For Bernhard, Chang, on approach and the point??

[mound]

I read something Bernhard wrote above, it's something he has said in other ways in other threads, but I really want to ask about this. I was going to write this as a response in that thread, but it deserves another thread I believe.

Bernhard wrote in the above mentioned thread:This is not unreasonable: with the right approach any one can master 20 pieces in a year (that’s less than two pieces a month), and will give you 3 - 4 hours of uninterrupted playing: enough for 3 or 4 recitals!

I've spent alot of time over the past several months reading about the practice and learning techniques that folks like Bernhard and Chang have documented so well. While I am only recently beginning to implement these methods in my own study, I am by all accounts considered by my teacher, friends and family to be somebody who is labeled "talented", and is progressing and excelling in my study very quickly. This is not magic, but my sheer dedication. I certainly am quickly gaining belief in the methods presented by Bernhard and Chang as I learn to implement them on my own, and am seeing how they can allow me to learn new pieces faster.

But, I have to seriously take issue with the concept of "mastering 20 pieces in a year." Even pieces on the level of the Chopin preludes and waltzes, some material like Schumann's Album for the Young, Bach 2 and 3 part inventions etc.. Not even advanced virtuosic repertory, but certainly those type works as well. Any repertory really, but even easier stuff. 2 pieces a month??

Maybe I am completely missing something here.. Maybe, just maybe, if I had a daily half hour lesson with Bernhard, along with my daily 2-3 hours of individual practice and really followed these methods to the letter, I could in fact come close to memorizing 20 pieces in a year. Maybe.. But master? If the definition of master is strictly "be able to play the notes with no score or flubs" then, well, perhaps. But the one thing I'm finding that isn't mentioned (at least not at length, unless I've somehow missed it) in any of what I've read from Bernhard or Chang (and please do correct me if I'm wrong), the thing which in my mind is more important than any of this, is the issue of musicality and expression. I had the Bach 2pt Invention in C memorized and playable hands together with no flubs in just a couple weeks. But with my teacher, week after week, month after month we put enormous thought and effort still into this one piece. Into the notes? No. The fingering? No. Memorization? No. Harmonic analysis? No, I can work that stuff on my own time to whatever level of detail I should care to take it.  On what then? On articulation and expression. The potentially endless depth of detail for the performance of this piece to the most subtle details of how to articulate the phrases from one to the other is where the focus, the "study" lies.  (As a quick aside, I know, it can be argued that Bach inventions aren't to be performed.. This is just an example, having been recently discussed on this forum when Bernhard outlined his process for teaching it. But the same applies to any piece I learn.) For me at least, memorizing the piece and having all the notes in my head and under my fingers, playable, for the most part w/o any flubs and doing harmonic analysis etc., is, and always has been, the easiest part of learning repertory. When that "homework" is done though, is a piece "mastered"? Of course not. That's when the real study begins.

With my teacher, we deal with expression and performance. Dynamics, articulation, INTENT. Bringing the piece alive through the subtle  details that only come once the stuff that Chang and Bernhard describe is out of the way. This study takes a LOT LONGER than half a month for any given piece because maturity can't be rushed.  As another example, I learned Chopins Waltz in Aminor (op. posth) over a year ago and do still work on it at times. Pretty simple piece.. Of course I have it memorized, to the smallest detail, but each time I decide to play it, it's the details of expression that grow and mature.  I wouldn't call any piece I "know" mastered even though in the past I have gone for a few months w/o thinking about that Chopin Waltz but could still sit down on command at a family holiday with cold hands and play it without flubs.

Perhaps my issue (if it is in fact an issue) is with semantics. What exactly is your definition of "master" and does it extend at all beyond having the notes permenantly ingrained in ones mind and fingers?  And what then is more important, developing a massive repertory of pieces that one "can execute" or, more slowly, building a repertory of pieces that one can really bring alive and inject a sense of their own being into?

Am I making any sense? I would love to hear some recordings of these students who are mastering two pieces a month. Sure the notes might be there, but how beautiful does it sound? I had all the notes of the Bach invention there after 2 weeks. My parents thought it was lovely when I played it for them, and in fact it may just have been. After months of study and work on the details that aren't on the score, now the piece is starting to sound closer to what I might call "mastered".

Again, I've been very intriqued by everything I've read from Bernhard and Chang and am asking this question with the utmost respect to both of them, but it seems that in a sense, if the end goal is simply to accumulate a body of memorized notes, it is entirely missing the point?

Or is it I who has missed the point??

thanks!

-Paul

[Egghead]

Hi Mound,

I second your question.

One remark re: Chang (and Bernhard by implication - do we have conclusive proof they are actually two people? ):
As far as I remember he emphasises in his book that the learning methods he describes should enable you to spend 10% of your time "practicing" and 90% "playing" music.

In some ways, the interpretation side of a piece seems to never end. The way I think of Chang's statement is: in 10% of your piano-time you learn how to execute a piece (using your terminology). Then you spend 90% playing it, i.e. playing around with it, discovering musical intent, possibilities, interpretative alternatives etc etc.
This is of course grossly simplified, as you cannot practice meaningfully without some musical feel. I think of it as more of a "first" interpretation.

The whole point of having a repertoire is that you have a stock of musical material you can rediscover (musically) and express differently for the rest of your life. Fascinating things might happen as your technique improves playing other pieces and you come back to some old piece and can now play it completely differently... Or you use a different tempo and it is suddenly a different piece...

I also think it is conceivable that someone already knows a piece very well and has a very clear musical imagination about it, before starting to practice it.

Hope I didn't misunderstand your question completely.

Curious what CC and Bernhard will say,
Egghead
p.s. I am neither talented nor diligent and despite many interruptions average about a piece a month. They are the kind of "easy" pieces you describe, except they are difficult for me (i.e. impossible at first).
p.p.s. Have you actually read CCs book?

[mosis]

Bernhard's method is good.

Chang should stick with physics.

20 pieces a year is bullshit.

[Spatula]

So what does Bernie advocate and what does CC go for?

[ThEmUsIcMaNBJ]

2 pieces a month is NOT realistic.  That's a piece every two weeks.  I didn't read much so I might be speaking out of context of what I read, however if someone can learn a piece to performance level in two weeks that is just ridiculous.  For example in Chopin...  Does that mean you could learn all the ballades AND scherzi in 4 months?  That would mean you could learn Chopin's scherzi, ballades, and 16 of his etudes thats over HALF in one year.  That's absolutely ridiculous.

I hope I am taking this incredibly out of context and maybe your talking about 2-part invention level.  If that is the case for an advanced player, 2-part inventions are more like sight-reading practice.  To say that an advanced pianist could learn 20 pieces of that level in a year, I think would be an understatement.

Either way they are both extremes  

I would read everything and give a more intelligent post, but I don't have time to right now.  So ignore this if it's totally off topic  

[mound]

Just to jump in quickly with a response, I do eagerly await a response from Bernhard and or Dr. Chang.

First, I have every reason to believe they are in fact two people, who share common insights.  I have had offline email conversations with Dr. Chang, he is a real person.

Anyway, I do agree that the interpretation side will never end. And in that sense, "mastery" can "never" be achieved.. Which is why I am confused by the notion of "mastering" 20 pieces per year. What would be the point?  Surely they wouldn't be beautiful or otherwise "worthwhile" performances of those pieces (of course that is a blanket and entirely subjective statement, purely for illustrative purposes). But, I can't claim to know if there is truth to my statement as such or not, which is why I asked!

p.p.s. Have you actually read CCs book?

Yes, I have. I have a few times over. And, I'm applying the methods he's documented to the best of my abilities to a piece which is a bit outside my range right now, with good results. I have as well had some offline email conversations with him. I do hold the utmost respect for both Dr. Chang and Bernhard, for they have provided me great food for thought. I am forced nonetheless to pose this question, as it is the only real point that has alluded me.

I hope I am taking this incredibly out of context and maybe your talking about 2-part invention level

Well yes and no. the 2pt inventions are "simple" on the outside.. two single note melodies. They have immense depth though when studied on a theoretical level as well as a "performance" level (even if said "performance" is only for studied peers).  Any repertory will apply though. I used that example specifically because Bernhard recently posted an extensive dialog as to how he would teach it, and it is a piece that I have spent considerable time on. Again, my question relates to any repertory, virtuosic or not.

Thanks! And again, I look forward, with utmost respect, to responses from Bernhard and Chang.

edit:

Bernhard's method is good.

Chang should stick with physics.

I wouldn't write it off that quickly. If you really read what they both have had to say, the parallels are astounding. I myself am a software engineer by trade,  a scientist as it were. This perhaps is what draws me to the "scientific method" of learning piano. Learning that is, not playing.  Playing piano is my escape from all things scientific. I'm all for scientifically based methods for "getting it in my fingers" but that's really just homework, which has to then be discarded when it comes time to "play" (or should I say, "express").

I have drawn parallels between what I've read from Chang and Bernhard.. And, it's not "Bernhard's method" he'll say as much.. Both of them are merely presenting what they have learned.


Take care
-Paul

[mosis]

I know it's not a method invented by Bernhard, but most people around here call it Bernhard's Method because they've never heard of it prior to Bernhard preaching it.

Some of Chang's methods don't jive with me, and some of his claims are outrageous and bias. Bernhard's approach is more feasible and I have seen immediate results with it.

[CC]

Sorry it took me a while to find this thread because this forum is not well organized and takes time to surf around.

In my book, my intention is to convey the idea that from finish to recital, you use (ideally, as a goal) 10% of time to "get the notes under your fingers" and 90% to music mastery.  My book is intended mostly for the first 10% and a slight excursion into the remaining 90%, which I do not deal with to any great extent -- that is where a good teacher is necessary, difficult to write in a book, I don't have the experience or material, and is not the main thrust of my book. Although I do emphasize musicality and talk about it in general terms in my book, the  detailed music lessons must be learned with each specific lesson piece. See my post about learning musicality from the great composers.

My only descriptions of repertoires refer to something like 5-10 hrs in 5-10 yrs, and even then I do not intend to convey the idea that you can play all of them at performance level without preparation.

Your post is a good one, since people need some kind of benchmark to say what is "mastered", but more importantly how to acquire a repertoire and what that repertoire might look like (how much is performable on demand?).  Obviously, the result if a function of how much time you have.  We have pianists that can barely practice an hour a day, 4 days/wk to those who can devote over 5 hrs a day, 6 days/wk. I have not yet put such numbers into my book. The closest I came to doing that is the section on learning the 3 Bach Inventions. The main reason I did not put a timeline for "mastery" is that I do not go into that aspect of piano practice sufficiently.

I can answer your basic questions off the top of my head, but usually, my first drafts are full of errors, so don't hold me to every detail.  But if I were to write a section in my book on this topic, it might go like the following.

It will take an "average student", with  a good teacher, about 1 year to learn a piece at his level to performance level. It will take 2-3 months to get all the technical stuff down (this is larger than the objective of 10%= 1.2 months, but most students try to reach above their level).  This "technical stuff" is what my book is all about. It will then take another 6-7 months of "musicality" study to get it up to level of 1st auditions (let's say this is a piano competition). One year after starting, they are ready for finals. If they win the finals, they can perform in Carnegie Recital Hall (the small one, not the main hall), as our daughters did for many years, usually 3-6 months after finals. Our daughters' program was pretty demanding and by the time they played in NYC, they usually had performed the piece at least 10 times with audiences of over 50 people each time. So these are actual numbers with real students and teachers experienced over many years. My book might do a little better than those teachers for the technical part because of my added research and help and suggestions from other teachers.

Note that you are always working on about 4 pieces at the same time, and the recital pieces tend to be the largest compositions, so during the year of lessons, you can learn something like 4-8 pieces.

Within 5-10 yrs, most people can acquire a repertoire of 5-10 hrs, completely memorized and "performable".  However, only a few of them can be performed at performance level at any one time. The main reason for this for students is that they are constantly learning new pieces and (1) have no time to maintain their old pieces and (2) learning new pieces has a nasty habit of destroying your old pieces.  Of course, your technical ability to play your old pieces INCREASES every time you learn something new; however, it takes  time to transfer that new skill to the old pieces -- this transfer doesn't always occur automatically, and in fact often interferes with old habits.  If students didn't have to constantly learn new pieces, it is conceivable (but not likely) that they can perform their entire repertoire on demand.

That's about the level of my understanding of the subject matter.  What do you think?

[CC]

PS:  I am not Bernhard -- he is just my role model.  One thing that helped me write my book is my practical engineering training as a problem solver as well as fairly advanced science education (my employer spent well over $1M [not corrected for inflation] just for my  education AFTER I started working for them). Publishing over 100 papers in peer reviewed science journals also helped. I also had to operate probably one of the most complex instruments in the world because my main job was to measure less than 1% change in the orbit of a single electron in zillions of materials to solve industrial problems. In fact, my machine appeared on the cover of Scientific American in 1965.

I am amazed at the wide range of subjects that Bernhard is familiar with -- Bernhard: what is your background that gives you such knowledge?

[CC]

PPS: by the way, our daughters averaged about 45 min practice/day, 6 d/wk. If they had 2-3 hrs/d, they could conceivably more than double their production of 4-8 pieces/yr.


What is the Bernhard method?  Is it available anywhere, in one place?

[Spatula]

Bernhard is very knowlegible about life, like where to get the cheapest bananas on sale.  

[mosis]

Chang,

I find your 5-10 hours in 5-10 years MUCH more realistic than 100 pieces in a year.

There is no Bernhard method, per se. Look around the forum for posts made by Bernhard and try to compile them. There is one topic called "How big are your hands?" that contains many detailed posts on Bernhard's practice method.

[CC]

The timeline I had described was for students with some technical skills still to learn -- the usual situation for students.  Each new piece is supposed to teach a new skill they don't already have.  However, for those who already possess the necessary skills, there are apparently very fast ways of mastering even quite difficult material in couple weeks.  This is demonstrated routinely  in international music competitions in which contestants are given music they had never seen or heard before and asked to perform in couple weeks.  Apparently most contestants succeed, and the judgement is not on whether they mastered it, but on the musical presentation because "mastery" is apparently a given. Although I seems to me that some of Barnhard's claims are a stretch, there are plenty of documented achievements that come reasonably close.  It is clear, therefore, that my book is just a beginning.  There will certainly be a lot more improvements that will be added in the future.

[xvimbi]

It is clear, therefore, that my book is just a beginning.  There will certainly be a lot more improvements that will be added in the future.

Dear Mr. Chang,

I am sure your are aware that your ponderings as written down in your excellent book are often presented in this forum as guidlines for aspiring pianists. They are also often evaluated critically with many posts supporting your notions and some not supporting them. You are a scientist, therefore you will most certainly welcome these discussions, as your statement above indicates. I am sure you have many sources of input for future editions of your book. I hope the discussions in this forum, which is dear to many of us, will be able to contribute to your work in a constructive way.

You wouldn't, by any chance, have anything to do with Auger electron spectroscopy or transmission electron microscopy, would you?

[bernhard]

Mound wrote:

But, I have to seriously take issue with the concept of "mastering 20 pieces in a year." Even pieces on the level of the Chopin preludes and waltzes, some material like Schumann's Album for the Young, Bach 2 and 3 part inventions etc.. Not even advanced virtuosic repertory, but certainly those type works as well. Any repertory really, but even easier stuff. 2 pieces a month??  

Maybe I am completely missing something here.. Maybe, just maybe, if I had a daily half hour lesson with Bernhard, along with my daily 2-3 hours of individual practice and really followed these methods to the letter, I could in fact come close to memorizing 20 pieces in a year. Maybe.. But master? If the definition of master is strictly "be able to play the notes with no score or flubs" then, well, perhaps. But the one thing I'm finding that isn't mentioned

Yes, you are missing a few things. First, I have described in another post three different levels a student can be in regards to a piece:

1.      The piece has been learned. This means that the student finally succeeded in playing the piece in its entirety, all the right notes in the right places, and hopefully has been able to bring the music to life even if in a rudimentary way. (If music was a martial art, this would be the “black belt” level. It is also the level where you finally are ready to start really learning the piece). However, the next day, the whole piece may fall apart, and the student may have to go back to learning methods to bring the piece back to its previous state of “learned”.

2.      The piece has been mastered. Now the student can always play the piece (some days better than others) and there is no need anymore to go back to the learning stages. To keep the piece at this stage all the student needs to do is to perform it more or less regularly. However if the piece is neglected for a couple of months (or years), it is as if the student never learned the piece. In order to master it again, he will need to go back to the learning stage – except that his time it will take a fraction of the time it took originally.

3.      Omniscience – As result of either performing the piece regularly or of relearning it several times, the piece is now so ingrained in the student;s subconscious that even if he stops playing it for 30 years, he will still be able to play it “perfectly”. This stage is the piano equivalent of riding a bicycle: once you learn it, you never forget it.

Someone who got to the level where they can play the Chopin etudes should be able to master (in the sense above) the easier preludes (no. 4, no. 7, no. 20) in about twenty minutes. A complete beginner should be able to master them in two weeks.

Likewise someone who can play the WTC should be able to master a 2 voice invention in 2 – 3 days (practising them for 40 – 60 minutes a day), while a beginner may take a month. (Just shows you how much more difficult Bach is).

the thing which in my mind is more important than any of this, is the issue of musicality and expression. I had the Bach 2pt Invention in C memorized and playable hands together with no flubs in just a couple weeks. But with my teacher, week after week, month after month we put enormous thought and effort still into this one piece. Into the notes? No. The fingering? No. Memorization? No. Harmonic analysis? No, I can work that stuff on my own time to whatever level of detail I should care to take it.  On what then? On articulation and expression. The potentially endless depth of detail for the performance of this piece to the most subtle details of how to articulate the phrases from one to the other is where the focus, the "study" lies.

I agree with you.

No piece is ever mastered in the sense you describe. In fact it is one of the beauties of the really superlative repertory that a lifetime will not be enough to explore all of its possibilities even for ridiculously easy pieces (Schumann’s “The Poet speaks” from Kinderscenen comes to mind).

Yet to even start this particular path it is necessary to “master” a piece in other ways – specifically in the ways I described above.

At the same time I do not really like to divorce technique from musicality because I believe they are both two sides of the same coin. So although superficially the methods of practice I use and suggest people to try, would seem to address mostly technique, I actually strongly pressure my students to start working on musicality as soon as the passage they are working on is large enough to allow it – that is, I do not believe that you should learn all the right notes at the right time and only then start working on musicality – quite the contrary, from the very beginning we should have a musical concept that guides one’s practice. We spend a lot of time working on the score, listening to CDs of several pianists and getting thoroughly acquainted with the piece before practising it, in short, I believe in delaying the actual practice at the piano until you have some sort of musical concept (even though you may change it later).

For me at least, memorizing the piece and having all the notes in my head and under my fingers, playable, for the most part w/o any flubs and doing harmonic analysis etc., is, and always has been, the easiest part of learning repertory. When that "homework" is done though, is a piece "mastered"? Of course not. That's when the real study begins.  

Yes, as I said I agree with you. However in my experience, the majority of students (at least the majority of my students) difficulty does not lie in the musical aspect, but in exactly those areas that you find easy: memorising (not such a big problem there); sight-reading (a major problem); motor co-ordination (major problem), truly understanding harmony and what “meaning of music” actually means (again the problem is not understanding but simply knowing all the chords and their voicings and different functions). So, to me a piece is indeed “mastered” once all that homework has been done. And of course you are completely right, this is where the real work begins. But you would perhaps be surprised how difficult it is to get to this stage of “homework done” for the majority of students.

With my teacher, we deal with expression and performance. Dynamics, articulation, INTENT. Bringing the piece alive through the subtle  details that only come once the stuff that Chang and Bernhard describe is out of the way. This study takes a LOT LONGER than half a month for any given piece because maturity can't be rushed.  As another example, I learned Chopins Waltz in Aminor (op. posth) over a year ago and do still work on it at times. Pretty simple piece.. Of course I have it memorized, to the smallest detail, but each time I decide to play it, it's the details of expression that grow and mature.  I wouldn't call any piece I "know" mastered even though in the past I have gone for a few months w/o thinking about that Chopin Waltz but could still sit down on command at a family holiday with cold hands and play it without flubs.

Then as far as I am concerned you have mastered the waltz (you may even be at the omniscient stage!).

Your teacher is absolutely correct in spending so much time on the 2-voice invention (I do the same). As we shall see there is a good reason for it. However he is not spending all that time teaching you to play the right notes at the right time. If after one year you were still struggling with the first four bars, I would venture that there is something very wrong with the way you are learning/practising this piece.

Now once you spend one (or two) years exploring all the angles of the first inventions and you proceed to learn the second, do you think it is going to take as long? I doubt very much. And when you move to the WTC again it will take a fraction of the time it would have taken had your teacher not spent so much time on the first invention.

The truth is that music is pretty limited in a certain sense. It is not for nothing that composers have “style”. Ralph Kirkpatrick – the guy who wrote the seminal work on Scarlatti sonatas  - once wrote that after studying in depth 555 sonatas he could not come up with a “model sonata”: they were all different and immensely varied in their musical inventiveness. Yet, the same Kirkpatrick also wrote that anyone who had thoroughly mastered all aspects of five or six of Scarlatti’s sonatas would find that the remaining ones would come easily ( I can attest to that).

The same has been said about Bach fugues: you cannot really come up with a “model fugue” unless you invent one. Again learn three or four thoroughly and the rest will come easily.

When I say that anyone can learn two pieces a month, I do not mean by that all the possible aspects of a piece. I mean that the piece is at a stage where you can perform it with confidence: all the right notes in the right times, everything memorised, and a reasonable interpretation. Certain pieces (Schumann comes to mind) will never be ready. Andras Schiff recently issued a new CD of the Goldberg variations since he was dissatisfied with his previous CD of them issued some 20 years earlier (if I’m not mistaken). Glenn Gould did the same. Yet I bet with you that it didn’t took him 20 years to learn the Goldberg.

So I see no contradiction in my claim and yours. What I am saying is that one should try to learn a piece in the least amount of time using the most efficient methods, so that one can start playing it and exploring its musicality as soon as possible.

And what then is more important, developing a massive repertory of pieces that one "can execute" or, more slowly, building a repertory of pieces that one can really bring alive and inject a sense of their own being into?  

Both are equally important. Especially in the beginning you want to have as much repertory as you can manage for several reasons:

1.      I do not believe in technical exercises. I teach technique from pieces. This means that in order to tackle a diverse number of technical problems you need a diversity of repertory.

2.      Beginners and intermediates would never survive the boredom of working on a single piece for one year. Most beginners and intermediates have not yet developed the necessary understanding required for this sort of intensive work. All they want is to play something different from what they did last week (this is really a cultural problem – it stems from a society that encourages limitless consumption and who demands new things all the time).

3.      It motivates the student if he is able to play several pieces, instead of just one. If he performs for friends and family, it relieves the boredom of the friends and family who otherwise would have to listen to the same piece over and over again.

4.      Different pieces require different learning strategies. Since I emphasise “learning how to learn” in the beginning a number of different pieces will allow me to cover most of the different strategies straight away.

Am I making any sense? I would love to hear some recordings of these students who are mastering two pieces a month. Sure the notes might be there, but how beautiful does it sound? I had all the notes of the Bach invention there after 2 weeks. My parents thought it was lovely when I played it for them, and in fact it may just have been. After months of study and work on the details that aren't on the score, now the piece is starting to sound closer to what I might call "mastered".  

Yes, you are making perfect sense. However your arguments refer to a more advanced student. Also, if you had all the notes of the 2 voice invention after 2 weeks, you are doing very well. The typical student having one lesson per week and not practising in between lessons could well spend one year to learn (badly) just a few bars of the same invention.

You are talking from your perspective: a talented student who practises hard (perhaps too hard). I am talking from the perspective of someone who observes several students of different levels of talent and commitment and trying to figure out what to do with them.

it seems that in a sense, if the end goal is simply to accumulate a body of memorized notes, it is entirely missing the point?

This is of course not the end goal. That is the first step on a very long journey, without which you will never arrive at your destination. So, the end goal is not to accumulate a body of memorised notes. But without an accumulated  body of memorised notes, no final destination.

Best wishes,

[bernhard]

Bernhard's method is good.

Thank you.

Actually, I would not call it a “method”, and I am sure I picked it from someone (several someones) somewhere.

Chang should stick with physics.

I am very happy (and grateful) that he didn’t. And in a sense he did stick with physics.

20 pieces a year is bulls**t.

Yes, you can “master” 20 pieces a year if they are within your level and if they are arranged in a progressive order of difficulty so that mastering one provides the resources for mastering the next one. Mastering here means simply good enough for you to be able to perform the piece.

I also believe on working on several pieces in parallel. You could spend a whole year just working on a Bach 2 voice invention, and at the end of that year you would have just that piece to show for your efforts. But would it be considerably better than if you had learned another 19 pieces concurrently? In my experience not only it would not be any better as it may have been worse – since the learning of one piece always informs (both technically and conceptually) the learning of another.

Let us look around, shall we? Richter had repertory of over 1500 pieces. Arrau had a similar one. Most professional pianists have a repertory of over 500 pieces. Brendel is possibly the one with the smallest repertory: he has said in interview that his concertrepertory is around 150 pieces. I assume that he has a much larger repertory, 150 are just the pieces he plays publicly.

John Browning once said in interview that he expected his students to bring him a sonata ready and memorised every weekly lesson. He said that most were shocked at his request, but they soon realised he was serious and they just somehow had to manage. He also said that although they complained bitterly of the work load, at the end of the year they were always grateful since not only they had 52 sonatas in their repertory, as in the process of learning them at such a pace, they had figured out ways to learn and memorise them so quickly.

So you say that 20 pieces a year is b***t. Well I say: wake up and smell the coffee.  

Best wishes,
Bernhard.

[bernhard]

2 pieces a month is NOT realistic. 

2 pieces a month is NOT realistic.

Er… realistic for whom?

That's a piece every two weeks.  I didn't read much so I might be speaking out of context of what I read, however if someone can learn a piece to performance level in two weeks that is just ridiculous.  For example in Chopin...  Does that mean you could learn all the ballades AND scherzi in 4 months?  That would mean you could learn Chopin's scherzi, ballades, and 16 of his etudes thats over HALF in one year.  That's absolutely ridiculous.

I myself learn around 30 pieces per month (just as a consequence of teaching). This does not mean that at the end of the year I have learned 360 pieces (although it may happen). What I mean is that at any month I am working on 30 pieces. Some take more than a month to get ready, others take far less. As a piece gets ready it is replaced by a new one (or an old one that needs relearning).

These 30 pieces are not all of them the most advanced pieces in the repertory. Some are beginner’s pieces, some are intermediate, and a very few are advanced (again this is a consequence of teaching: I learn the pieces I teach).

My point is: there is some wonderful repertory out there that is very easy. Why should you only want to play Liszt transcendental studies, Rach 3 and Chopin Ballades. There is nothing wrong with them of course, but there is also nothing wrong with MacDowells “To a Wild Rose”, which someone who is working on a Liszt transcendental study can master in about 20 minutes. (A beginner may take a couple of weeks).

Take Scarlatti’s sonata k32. Just one page long and presenting no technical difficulty of any sort. I often give it as a first piece to adult beginners. It is a stunningly beautiful piece, contemplative and lyrical. It took me 15 minutes to master. It takes a complete beginner about a week. Yet, Even though I have now played (and taught) it for many years, I keep discovering new aspects to it. So in this sense it may never be fully “explored” or “mastered”. But it was learned and memorised in 15 minutes, and that very same night I played it for my family, beautifully and without mistakes. Of course, if I was to play it now many things would be different from that first performance (hopefully for the better).

In my opinion the only reason people do not learn 2 pieces a month (really a bare minimum) is either because of laziness, or because they squander their time not being organised and systematic. Pianists are artists, so they are always waxing lyrical about inspiration and expressing emotions. This is good as far as it goes. But I am more interested in piano playing as a craft. Many of my students – if left to their own devices - will only play and practise when they “feel like it”. This is one of the most destructive attitudes one can have. I myself used to be like that in my teenager years, so I know exactly what I am talking about, and one of the advantages of age is that you realise the folly of your own youth. The disadvantage is that you cannot do anything about it. Discipline is very important: you plan your work and you work your plan.

But how many pianists actually have a plan? How many sit down and decide what is it that they are going to learn for the next five years, and organise their learning on a daily basis, setting short, middle and long term goals? Most pianists will break down in a rash if so much is suggested. Piano playing should be “free” and follow the pianist’s whims – and all the rubbish that comes with this package. In my experience people can be physically very industrious and yet mentally utterly lazy. I met in my life many students (and teachers who approved of such idiocy) who would spend 3 or 4 hours in the morning just practising the C major scale (or some other scale) up and down the piano over four octaves. Some would even read the newspapers or watch TV while doing that.

I also came across many students who had passed their grade 7 exam and yet could not play anything: They had forgotten their grade 7 exam pieces, and were still learning their grade 8 pieces. I think it is disgraceful to spend 9 or 10 years learning the piano and not be able to play anything.

In my youth, I would have reacted to 20 pieces a year with the same sort of incredulity. My fellow students were not managing it. If anyone mentioned Arrau or Richter I would have discounted them as “genius”. However, as I became more and more aware that people were actually doing far more than 20 pieces a year, it started to daunt on me that either everyone was a genius and I was mentally challenged, or I had some seriously wrong preconceptions - which happened to be the case.

Best wishes,
Bernhard.

[bernhard]

Bernhard is very knowlegible about life, like where to get the cheapest bananas on sale.  

You better make a stockpile of bananas. They may be extinct in ten years time (by which time you may have no bananas but you may well have 200 pieces in your repertory ).

Have a look here:

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-02/aps-ppu021403.php



Best wishes,
Bernhard.

[bernhard]

Anyway, I do agree that the interpretation side will never end. And in that sense, "mastery" can "never" be achieved.. Which is why I am confused by the notion of "mastering" 20 pieces per year. What would be the point?  Surely they wouldn't be beautiful or otherwise "worthwhile" performances of those pieces (of course that is a blanket and entirely subjective statement, purely for illustrative purposes).

The point(s) are several (see my original answer above). But the mains point is to have a varied enough pool of pieces to work on. Imagine that after one year of learning the piano all you could play was the Chopin Waltz in Am you mentioned before. I don’t know about you, but if I was a beginner I would feel pretty disheartened. Besides there is only so much work on “musicality” you can do on a single piece for a year. The fact is that your “musicality” will be informed by working on other pieces of different eras/composers/styles. In fact – as I have suggested elsewhere – one of the best methods to truly get to grips with a piece is to regularly neglect it and relearn it. Working on several pieces is a great way to use the time you are neglecting other pieces. Also consider that the first two pieces you learned in the first month you will continue perfecting throughout the whole year, so that by the end of the year you will have twenty pieces at different stages of development. This variety is a great motivator. Just consider the alternative.

Best wishes,
Bernhard.

[bernhard]

Chang,

I find your 5-10 hours in 5-10 years MUCH more realistic than 100 pieces in a year.

Er... I said 100 pieces in five years (20 in a year), which amounts to pretty much the same as 5 - 10 hours in 5 - 10 years. Since most pieces average 3 minutes, 5 - 10 hours means 100 - 200 pieces in 5 - 10 years.

Best wishes,
Bernhard.

[bernhard]

PS:  I am not Bernhard -- he is just my role model.  

And I am not Chang, he is just my role model

By the way,

I agree with Chang. (5-10 hrs in 5 – 10 years is about 200 pieces). I would only add (and he probably knows this) that the first 2 years are the slowest ones in terms of learning, You may not be able to do 20 pieces a year. But after that, the speed of learning increases – mostly because music is heavily patterned. By the end of two years of serious study, many skills that were baffling and completley elusive at the beginning will have become subconscious.


Best wishes,
Bernhard.

[Spatula]

I love analogies and poetry (the poetry sometimes)

How about this one Bernie?

Learning and mastering a piece is like aging a red or white wine.  It takes patience and "endurance" by the wine manufacturer as well as the fermentation process to produce some of the worlds most richest wines.

How it tastes on your pallet? Oh so delicious.

I'm just wondering by your judgment of how well I seem to be learning a piece (I know I'm excluding a lot of variables here but anyways)  
I’ve been working on the Rachmaninoff Prelude Nr 5 Op 23 for almost 6 months now and I seem to be able to work around it and play at about MM = 60 – 70.  
I’m still working on the 2nd page as it’s terribly difficult to get all the chords in the right progression.  Please note that the last repertoire I managed to learn for an exam was Beethoven’s Sonata Op 49 Nr 1 – youth’s sonata. So that’s a pretty big jump.

So umm how fast (or slow) am I progressing?

[mosis]

Good lord, Bernhard, I'm starting to get the impression that you are a machine. :p

You type huge posts at a time, and you've answered the same questions at least 3 times, yet you continue to inform us all. Thanks for that.

I still don't understand how I can learn my six pieces in 5 months, never mind about 3 months. I don't necessarily know exactly how to practice what, aside from the few bars for 20 minutes. I made a post in another thread that you detailed learning Satie's Gymnopedie. I pointed out that you were contradicting yourself about a point (or I was just confused). It'd be cool if you checked it out.

[CC]

You wouldn't, by any chance, have anything to do with Auger electron spectroscopy or transmission electron microscopy, would you?

That's me!  Have we met before?

[CC]

Although I am not there yet, conceptually, the reputed tremendous learning rates of famous pianists actually do have a logical foundation. And Bernard already said basically what I wanted to say (as usual).  But maybe I can look at it from a different angle.

Piano learning rate is what Physicists call non-linear. The more you learn, the faster you learn, and the more you memorize, the faster you memorize, and the faster you memorize, the better you memorize.  As I wrote in my book, this is the mathematical basis for the myth of "talented" vs "ordinary" students.  People just can't believe that they are the same persons who just happend to be on different non-linear paths because of the huge difference.  There are many similar examples in everyday life.  People just can't believe that, if you save $3000/yr into your IRA, delaying the starting of that IRA by just one year at age 20 can make a difference of several hundred thousand dollars to a million at retirement. And compounded earnings is only a mildly non-linear function.  Piano learning is highly nonlinear because of the large number of factors that come together to assist each other. For example, if you start young, your musical brain will also grow, adding another huge factor. Therefore, a dedicated full time pianist can achieve something astounding and magical compared to a part time pianist, without being any more talented initially.  It doesn't necessarily mean the IQ will increase, although the tendency is there; in fact the brain development in other areas (social, scientific) might be retarded. It is hard to argue this point because it is easier to believe that Mozart benefited from nonlinear learning than that he had a brain so much different from everyone else.  Then, why no more Mozarts since Chopin?  Blame it on Hanon and Czerny!

[xvimbi]

That's me!  Have we met before?

No, I don't think we have met. I am in a (very distantly) related field, X-ray crystallography. I was just wondering what type of research you did. Ah, the wonders of science search engines.

[bernhard]

I love analogies and poetry (the poetry sometimes)

How about this one Bernie?

Learning and mastering a piece is like aging a red or white wine.  It takes patience and "endurance" by the wine manufacturer as well as the fermentation process to produce some of the worlds most richest wines.

How it tastes on your pallet? Oh so delicious.

Yes, this is a very apt analogy.

However, even here there are some easily recognisable stages: you start with grapes. They are quite tasty on their own. You can eat them straight away as long as they are ripe. So a ripe grape (which takes time) is like the piece you have just learned. You can play the right notes at the right time. Most people (listeners and players alike) can (and should) be quite happy with a ripe bunch of grapes.

But you can go one step further and make grape juice. This will demand a bit more effort, but if the grapes were good, you will end up with some wonderful fresh, refreshing juice. This is the mastery stage. It will appeal to most people whose tastes are somewhat childlike: it’s sweet and it demands little effort to appreciate (you don’t have to chew thousand of grapes to get the same amount of juice).

But the process does not need to stop there. You can now ferment the grape juice into wine. But you must keep in mind two things: It is not a process that any person can do – you need specialised knowledge of the highest degree (quite different form picking ripe grapes or making grape juice). Start fooling around with the process and you will end up with vinegar. And wine is not to everyone’s taste. It is an acquired taste; something that only the connoisseurs will truly appreciate. Appreciating and learning to tell good from bad wines requires study and dedication.

And here is another interesting parallel: there is an intermediate period where the grape juice is no more grape juice and is not yet wine. Many pieces are like that: After you master them, there will be a stage where they are neither here nor there: they are not as nice as when you first mastered them, but they have not yet matured into aturly perfected performance. You may have heard the tale that Ashkenazy spent three years working on Chopin’s op. 10 no1 before playing it in concert. I assure you that it did not take him three years to make grape juice with that particular piece. However as he started making wine with it, he could not simply play it: it was not grape juice anymore and it was not wine yet.

Again, there is a definite moment you have wine. It is perfectly drinkable, it is very fruity and it is deliciously fresh. In Portugal they call it “vinho verde” – “green wine” – a wine that has not yet matured but it is perfectly drinkable. Many people (including me) love this type of wine.

Of course, you can keep your wine in the barrels for more time and keep maturing it. Red wine can stay there for several decades – if the original grape juice was good enough – White wine does not age well for so long. So again the analogy is very apt. Certain pieces are very fresh – salon music – but do not improve too much with age. Others can keep maturing forever. Yet others are only good consumed “green” or even as grape juice. Other pieces still are only good to make vinaigrette and serve as salad accompaniment (muzak).

The public also can be more or less sophisticated. I once went to a party and brought a bottle of a superb wine in my bag. I was about to produce it, when one of the hosts (the husband) poured himself some of the wine already on the table, and proceeded to my horror to complete the glass with coca-cola. Meanwhile his wife added water and sugar to hers stating loudly: “I love wine juice! It is the only way I find it palatable!”. Needless to say I brought my good wine home, back with me. This in music is represented by the likes of Maksim, Mylene Klaas, Alicia Woods. They are wine juice. You don’t need good wine to make wine juice. Any cheap wine will serve the purpose. Then you have Britney Spears and the pop crowd. That is wine mixed with coca cola. But why bother adding the wine at all? Keep to the coca cola  - which is exactly what pop ends up doing. No wine there at all.

So although there has been a lot said about musicality lately on the forum, a most important ingredient for musicality is simply good taste. Rather than worrying about how to develop musicality and how to imbue your interpretation with musicality, people should be concentrating on how to develop good taste to start with. Musicality will then be simply a natural consequence. If one has good musical taste, their playing cannot help but be highly musical. But if you only find wine palatable if it is mixed with sugar and water, no amount of instruction will help your interpretations. And how do you develop good taste? I guess this is a subject for a different thread.

I'm just wondering by your judgment of how well I seem to be learning a piece (I know I'm excluding a lot of variables here but anyways)  
I’ve been working on the Rachmaninoff Prelude Nr 5 Op 23 for almost 6 months now and I seem to be able to work around it and play at about MM = 60 – 70.  
I’m still working on the 2nd page as it’s terribly difficult to get all the chords in the right progression.  Please note that the last repertoire I managed to learn for an exam was Beethoven’s Sonata Op 49 Nr 1 – youth’s sonata. So that’s a pretty big jump.

So umm how fast (or slow) am I progressing?

You are progressing slowly (but that is not a problem – as long as you keep moving it does not matter how slow you travel, you will get there eventually). On the other hand. wouldn’t it be nice to have this piece under your fingers after 3 – 4 weeks, memorised and at the correct tempo at the grape juice stage, so that you could start thinking about making some good wine? It is perfectly possible if you are already at the level of Beethoven’s op. 49 no. 1 (and I trust your hands can manage the stretches).

So why is it taking you so long? I would have to have a detailed description of how exactly you are going about learning this piece, although I can predict a few of the strategies you are using (everyone uses them) that are not optimal.

Here is how I would teach it so that anyone who has been learning (with me) for 6 months – 1 year would be able to get grape juice out of it after 3 – 4 weeks.

Step 1: Make an outline of this piece. This means simplifying and reducing the pieces to its skeleton. I do that for my students, however this is a great opportunity for you, since doing outlines (you will have to do it by trial and error until you get the hang of it) is one of the greatest ways to get to know a piece back to front. You will need to decide all of the fingering in advance, so that you keep the original fingering in the outline (this should not be a problem since you already can play it). This way when you play the piece as originally written all of the movements and fingerings will already be ingrained.

Take the first bar. Get rid of the thirds in the right hand and the fourths in the LH and you have your outline.

Go through the whole piece reducing all octaves to either the top note or the bass note. In the second part do not play the arpeggios in the left hand, just the bass note. Don’t play the full chords on the RH, just the octave, or reduce it even further by plying just a single note (either the top one or the bottom one). Keep taking away layers and fillers until you are left with the bare essence of this piece. you get the idea

Write a score with this outline (keeping all of the original fingerings though). This may take you a couple of weeks of hard work at the score – but this is also practice – perhaps more important than what you do at the piano (by the way no one wants to do it – even though its benefits are staggering). Of course since I usually do all that for my students (in the beginning – later on they must do it themselves) it saves them a huge block of time.

This simplified version should be so easy that even a total beginner should be able to master it. So make it that easy: grade 1 easy.

You should be able to learn this outline in 2 – 3 sessions (20 minute sessions) at the most.

Now you can either go straight to the piece as originally written , or (which I recommend in this particular piece) you can write another score with a more complex outline, where you add one of the layers you subtracted.

You can keep adding layers to your outline until you have the music as originally written.

If you decide to go straight to the piece after mastering the basic outine, here is how I would go about it:

Step 2: fill in the outline and play the piece as originally written:

First break the piece into manageable passages. I believe that the suggestion below is manageable by anyone who – like yourself – has got to the level of playing op. 49 no. 1:

Practice session 1: Bars 1 – 9
Practice session 2: Bars 9 – 16 (bars 10 – 13 = bars 1 – 3)
Practice session 3: Bars 1 – 16
Practice session 4: Bars 16 – 24
Practice session 5: Bars 1 – 24
Practice session 6: Bars 24 – 32
Practice session 7: bars 1 – 32 (first part learned)

Practice session 8: bars 48 – 55 (keep working at bars 1 – 32: at this point this really means playing it and working on the musicality)
Practice session 9: Bars 55 – 62 (keep working on bars 1 – 32)
Practice session 10: bars 48 – 62 (keep working on bars 1 – 32)
Practice session 11: bars 48 – 69 (bars 62 – 69 = bars 17 – 24)
Practice session 12: bars 69 – 76
Practice session 13: bars 48 – 76
Practice session 14: bars 76 – 84
Practice session 15: bars 48 – 84 (third part learned)

Practice session 16: bars 32 – 36 (add first beat of bar 37 – keep working on the 1st and 2nd parts throughout the next practice sessions)
Practice session 17: bars 37 – 39 (add first beat of bar 40)
Practice session 18: bars 32 – 39 (add first beat of bar 40)
Practice session 19: bars 40  - 43 (add first beat of bar 44)
Practice session 20 : bars 32 – 43 (add first beat of bar 44)
Practice session 21 : bars 44 – 48 .
Practice session 22: bars 32 – 48.

Practice session 23: the whole piece.

Each of these practice sessions is about 20 minutes long. So you could learn this whole piece in about 23 days (a bit over three weeks) practising just 20 – 30 minutes a day.

It will probably  take even less than 23 days, since almost half of these 23 sessions are devoted to joining passages (e.g practice sessions 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 18, 20, 22, and 23).

What do you do during these twenty minutes? You do not just repeat blindly the passage of the practice session over and over hoping for the best. To start with they are probably too large to be tackled straight away. So you break them further (use the 7 repeat rule). You work with hands separate. You do rhythm variations. You do repeated note-groups (particularly appropriate for your difficulty in memorising chord progressions). In short you use all of the practice trickery I have described in over 2000 posts and Chang has described in his book. By the end of the session you should really have that passage learned (grapes stage).

Next day start by playing it. Can you do it? Probably not. So repeat the whole practice session you did the previous day. You will go back to your previous state of mastery in a fraction of the time, even though at the beginning the difficulty seems to be the same. You will be able to do it in 5 minutes instead of 20. So use the remainder of your practice session to tackle the next passage. On the 3rd day, you are going to spend the whole 20 minutes joining both passages, so go through the learning stage once again doing all the steps and not skipping any part of it. Again it will take you only a fraction of the time so you will have plenty of time left to work in seamlessly joining the passages. By then the passage is large enough for you to start working on the musicality of it.

By day 7, you will have worked on the first passages on seven practice sessions. By then you do not need to work on them anymore, just play through the first part. If there is any point that is giving you trouble, identify it and single it for special practice. Likely it will be just a few notes, so five minutes work on it should be all that you need.

In this piece most bars are similarly difficult. So I organised the learning of it from beginning to end. However, in pieces where there are clearly identifiable bars as particularly troublesome, start at those in the very first practice session, This way, by the time you learn the whole piece you will have practised that difficult section the most. Difficulty is usually personal, so it is really up to you to organise the learning of your piece in a way that is personally best suited to you.

In my teaching I can tell straightaway how to tailor the teaching strategy to the student. In a forum I can only point out general principles and give examples that may or may not be applicable to you. So take the ideas here as illustrations, and modify them to suit you personally.

[to be continued...]

[bernhard]

[continued from the previous post].

So you have worked for 20 – 30 minutes on your prelude. You still have the whole day free. So put in another 5 practice sessions. What should you do in these 5 extra practice sessions? New repertory of course. But not just any new repertory. Select pieces that will add to your main piece which is the Rach prelude. Here are 5 pieces that address similar technical problems, are worthwhile pieces in anyone’s repertory, and are easier (technically) than the prelude (in progressive order of difficulty):

1.      Prokofiev – Melody in Eb – Like the prelude this is in ABA form, but the other way around: large span arpeggios on the LH on the first and third part and chords in the second part – but much easier without all the skips.

2. Mendelssohn – Song without words op. 62 no. 3  (Funeral march) – addresses chord playing and skips although not as drastic as the ones in the prelude.

3. Alexander Tcherepenin – Bagatelle op. 5 no. 6 - – addresses fast arpeggios in the left hand but with a much smaller span than the arpeggios in the second part of the prelude.

4. Mendelssohn – Song without words op. 53 no. 3  – addresses fast arpeggios in the left hand with chords in the right (just like the second part of the prelude) but not as difficult.

5. Chopin – Polonaise in A (op. 40 no. 1). addresses chord playing and skips although not as drastic as the ones in the prelude.

These pieces are easier than the prelude, and yet use similar figurations. Moreover their character is musically very similar, so working on the musicality of these pieces will inform your work on the prelude as well.

However you may find these pieces – although easier than the prelude – still challenging. So here is another list of four worthwhile pieces that will pave the way to the prelude and yet are very easy:

1.      J. S. Bach (attrib.) – Musette – from the little Book of Anna Magdalen Bach – excellent for skips where both hands must jump together to a new location (as in the first part of the prelude).

2.      Robert Vandall – Prelude no. 15 in Cm  - the same sort of “staggered” chords as in the Rach, with a second section with LH hand arpeggios on a much more manageable span.

3.      Stephan Heller – Etude op. 45 no. 15 – Excellent for huge chords  and skipping between them.

4. Ludovico Einaudi: I giorni – especially good for large span arpeggios in the left hand and chords spaning a tenth. Musically this is of a very different character from the prelude though. This is minimalist, lyrical writing, more akin to new age.

Of course these pieces are just examples, there are thousands more out there. Your only limitation is how much repertory you know.

When I said that one could easily learn 2 pieces a month I was probably underestimating. Look above: you could master 10 pieces in a month! (maybe even more).


What are you still doing here? Go to the piano and try it out!

Best wishes,
Bernhard.

[bernhard]

Good lord, Bernhard, I'm starting to get the impression that you are a machine. :p

Actually I am a sensitive, macho guy. (A gay truck driver? )

You type huge posts at a time, and you've answered the same questions at least 3 times, yet you continue to inform us all. Thanks for that.

Mostly because people keep asking the same questions instead of going to the piano to try out the answers. As a rule people do not want solutions, they want support.

I still don't understand how I can learn my six pieces in 5 months, never mind about 3 months. I don't necessarily know exactly how to practice what, aside from the few bars for 20 minutes. I made a post in another thread that you detailed learning Satie's Gymnopedie. I pointed out that you were contradicting yourself about a point (or I was just confused). It'd be cool if you checked it out.

Contradiction? Moi? (can you post the thread?)

I did not say you could learn your six pieces in 3 – 5 months (what are they, by the way?). Maybe it will take you 5 years to learn them. What I said is that it was a waste of time to learn only 6 pieces in 5 years, when you could learn another 94 at the same time.

There are pieces that are so difficult that they may take a couple of years to just get under the fingers. (This however is as much a statement on the present condition of one’s technique as it is on the difficulty of a piece).

The point I keep making is that a lot of students limit themselves unnecessarily. They become obsessed with a couple of pieces and spend years not being able to play them. In the UK a lot of students will just do the required three pieces a year for their exams. Exams become the main goal of piano study. This is a complete distortion. Other students have no clue about what they want to learn. Their next piece is whatever their teacher decides they should learn. This baffles me. Even here in the forum (where people are supposedly interested in all things piano) you keep getting requests for what to learn next? Although I have posted list after list of repertory, what does my opinion matter? I expect my students to choose what they want to learn. If they don’t they will end up  learning what I want to learn. My job is really to give them the resources to learn their choice of pieces.

This is a particularly fortunate era in terms of repertory choice: you can buy CDs of most composers complete works for piano, and many of the labels doing this sort of CD are very cheap (Naxos, Regis, etc.).

When I was learning the piano there was no such facility. The records of classical music were few and were restricted only to the more famous repertory. If you want to investigate repertory you either had to ask your teacher to play it for you (which my teachers refused “so as not to influence” my interpretation – what a crock of potatoes!), or you had to sight read through it. Music scores were nowhere near as varied as today. It is just amazing how much available repertory there is out there, most of it for free (both the sheet music and the midifiles). So really there is no excuse not to play a huge diversity of music.

Best wishes,
Bernhard.

[bernhard]

Piano learning rate is what Physicists call non-linear. The more you learn, the faster you learn, and the more you memorize, the faster you memorize, and the faster you memorize, the better you memorize.  

This is very true. And of course the downside of it is that progress is never gradual. Rather one progresses by jumps. So any piano student must learn to accept that there will be times when nothing seems to be happening and s/he must not get discouraged and just keep working at it, trusting that when progress eventually come it will be sudden swift andusually surpass one's wildest expectations.

Best wishes,
Bernhard.

[bernhard]

I made a post in another thread that you detailed learning Satie's Gymnopedie. I pointed out that you were contradicting yourself about a point (or I was just confused). It'd be cool if you checked it out.

I have just answered your post here:

https://www.pianoforum.net/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?board=stud;action=display;num=1096969591;start=0

Best wishes,
Bernhard.

[Spatula]

Sorry it took me a while to find this thread because this forum is not well organized and takes time to surf around.

In my book, my intention is to convey the idea that from finish to recital, you use (ideally, as a goal) 10% of time to "get the notes under your fingers" and 90% to music mastery.  My book is intended mostly for the first 10% and a slight excursion into the remaining 90%, which I do not deal with to any great extent -- that is where a good teacher is necessary, difficult to write in a book, I don't have the experience or material, and is not the main thrust of my book. Although I do emphasize musicality and talk about it in general terms in my book, the  detailed music lessons must be learned with each specific lesson piece. See my post about learning musicality from the great composers.

So to be clear and concise, Dr. Chang, your book focuses on the 10% of getting to know where to put your hands in what time am I correct?

Now here is something that you or Bernhard may reply to.  I wouldn't be surprised if it was brought up numerous times before but for my sake and my piano career's sake:

The Ability to Stay Focused?

I’ve done some reading through Chang’s piano notes and have attempted to reverse the intuitive method that many students follow.  However even with memorizing the music and not where the hands go next for a piece, I’m still unable to focus 100% of my undivided attention to just only the music.  I might be able to do this for a few bars, and lately I have only been practicing a few bars instead of a whole section.  I’ve only recently looked at his methods and I understand it will take years to fully unlock all the essential aspects of piano in his book.  

I’m still very unsure on how to start up my practice sessions because I require some finger warm up, so I always start with scales, then four note chords, then arpeggios, then dominant or diminished 7th chords, then finishing with chromatic scales.  I cannot immediately jump into the Fantasie Impromptu without proper hand warm ups or else my piece will suffer.  I know it’s true that just right before the performance it’s a do or die situation.  You either will start the piece well, or you’ll screw it up.  

The Hanon exercises have also come to a full halt and the only technique I’m practicing are those conservative and proper technique outlined in the second paragraph.  I’m also starting to play with hands separated to really learn what the piece is like.  What I want any of you reading this to do is go to your piano and take out your sheet music for your current repertoire you’re doing.  Now play hands together at tempo or slower.  

Now take the sheet music away from you and only play the left hand.  I’m very sure that close to 100% of all of you have recognized this before: both hands depend on each other to “queue” which hand will play the next part.  When we play hands together, the left hand will observe what the right hand is doing (actually the right side of the brain with observe the left lobe), and will know when to come it.

Is it true that playing with just one hand without sheet music really tests to see if your hands and brains are synchronized so well and that your brain and hands know how to respond to music?

Another question is how do you know when you’re just moving your hands to the right position but not observing the music you’re producing?  What sort of brain techniques can be used to maximize both what your brain is absorbing without mindlessly droning on the keyboard?  I know this has been discussed but I’m extremely frustrated.  

And the question that I ask all pianists and musicians is:
Are you consistently and always counting the beat along with what you are playing?  Does this always need to occur even though your hands know the tempo without a mental metronome?  Do all professional pianists count in their head all the time?

Bernhard and Chang, do you always keep a mental metronome in your head?  I know this helps tremendously with sight reading a first time piece, but I find it’s distracting to my brain that trying to compute when and where certain connotations of expression and feeling in the music.  I find that when I count, my playing becomes extremely mechanical like a robot.

What are your thoughts?

Thank you

[bernhard]

Success! we manage to thoroughly confuse you!

There are too many questions there and they are far too general. I don't know even where to begin.

I may try to answer some of it next weekend when I will have more time.

In the meantime, have a look here for the warmup question:

https://www.pianoforum.net/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?board=perf;action=display;num=1079396473;start=7

Best wishes,
Bernhard

[Spatula]

Success! we manage to thoroughly confuse you!

There are too many questions there and they are far too general. I don't know even where to begin.

I may try to answer some of it next weekend when I will have more time.

In the meantime, have a look here for the warmup question:

https://www.pianoforum.net/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?board=perf;action=display;num=1079396473;start=7

Best wishes,
Bernhard

Looks like I managed to confuse YOU!  

[bernhard]

These days if you are not confused it is probably because you are not thinking clearly.

[xvimbi]

These days if you are not confused it is probably because you are not thinking clearly.

Ha! This is a rendition of one of my favorite quotes by Niels Bohr: "If you don't get dizzy when you think about quantum mechanics, you haven't understood it."

This quote applies to a lot of complicated subjects  

[CC]

Spatula:  I don't consciously count.  Counting is part of rhythm which is a separate part of music (from pitch, dynamics, etc). A beginner may need to count, but by novice level you are not expected to be counting but using rhythm, which is mostly internal and almost automatic. If you are always counting, that will detract from the music and give you all kinds of trouble.  Some teachers will ask you to count when your rhythm or timing is wrong, just so that they can correct you.  That doesn't mean that after you get it right, you still need to count.  That's like walking on crutches all your life because at one time you broke your leg and needed them.  Rhythm is not an easy thing to define, and I am still struggling to find a good definition because my book is based of definitions as far as possible -- definitions are what allow us to discuss complex topics without confusion and in a precise, compact way so we don't waste time or misunderstand each other.  You will notice that, after reading my book, you can discuss certain complex topics very efficiently and even get to some conclusions quickly without going in circles.  Abby Whitesides wrote that rhythm is the most important element of music, yet never succeeded in defining it anywhere in her book.  But then, she never had a good scientific education.

The counting that I do, if I need it, is with the help of the metronome. By now, I am immunized against my own errors.  Even if my counting is wrong, after 45 years of practice, I wouldn't detect my error in counting, so it is no use. I use the metronome as briefly as possible just to tell me where and by how much I am off.  Then I correct it and never need the metronome again.  "BUT", you might say, what if I have poor rhythm?  That's where my definition of rhythm comes in. W/o a good definition, it is difficult to pin down what you mean by poor rhythm.  Let's take a concrete case:  ME.  I also have poor rhythm; that's why I am a poor dancer.  After some analysis, I have concluded that I have poor rhythm because I confuse pitch and timing. Rhythm is not only timing and repetition, but also emphasizing certain beats.  At the same time, the pitch is going all over the place.  At the same time, the dynamics are changing, loud, soft, emotional, etc. I cannot always keep these things separate. So if there is a high, important note at a point where the rhythm is not accented, I sometimes shift the rhythm to an accent and then get lost because I am now off and don't know how to get back.

Clearly, rhythm must be learned and practiced like anything else.  People with good rhythm lucked out at some time when young, succeeded in catching rhythm, enjoyed it, so kept using it all the time, thus inadvertently practicing it like crazy -- that's why they are good.  Those with poor rhythm never caught on, and never practiced it because it is something that doesn't work so you naturally never practice it. So there is this unstable equilibrium, just like memorizers and sight readers; you tend to become very good or very bad at it.  So for those who need to practice timing, what can you do?  The metronome, of course.  But those with poor timing have a terrible time using the metronome. Very often, no matter how hard they try, they can't keep time with it. Fortunately, there may be a solution for the majority of cases, because this situation is like playing Bach:  if you don't know how to practice Bach, you can practice one Invention for years and never really play it well.  That, of course, tells us how to solve the metronome problem (remember, I am a career problem solver).

There are 2 common reasons why you can't play with metronome. It is either (1) lack of practice or (2) over-use.  If (1), keep practicing and it will come.  The way to practice is to do it in short spurts (sound familiar?).  If you are REALLY poor with the metronome, short means less than a minute.  Then QUIT!! Because if you do any longer, you will worsen the disease, and you will only increase your level of frustration. Even metronome use has its "Post Practice Improvement (sound familiar? - see link below), so do it every day, just a little, same or similar place, and see if you improve from day to day. Do not expect any progress during practice because, if you do, you will become frustrated.  As you improve from day to day, start increasing the time you use, but never longer than you need.  I use metronome  only for a few minutes here and there, just to tell me where I am wrong, then I shut it off -- too much interference with my playing.  Never play for long periods with the metronome like an accompaniment because that will always lead to one disaster or another, and will lead to problem (2).  Your brain  doesn't like constant, incessant, ticks -- that's the basis of "Chinese Torture".  Your brain will either rebel or go crazy. It can rebel in many ways, depending on which of your faculties is fatigued.  This is why many metronomes have flashing lights. When your auditory system is fatigued and rebelling, you can use the metronome a little longer by switching to the visual system.  But no one should EVER abuse their brains like that.

[namui]

After almost a year of reading, searching, scanning posts in this forum, I found this thread to be the best.

Like it so much, 18 "useful" printed pages in 3 days!!

namui

[mound]

After almost a year of reading, searching, scanning posts in this forum, I found this thread to be the best.

Great, I'm glad I started it! I had debated with myself posting the initial question or not.

I just returned from a weekend with the family, I need to digest the above responses a bit before I write a response.

-Paul

[mound]

Thank you all for your interest in this thread. So much food for thought, such a great resource you all are. Lets see, how to respond. Bits and pieces I guess.

First, Dr. Chang:

Chang: My book is intended mostly for the first 10% and a slight excursion into the remaining 90%, which I do not deal with to any great extent -- that is where a good teacher is necessary, difficult to write in a book, I don't have the experience or material, and is not the main thrust of my book.

I did actually get that much, it's even stated in your book. Probably why your book is called "Fundamentals of Piano Practice" not "Performance". Because I have drawn my own parallels between what I have read from yourself and Bernhard, I think I lumped you two together as the focus of my question, and in a sense, that lumping remains, but I definitely was more intriqued by Bernhard's statements, because he actually is a piano teacher. (Not that you aren't a teacher in a sense, your book seems to be reaching far, but you don't deal with students on a daily basis as Bernhard does.)

Thank you though for your thoughtful responses.

Chang: Your post is a good one, since people need some kind of benchmark to say what is "mastered", but more importantly how to acquire a repertoire and what that repertoire might look like (how much is performable on demand?).

Thank you. I think in a sense, that distinction was the heart of my question. Acquisition of repertoir vs. "what it looks like and how performable it is." Bernhard gets to this later, as will I.

Chang: It will take an "average student", with  a good teacher, about 1 year to learn a piece at his level to performance level. It will take 2-3 months to get all the technical stuff down (this is larger than the objective of 10%= 1.2 months, but most students try to reach above their level).  This "technical stuff" is what my book is all about. It will then take another 6-7 months of "musicality" study to get it up to level of 1st auditions (let's say this is a piano competition). One year after starting, they are ready for finals.

This sounds to be more in line with my experience. Though that is taking into consideration use of the "intuitive method" of learning as you describe in the beginning of your book.

Chang: I am amazed at the wide range of subjects that Bernhard is familiar with

As is most everybody on this forum it seems. I surely hope he publishes a book at some point that puts it all together in an easy to navigate form!

Chang: by the way, our daughters averaged about 45 min practice/day, 6 d/wk. If they had 2-3 hrs/d, they could conceivably more than double their production of 4-8 pieces/yr.

That makes sense to me. One thing I have wondered, and I'm sure others do as well, is what is YOUR experience with piano? What does your repertoir look like and how would you rate your performance abilities? Or are you strictly publshing your thoughts as a scientist whom has observed the learning process of others? (your daughters)

Spatula: Bernhard is very knowlegible about life, like where to get the cheapest bananas on sale.

LOL. I love that he of course had a link to offer

Chang: This is demonstrated routinely  in international music competitions in which contestants are given music they had never seen or heard before and asked to perform in couple weeks.  Apparently most contestants succeed, and the judgement is not on whether they mastered it, but on the musical presentation because "mastery" is apparently a given

This "mastery" goes beyond any given piece. This demonstrates mastery of the piano and all skills associated with it. But if this defines the term "master" how can we then apply the same term the bits and pieces of repertoir which may or may not improve based on technical skills learned from subsequent repertoir? Again, semantics.

Now, on to Bernhard's responses.

Yes, you are missing a few things.

Well, I figured as much

First, I have described in another post three different levels a student can be in regards to a piece. (learned.... mastered... Omniscience...

Ok, yes, I do actually recall reading this outlined in another post and it clearly defines the terms in so far as technical execution. And that makes perfect sense.

(If music was a martial art, this would be the "black belt" level. It is also the level where you finally are ready to start really learning the piece).

I think in almost all of my essays for a rank advancement in my Taekwondo study I have drawn these parallels between music and Taekwondo and have made just that point. In theory, a 1st degree black belt would be at the "Omniscience" level with regards to forms and other technical skills they had to learn to earn their 1st black belt, but in reality this never seems the case. The forms still ends up getting forgotten when new material is learned, and then relearned (quickly) in order to take the next advancement test. That's because too many folks don't practice their forms every day. That is NOT the case however with my "Master" who is clearly at the "Omniscience" stage with regards to all of the Taekwondo curriculum. Perhaps this is why I have trouble applying the term "master" to piano when in fact we're talking about a piece merely having been "learned" I myself have, according to your definition of "master", mastered all of my forms and techniques required of me for my current degree level in Taekwondo, but I am absolutely not a "master" and wouldn't be considered one until at least 5th degree (technically), as well, I'd have to be running my own school.

Someone who got to the level where they can play the Chopin etudes should be able to master (in the sense above) the easier preludes (no. 4, no. 7, no. 20) in about twenty minutes.

In terms of your definitions above, I would agree with this. Well almost. Somebody at the level of the Chopin etudes, will (or should) have the technical facility developed, as well as the advanced sight reading and pattern recognition to in fact get through and "learn" a prelude quickly. But tomorrow, will they be able to sit down and play it off the cuff perfectly? If that is in fact possible, I surely look forward to the day when I can pull that off.

No piece is ever mastered in the sense you describe.

I'm glad you agree with that. Again, the difference is semantics.

In fact it is one of the beauties of the really superlative repertory that a lifetime will not be enough to explore all of its possibilities

That's the beauty of music in any form.

So although superficially the methods of practice I use and suggest people to try, would seem to address mostly technique, I actually strongly pressure my students to start working on musicality as soon as the passage they are working on is large enough to allow it - that is, I do not believe that you should learn all the right notes at the right time and only then start working on musicality - quite the contrary, from the very beginning we should have a musical concept that guides one’s practice.

Well I'm glad you said that. Have you made that statement elsewhere in these forums? I absolutely agree with you, and I'm sure my teacher would as well. I may have only  had a new piece for a week, and I'll come to a lesson, maybe only having worked on an 8 bar section or whatnot, and he immediately begins going to the expression, intent, articulation and all things "musical". It doesn't matter to him that I may not quite have all the notes down, or even the majority of the piece in my head, the musical expression becomes a focus of the lession immediately, as he knows that I do my homework and he doesn't have to worry about going over that stuff with me.

We spend a lot of time working on the score, listening to CDs of several pianists and getting thoroughly acquainted with the piece before practising it, in short, I believe in delaying the actual practice at the piano until you have some sort of musical concept (even though you may change it later).

I have in fact seen you make statements to this elsewhere in these forums, and I agree with it. I always seek out recordings of the pieces I'm learning or hope to learn. In fact when I was working on the Bach 2pt Invention in C, I made a CD of 5 different versions of it, all were astonishingly different in their articulation, phrasing and ornamentation. We listened and discussed the differences. I also encourage my teacher to help me with some harmonic analysis and other structural type work to get his thoughts, as I'm not sure he's used to working on this level with his other students. He said to me "I wish all my students were so proactive."

I agree with you. However in my experience, the majority of students (at least the majority of my students) difficulty does not lie in the musical aspect, but in exactly those areas that you find easy: memorising (not such a big problem there); sight-reading (a major problem); motor co-ordination (major problem), truly understanding harmony and what "meaning of music" actually means (again the problem is not understanding but simply knowing all the chords and their voicings and different functions). So, to me a piece is indeed "mastered" once all that homework has been done. And of course you are completely right, this is where the real work begins.

 


Interesting.. I definitely am asking my questions from "my perspective" and not being a teacher, I don't tend to see what kind of perspective others come to this with and sometimes I think I have unrealistic expecations of others. That is one of the reasons I like reading these forums, as I do hope to teach music one day. (I am tired of writing software.) Memorizing has just been a purely natural byproduct of my learning process (even though I'm learning that my learning process can be significantly optimized.) My teacher once commented when I had a total "brain fart" during a lesson that "I'm glad you messed that up, I was beginning to think you weren't human"  (not patting myself on the back or anything, I'm not talking about musical quality, purely the memorization.) Sight reading for me isn't top notch, but it's getting better every day. The quick memorization tends to put a damper on it I think, but I'm getting better at quickly recognizing patterns and translating them to the keys. Motor coordination has always been pretty simple for me. Probably because I am a martial artist, probably also because I have experience with playing other instruments (bass and some latin percussion) and maybe, maybe that I can type 120+ words a minute? Though I'm not sure that parallel can be drawn for anything other than dexterity in my digits. Truly understanding harmony.. well, I don't claim to be an expert, I have alot to learn, but I do try to learn and explore as much as time permits. That will come with time.

But you would perhaps be surprised how difficult it is to get to this stage of "homework done" for the majority of students

I guess so!

Then as far as I am concerned you have mastered the waltz (you may even be at the omniscient stage!).

Maybe I should actually not touch that piece for the next year to see if this is true. I let a couple months go once and it was still there. But again, and it's my natural inclination to put the term "mastered" in a higher light than we are using for discussion here, I know there is more within me that hasn't come out in performance of that piece.

Now once you spend one (or two) years exploring all the angles of the first inventions and you proceed to learn the second, do you think it is going to take as long? I doubt very much. And when you move to the WTC again it will take a fraction of the time it would have taken had your teacher not spent so much time on the first invention.  

Definitely not, and I am beginning to see that this is really the heart of what you and Chang speak of in terms of a steadilly built upon foundation, one piece leading to the next. I am sure the next invention will get to the level the first is at now, MUCH faster because of the contextual knowledge I now have as well as the physically understanding of how to play baroque music (as opposed to all legato like Chopin)

Yet, the same Kirkpatrick also wrote that anyone who had thoroughly mastered all aspects of five or six of Scarlatti’s sonatas would find that the remaining ones would come easily

I am still very much a beginner in development of a repertory, and I would love to perhaps learn all of Chopin's Nocturnes to put this to the test. (because of their difficulty or virtuosic level? no, purely because there's not one that I don't love listening to.)

When I say that anyone can learn two pieces a month, I do not mean by that all the possible aspects of a piece. I mean that the piece is at a stage where you can perform it with confidence: all the right notes in the right times, everything memorised, and a reasonable interpretation.

I guess then that my practice regime still needs to be optimized.. I am, every day (these days) conscious of the processes for learning that you and Chang have outlined, It will I'm sure take time to "learn the method" though so I can't expect too much too soon. As I think you are aware, I'm trying to learn these methods on Ernesto Lecuena's "Malaguena", I'm trying to learn it quickly so that I can perform it for my grandmother who sadly only has a couple months to live. I am a bit discouraged though because while it is coming together, and I am conscious of the "7 times/20 minutes" and "practice speed first" and "parallel sets" and all the other good stuff, I don't honestly think it's coming together much faster than any pieces I've learned using what Chang describes as the "intuitive method". Maybe it is, maybe I'm just not seeing it. Maybe it's because it's a more complex piece than I'm used to.

Andras Schiff recently issued a new CD of the Goldberg variations since he was dissatisfied with his previous CD of them issued some 20 years earlier (if I’m not mistaken).

Funny I think my teacher just mentioned that a few weeks ago in the context of a similar discussion.

So I see no contradiction in my claim and yours. What I am saying is that one should try to learn a piece in the least amount of time using the most efficient methods, so that one can start playing it and exploring its musicality as soon as possible.

Gotcha. we agree.

(to be continued..)

[mound]

Both are equally important. Especially in the beginning you want to have as much repertory as you can manage for several reasons:
1. I do not believe in technical exercises. I teach technique from pieces. This means that in order to tackle a diverse number of technical problems you need a diversity of repertory.

You and my teacher agree. I've never once been assigned any technical exercises other than scales and arpeggios, and that's for learning them and getting arm weight and relaxation down. I spend 5-10 minutes on them a day in varying rhythmic variety.

2. Beginners and intermediates would never survive the boredom of working on a single piece for one year. Most beginners and intermediates have not yet developed the necessary understanding required for this sort of intensive work. All they want is to play something different from what they did last week (this is really a cultural problem - it stems from a society that encourages limitless consumption and who demands new things all the time).

I think I've kinda created a world for myself where this isn't true. Perhaps because I am unfortuantely becoming quite jaded with the overall attitude I see in society these days (that's another thread and forum entirely.) My love of music combined with the focus and LONG term path of my martial arts study I think has provided me, as a beginner piano student, with the mentality of an advanced student. And now that I think about this some of the comments my teacher has made to me in the past that I've just kinda shrugged off (because of my humility) are making a bit more sense. Perhaps this is why I have the desire to be a music teacher myself some day.

3. It motivates the student if he is able to play several pieces, instead of just one. If he performs for friends and family, it relieves the boredom of the friends and family who otherwise would have to listen to the same piece over and over again.

Screw them! Just kidding.. I can agree with that! I am a perfectionist though, for whatever reasons, perhaps to a fault. Lately though I am getting better at, and having a deeper appreciation for the benefits of learning several pieces at once.

Yes, you are making perfect sense. However your arguments refer to a more advanced student.

I'm glad I'm making sense. I'm not an advanced student though, I guess I have the mentality of one though which perhaps is the root of many of my questions.

Also, if you had all the notes of the 2 voice invention after 2 weeks, you are doing very well. The typical student having one lesson per week and not practising in between lessons could well spend one year to learn (badly) just a few bars of the same invention.

God it must be frustrating for you to have students like that. (I wouldn't expect you did, having read your stringent requirements for your students.) If I were a teacher and I had a student who didn't practice between lessons, I'd drop them as a student. anyway.. Actually it was probably 3 weeks. In fact, now that I think of it, I'm just realizing this now, the process I used to tackle that was pretty much exactly as you and Chang have described. Since each hand is a single note melody.. yes, in fact this is how I learned it.. It's not how I've learned other pieces but that is how I put this one together. I hadn't even been aware of either of you at that point though. Interesting.. I could play each hand from memory seperately and pretty briskly, probably after 3 or 4 days for each hand.. It took me probably 2 weeks to be able to do hands together and then probably 2 months to make it sound Barogue rather than as if I were playing Chopin and then, well, to this day I'm exploring articulation and expression with it.

You are talking from your perspective: a talented student who practises hard (perhaps too hard).

Yeah, I picked up on that already. It's funny you say "perhaps too hard" - I think you might be right, well, no, not "too hard" but not quite as "planned and optimized" as it could be. I schedule myself 2 hours every morning. Sometimes I do another hour at night. For example, this morning, I put in my two hour practice. I decided I was going to be acutly aware of only your "7 times/20 minutes" aspect of practice. This was my first practice consciously aware of this approach. It was very clear to me that today I made more progress than I did yesterday, only because I didn't allow myself to keep practicing something I had finished learning today. I literally counted outloud to seven with each iteration, I was picking right sized chunks I think because it never took me more than seven tries to get it down. Then I stopped and moved on to the next section. Exactly as you've described. I am absolutely sure that before today, I have never been conscious of that "learned limit", and as such, have repeated things, probably, oh man, 100 times give or take before moving on because I feared stopping if I thought I'd have to re-learn it tomorrow. But the forget and re-learn is the whole point! The parallel is Chang's "Post Practice Learning".

Wow.. I'm starting to see what this is all about. My practice has been dedicated, consistent and focused, but not optimized. I'm not sure Chang's book articulates this "7/20" concept, at least that's not what I took from it (my bad??) - I would work something, one hand until fatique, other hand until fatique, repeating fast sets, which well could be good, but I would do that indefinitely, until I decided it was time for another chunk. Long past the point that I could repeat it 7 times.  What are your thoughts on this Dr. Chang? On how long you should keep at these fast sets (parallel or serial? Did I miss it in your book or is this a definining characteristic of the method Bernhard presents that is missing from yours?)

This is of course not the end goal. That is the first step on a very long journey, without which you will never arrive at your destination.

Honestly I have no destination. This is a tenet I've taken and discussed at length in my Taekwondo testing essays. It's the path that's important, with lots of short term goals defining the stakes in the ground along the way. If I ever "am done" then I might as well be dead. (I know Bernhard has said repeatedly "your only limitation is death")


(to be continued..)

[mound]

(skipping down to your other replies.. not sure if I even need to, I think my writing this has flipped the switch on for all the lightbulbs in my head that needed to be turned on by this thread, but what the heck..)

But how many pianists actually have a plan? How many sit down and decide what is it that they are going to learn for the next five years, and organise their learning on a daily basis, setting short, middle and long term goals?

It's interesting you say that. I don't have a plan. Well, the only plan, actually, that I've set for myself is:

1. Study jazz harmony for the next year while my classical study prepares my technique, and then find a jazz teacher. (having done as much homework as I could before wasting his time)

I don't however plan to stop studying classical with a teacher, but I have not even considered a plan for that. I'm learning Malaguena now because I requested it, but I requested it because I want to perform it for my grandma. My teacher has given me scores to two Chopin Nocturnes because I requested them after hearing them, but I have not yet begun them. Other than that, my Bach studies came about because he said he'd be remiss if he didn't teach it to me, but I have no idea where we're headed repertoir wise, I kinda thought, like any teacher, the path was for him to define, a student not knowing what they don't know.

Piano playing should be "free" and follow the pianist’s whims - and all the rubbish that comes with this package.

It's my desire for that freedom that puts jazz study in my plan. (after all, I've been playing jazzy rock and fusion electric bass for the last 10 years, I do, and will always love to "throw it down") - it's the discipline of classical that draws me to it.

I met in my life many students (and teachers who approved of such idiocy) who would spend 3 or 4 hours in the morning just practising the C major scale (or some other scale) up and down the piano over four octaves. Some would even read the newspapers or watch TV while doing that.

Was it Einstein who said something like "Insanity is repeating the same thing expecting a different result"

Imagine that after one year of learning the piano all you could play was the Chopin Waltz in Am you mentioned before. I don’t know about you, but if I was a beginner I would feel pretty disheartened

So would I. My repertory isn't much larger than that, I have been studying piano for 1 year this month. (as I said, I am a beginner). I can, and have, performd the following pieces:

Chopin Prelude in Emin
Chopin Waltz in Amin (op. posth)
Schumann Knight Rupert (at speed)
Bach 2pt Invention in C

some other pedagogical repertory, like "A Little Jazz Waltz" I think it was called.. other beginner stuff and some jazz improvisation which I actually did quite well at my first recital. As you can see, this list doesn't even come close to some of the lists I've seen you post as representative of your 1 year students. That in mind, and knowing my dedication and focus, is one of the things that prompted my posting this thread, thinking "how the hell can that be??" However, I'm pretty sure those are all very deeply ingrained in my head, and I could perform them at any time with no preparation. This in contrast to a Chopin Mazurka (the opus number escapes me) which I learned, but have forgotten and some of the other simpler pedagogical stuff that I learned and have forgotten because I didn't give them the same kind of time.) I'm sure that list would be quite a bit larger if I didn't take so much time on the artistry side of them (and had more optimized practice habits I am now learning) but if that were the case, its not likely I could perform them all with no perparation.

Chang: Piano learning rate is what Physicists call non-linear. The more you learn, the faster you learn, and the more you memorize, the faster you memorize, and the faster you memorize, the better you memorize.  As I wrote in my book, this is the mathematical basis for the myth of "talented" vs "ordinary" students.

I think I'm beginning to see and internalize this. Again, there is the same parallel in martial arts. I've learned black belt forms in a fraction of the time it took to learn the first yellow belt form, because so much of the technical skill and understanding of what a form represents, is already well established.

It doesn't necessarily mean the IQ will increase, although the tendency is there; in fact the brain development in other areas (social, scientific) might be retarded.

This is interesting to me as well. I didn't start martial arts or piano until I was an adult (not counting the 4 years of Suzuki method on piano when I was 4 years old that I have completely forgotten about.. or did I?) - I believe I am much "brighter" than I was before I studied this stuff. Quicker, more focused, learn new things faster etc..

Then, why no more Mozarts since Chopin?  Blame it on Hanon and Czerny!

No, blame it on TV, Playstation and parents who put DVD players in the back seats of their SUV's to further prevent their kids from exercising their brains in the first place.  (sorry, rant)

Ok, this post is plenty long..

Thank you!
-Paul

[Spatula]

(skipping down to your other replies.. not sure if I even need to, I think my writing this has flipped the switch on for all the lightbulbs in my head that needed to be turned on by this thread, but what the heck..) No, blame it on TV, Playstation and parents who put DVD players in the back seats of their SUV's to further prevent their kids from exercising their brains in the first place.  (sorry, rant)

Ok, this post is plenty long..

Thank you!
-Paul

DVD players in automobiles are car accidents waiting to happen, no matter where the screen is.  

[Spatula]

Bernie and CC, do you guys actually know each other besides a distant internet or professional piano relationship (for example reading a book by CC and "knowing" him) through that?

Or are you friends? piano practice buddies? the silent guy next door? bloody thristy rivals?

Have you guys met face to face and shook hands and give the european cheek kiss?  I don't know.

Enlighten the kitchen utensil for it is grasping for knowledge, that's why I go to College? !  

[CC]

Bernie and CC, do you guys actually know each other besides a distant internet or professional piano relationship (for example reading a book by CC and "knowing" him) through that?

Or are you friends? piano practice buddies? the silent guy next door? bloody thristy rivals?

Have you guys met face to face and shook hands and give the european cheek kiss?  I don't know.<<<

Good question!  I was wondering my self.  I first encountered Bernard a few weeks ago when I came on this forum, and was astounded to read his stuff, because unlike any other posts, there wasn't a single thing I could object to.  I know nothing about him except what I read in these couple weeks here.  He is only one of about 3 people I have met on the piano discussions who can't seem to say anything wrong, and has an answer to everything.  Unbelievable. Why? Because it validates what I had been struggling to write correctly all these years.  A large part of that validity comes from the fact that we had never communicated before. Unless I got it right, the chances of us both being wrong in exactly the same way is basically zero.

[Spatula]

[continued from the previous post].



3.      Stephan Heller – Etude op. 45 no. 15 – Excellent for huge chords  and skipping between them.



Of course these pieces are just examples, there are thousands more out there. Your only limitation is how much repertory you know.

When I said that one could easily learn 2 pieces a month I was probably underestimating. Look above: you could master 10 pieces in a month! (maybe even more).


What are you still doing here? Go to the piano and try it out!

Best wishes,
Bernhard.

Yes, I’ve learned the Heller study Nr 15. Op 45 for my Grade 8 exam along with the Beethoven piece.  As a matter of fact, I just took out that sheet music for the first time in three years this morning right before I left for work.  It’s kind of funny because I only had five minutes before I left.  So as I was sight reading, I somehow still managed to remember where my hands were to go in a general direction!  Of course there was a few missed notes and wrong ones, and I played at half tempo.  But more importantly was proving that even leaving something in the dust for three years, it still was grape juice.

[Spatula]

Bernie and CC, do you guys actually know each other besides a distant internet or professional piano relationship (for example reading a book by CC and "knowing" him) through that?

Or are you friends? piano practice buddies? the silent guy next door? bloody thristy rivals?

Have you guys met face to face and shook hands and give the european cheek kiss?  I don't know.<<<

Good question!  I was wondering my self.  I first encountered Bernard a few weeks ago when I came on this forum, and was astounded to read his stuff, because unlike any other posts, there wasn't a single thing I could object to.  I know nothing about him except what I read in these couple weeks here.  He is only one of about 3 people I have met on the piano discussions who can't seem to say anything wrong, and has an answer to everything.  Unbelievable. Why? Because it validates what I had been struggling to write correctly all these years.  A large part of that validity comes from the fact that we had never communicated before. Unless I got it right, the chances of us both being wrong in exactly the same way is basically zero.

I remeber reading your introduction on Fundamentals for Piano Practice and it said somewhere about finger independance. I know that you have stated virtuosity is not so much in the fingers as in the mind, but just dealing with finger independance, are you talking about COMPLETE independance or just slight independance?

Bernhard has discussed before that Complete independance cannot be achieved due the the natural anatomy of the human hand and was saying how Hanons are impractical for this type of independance.

Can you please clarify what type of independance you are addressing?  

[mosis]

This thread and the "Bernhard method" thread should be merged. That would be *** amazing.

Chang, you mentioned that Bernhard is one of three people you've met that you can't disagree with. Not that I'm doubting you or Bernhard, but who are these other two people, and where can I find any information about what methods they teach?

[mosis]

Bernhard, there is yet one more thing I must ask you in regards to mastering a piece.

When you say "On day x, if you play the piece for the first time and it is mastered, then you no longer need to practice that piece again. You just need to play it regularly."

What is mastered?

Is it every single note correct? What if you play 2 or 3 times absolutely perfectly, but on the fourth run through, you make ONE slight, unnoticeable, slip-of-the-finger or lapse-in-memory error? What if you then continue and you play 5, 6, 7, 8 times absolutely perfectly, and maybe make another (different error for the same reasons) on the ninth try? Does this mean you have to take it apart and begin practising it again?

Yesterday, this happened with the first page of my Bach prelude. I played it through once perfectly. Then I did it again. Then I did it once more, and a little slip of the finger caused a virtually inaudible error. I went at it again and two or three more times it was notally perfect. I broke it up again and practised it all in sessions again ANYWAY.

The next day, I come to the piano, sit down, and the first run through I made some random mistake like the one listed above. I played through four or five more times perfectly, and then decided to break it up into the practice sessions AGAIN.

Am I being unnecessarily obsessive?

In my fugue, I have the last page or so learned quite well. It's "grape juice." However, today, as I was playing through the third or fourth time, suddenly many things were slipping my memory. I was forgetting quite a bit, and so I split it up into the respectable practice sessions and practised it as such again. Was this the correct thing to do?

Thanks for your help,

Adam

[bernhard]

Bernhard, there is yet one more thing I must ask you in regards to mastering a piece.

When you say "On day x, if you play the piece for the first time and it is mastered, then you no longer need to practice that piece again. You just need to play it regularly."

What is mastered?

Is it every single note correct? What if you play 2 or 3 times absolutely perfectly, but on the fourth run through, you make ONE slight, unnoticeable, slip-of-the-finger or lapse-in-memory error? What if you then continue and you play 5, 6, 7, 8 times absolutely perfectly, and maybe make another (different error for the same reasons) on the ninth try? Does this mean you have to take it apart and begin practising it again?

Yesterday, this happened with the first page of my Bach prelude. I played it through once perfectly. Then I did it again. Then I did it once more, and a little slip of the finger caused a virtually inaudible error. I went at it again and two or three more times it was notally perfect. I broke it up again and practised it all in sessions again ANYWAY.

The next day, I come to the piano, sit down, and the first run through I made some random mistake like the one listed above. I played through four or five more times perfectly, and then decided to break it up into the practice sessions AGAIN.

Am I being unnecessarily obsessive?

In my fugue, I have the last page or so learned quite well. It's "grape juice." However, today, as I was playing through the third or fourth time, suddenly many things were slipping my memory. I was forgetting quite a bit, and so I split it up into the respectable practice sessions and practised it as such again. Was this the correct thing to do?

Thanks for your help,

Adam

Aha ! I found the thread! Sorry it took so long.

I will tell you what is mastered. It is pretty simple.

Think about riding a bicycle or iceskating. When have you mastered bicycle riding or iceskating? When you can do a sommersault in your BMX? When you can do a triple axle in the ice? Or would you consider to have mastered the art if you can go to town by bicycle without falling on your face, or if you can go round the icerink without falling on your butt?

Actually none of the above. You know you mastered riding a bicycle the moment you stop being nervous about it. The moment you stop being tense. The moment you can do a curve by simply slanting your body (rather than the clumsy turn of the handle bars that beginners do and that invariably ends with a fall). You know you have mastered ice-skating the moment you barely move your feet and yet just by moving your body from side to side you can get to speed, and you do not feel panicky about it.

In short: You mastered something the moment it becomes easy. You can still fall from the bike, you can still fall on the ice, but it is no big deal. And there will be plenty of more advanced stuff for you to do if you care to do it.

The same can be said of any area. Think about reading. When did you master reading? When you became fluent at it. Do you know every possible word in every book? Probably not. But if you truly mastered reading, it is easy. On the other hand if you have to laboriously join letters to form syllables and join syllables to form words, you may be able to read, but you are far from mastery.

I often hear people say of superlative pianists: “He makes it look so easy”. That is because for him, it is easy.

However this will not happen by itself. You must aim at it. Most of our practice aims are unconscious. We are often unaware of what we are aiming at. Some people are attracted by what they perceive as very difficult or “virtuoso” pieces. So the idea of “difficulty” is already ingrained in their unconscious before they even begin. They believe that not only the piece is difficult as it must feel, look and sound difficult to play. As a result these people never ever acquire facility because they want it to be difficult. Their playing is laborious and effort laden.

On the other hand if you direct your practice towards making a piece/passage easy, then you will eventually hit upon the precise technical parameters that will allow you to play that piece easily. But it must be your final aim from the very beginning. And once the piece is easy to play you will have mastered it, even though you may make mistakes or even completely flop it.

Best wishes,
Bernhard.

(And yes, you are starting to become obssessive )