Defending technical studies

[Daniel_piano]

I talked with my teacher and told him that I believe technical studies are boring and useless and that it would be far more better to get technique from repertoire pieces
He agreed to a certain extent but also told me something that actually made me rethink all this issue
He told me that in order to get technique from pieces you should not practice them enterily
According to him, usually a sonata 10 pages long only has few bars with techcnique challenges, the other is just repetition or the same techcnique problem
So, to use a sonata to learn technique, he says, I should only practice the technique demanding bars
So I would have just 10 bars learned from each piece and a lot of incomplete pieces
On the other hand, he says, technical studies by Cramer, Czerny, Pozzoli, Liszt, Heller and so on concentrate in few pages a lot of technique demanding passages so that by learning only 2 pages you're working on the technique demanding bars of all the sonatas

According to him by only practicing pieces you need more time to eventually learn them because you lack the technique to play them and you get the technique by practicing them, only that in a 10 pages long only few bars contain technique challenges
On the other hand if you practice on Czerny or Pozzoli in each study there are different technique challenges so that when you eventually have learned them and start practicing Nocturnes, Sonatas, Preludes and so on you already have much if not all the techcnique needed to play these pieces and you don't have to waste your time trying to acquire technique on all the repetitive pattern and easy bars of a long sonata

He even said that many Czerny, Cramer and Pozzoli studies derived from the technique demanding bars of other authors sonatas

Dunno, this argument makes sense actually
With technical studies you learn first a concentration of techcnique from sonatas that would require far more times, due to repetitive and long nature of sonatas, if learned directly from sonata because out of 20 pages only few bars contain technique passages/challenges

He said that he had students that tried to learn only from pieces
The problem he says is that they learned a sonata every two month
While the group who did many technical studies didn't touch a sonata for 9 months, but when they completed the technical studies and started practicing sonatas they learned a sonata every two weeks

He think that Hanon is useless though and it's a great promoter of rhythm veriations and post practice improvement

Any thought?

Daniel
 

[xvimbi]

I think the greatest disadvantage of technical exercises is that they are generally pretty boring. If you do exercises in a brainless way, they are of no good use. In addition, they tend to be non-musical. However, there are exceptions: Burgmueller and, particularly, Bach Anna Magdalena and his inventions and sinfonias are great exercise pieces that are musical and can be added to anybody's repertoire.

Compare with climbing: one can get a lot of technique by practicing in a gym, but the real thing, i.e. mountains, is so much more rewarding, although one cannot do the hard stuff right away.

Both approaches will get you to where you want to go in about roughly the same amount of time. Yes, it will take 9 months of boring exercises before you can play a decent sonata, and it will take 9 months of easy, gradually more complex pieces, before you can play a decent sonata.

I think a healthy combination of both approaches is the best, with the emphasis on either one, depending on the desires, discipline and mental attitude of the student.

If you want to acquire technique, by all means, do exercises. If you want to make music, play pieces.

[bernhard]

We are talking here about two schools of thought; two different philosophies. At some stage you will have to choose.

Your teacher is absolutely correct when he says that:

He told me that in order to get technique from pieces you should not practice them enterily

You will not get any technique from pieces by just playing them. You need to have a specific program for work on your pieces so as to develop your technique in order to play them.

However there is a huge flaw in what he says next. (according to the school of thought I subscribe to, and to this day I have not yet seen any good argument against it – the reason I subscribe to it in the first place). The huge flaw is this: That technique can be dissociated from musical purpose and meaning.

Yes, Czerny studies are derived from the difficult bars in Beethoven sonatas (for instance). However, the musical purpose and meaning of the fast arpeggios in the 3rd movement of the Moonlight is very different from the musical meaning and purpose (if you can find any) on Czerny’s op. 299 no. 3, which superficially would seem to deal with the same technique. You can practice the Czerny as much as you want, but the technique you will be acquiring will not be the technique you will need for the Beethoven. You will have to change it completely and modify it to suit the musical purposes of Beethoven.

Hanon is also derived from patterns found in the repertory (most notably Bach). Take his repeated note exercise no. 47. Surely repeated notes can be best learned in isolation and then applied to whatever piece they appear? Surely this will save time? Well, think again. Are you going to change fingers in the repeated notes? That is one technique. Are you going to play the repeated notes with the same finger? That is another technique. Which finger(s) are you actually going to use? Are you going to accent some of the notes? Are you going to play them evenly? Are you going to articulate them the same?

You see, these decisions cannot possibly be taken if you are doing Hanon, Czerny, Pischna and the like. They are not musically sophisticated enough.

The repeated notes in the LH of Beethoven’s Fur Elise require a different technique from the repeated notes in Scarlatti’s K141 and from Chopin’s prelude op. 28 no. 15. Each of these pieces will require a careful study in order to decide issues of tempo, agogics, articulation, rhythms (harmonic, metric, melodic, etc.) plus intended incongruities between metrical and musical aspects, your own body responses to the overall rhythmic pattern of the piece/passage, accents, etc.

You will never get the technique – which by now you may start to realise is completely specific to the piece you are playing – to play either Beethoven, or Scarlatti, or Chopin repeated notes from Hanon or Czerny. In fact the only technique you will get from Czerny is the technique necessary to play Czerny.

Now if you believe in the other school of thought (technique can be separated from music, can be learned on its own and basically is the same no matter what the piece is), then of course you should do as much Czerny (and yes, Hanon as well) as you can possibly get your hands on. In fact you should delay working on repertory and only tackle any piece after 5 years working on pure technique (there are people who actually propose such insanity – the most notorious being no other than old Rach himself)

However, if like me you belong to the school of thought that believes that technique is dictated by musical content, then the only reason to play Czerny, is if you actually want to play it. There is nothing wrong with that. He did write some pretty pieces (even some pretty studies). So of course, if you want to include some of Czerny’s pieces in your repertory, and play them as encores or for your own pleasure, then work on them.

But if you are playing them in the hope that you are saving time by learning with Czerny a technique that you will then be able to apply to repertory, think again.

The piano repertory is huge. There are more pieces written for piano than for all other instruments combined. I will never be able to play everything I want to play. One lifetime is simply not enough. I for one have no intention of touching any piece that I have no interest in playing.

I understand, of course that you are in a school which may have demands and philosophies other than the ones I subscribe to. So you will just have to put up with it and make the best of it.

You must also understand this:

Never start from generalities (As someone recently posted: “My teacher told me to use Hanon and to believe him”). Always start from problems. Real, specific problems. If a teacher wants his student to use Hanon, that is fine as long as there is a real, specific problem to be solved.  A student should ask the teacher bluntly and directly – and of course politely: “Which specific problem will I solve by doing this exercise?”. Good answer: “That run in bars 122 – 125 of the Mozart sonata is terribly uneven and muddled – I believe that working on Hanon no. 14 for 15 minutes every day will solve the problem in a week or so” is a very good answer, and I would urge you to follow your teacher’s advice – if anything to see if it actually works.

Completely wrong answer: “You must do Hanon every day for one hour to warm-up and because it will develop your general technique. Just trust me”. The teacher (and this realisation always comes as a shock) may even be a great concert pianist, he may even be Russian, but he is ignorant of the issues involved  and does not know what he is talking about. Worse, he did not go to the trouble of informing himself since most of this information is now freely available.

According to him by only practicing pieces you need more time to eventually learn them because you lack the technique to play them and you get the technique by practicing them, only that in a 10 pages long only few bars contain technique challenges
On the other hand if you practice on Czerny or Pozzoli in each study there are different technique challenges so that when you eventually have learned them and start practicing Nocturnes, Sonatas, Preludes and so on you already have much if not all the techcnique needed to play these pieces and you don't have to waste your time trying to acquire technique on all the repetitive pattern and easy bars of a long sonata

Again, I cannot really see the sense in this. If most of the bars of a sonata are easy and repetitive, why should you need to do exercises to acquire the technique to play them? And if you do not have the technique to play the easy repetitive patterns in a sonata, surely the best way to acquire the technique to play them is by working on them, and attending to their specific musical requirements –not in an exercise whose musical requirements are completely unrelated.

Finally,once you acquire a technique it is yours for life. You do not need to keep working on it. I did Hanon on my youth. I haven’t touched it for several decades. I can still do all of them perfectly and from memory (which just shows how technically undemanding they actually are).

I hear of people spending two three hours every day “working on technique”. I truly do not understand this. Do they work at “walking”, do they work at “lifting a fork to their mouths” just in case they blotch the technique and cannot feed themselves ever again? I lived in Japan for a while, and I learned (with perfect technique) to eat with chopsticks. Do I practise it everyday? Of course not. I have not eaten with chopsticks now for may years. Yet on the odd occasion when I go to a Chinese or Japanese restaurant I can still impress my companions with my perfect technique.

The problem of course, is that most people never acquire the technique in the first place. They fool themselves that they do. They may even “practise” it hours on end. And yet you can always see them in Chinese restaurants holding the chopsticks in the wrong way and dropping food in their laps.

So it is with piano. You may spend tens of hours at the piano for several years and yet not acquire any technique. Or you can acquire all the technique you ever need in no time at all (my reckoning at this point in my life is one – two years, but I am always on the look out for ways to shorten this time). It all hinges on if you know what you are doing.

Best wishes,
Bernhard.

[cziffra777]

Any thought?

I agree with your teacher. There is a lot of historical evidence supporting the use of technical exercises rather than relying solely on repertoire for technique. The number of great pianists who can claim to have developed their abilities without doing technical work like Hanon and/or Czerny is fairly small. Technique is a big part of piano study in Russia. Rachmaninoff and Lhevinne (Josef) commented on this technical training. I believe it was in James F. Cooke's 'Great Pianists on Piano Playing'. Students of Leschetizky also had to do quite a bit of technical work, although this was probably preparatory work done with his assistants before a student was allowed to study with Leschetizky himself. Contrast this with the 'Abby-Whiteside-never-practice-exercises-because-they-aren't-fun' approach. I could probably count on one hand the number of great pianists produced by such an approach. It never ceases to amaze me how fanatical some people are when it comes to Hanon, Czerny, et al, but the evidence just isn't there for a purely repertoire-based technical regimen being better than one that includes exercises and etudes.

That said, I don't have anything against trying to get technique exclusively from repertoire. It's all about what works for you. Excluding any approach is stupid. Don't listen to someone who tells you exercises are useless. They may be for that particular person and maybe even for you, but don't just believe they are useless because someone on a forum tells you that. Try doing Hanon, Czerny, et al for a while. If it helps you, great. If not, you have at least learned something about how you should approach the piano.

[Motrax]

I do not encourage Czerny or Hanon, but I do think some specific technical excercises are needed to tackle problems well in certain pieces. It's more of a mental block than a physical one, though, so if you can practice a difficult passage with one of Bernhard's methods and end up performing it flawlessly, this is the way to go.

However, sometimes a very difficult passage might seem too monumental a problem to deal with - you practice slowly, vary the rhythms, break it into small sections, and can only get it working to a small degree of success. When this happens, I take a break and pull out some Dohnanyi. It's mentally relaxing, since there is no musical substance (though this does not mean you're allowed to play it mechanically). But if done right, it releases a great deal of stress that builds up from practicing a hard passage, and usually I'm able to go back to the tough section after ten or fifteen minutes and work on it with renewed fervor. I've just found Dohnanyi's excercises (and a few other isolated excercises) enable me to both relax and continue keeping my fingers agile.

I also begin practice sessions with about 10 minutes of excercises, be they scales and chords or little etudes, or just improvised passages which work on specific techniques. I practice interval runs (3rds, 4ths, etc) because my intervals aren't very good, but I dono't have any pieces where I need them, so I get very little practice with that particular aspect of piano. There are a number of advantages to technical excercises, but they certainly should not be practiced for great lengths of time, and should not need to be practiced if learning a piece goes smoothly by itself.

[galonia]

It seems that most people who are against technical studies such as Hanon and Czerny are against learning technique in a vaccuum, and I couldn't agree more.  After all, we don't play piano so we have great technique; we need good technique to play piano!

That said, I use studies to fix specific problems I have e.g. if I am having troubles with an arpeggio because my thumbs aren't going under correctly, I will pick (or more precisely, my teacher may prescribe) a study to assist me in practising the correct way to do it.  I still take apart the section of my piece which has that and do variations on it to apply the technique to the specific repertoire, but the studies I find are very helpful.

Also, my teacher requires that we present a study each week - we are expected to learn a new one all the time.  I don't know if it's because we are used to learning new works all the time, but it's true that if we were given short notice to perform, we can master our performance repertoire very quickly.  I've even learnt a new piece for an exam in under a month when my teacher decided we should replace one of the pieces I already knew.  And at school, if soloists "forgot" their accompanist, I was always called upon to be the last-minute substitute.  The shortest time I was given was 8 hours before a performance, I had to learn the accompaniment part and rehearse with the soloist - it was panic stations, but it wasn't impossible, even with other commitments (I was also performing that night, and accompanying other soloists, so I wasn't totally devoting every moment to the last-minute soloist).

Ultimately, you have to decide what works for you.  I hate Hanon, but there are two studies of his that I use sometimes because they are useful.  I use Czerny a lot, and I also play some Moszkowski studies.

As Bernhard points out, there's nothing wrong with playing the studies purely for enjoyment.  My teacher considers studies to be music, so we are expected to play them musically, with good tone, dynamics, phrasing, expression.  In fact, I was playing a Czerny scale study at my musicology teacher's house, when a piano student arrived, and his mother asked my teacher, 'What is Miss playing, it sounds so wonderful" and she wanted her son to learn it and perform it!  Luckily, the child couldn't be fooled, and told his mother, "It's just scales, Mum!"   

[rachlisztchopin]

Why not combine the two schools of thought? That tis what I do...I have a bunch of books of technical studies and a bunch of books of piano solo music...I use them both.

[cziffra]

Bernard, did you teach Arcadi Volodos by any chance?  All your talk of learning the entire body of piano technique in two years seems unbelievable, but then i think of dear arcadi who allegedly started learning when he was 16.

You know, i'd be very interested in reading a book of yours, if ever you wrote one.

[lostinidlewonder]

I think there is a good case for both sides of the story. I find tackling technical studies and then looking at all peices as a matter of technique is a little bland and an uncreative process. To jump up and point to a piece which isn't a technical study and say "The part in this piece i like is like this etude/study I did so I'll play it like this" is wrong. It is a matter of sound quality more than anything else. We shouldn't focus attention to how nimble our fingers are unless it affects the sound quality. I guess it is like what Chopin said, ["A well-formed technique, it seems to me, is one that can control and vary a beautiful sound quality.”]

[ujos3]

Hi everybody

My teacher defends the technique approach, mostly Hanon! He says that without Hanon we could never had reach to play accurately Chopin etudes, Pictures at an Exhibition, etc.

We recommends me to do Hanon, because we says my main problem is technique (i'm learning a Chopin etude now), and explains me the purpose and effect of every Hanon Exercise we approach.

When people says it is better to learn technique from pieces, they never talk about the physical effect over the palm, fingers and whole hand developpment. They seem to think that everything is in the brain so we are mainly learning specific movements . Of course, if it were the case, why should we learn the exercise movements? we would be practising a lot of things for nothing.

But I think that with exercises, fingers agility, palm streches, flexibility of articulations, including even arms and forearms , all of them are physical achievements. We know hand has not muscles to develop, but however, there is a physical stuff that can be trained. I think pieces take too long to achieve this aim.
And also, with exercises you learn also the right movements (i am not saying they are not important).

A beginner may learn the Fantasie Impromptu doing only that (as our friend breadboy is going to do), but I do not think that by doing so he is developping all the physical stuff in one run. After the FI he will take another piece and feel he is still having technical problems.

I argue from my experience, it is true for me that Hanon has had fast benefits over my play. Much faster , I think, that without it.

When Bernhard talks badly about Hanon he is talking about others (his pupils) experience. He says he did Hanon in his youth, so may be Hanon has had good influence in his technique. It is impossible to know. He should born again and then do not play Hanon.

And even his pupils experience is mostly not-Hanon, how to compare?...

Of course, we are always waiting for an true Experimental Design to clear things (I am a Statistician, and would know how to do it, but how wants ? It should be the same teacher doing two differents styles of teaching to two similar groups of pupils)

Sorry for my english, and thank Bernhard for all your posts.

Javier





 

[Daniel_piano]

Hi everybody

My teacher defends the technique approach, mostly Hanon! He says that without Hanon we could never had reach to play accurately Chopin etudes, Pictures at an Exhibition, etc.

Now, this is like saying that cooking is impossible without a microwaves oven or that you can't move without a car
So, do your teacher really believes that it was  impossible to play the piano before Hanon created his studies book?
So, does that mean that we all dreamed that people like Bach, Scarlatti, Liszt, Schubert, Chopin, Beethoven, Grieg and many other could play the piano well?
If people was able to become a good pianist years and years before Hanon studied were invented, it simply means that they're not vital for piano technique
The word "never" is completely out of place in this case
Despite wath anyone think about Hanon at all, it should be clear to anyone that we  were able to do almost anything even before new technologies and tools was invented
"We" certainly were able to learn how to play the piano even before Hanon or Czerny were born
I don't know if your teacher point of view is more like the self-deluded that believe nothing is possible without help tools or if it is more like the presumptuous attitude that believe that since today we have campasses we're all better artists than Giotto (there was a similar idiot issue about today composers being better than Mozart because Mozart music is simply and there he didn' know about the complexity of impressionistic music: no comment
Let's get real: Hanon grandfather was not yet born when people were already able to learn how to play the piano properly and majority of technical demanding piece were being written

Daniel

[BoliverAllmon]

all of the great pianists that you mentioned did technical studies. Beethoven wrote some, Mozart's father created some for wolfgang. Bach wrote some for his children. They just didn't collect them and put them into a book format or anything.

boliver

[Daniel_piano]

all of the great pianists that you mentioned did technical studies. Beethoven wrote some, Mozart's father created some for wolfgang. Bach wrote some for his children. They just didn't collect them and put them into a book format or anything.

boliver

I was specifically talking Hanon studies
Now, one thing is to say that technical studies might be necessary as they have been existing from Baroque times
But to say that Hanon is necessary to play the piano is absurd as it didn't exist in the Baroque

Daniel

[xvimbi]

all of the great pianists that you mentioned did technical studies. Beethoven wrote some, Mozart's father created some for wolfgang. Bach wrote some for his children. They just didn't collect them and put them into a book format or anything.

Bach did very well collect his "etudes":
Klavierbuechlein Fuer Wilhelm Friedemann Bach
French Suites
Klavierbuechlein Fuer Anna Magdalena Bach
Well Tempered Clavier
Two- and Three Part Inventions
various collections of Preludes, etc.

Practically all technique can be picked up by studying these Bach collections. So, if all those etudes exist that bundle technical exercises with real music, why do the purely technical exercises? To me, it's a fundamental decision whether one prefers doing exercises separated from music and hope the acquired skills may come in handy sometime, or whether one does acquire technique while making music. It's a personal preference. No question, purely technical exercises help build up technique, but there is no evidence that they are REQUIRED to build up technique (big difference). In fact, there is plenty of evidence that they are NOT required. Again: personal preference.

[ujos3]

So, do your teacher really believes that it was  impossible to play the piano before Hanon created his studies book?

No, it was just a comment, so to speak...Hanon helped him to achieve his pieces at a specific moment in his career. Don't take comments so seriously...

I don't know if your teacher point of view is more like the self-deluded that believe nothing is possible without help tools or if it is more like the presumptuous attitude that believe that since today we have campasses we're all better artists than Giotto...

No, he is very open minded . He just like Hanon, nothing more. He does not deserve this ***. Please!

Javier

[BoliverAllmon]

agreed.

[julie391]

one thing i really dont get, is why HANON is the most played book of exercises - ITS THE WORST IVE EVER SEEN!

[Daniel_piano]

I don't know if your teacher point of view is more like the self-deluded that believe nothing is possible without help tools or if it is more like the presumptuous attitude that believe that since today we have campasses we're all better artists than Giotto...

No, he is very open minded . He just like Hanon, nothing more. He does not deserve this ***. Please!

Since I don't know your teacher personally every thing I say that sounds offensive shouldn't be taken as personal but just from the pure anectodal point I view I developed from the few information I have
Your teacher might be the most generous and intelligent person on earth and if I knew it personally I wouldn't have probably used that words
Remember only when bad words come from someone that you know they can be taken as offensive and hurt
If I friend of mine says I'm an idiot it hurts me, if a strager says I'm an idiot I don't care as since he doesn't know me he is probably commenting on just an action of thoughts of mine not my whole person

Daniel

[bunbuns]

Your all so smart! I cant read this anymore!

[Sketchee]

I think it's important to keep an open mind about all aspects of piano.  We've already discussed before that technique and musicality aren't really seperate.  You can play something in a very technical manner and if that's what the piece demands musically, then it is musical.  Exploring different ideas is the heart of musicality, IMHO.  While one can present the theory that technical excercises are absolutely helpful or absolutely not, it's beyond the realm of even human experience to know whether they really do.  No one has experienced everything.  If you have a technical problems or want to prevent a technical problem, don't limit yourself from trying different things that may work.

For myself, tackling technical excercises as if they were a piece of music revealed certain tendencies in my overall technique. That helped me improve all of my pieces and the way I approach a piece.  I've said elsewhere that I liked Czerny a lot more than Hanon.  Hanon is boring.  No matter what you're playing, you have to listen to it carefully.