What is the best principle for working on Chopin's etudes?

[chopinard]

We all know that Chopin's etudes are very difficult.
But there are always some pianists who can play all the Etudes.....
The universal concept of working exists?
Or the universal attitude of working on Etudes?

Thanks
 

[debussy symbolism]

Greetings.

I haven't yet played them, but one so far(not done of course). I can safely say, flexible wrist, arm motion and relaxation. Hope this helps.

[lostinidlewonder]

The way to seriously study them is to memorise one every day, so that in 3 weeks you have covered them all. Perhaps you cannot play them at peformance level but you can get your hands and mind around them. If you find that this task is impossible then you are not ready to seriously study the entire collection. Some people are at a level not enough to be able to study all of the etudes in 3 weeks which is fine, you can then choose one or two to study over a month.

The attitude one should have is to master the physical aspect of producing the notes so that what is naturally uncomfortable becomes comfortable. Afterall Etudes are studies that try to make our hands work out difficult procedure so that we can add this to our own peronsal list of general playing. For example someone who masters Op10 no1 would find that large arpeggio movements in the Rh are easy procedure where someone who hasn't studied this might find it incredibly difficult and something to practice/work out.

[henrah]

The way to seriously study them is to memorise one every day, so that in 2 weeks you have covered them all. Perhaps you cannot play them at peformance level but you can get your hands and mind around them.

That sounds like an interesting endeavour. I'm pretty sure that only after a day I wouldn't be able to play any of them at performance level, or even at the right tempo. But, I think I might be able to play through them slowly through memorisation; and I think that will be the best way for me, because once I can play it without the music I can play it anywhere where there's a piano, and thus eventually it will be at the right tempo.

Cheers lostinidlewonder, you're a great help!!!
Henrah

[daniel patschan]

Well i think there is a general concept for 95% of us (including myself): 1) Practice regulary, 2) Practice correctly (correct movement patterns - shown by a teacher), 3) choose your repertoire accordingly to your overall pianistic skills and increase the level of difficulty slowly but continously over time. Than, after 3-4-5 years (sometimes faster, sometimes never) you might be able to study one of the more managable etudes (Op. 25, No. 3). If you succeded, try another one. At the end, try for example Opus 10 No. 2 or Opus 25 No. 11. There is no garantee to succeed - but there is also no 'secret'. These pieces are 24 (27) masterworks that require a lot of time and effort to be mastered. In so far there isn't any overall concept. It's just hard work !

[zheer]

The way to seriously study them is to memorise one every day, so that in 2 weeks you have covered them all.

  Well obviously your are not good at basic maths.

[gruffalo]

working through the Chopin Etudes is like unlocking your technique, to eventually be able to play difficult things with ease and without tension. the Chopin etudes are pieces of repetitive technical strains, so there are whole etudes just to one or two specific areas, e.g. the double octave etude, or the rotary arppeggio etudes etc.

[pianowelsh]

There is ONE and its unbearably hard to swallow!
PATIENCE!

[pianistimo]

good way to get tendonitis.  i take it easy (but don't follow my example) and play one per year.  am i lacking in passion?? i still imagine being at the start of a sprint.  the gun goes off.  you go for the gold.  but you stumble over one dratted note and the whole thing just spirals out of control.  you're doing double rolls on the pavement.  either you play them well, or you just *. 

what's strange is that i can play other things really fast (but that fit under my fingers better).  maybe i need a smaller piano.  there's some lady that claims she couldn't play them either until she got a smaller keyboard and now she can play them fine.

[pianowelsh]

Dont be afraid of them! and also dont be afraid to go back to really slow practice of them and even hands separate practice.  You should always pay attention to the bass too. People often underestimate the LH in the etudes because it looks easier - but actually it is the cause of most mistakes in performances!

[chopinard]

Thanks a lot.
I find that all of your ideas are very interesting and helpful to me.
They are about  memory, tempo, attitude ,and even objectif to practice Chopin's etudes.
You give me really good ideas to think about it!!!

[emmdoubleew]

The way to seriously study them is to memorise one every day, so that in 2 weeks you have covered them all.

First of all two weeks will be barely enough to go through op. 10, doing them one a day.

Second, it's absolutely ridiculous to work on an etude and expect to be able to play it after a single day.

Etudes are meant to be played repeatedly over the course of weeks so that your fingers really actually learn something from them. The point isn't to memorize the notes - which is porbably the best you could do in a day- but to be able to play them efficiently and fast. That's how you can truly measure asess your mastery. And we all know, thanks to members like Bernhard and others, that there is only a certain amount you can actually do in a day, and the rest is waste. Working on an etude all day in a single day will give you much worst result than working on it 20 minutes a day for 7 days.

How you can claim that the way to study them "seriously" is to rush through them one a day is a little beyond my undersatnding. So please, if you could explain a little more in depth. For me, that's the antithesis of seriousness and fervor.

[lostinidlewonder]

First of all two weeks will be barely enough to go through op. 10, doing them one a day.

Second, it's absolutely ridiculous to work on an etude and expect to be able to play it after a single day.

Etudes are meant to be played repeatedly over the course of weeks so that your fingers really actually learn something from them. The point isn't to memorize the notes - which is porbably the best you could do in a day- but to be able to play them efficiently and fast. That's how you can truly measure asess your mastery. And we all know, thanks to members like Bernhard and others, that there is only a certain amount you can actually do in a day, and the rest is waste. Working on an etude all day in a single day will give you much worst result than working on it 20 minutes a day for 7 days.

How you can claim that the way to study them "seriously" is to rush through them one a day is a little beyond my undersatnding. So please, if you could explain a little more in depth. For me, that's the antithesis of seriousness and fervor.

Excuse the typo I meant to hit 3 weeks instead of 2, please don't burn me at the stake

It is most definatly possible to do initial study of these etdues in this time frame, a lot of advanced students have gone down this tough road. Mind you it usually requires a good 9 hours or so of solid practice every day (9 hours seems to be to me the max time I could manage and let me play through one etude per day, 3 blocks of 3 hour study sessions). The Chopin etudes are for piano like the Paganini Etudes for Violin, a must for all serious students. After three weeks you shouldn't be mastered at playing these etudes, but you should at least have your fingers around them, also at least one or two of the set of 24 should be at standard concert playing level.

This of course is a way to study these etudes seriously. If you want to take your time and study one a week or one a month, that isn't really serious study, but it is putting in a good effort. Total immersion and commitment in my mind is serious study. My hands still tremble when I remember a concert pianist who instructed me told me to play all of the 24 in 3 weeks because he had done so in only 2 with his own teacher who was a student of Rachmaninov. It is an impossible task in the mind at first, but you have to try it, it really takes you on a wild ride and reveals an extremely fast rate of learning that is much to be desired. To experience this type of transcendentale learning with possibly the best piano etudes is really a rewarding experience.

One has to question what is enough and when to move on, when studying how to play a piece. Do we only move on to the next part once we have totally mastered the physical procedure? No, we must learn to move on to the next part once we have mentally understood the way to memorise what to do. Again how we memorise is all different but there is always that instance in all of us when we know where the fingers must go because we have some logical statement, or observation of our hand/finger movement which excites a memory of what to do. This is when we must move on. The mastery of the physical procedure works itself out with time, but this mental procedure of memorisation is a constant flow, memorisation connections in the brain can continually be made, there is no limit to the mind. The brian stores all memory guides to help our hands to tell them where to go, eventually the brain pushes those memory guides into the subconsiousness and the hands learn to memorise the notes through muscular memorisation, something which is then guided and memorised through ear control.

This delicate procedure of how music flows through the body to me is really facinating and you can really feel it when you study the Chopin etudes in rapid time.

[m1469]

hmmmmm... lostinidlewonder, that just sounds absolutely delicious.


You mentioned practising 9 hours a day with this, in three 3-hour blocks.  May I ask, did you happen to use a practice method similar to how Bernhard describes ? 

Did you do some listening while you learned ? (if so, how did you balance that out with other work ?)

Does this time include score analysis and so on ?

Otherwise, would you mind elaborating a little ?


Thanks,
m1469

[lostinidlewonder]

Did you do some listening while you learned ? (if so, how did you balance that out with other work ?)

Does this time include score analysis and so on ?

Otherwise, would you mind elaborating a little ?

Thanks,
m1469

I had listened for years to the Chopin etudes before I first studied them. So the sound was inprinted in my memory. Because the aim was to be able to play through (not at peformance level) all of the etudes in a short space of time, one could not get overly obsessed with score analysis. The extent of my markings on the sheet would cover particular fingering, memory guides (written statements or highlighted notes which are key to memorising a passage) and breaking up the piece into its musical sections with big brackets and colors.

I had to learn fast so this meant throwing sightreading skills initially onto the stage. The first 3 hours was purely playing the score over and over again, writing in my fingering, defining and highlighting tricky parts and determining why they are tough, make a judgement as to how to solve it.

I paced myself by ordering the level of difficulty in the score. There would often be large sections of a score that I could absorb more readily than others, the ones which where fast to absorb where learnt first. Through the first 3 hours of sightreading I would determine which parts where easy by a big solid blue pencil line above the top staff, harder parts where in orange and red, orange for tricky, red for tough.

The next session of 3 hours was spent memorising first the blue,orange and then red lines of difficulty (easiest to hardest) with respect to the musical sections of the score. Usually I would go from bar 1 to end but often when the same procedure is repeated later on in a piece but with small differences it is more efficient to practice these adjacent to one another and observe the small change. This to me is the most strenuous part of the musical study because you have to mentally process a great deal of information, you have hundreds of memory guides per piece and each of these guides have to be consciously acknowledge then forgotten about once we discover the muscular memorisation of the passage. But this constant mental acknowledgement while we play to control where our fingers have to move to drains a lot of energy. It is very uncomfortable to play like this but we must strive to force the transistion of mental acknowledgement of notes to muscluar memory of notes. Not saying I will wait a few weeks until I get it right, force the issue, do it now, question why can't you do it right, develop a practice method to solve this (different ways to repeat the trouble passage), question each and every fingering choice and movement of your body to parts which are giving you trouble.

The last 3 hours goes over the entire score and continues the practice on trouble sections. I will strive to play the entire score slowly without note errors. I will keep the sheet music up but slowly start to cover the score with post it notes. Once the entire score is covered I will keep a tally on the post it note the number of times I had to flip up to remind myself of what notes to play. After playing through the piece about 100 times in the practice session I have a good indication of where I have to further develop. I put the sheet music to the side leaving the post it notes on sections which still trouble me, removing them on all parts which are controlled.

Over the day I might play some more of the piece but not concentrated study, just simply playing through it, trying to forget about thinking what to do and memorise it through the hands, try to listen to what I am doing so that I can forget about my hands. But this requires hours and hours of playing time practice, this type of practice is enjoyable for me, the hard road is getting the notes initially into our heads and hands.

As you get into the first week you have 7 pieces already memorised, it is essential that you play through each one every single day. This means that the work load gets tougher and tougher as you learn more etudes. By week 2 you must play through 14 etudes that day, at the end of the 3rd week you should be almost able to play the majority of them without the sheetmusic.

Continually cycling through the etudes can get very demoralising, especially when you find out you forget parts or play wrong notes. This is where you must to detach your emotion from it otherwise you get very discouraged. I could say at the end of the 3 weeks I had forgotten probably what amounted to 2 entire etudes of forgotten/misplaced memorisation. But these holes can be patched up, the general structure is there and if you play with the sheet music it should remedy it. But we want to play without the sheets that is the plan because from there you really get better. I actually injured my hands purely out of frustration bashing the keys as I pushed myself away from the keyboard in disgust over what I had forgotten. So it is a real emotional ride too because usually I'm rather calm!

[m1469]

Well, thank you very much for your most helpful response, lostinidlewonder.  I guess the unspoken and obvious aspect about your learning principle, is that you had actually been preparing for this for years leading up to it.  You had probably already dealt with a lot of the musical shapes and some form of many of the technical aspects within other pieces and exercises before you ever tried playing the Etudes.  In that sense, you had begun working on them from your very first note.

Sometimes I cannot tell whether I simply stating the obvious, or if what I am trying to say is unclear and possibly even offensive.  This is one of those times. 

My main point is, for somebody who has never read an ounce of music before in their life, there is no way it would take them only 3 weeks to learn these etudes.  There is naturally some leading up to it, by playing other pieces, that must come into play.

So, while I do like the idea of learning them in 3 weeks, I am not there yet.  Basically, I need to learn more music before I tackle that particular endeavor.  But, it is possible to program my progress in such a way, that I consciously prepare myself for learning them.  And, in a sense, no matter what I might do, I am already working on them.

hmmmm...  I will have to wait for those glorious three weeks to sink into them full fledged. 


m1469

[m1469]

Okay, I was reading through your post again, Lostinidlewonder, and I found a part of what my next question is.

As you get into the first week you have 7 pieces already memorised, it is essential that you play through each one every single day. This means that the work load gets tougher and tougher as you learn more etudes. By week 2 you must play through 14 etudes that day, at the end of the 3rd week you should be almost able to play the majority of them without the sheetmusic.

In this part here, I was wondering, so do you not actually have to "work" on the pieces anymore after the first day ?  You just play through them ?

And, I assume that you are practicing more than 9 hours a day by day two, and then it multiplies beyond that.  One needs to have incredible mental and physical stamina by this point and is probably already practising around 9 hours a day with other material.


m1469

[zheer]

The way to seriously study them is to memorise one every day, so that in 3 weeks you have covered them all.

  well obviously you are going to have to start useing a calculator.

[lostinidlewonder]

  well obviously you are going to have to start useing a calculator.

3 weeks is probably the closer target than saying 4 weeks. If you say 4 weeks then you do it in 5, if you say 3 then you do it in 4, just underestimating the time if that is ok with your mathematical genius Is that a good enough excuse? I hope so... hehe

In this part here, I was wondering, so do you not actually have to "work" on the pieces anymore after the first day ?  You just play through them ?

And, I assume that you are practicing more than 9 hours a day by day two, and then it multiplies beyond that.  One needs to have incredible mental and physical stamina by this point and is probably already practising around 9 hours a day with other material.

Conscious memorisation (logically observing the music like observing shape of hand, patterns undergone etc) is all done in the first 9 hours of practice. Muscular memorisation takes a lot of repetitive experience and is the requirement to play any piece well.
 
The muscular memorisation must come through PLAYING the pieces and is why you must continutally play the piece once you have undergone the initial stage of conscious memorisation. But in the 3 weeks of studying the Chopin Etudes we aim not to complete our muscular memorisation for all the pieces but rather the conscious memorisation. There lies an obvious difference.

The rule is the more you practice your conscious memoristaion of new music you learn the more connection you make to move towards muscular memorisation which takes away the conscious part of controlling your new notes and moves it to a more advanced/effective method of memorisation. To experienced pianists we know when we reach muscular memorisation and we can control how fast we attain it with any new or old procedure we face.

The initial conscious memory study of each etude is 9 hours. After that you should be working on attaining muscular memory. If it takes longer than 9 hours to consciously appreciate what you must do then you have to question if the music is too difficult for you to undergo serious study of the complete etudes. I am sure if you double the time say 2 days per etude then you are leaving more time open and a lot more people would be happy with this, but this releases the pressure on your study and really eliminates the purpose of total immersion. The point is to be faced with a mount Everest.

After we complete the 9 hours of initial study I would play through the etude for at least another 2 hours more. This process simply restates what I have gone through but is more relaxing since you simply repeat what you have been learning. Although new observations to push us towards muscular memorisation can be made, like what particular movement helps us to play through a technical passage more easily, these things should be written down on the score.

In the first day you only have one piece to contintually study so there is not much to do here, but you definatly get this first piece well known, the second day when we get to this stage of course now we have 2 etudes to practice, I would focus a little more on the newer one than the one I did the day before since that had 2 hours of practice all to itself. As you move along the first etude you practiced is well understood and when you get to these playing sessions you really play through the initial etudes with less effort than you do the later ones. However in this playing state you also observe a lot of things that you forget, so it is important to mark all these things out.

There is a huge psychological battle as well when you do this. A lot of us refuse to move on to a new section unless we have totally mastered what we just learnt. This is a security blanket issue and a very tough one to break. To move onto a new chopin etude when you barely can control the one you just learnt goes against our very nature! But to do it and learn how to control the holes in the music you leave behind, this is a very rewarding and challenging position to be in. It definatly stretches you in all ways.

[henrah]

It sounds like a marvelous journey, one of courage and much hard work. I too would love to attempt this one day, but I think when I do I might start with Op.10 for 2weeks and not go onto Op.25 for quite a while. I would love to take this journey fairly soon, but my technique is not as it should be for learning these pieces; so, after looking at them I will not do both Opuses as there are quite a few pieces in Op.25 that scare me, and would have me waiting even longer to attempt both at the same time due to my lack of technique.

Thankyou for sharing your journey with us Idlewonder, it was certainly interesting and educational
Henrah

[zheer]

if that is ok with your mathematical genius .

   Can you remember haw many etudes Chopin  composed?       
He composed 27, therefore 4 weeks is closer to 27 than three weeks, anyway i dont agree with all of what you said, simply because a persons pianistic ability might be more advanced than his or her memory. finaly they are Etudes composed to develop the pianists ability not to test haw fast or slow he/she can memorise or learn them. personally i think you should spend a life-time on them, infact 24 years on the 24 chopin Etude is better than 3 brief weeks.

[lostinidlewonder]

.......anyway i dont agree with all of what you said, simply because a persons pianistic ability might be more advanced than his or her memory. finaly they are Etudes composed to develop the pianists ability not to test haw fast or slow he/she can memorise or learn them. personally i think you should spend a life-time on them, infact 24 years on the 24 chopin Etude is better than 3 brief weeks.

I am only considering Op10 and 25 which is only 24 so there is some communication mix up there, at least I have you to keep my numbers right for the future

The idea is not for speed. If I wack infront of you something simple and basic you could learn it immediately, when it is that you start taking more time to learn the music that is infront of you? It has to do with facing procedure you haven't tried before. So when we study Chopin Etudes as a serious student of music we discover that the movements written in the score are not all NEW but rather build upon and emphasise particular movements we have experienced before, in fact all technique explored in Chopin's 24 etudes op 10/25 are all procedure you find in a huge amount of piano music. So there really is nothing new to experience but more focusing on particular known technique that is emphasised with musical genius of Chopin's etudes.

This should give you a clue as to when you are ready to seriously study Chopin's Etudes.  No one should undertake a COMPLETE study of these unless they can understand how to memorise/play one etude within a days work. It would be ok to say I will study the etudes in 1 year and focus my efforts on it, spread it over 365 days. But in my opinion it isn't the best principle for INITIAL work on the etudes. The intial study should be fast paced, you should cover everything straight away, you should measure how difficult it is for you to control the technique in all 24 etudes and question why particular ones give you more strife than others. This is so you as a musician can gague what procedure at the keys really troubles you, where you are at right now.

If you spread yourself over the year to study the etudes you will find gradual improvement to your playing ability, you don't get to see through the window that reveals our musical ability because our initial study is so gradual and careful. Everyone can be careful and baby step through music but why don't we question how fast we can learn "difficult" music? Why should a difficult part take weeks to master? Do it now, master it now, this is what is required of a good pianist, average pianists take their time but still create beautiful music, good pianists learn things as fast as possible, attain muscular memory and mastery over new technique. We must question the speed at which we learn things, it should be fast, efficient and effective. We shouldn't be satisfied with the speed at which we attain mastery over procedure at the keyboard. Always push the limits.

[zheer]

I am only considering Op10 and 25 which is only 24 so there is some communication mix up there, at least I have you to keep my numbers right for the future

   Well look for most of us it takes a long time to play all the Chopin Etude, but we get there in the end. So when someone comes along and says well i did it in three weeks and thats haw a serious student should do it, well its not helpfull , and i doubt that your post as about making helpfull suggestions, its more like your way of downn-grading the hard work and the long time it takes to learn and memorize these Etudes ( for most of us).
     Well if it only takes 3 weeks for you to memorize all the Etudes , then good luck to you, and i guess you shuld then learn all the Godowsky etude to strech your limits a little more, other than that what is the point you are trying to make?  Actually dont answer this question am not intrested.

[m1469]

Actually, Lostinidlewonder's posts regarding this subject have been quite helpful for me (and I am sure for others as well), and I am happy that he was willing to share.


m1469

[zheer]

Actually, Lostinidlewonder's posts regarding this subject have been quite helpful for me

     Am happy for you m1469, am glad you found Lostinidelwonders helpful.

  i will go with Chopin on this one, (quote)  " Time is still the best critic,and patience THE BEST TEACHER"   

   You do it your way i will do it Chopins way. ( as far as i know , with patience)

[m1469]

Well, I don't think that Lostinidlewonder ever described anything that excludes patience and time.  He even reiterated my remark from above that most of these shapes and so on have been seen before if somebody is to accomplish this kind of study as he describes.  He is just talking about a different aspect of the approach, and a different element.

Also, we do not actually know what Chopin even meant exactly.  You are interpreting what you think it means.

Even if a person "learns" the music within 3 weeks, it is a lifetime endeavor both before and after.  It will always require patience and "time".   And actually, it is virtually impossible to truly learn anything if a person's mind is cluttered with impatience, no matter how quickly or slowly they learn it.


m1469

[zheer]

Just had the dis-pleasure of reading your reply, and it made this much sense -

    lkjhpdfoivmgpodtiuynbgskd n;oitdmvp iy; vlkjey;vipojdvmp ojhep ifxckjdo
  s;ojg iojg ndlkgjsm;roigm;slk mg;sipjmcposjgskjgp9swmg;lkm;vlizol
v kjmk vgmxkjg;mdojgm;sog,'sopgks'pog,s'ogjk. 
 

[m1469]

he he... well, zheer, yours is quite clear.  Congratulations  

[zheer]

he he... well, zheer, yours is quite clear.  Congratulations  

         

[lostinidlewonder]

*hugs m1469* thanks for defending me against Zheer's fangs lol

Zheer, I am mentioning 3 weeks to INITIALLY STUDY the etudes, not MASTER the etudes. Of course you must play them for your whole life, but the intial study of the complete etudes should be done as quick as possible for the reason to really test and to immerse yourself into piano technique.

The initial study of ANY PIECE is not striving for perfection, people get too obsessed about it, they refuse to move on  to something else until what they play is perfected, this is terribly wrong and slow and inefficient. As you get better at the keyboard you should be at a maxium of efficiency, you should initally learn music very fast (conscious memorisation) but labour months/years on the muscular/sound memorisation and complete mastery of the piece.

If you force your way through the etudes in 3 weeks you will find in another few weeks later what you have learnt really becomes more solidly understood (if you keep studying them, if you stop you will forget the majority of it), not so etherial. I say etherial because when you study music very fast you often forget what you memorised so the memory is very blotchy and difficult to recall but still somewhere in the recess of your mind, youc an still sense part of it, so with some experimentation and using what you hear from within you can guide yourself towards it and make it stronger in our minds.

It is so confusing talking about what happens in the head when we learn music but it is something we all should observe and question. Alot of piano students I have met I ask them how long it takes them to learn a part of music, they mostly shrug their shoulders and say its too hard to measure. This is where we are making excuses for ourselves (and humans are naturally lazy), we CAN control how long it takes to master something we just have to understand HOW we personally memorise music and aquire mastery over the physical touch. Basically we must understand how conscious memorisation moves to muscular memoristation moves to sound memoristaion for us. It is all different for each and every person, it is extremely facinating (a big reason why I took up teaching).

[burstroman]

Practice, practice, and more practice!

[m1469]

*hugs m1469* thanks for defending me against Zheer's fangs lol

You're welcome  .  I am convinced that underneath that cold exterior, Zheer is really just a cuddley crocodile 

[gorbee natcase]

lostidlewonder you are a well dissiplined beast reading through your post had sweat dripping down my face 9 hours on 1 piece, but so true. Can you buy stamina in a jar?
I may try your aproach but not to that level. I think I would pop

[mike_lang]

Try Cortot's edition - it provides invaluable preparatory exercises.  More of a pedagogical than performance oriented approach.

[celticqt]

Wow.  I admire those of you who have the discipline to physically practice for nine hours a day.  Unfortunately my schedule won't allow that, so I have to settle for three.  And I don't think I'm an advanced enough student to be able to memorize them as quickly as you're mentioning, but I am still enjoying studying them.

I have been studying five of the etudes for about a month now and my elbows are absolutely killing me.  Not sure if this is due to the etudes or to my other music . . . But I am playing a concert at the end of April and I can't take any time off right now.

[penguinlover]

I just started the etudes, after many many years of avoiding them.  No way could I even attempt to even read through them in three weeks!  I did three the other day, and personally found them not pleasing to listen to.  It is hard to practice something that doesn't sound good to you.

[mike_lang]

I just started the etudes, after many many years of avoiding them.  No way could I even attempt to even read through them in three weeks!  I did three the other day, and personally found them not pleasing to listen to.  It is hard to practice something that doesn't sound good to you.

First off, they are etudes.  Secondly, if you haven't listened to a recording of them, that will give you a much better impression than your sight reading.  My personal favorites are Pollini's and Perahia's.

[penguinlover]

I am sure that hearing how they are suppose to sound would help greatly, but I have no access to that.  I am doomed to my own sight reading.  Some of the ones at the end aren't as bad as those first three!

[lostinidlewonder]

lostidlewonder you are a well dissiplined beast reading through your post had sweat dripping down my face 9 hours on 1 piece, but so true. Can you buy stamina in a jar?
I may try your aproach but not to that level. I think I would pop

Don't think you would pop, you will definatly pop. I hated doing 9 hours a day solid practice. It wasn't by choice that I did it, it was forced upon me, a requirement from my teacher. At the end of the initial day my fingers where killing me and I honestly for the first time in my life hated the piano. But I always know when we are in situations which make us uncomfortable, situations which totally challenge us, this is where we learn things which will say with us for the rest of our lives and for the better.

I caught a glimpse of an amazing rate of learning, mind you I really honestly do not think I have the motivation to exist in this realm every single day of my life. I really do have more things in this world other than piano that I love to do. But when I am forced to learn things in a very short time I can do so because I have practiced learning at a fast rate. I know how to force the issue in my head so that my conscious memorisation of notes falls into muscular memorisation as fast as possible. This of course comes through tonns of repetition and logical thought. Not just senselessly repeating notes, but repeating passages and consciously observing notes which guide us, forgetting about them and then testing if we can appreciate what the feeling of the hands during the passage.

Wow. I admire those of you who have the discipline to physically practice for nine hours a day. Unfortunately my schedule won't allow that, so I have to settle for three.

I have been studying five of the etudes for about a month now and my elbows are absolutely killing me. Not sure if this is due to the etudes or to my other music . . . But I am playing a concert at the end of April and I can't take any time off right now.

Of course not everyone can devote the majority of their awake time to piano practice, it is a hermits life and most of us have other commitments and interests. But the Chopin Marathon of 24 etudes distance should be run in a 3 week period and this you choose do any time of your life, even if you have been practicing the etudes here and there for years. Although some of us make ourselves so busy we never can even have that 3 week honeymoon with the etudes.

There should be one point in your life where you say, I'm going to do this now, I'm going to study all the etudes, one a day, until I play through them all and can play through them all without using the sheet music. PLAY THROUGH THEM, not master them, and play through them could mean 1/2 tempo even. If you are a serious piano student you must study all the etudes in a brief time period, since they embody the entire piano technique as a whole. It is used for you to measure what you can and can't do well at the piano. The best litmus paper for your piano technique and musicality. If you spread out the study of the etudes over the years then you do not test yourself, you learn and grow with the music. We should use try to use the etudes as a test, we should know how to deal with the technique written within them and question why it is harder or easier in places.

This is so that we know ourselves as pianists better. We should study the Chopin etudes as a test for our piano technique and make adjuistments to our playing based on difficulties we face, we shouldn't use the etudes as peices to develop technique (although many people use it for this initially), we should already have aquired technique through other pieces but demonstrate it with the etudes.

And I don't think I'm an advanced enough student to be able to memorize them as quickly as you're mentioning, but I am still enjoying studying them.

Everyone can consciously memorise music at the same rate. I can make a beginner consciously understand what notes they have to play for the most difficult piece in the world, but what is the point? Their hands will not be able to follow it and it might take 2 weeks for them to aquire the muscular memorisation of one bar!

A lot of intermediate/advanced students I teach throw their hands up and complain that they learn music too slowly. Most of them say it takes so long to learn a little section even though their hands have no problems playing it. This is where I sit down and try to understand the flow of Conscious memorisation- Muscular memory- Sound memory within them.

A lot of people neglect conscious memorisation of music. Sight readers for instance do not make strong conscious memoristation statements while they read their music. They simply read the dots and it cues their hands what to do, however there is no conscious observation of a note which acts as the centre of the hand, or a note which guides our memorisation of the pattern we must go through. There is no pattern recognition actually written down, it might be etherial in their heads, something that they sorta undertand but do not take that little step further to mark it down with a pen or highlight it.

Memorisers get too caught up in the actual fingers and notes, they neglect reading the score and advancing onto new sections using conscious observations as our guide. Sometimes I feel like it is like the Hanzel and Grettle fable, we make these conscious memoristations by dropping bits of bread through the score, but these may get eaten up by confusion in our heads, this is where we must also learn to backtrack and repair conscious memory points which are failing or we will get lost and eaten up oruselves.

Conscious memoristation of notes will vanish if it is not continuously restated again and again during our practice session. We must remind ourselves of notes which act as a balance to the hand, notes which define a pattern we play etc. We must lift our hands and put them down on notes simultaneosly making a conscious observation of notes and patterm in our head, we can even say it out loud which I catch myself doing a lot of the times. But at the end of a practice session these conscious memory statements should be pushed out of our minds and we should be able to appreciate the muscular memorisation of the passage. This should be done straight away, do not ever leave the piano with conscious memorisation still in your head because this will be forgetten and you will forget a lot of work. Only stand up once you have attained muscular memorisation of a passage this is long lasting.

Some people never consider this flow of learning, they just let it happen instead of controling its progress. Try to understand how to move from conscious memory to muscular, once you do that you really push your rate of learning, you will feel like you have control over what you learn then. Sounds all nice in words but in reality this is really tough, to understanding how we learn is very hard and sometimes we can't understand it without a good teacher or taking on marathon study tasks.

[penguinlover]

Question for lostinidlewonder: 
       Since you are a concert pianist, and seem to know much about the subject, let me ask you,  is it possible to correctly learn the Chopin etudes without a teacher?  I have a book that has fingering written.  Is that the correct fingering?  Does everyone have to use the same fingering?  My goodness, Chopin's hands must have been huge!

     Another question for you.  Up several posts was mentioned getting sore elbows from play or practicing hard.  Is that caused by poor technique?  My left elbow is killing me, I thought I had injured it climbing on something, but maybe it could have been from trying to learn music that's above my head.  Anyway, you're young and don't have to worry about old people's aches and pains, so what do you think about this?  I have always thought that if you wanted to learn something bad enough, you could do it no matter how difficult the piece.  Maybe I will have to rethink this stance. 

    I don't know how you find the time to converse here on the forum and still practice all those hours, but I am glad you do.  I appreciate your input.
 

[mike_lang]

Question for lostinidlewonder: 
       Since you are a concert pianist, and seem to know much about the subject, let me ask you,  is it possible to correctly learn the Chopin etudes without a teacher?  I have a book that has fingering written.  Is that the correct fingering?  Does everyone have to use the same fingering?  My goodness, Chopin's hands must have been huge!

     Another question for you.  Up several posts was mentioned getting sore elbows from play or practicing hard.  Is that caused by poor technique?  My left elbow is killing me, I thought I had injured it climbing on something, but maybe it could have been from trying to learn music that's above my head.  Anyway, you're young and don't have to worry about old people's aches and pains, so what do you think about this?  I have always thought that if you wanted to learn something bad enough, you could do it no matter how difficult the piece.  Maybe I will have to rethink this stance. 

    I don't know how you find the time to converse here on the forum and still practice all those hours, but I am glad you do.  I appreciate your input.
 

I would like to give you an idea on the Etudes.  Although it is preferable to study them with a knowledgeable teacher, there is an edition of the Etudes by Alfred Cortot which may be of help.  It is a pedagogical edition, with two to three pages of exercises preceding the Etude itself, along with explanations.  I believe it is published by Salabert.

[penguinlover]

Thanks. I'll look for it.

[celticqt]

Another question for you. Up several posts was mentioned getting sore elbows from play or practicing hard. Is that caused by poor technique? My left elbow is killing me, I thought I had injured it climbing on something, but maybe it could have been from trying to learn music that's above my head. Anyway, you're young and don't have to worry about old people's aches and pains, so what do you think about this? I have always thought that if you wanted to learn something bad enough, you could do it no matter how difficult the piece. Maybe I will have to rethink this stance.

Yes, sore elbows like mine (and yours, apparently!) are caused by poor technique. I have been reading a lot about tendonitis lately, and one recurring theme is . . . if it hurts, stop!  This is really hard to do - I don't remember the last time I went one, two, or three days without playing at all.  But repetitive strain injuries are not fun and if your body hurts, it's trying to tell you something.  This link might be interesting: https://www.pianomap.com/injuries/index.html

You can give yourself a repetitive strain injury from playing anything too much, incorrectly - they're not necessarily caused just by "difficult" music or pieces that are "above your head."  And I am not that old either, and I'm still dealing with aches and pains. 
       

[penguinlover]

Thanks.  I went to the link and read.  The problem is, that without a teacher, it is hard to detect what I am doing to cause injury.  How do you find a teacher that knows this stuff?  This guy is in Oregon, I am in So. California.  Any suggestions would be helpful.

[lostinidlewonder]

       ..... is it possible to correctly learn the Chopin etudes without a teacher?  I have a book that has fingering written.  Is that the correct fingering?  Does everyone have to use the same fingering?  My goodness, Chopin's hands must have been huge!

If you are relying on fingering marked on the score to make decisions for you, then most definatly you will need a teacher to study these etudes correctly. To be able to study any piece by yourself you should be confident in determining the fingering for yourself, of course there might be a lot of procedure in the Chopin etudes you might have never experienced before, so the fingering might then become very tough because you have nothing to relate it to. But all shapes and patterns you play on the piano are similar to one another in some way, depends on how you look at it.

All fingering we choose has to aid our comfort and control of a group of notes with one hand position, sometimes it is hard to feel the comfort without repeated practice and sometimes we might choose ineffective fingering and only find out after practicing it for an hour that it is no good! This all adds to our experience though. I use to study pieces other than what my teacher use to give me, she of course would not help me with them because she gave me quite a lot of her own music that we had to go through during lessons. But I use to always puzzle over the best fingerings, eventually you get faster and your choices become much more accurate and always lean towards your own personal comfort at the keyboard. So the fingering in any music is not set in concrete, there is awlays variation as there are variation in peoples hand sizes.

Up several posts was mentioned getting sore elbows from play or practicing hard.  Is that caused by poor technique?  My left elbow is killing me, I thought I had injured it climbing on something, but maybe it could have been from trying to learn music that's above my head.  Anyway, you're young and don't have to worry about old people's aches and pains, so what do you think about this? 

Perhaps you are sitting too low at the piano? Always make sure the arms are parallell to the ground, not angled upwards (sitting too low) or downwards (sitting too high). I am afraid my guess would be as good as anyones, without sitting next to you and watching you play it would be very hard to pinpoint why your elbows are sore after playing.

Perhaps don't bend as much at your elbow while you play, especially when you lift the hands to move to another point, bend very slightly at the wrists to remove contact from the keys  to reduce the amount the elbow needs to bends to lift the hands. The wrist shouldn't bend past a 45 degree angle to the ground. If the wrists are locked while you play then you will have to bend more at the elbows to lift the hands from the keyboard, this could be a reason why your elbows are sore. So could more things...

I have always thought that if you wanted to learn something bad enough, you could do it no matter how difficult the piece.  Maybe I will have to rethink this stance.

You can learn anything you want no matter how difficult it is that is most definatly true. The amount of time it takes you is the cost though and we don't have infinite time with our mortal bodies! I wouldn't suggest forcing your way through music which is tough for you because overpracticing hand breaking passages can do you a lot of damage, especially if your technique is inefficient. There are countless examples of concert pianists who have damaged their hands through over practing of difficult passages and their technique is quite strong. We must always monitor how we physically feel while practicing. As soon as we start hurting we must stop. Never ever keep practicing if you feel sore. Some musicians get so infuriated difficult passages are not mastered that they even push through physical pain to achieve it. This is wrong in my mind, we have to preserve our physical ability to play for our whole lives, we have to treat our hands with care.

[cloches_de_geneve]

Just work through some of the exercises in Cortot's edition (publisher Salabert) as already noted by Michael. The time it takes you to learn them is completely irrelevant; what you want is not to know how quick you are, right? What you want, I assume, is to progressively unblock your technique by working through each of the problems posed by the Etudes.