About technique

[mmro]

Do you think you're either born or not with it, or is it something we all have access to but don't know how to achieve?

I'm inclined to the second one.

[shortyshort]

Yes, technique is something that i feel can be learned.

I have not learned any yet, but I get by.

[ramseytheii]

Some people will say that there are always limitations to skills which are not in-born but this is a simplistic view.  For one thing, we should not be focussed on limitations, but rather we should always - throughout our entire lives - be focussed on possibilities.  For another thing, people who spend their early childhoods perfecting their natural talents forget the amount of work that went into that perfection.  It is easy for them to claim their skills as inborn, because they have blocked out from their mind the difficult and trying labor that went into what they do.

The composer Györgi Ligeti made an interesting comment in the liner notes to Pierre Laurent-Aimard's recording of the piano etudes:

"My... Etudes... are the result of my own inability [to play piano].  Cézanne had trouble with perspective.  The apples and pears in his still-lifes seem about to roll away, in his rather clumsy depictions of reality the folds of the tablecloth are made of rigid plaster.  But what a wonder Cézanne accomplished with his harmonies of color, with the emotionally charged geometry, with his curves, volumes, and weight displacements!  That's what I would like to achieve: transformation of inadequacy into professionalism."

[italics are my own.]

The point I want to raise is that for industrious and intelligent people, short-comings can become transformed into assets.

Oh and one more thing, I disagree with you on your second point: technique as "something we all have access to but don't know how to achieve."  Many people who are not born with an immediate physical prediliction for piano, have achieved it, and still yet, they know how.

Walter Ramsey

[thierry13]

Of course some people will be able to bring piano technique farther with not necessarily more work, some people will get it faster, some people will reach their maximum faster than others, but I'm sure about anybody can work at it enough to play the piano very well without being a virtuoso.

[gyzzzmo]

Do you think you're either born or not with it, or is it something we all have access to but don't know how to achieve?

I'm inclined to the second one.

I think technique and musicality mainly has to do with the opportunity/luck-factor and on how your mind works. Since that last part has to do with IQ (wich has some genetic factors) you're partially 'born with it'.
Im convinced though that that IQ part is the ONLY thing wich requires the proper genes, the rest totally depends on the right surcomstances.

gyzzzmo

[hyrst]

Ramsey, I love your post!  Awesome insight!
Annah

[kard]

I think it's something we have access to but don't know how to achieve (efficiently). Anyone can practice and eventually become skillfull if their chosen practice methods work I think the trick is finding a teacher or resource who can either help you find/refine your way in the fastest time possible or pass on their own methods to you.