingers, that is only one part of its aim. CONTROLLING A GROUP OF NOTES WITH A SINGLE HAND POSTURE, this is the secret to all piano players and what amazes people when they hear the piano played. How on earth do you memorise all those notes! How often have pianists heard that? It is simple, the hand can control heaps of notes with one unmovable position, so the mind can play a great deal of notes with only a single realisation of hand position. The pianist simply controls these MOVEMENT GROUPS of the hand not the individual notes. Of course this concept is very difficult to understand for the beginner because they are tied up thinking that they must press each individual note of the piano, excerises hopefully push them to realise that a group of notes can be played without even thinking about the notes, but simply controlling one posture of the hand.

i agree totally with this. MOVEMENT GROUPS are exactly how i make my fingers go faster with difficult passages. this is where the phrase "technique is all in the mind" happens to be best described.

however, "CONTROLLING A GROUP OF NOTES WITH A SINGLE HAND POSTURE" is NOT best done in hanon. you see, this phrase that you yourself said is sort of only 10% physical, and 90% mental, which means YOU REALLY HAVE TO BE IN CONTEXT---> one must practice controlling the groups of NOTES FROM THE PIECE/REPERTOIRE itself so that a problem can be solved directly.




- crazy

[lostinidlewonder]

that's why it's risky, because most people tend to think they are doing it sucessfully if all the notes are played evenly. what i said about eveness was just one problem that i had to work on, but it wasn't the sole purpose of my using the hanon.

I still do not understand the argument that Excerises should not be practiced because they could be practied wrongly. Pieces can also be practiced wrongly, so can everything else. At least with excerises the problem is in a simplistic model, pieces are much more complicated. As a teacher you can measure the students progress in different aspects of piano playing, in piece playing, excerises playing, scale, chord, general forms, not just playing pieces. The more you can tests them with the more proficient they become solving techincal problems they face.

Secondly for the beginner it is good to get their fingers moving, so there is again nothing wrong with trying to play excerises, even if they are wrong, at least we get the fingers moving around and get use to the idea of touching keys on a keyboard. I just don't want to repeat what has already been said in previous posts.

[crazy for ivan moravec]

I still do not understand the argument that Excerises should not be practiced because they could be practied wrongly. Pieces can also be practiced wrongly, so can everything else. At least with excerises the problem is in a simplistic model, pieces are much more complicated. As a teacher you can measure the students progress in different aspects of piano playing, in piece playing, excerises playing, scale, chord, general forms, not just playing pieces. The more you can tests them with the more proficient they become solving techincal problems they face.

well, i know the argument sounds weak. but hanon being a repetitive exercise, it is so easy to build bad habits IF a student can't do it the correct way. one mistake means hundreds of measures of repeating that mistake. that's a risk worth considering IMO. this is not the case with pieces.

i know exercises are simplistic, and so, much easier to learn from. true. but pieces are not that complicated to work on as EXERCISES either! what you're trying to say is that pieces are complicated as a finished product already... coz there are a lot of things to consider in making music.
as a teacher, it is my job to make a music piece easy for a learning student. when i want them to work on a certain passage, i simply draw a bracket and group those notes and tell the student to isolate that passage and work on it alone in this way or that way... etc. i would dissect a piece for them, find those TEACHING POINTS and write prescriptions on their assignment notebook. this may sound complicated for a kid but it is very applicable to beginners, just do it ONE PROBLEM AT A TIME, something which they can take. think quality over quantity:)

Secondly for the beginner it is good to get their fingers moving, so there is again nothing wrong with trying to play excerises, even if they are wrong, at least we get the fingers moving around and get use to the idea of touching keys on a keyboard. I just don't want to repeat what has already been said in previous posts.

i don't believe in getting the beginners' fingers moving just for the sake of moving. i don't believe in the "saying" (or so) that goes: getting our fingers "oiled" simply by moving the fingers everyday.

"moving in what way?" is a more important question. moving the fingers the WRONG way is NOT GOOD.
with kids, teaching them a certain correct movement using their little pieces is much more valuable than simply making those fingers move using repetitive exercises (just because they can't play pieces yet).

[crazy for ivan moravec]

just for clarification, i am only against repetitive exercises such as hanon and philips. i do not refer to czerny stuff.

[pianowelsh]

I assign a couple of exercises in the 'core'playing forms 1. Trills, 2 Scales/5finger work, 3. Arpeggios, 4. Doubled notes/chords, 5 octaves (or if hand small octave preparation.  This way every area of technique is developed and the whole playing apparatus is warmed up ready to begin pieces.  You would need to learn a heck of a lot of repertoire to do the same thing! for an early years student this is impossible - they dont learn pieces like the waldstein and pagininni variations in years 1-5 of starting but i have found the ones who practice their exercises develop much faster and learn pieces much more quickly. They also sightread better for their level because they are good at pattern spotting and they have developed conepts of good fingering and appropriate articulation.  So much can be learnt from 2mins perday per exercise.  Im not suggesting dont play pieces until the technique is mastered and I wouldnt have a student sit and work through hanon chapter by chapter (actually i use beringer more - it modulates and they learn another new skill and develop sense of key) but i think that for what they are exercises are very usefull and time efficient ways of learning key principles.  Very often i begin a lesson by hearing some of their exercises and i will work on efficiency of finger use. Cultivating a really smooth legato or consisten staccato and shaping the crest of the pattern and then i will continue the theme in the pieces later in the lesson so they see how the exercises whould be practiced - in relation to the repertoire.