I must warn you, I am very good at hijacking forum treads!
Fine, let's join forces and make this
the legendary super op10/1 ultra-tread! First, let me thank you for changing my mindset from "I better play 5 more years before even saying 'etude' out loud" to "hmm... maybe with some work...
". I guess there is a certain psychological barrier, an intimidating aura of some sort, surrounding these etudes. Many, myself included, look at these etudes as the pinnacle of achievement on the piano, and I suppose they really are a benchmark for piano technique. But, seeing as these are "etudes", not waltzes or sonatas, the name sort of implies that one should work on these to gain technique, not gain technique to work on them. Besides, there are some really insane works out there, like the Godowsky studies on these etudes, which makes this look easy in comparison. I am now convinced I should start working on this etude, but not like I would work on any normal piece.
There are several ways to learn a new piece, I usually pick one of these:
1) Sightread through the piece as slow as you must in order to not break the rythm, and gradually increase the tempo until you can play it as fast as it should be.
2) Start with a couple of measures, memorize it until you can play the section without the score, then proceed in the same manner until the whole thing is memorized. Then start eliminating mistakes and difficult passages.
3) Start with the most difficult sections. When these are mastered, memorize the rest of the piece.
I tend to pick the number 2, but I really tend to get lazy when the score is memorized and I can play the entire thing, no matter how bad it sounds. I am now trying to get into the habit of doing method number 3. If the score is really easy, and I don't see any reason to memorize it, of course I'll just sightread through it a couple of times.
Anyway, I don't think any of the above methods will do me any good with this etude. I mean sure, I could spend 30 minutes each day memorising two bars for a month or something, but that would only result in me being able to play this at one third the final tempo. It would also be an excersice in memorizing, not in executing insanely fast lateral shifting arpeggios. I could sighread it at like, 20 bpm or something, but that would be even more pointless. As for my method number 3, there aren't any sections sticking out as more difficult than the rest in this piece, the whole thing is just way out of my league.
Instead, I am proposing something similar to what I'm suggesting in my op2no1-tread, just in a more "extreme" way. The Cortot-edition has 15 exercises for this piece, each to be modified to each measure. I can write these exercises here if you do not have the Cortot-edition and want them. They are similar to what I did to learn these two measures, just more throughout. To give you an idea, what I did now, was to learn the sequence of notes, ECGce etc. I then set my metronome to 176, and tried to play ECGce as 16th-notes (ascending), which I could not do no matter how much I tried. I then lowered the metronome to 140, and tried the sequence again, which i did manage. I proceeded to play the 5-note sequence starting on the three other positions. It was then not so difficult to link them together and play the four ascending octaves at maybe 2/3 the final tempo. At this point, my hand started getting tired, and I didn't do anything with the descending arpeggios, which is why the speed of the two measures is way slower than my speed of the first measure alone. This takes me to my next point.
For me atleast, two measures is too much to focus on in one practise session, especially if I am to do 15 exercises on each measure. Now, I am not sure if Cortot's intention is to master ex 1 on every single measure before starting on ex 2, or if he means one should master 15 exercises on each measure before tackling the next. If it's the former, then I guess more than one measure per session is fine, if it's the latter, one measure is more than enough. As this etude has 78 measures, spending two days on each measure means spending 156 days to get through the entire thing. One can then start at the beginning, this time doing two measures each session, then starting over doing four, etc. At some point, after like a year of practising, one can do the entire piece in one sitting, and it should sound pretty good too!
Now, I'm not entirely sure if this is the precise order I'll do it in, but something along those lines seems to me to be the best way to really master this. This is getting pretty long, and I've not even gotten started on the details of the hand movements etc. I think I'll save some of that for later.
What do you think of my plan, and how did you organize your practising violinist?
Topic: Full speed Chopin 10/1 etude [[Newest Video: March 9]]