Pischna - My Story

[pianopoet]

Im an 18 year old piano student who started to play piano from scratch 4 years ago. Within 2 years, one of my competition pieces was Chopin's 3'rd Scherzo. I have won a few competitions with it and I owe my being able to play it on 1 thing and 1 thing alone: Pischna. I don't care what anyone says, I will do Pischna for the rest of my life as I am living proof that it works! I know my little story will stir some controversy as I saw a previous posting where Pischna is regarded as rubbish but all I have to say about that is: The person saying that obviously wasn't doing it correctly...!

[brettkun]

I second your motion Pischna has done the same for me.

[aerlinndan]

The person saying that obviously wasn't doing it correctly...!

That was me!  I doubt that I was doing it incorrectly, however, as the teacher that gave it to me was himself raised on Pischna all throughout his life, and assigns it all the time to his students. (His teacher was John Perry, if you have heard of him, who is also a Pischna advocate.)

My method of learning Pischna would go like this:

1. Learn all the non-redundant preparatory exercises at a moderate tempo.
2. Learn them in lots of rhythmic variations and gradually speed up the tempo to a point where they are all a bit faster than the final tempo of the "actual" exercise.
3. Learn the "actual" exercise, using any rhythm or other variations that I or my teacher could think up.

Did I miss anything?

[xvimbi]

Im an 18 year old piano student who started to play piano from scratch 4 years ago. Within 2 years, one of my competition pieces was Chopin's 3'rd Scherzo. I have won a few competitions with it and I owe my being able to play it on 1 thing and 1 thing alone: Pischna. I don't care what anyone says, I will do Pischna for the rest of my life as I am living proof that it works! I know my little story will stir some controversy as I saw a previous posting where Pischna is regarded as rubbish but all I have to say about that is: The person saying that obviously wasn't doing it correctly...!

Not favoring technical exercises myself, I have to say:

1. If they work for you, stick with them.
2. If you play properly, you can play whatever you want without risking injury.
3. There is only one conundrum: Many people play Scherzo #3 well. Some have used Pischa. Are they living proof that Pischna works? Some have used Hanon. Are they living proof that Hanon works? Some have used Czerny. Are they living proof that Czerny works? Some have not used technical exercises. Are they living proof that this works too? There are many ways one can make things work. The only thing that highly annoys me is when people derive from their own experiences: "It worked for me. You MUST do this too!"

There is no way of knowing which approach is the most successful for a given person, unless one could live several parallel lives. Good teachers combine ideas from various approaches and tailor them to a given student with a given personality. Bad teachers have rigid approaches. This is true for any discipline.

Likewise, students who have a successful experience with something (for example Pischna) are often running the risk of neglecting everything else that's out there, thus becoming rigid and inflexible. Even after tasting a sweet strawberry, one should constantly be looking whether there isn't a sweeter one around.

If you are starting out fresh and you have never followed any of these approaches, which one would you pick? They are all successful; after all, there are lots of living proofs for any of them. This is when a discussion about the merits of technical exercises is most important, not after the fact.

[c18cont]

I can only say,

Caution...But what works, works...