Piano Wisdom

[tekime]

I've been reading a collection of old papers in a book called "Great Pianists on Piano Playing", and have stumbled across some interesting advice. Some of it is rather silly, like practicing nerve control by balancing a bottle of mercury on your fingertips. But there is also some real wisdom.

It seemed like it might be a neat idea to start our own little collection of wisdom... something both the seasoned players and the amateurs like me could benefit from.

So, I will start. If anyone else would like to chime in that would be excellent. Or perhaps this thread will suffer a morbid death, destined to suffocate deep in the folds of Piano Street archives, alone and dusty. 

S.V. Rachmaninoff ends his paper entitled "Essentials of Artistic Playing" with the following:

Fine playing requires much deep thought away from the keyboard. The student should not feel that when the notes have been played his task is done. It is, in fact, only begun. He must make the piece a part of himself. Every note must awaken in him a kind of musical consciousness of his real artistic mission.

Sergei Rachmaninoff

[tekime]

Nervousness is often nothing more than self-consciousness unduly magnified over the real significance of the player's artistic message.

Alberto Jonás, Nervousness in Piano Playing

[cjp_piano]

“Beethoven wrote music even though he was deaf. He was so deaf he wrote loud music.”
-- anonymous grade school child

[iansinclair]

No one should attempt to play a Chopin Nocturne until they have been in love -- Artur Rubinstein

[austinarg]

"Evry great pianist hez a thound of thez own, un intonashon, buth, sum pianists, liek for exumplo, Horowitz, or Gilels, can't, for dhze THOUND, for dhze THAKE of dhze THOUND, un datz probably what made deir thound so special un so personal." Yevgeny Kissin

Please don't hit me 

[j_menz]

They who thoroughly study Clementi, at the same time make themselves acquainted with Mozart and other composers; but the converse is not the fact.

LVB

I'm currently getting aquainted with his sonatas, which I highly recommend, but not sure I'd go quite as far as Ludwig.

[werq34ac]

We [musicians] do not need drugs in order to get high. We can get high in a practice room

-Menahem Pressler

[ajspiano]

~ something like - "You can't make good music with bad feelings (stress, tension) inside your body...  ...Have a model for what good playing should feel like, make sure all passages feel that way."

-Dorothy Taubman.