About Bernhard method

[drazh]

Hi
I am a fan of Bernhard. Actually I saved many of his posts  and practicing them.
But about hanon and czerney I have some doubts .I am sure his experience in piano is far more advanced and in martial arts  , but I think I have more experience in painting. As a beginner of painting one has to draw lots of boxes, glasses , cylader etc. Then to draw a woman in full clothes one has to draw simple skeleton , then muscles , then nude and only after that can draw a picture of woman with clothes  . There is no shortcut.
Now I'm afraid hanon and czerney etc are skeleton for more advanced piano pieces.I wish they weren't.
Actually I myself hate hanon and many czerney exercises.but I'm afraid to miss fundamentals in piano playing.
Thanks

[keyboardclass]

There was life before Hanon and Czerny.

[quantum]

The concepts learned from Hanon and Czerny can be learned from other sources. 

In your analogy, it may be equivalent to a person wearing a yellow shirt with black stripes.  Your subject does not need to specifically wear a yellow jacket with black stripes in order for you to learn how to paint a subject with clothes. 

[thalbergmad]

As a developing pianist you need to keep what works and discard what does not, so my advice is to try them. Despite what has been written on this forum, if exercises are done under the supervision of a teacher, you will not end up with crippled hands and you will not have to pick your nose with your elbow.

The Hanon bashers have written innumberable pages to describe to us why it is a waste of time, yet many here claim they have received benefit and they cannot all be liars or lunatics. Equally, many have said they did nothing at all, but there is only one way you are going to find out.

Thal

[drazh]

Hi
I mean is there any backbone to piano learning eg : 3rd , 6th , octave , double notes , scale etc over which whole piano pieces are built ?
If yes what is that or at least part of that ?
If yes I will be happy doing those boring exercises every day to be a good pianist.
Thanks

[ajspiano]

Music is built on a huge array of technical difficulties, with many different physical solutions. You simply can not expect to practice a bunch of exercises and have that make you a well grounded pianist. One person may swear by hanon, probably because they practiced it with the right motions - while another person despises it and received no benifit - because they used wrong inefficient motions.

the same thing applies to musical works

whatever you play, pieces or exercises..  you must play them under guidance and with thought about how you are doing it or you will not improve unless you are lucky enough to fluke it and play correctly purely through intuition.

Hanon may have its benifits, I played it when I was much younger and I suspect it did help on some level - i don't typically recommend it to students now though. If I do its going to be a specific exercise for a specific reason, not just hanon or czerny from start to finish. And, i will generally provide guidance as far as how to move in order to play the notes not just say 'go home and play this'

In addition to its lack of musicality, we now know that many of czerny's ideas were a long way off the mark as far as technique so you can't go reading his instructions and expect to get very far either..

EDIT:
I also notice that you had the thread in the students corner re the heroic polonaise..  If you are playing this piece then most of hanon's 60 exercises should be far to easy for you and bore you to tears. - more or less everything except perhaps the trills, double note trills, scales in 3rds/6th/octaves.

[pytheamateur]

Is Bernhard C C Chang, the gentleman who wrote the book on piano practice?

[commissiona]

I recall a 2004 dialogue between RobertHenry and Bernhard which really defined how Bernhard felt about Hanon and Czerny to a slightly lesser extent.  I can't find it now, otherwise I'd post the link, but the jest of it was RH saying he wasn't inherently against Hanon, and Bernhard actually agreeing that he really wasn't either.  

Bernhard's main beef against Hanon was the claims of the introduction/prologue delaring itself to as being the ultimate book of piano technique with practice instructions that appear to be physically impossible and would result in injury if attempted - that and the book's popularity for students and teachers over the past century.  Because of that, Bernhard advocated very strongly to not use the excercises to build technique as it does more harm than good.

I would agree that the exercises (NH and Bernhard make it clear that they refer to the first 30 exercises or so), because of it's seemingly false claims, is hugely overrated as being a great technique builder from reading the agruments against it and my own ituition.  

However, I haven't trashed my copy just yet because I found a way it can be useful to me, other than giving my fingers a workout.  

I am not proficient enough to transpose pieces of music on the spot, and I do like to work on my scales as much as possible.  The Hanon exercises are repetitive and simple enough to where I can use them to work on testing my profiency of scales by transposing them.  This gives me several different patterns and permutations to practice my scales, other than the standard exercsies we are used to.

I do this not so much as to practice transposition (because what I'm doing isn't really going to help much with that), but to get myself more familiarized with different keys, as standard scale practice, I think, eventually leads to playing them with pure hand memory rather than really being truely comfortable in a certain key.  I can't think of many other exercise sets that would allow me to do this with this kind of ease.

But, as thalbergmad said, the only way to really know is to trial different things and do whatever works best for you, which is what Bernhard also frequently advocated - try it different ways and see for yourself.  

But personally, I don't think the answer really lies in either extreme of the issue, it's somewhere in the middle, and I just found a way that seems to work great for me.  

The only thing I'm fairly sure about is what ajspiano said, that no set of technical exercises can prepare you for all the technical difficulties in music, so repertoire itself would be our best bet for that.

Hi
I mean is there any backbone to piano learning eg : 3rd , 6th , octave , double notes , scale etc over which whole piano pieces are built ?
If yes what is that or at least part of that ?
If yes I will be happy doing those boring exercises every day to be a good pianist.
Thanks

Those would be the exercises beyond No. 30, again which is not stressed about when we argue about the method book, so this may be drazh's main question at this point which I don't really have nor should (at my skill level  ) have an opinion about.  Does anybody have any words on those?

Is Bernhard C C Chang, the gentleman who wrote the book on piano practice?

   Haha - I often wondered that myself, but I don't think so.  They just have very similar opinions about practice method.  If he is, then he may also be lallasvensson, kulahola, and J.S. Bach! 

[jtguru]

I believe that those exercises are not the best use of time. The main issue I have with pure technical exercises is this:

You work on an exercise, and become very proficient at that exercise. Then, at a later time you go to learn a piece and find that the piece contains that particular technique for which you have mastered a technical exercise. You get excited, and think that this piece will now be easier for you than it would have been prior to mastering that exercise.

And then you find that this setting will require a different fingering, a different approach, than how you did the technical exercise. This is especially a problem with scales. Yes, working on scales can be important to help you improve your intuitive understanding of keys, but mindless repetition of a scale as fast as you possibly can is rather pointless. You will be putting large amounts of practice into perfecting a fingering that you won't even use every time you find a scale in a piece.

What's more, even if the fingering you use in a piece is the same as what you use in your technical exercise, there is still the problem of differing musical settings. Dynamics aren't taken into account in Hanon. Musical setting isn't taken into account in Hanon. You could literally take the exact same notes, same rhythm, same tempo, and the details of the technique used to play it will still be different depending on if it is pianissimo or fortissimo, or if it is an accompaniment or the main melody, etc. A Hanon exercise can't prepare you for that.

If you want a technical exercise, take a piece you are learning, isolate a difficult measure or so, and repeat it sequentially in different keys, maybe add some rhythm variations, etc., and ta-da, that easily you have created a Hanon exercise, but it is worth more than a Hanon exercise because it has musical meaning for you.

Variation in musical context is too extreme for you to expect to be able to gain the capability to play anything from a set of technical exercises, no matter how extensive those exercises (ahem, Liszt). If this wasn't the case, music would get quite boring very quickly.

Don't worry about "missing the fundamentals in piano playing" by not doing Hanon, Czerny. Neither of those represents anything of "fundamentals."

[drazh]

Hi
My first teacher taught me hanon and czerney from beginning to end each lesson for one week .I sight read them not memorizing of course with decreased tempo  .
When I changed my teacher new teacher said your finger is not strong you should work in czerney and hanon again !
Thanks

[birba]

I never in my life played Hanon.  Don't know why.  I was never given it.  My musical past IS sort of strange, but I was just never given Hanon.   I sort of feel left out.  I did do Czerny, Cramer (lots) and Clementi.  Oh, and Pischna.  I don't think it's the excercise itself that counts, it's HOW you play it.  with what technique.  If you're going to tighten and tense up your hands and arms, no excercise is going to be any good.

[keyboardclass]

I did do Czerny,

Chopin called him the human inkpot!  Cramer is good.

[birba]

   Never heard that!

[keyboardclass]

Sorry, I got my references crossed it was Field who called him a human inkpot.

[ted]

I have always invented my own technical exercises to suit my own musical ends. These ends have always been highly individual at the best of times so I saw little benefit in slaving away at disciplines directed to aesthetic ideals which do not concern me. Now I did have a lot of time for Bernhard. His was the sort of broadminded musical and technical approach I wish I had been exposed to more in my youth; I might now be a better pianist for it.

On piano forums I read continually about all those writers of exercises but haven't much idea what they are. From the little I have discerned, most of them seem to be unimaginative, repetitive old-fashioned playing forms directed toward the playing of old-fashioned music.

But as Thal says, to each his own, and the only way to find out is to try.

[slobone]

I very much enjoy doing technical exercises, and I think I can tell the difference when I do them, versus when I skip them (I would describe myself as an intermediate level player). What I like about Hanon, scales, arpeggios, Dohnanyi, Slonimsky, etc., is that it's very easy to learn the notes, so you can get right down to the exercise part. With etudes that are more like real pieces (Clementi and even Czerny), you still have to go through the learning phase before you can play them up to tempo, and to my way of thinking it's not worth it for such mediocre pieces (Etudes by major composers are in a whole different category.)

As for Hanon in particular(#1-20), I would say his main value is just to build up strength and speed in your fingers. It's NOT to memorize particular patterns in the hopes that they'll show up in your real pieces. Think of them as the kind of stretching exercises that an athlete might do at the beginning of a practice.

Since I know them so well, I've devised ways of making them more difficult so as to be more of a challenge. I do them in different keys (still with the same fingering), in triplets, quintuplets, etc., and of course you can always keep cranking up the metronome. If you really hate them, don't do them, unless your teacher insists on it. And I would say, never do them for more than 20 minutes a day.

But getting back to the original post, could somebody fill me in on who Bernhard is and what his method is? Since I'm working without a teacher, I'm always interested in different technical approaches to the piano.

[_achilles_]

I used to dislike Hanon and Czerny based off the whole lack of musicality. But then I tried to just get improvements from technique in them while still making them sound as musical as possible and I feel like the results were definitely worth it. Czerny short exercises especially were great for letting me realize how to let go (and also identify) tension in my playing. To each his own, as others have said.

[lostinidlewonder]

We had an interesting discussion a number of years ago on Hanon here:
https://www.pianostreet.com/smf/index.php?topic=13583.0

[fleetfingers]

I used to dislike Hanon and Czerny based off the whole lack of musicality. But then I tried to just get improvements from technique in them while still making them sound as musical as possible and I feel like the results were definitely worth it. Czerny short exercises especially were great for letting me realize how to let go (and also identify) tension in my playing. To each his own, as others have said.

Can't you do the same thing with whatever piece you are working on? Why does there have to be a special exercise to practice musicality and technique?

[cmg]

Hanon is pretty elementary stuff.  The trick is to play with fingers raised as high and curved as you can . . . and to play forte.  It's the raised fingers that stretch the fine muscles and strengthen them.  

More advanced players should explore Dohnanyi, Pischna and the Brahms exercises.  Again, to be played forte and with high, curved fingers.  Played anyway but this, they are a waste of time.

And they DO work.  Actually, dramatically.  I've been doing them under the supervision of a teacher who was a protege of Weissenberg and Brendel, among others.  All of them did exercises.

So did Brahms.  Naturally.  He wrote a series of them for a reason.

I think you can say the technical-exercise parallel to pianists is what ballet dancers do with their work at the ballet barre.  You could argue they should only just work on the steps of their role over and over, but they use the barre for strengthening and technical refinement.  Learning the steps and movements to a role demands a freedom from technical issues -- gained at the barre -- so that matters of expression and musicality can be concentrated on.  It's very hard to do both at the same time without losing your love for the music.  Our exercises allow the same development that leads to security and technical mastery when it comes time to play the masterworks that characterize the pianistic literature.