bach and czerny

[kimba1055]

hi every one i'm rick i play piano for last four years but in 4 years i only study bach and czerny becouse that is what my teacher want me to play know i'm working

the art of finger dexterity czerny

well tempered clavier book 1 and 2

my question is. is my teacher crazy ? or what becouse th bach preludio and fugue take me month to play then perfet
i play the 15 invention from there she make me buy the well tempered clavier i dont know what to think of my teacher well she is good she can play anything maybe that is where she is planning to take me help please.
sorry for my inglish

[molto-marcato]

Depends. If you like Bach very, very much it is ok. Otherwise i wouldn't work solely on Bach and Czerny technical exercises for 4 years. That would be a little boring imo. Why not ask your teacher to do something else additionally. If you want to become a good pianist it is obligatory to have worked on some Mozart/Beethoven/Chopin works, maybe Brahms/Schubert/Schumann/Rachmaninoff/...... too.

Sure, you can spend your whole life with Bach, there is lots of material, but i would go for a more widespread repertoire. This greatly adds to your technique btw.

[webern78]

Those Bach pieces aren't just 'repertory'. They were meant specifically to teach students and it makes sense that they should be used for that purpose. Likewise for Czerny.

She's not teaching you how to play those works, you are learning how to play through them which means your not ready to have a repertory yet. My 0.02 cents.

If you are getting bored (who gets bored with Bach anyway?) you can ask for more pedagogical pieces by other composers. Bartok would be a good start...

[danny elfboy]

I think she's wrong
First of all because there are actual repertory pieces for all technical levels so there's actually no need to spend years on didactic often boring material (czerny) before moving to actual pieces. On the second place if you spend years on didactic material you may also learn the technique to play repertory pieces but you also decondition your musicality
Musicality and technique must go hand in hand and for this is necessary to have to do from the beginning with actual pieces where emotional content and dynamic nuances are very important

Edith Grosz Lateiner is an example of a teacher that focus on actual repertory and musicality even at the early beginner stage. She knows that a pianist is not a sport-player and that pianists don't have to learn technique separately from musicality, in fact that such approach is the worse danger to pianistic development and music sensitivity. Lateiner is also one of the best teacher in the world forming some of the best concert pianists out there

An other important aspect is that you must have fun
Even on very serious accademical matter success depends on not getting frustrated with that you do. It's a fact that even on matters like biology, english literature, languages, mathematic the austere seriousity approach doesn't work half as well as free, fun, stimulating and passional approach.
With piano playing (especially for training something as ephemeral as musicality) is of greatest importance to always approach the idea of practicing and playing with enthusiasm. For a musician this comes from the love of music. Such enthusiasm is clearly killed by lack of different musical stimulus and by lack of variety

An approach that for example take advantage of classic, jazz, blues, country, soundtracks pieces rather than just focusing on accademical literature works way better.
It's called overlearning. The more varied are your stimulus the better you learn and advance as your brain has lot of different material to pounder upon.
There's no a single area of life: reading, learning, practicing, sport, discovering, eating, watching ... there "lack of variety" is positive

You're ready for real repertory pieces way before you can play 1 invention let alone after you've played all inventions. I would ask for a sonata or a sonatina at least. I would ask for real baroque pieces like Gigues, Canons and Toccatas from Galuppi, Pasquini, Marcello, Luppi. I would ask for easy Nocturnes and Mazurkas. I would ask for the easier Lyrics Pieces of Grieg

Even didactically there's way better then czerny and technical pieces
Album for the young from Shumann. Album for the young from Tchaikovsky. Russian dances by Kabavlesky.