Hello again.
I've stopped by on an infrequent basis to peruse some of the posts. Because quite a coincidence has happened, I decided I'd write again. The coincidence is that shortly before making this latest peruse, I wrote something which I think is appropriate for this thread topic. I’ll first explain the coincidence.
I have a close friend who has a 12 year-old son who lives with is mother a great distance from both his father and me. The boy lives in a fairly remote, but very beautiful, part of Alberta, and has been "home schooled" to this point in his life. His mother has encouraged his study of music - first the accordion (one of my least-favoite instruments), and, over the past few years, also the piano. He recently participated in some accordion events and actually “won” one of them.
Because my wife and I live at a very convenient mid-point between them, Dad and he have both visited our home frequently during the past 5 years. I have played piano for them and rambled on and on about the piano during the course of those visits. His mother is definitely not a classical music fan - she’s an avid country and western music fan and a real fan of the accordion. Even considering the musical atmosphere with which he has been saturated, I guess because of his exposure to classical piano through me, he has expressed more and more interest in the piano, and, last year, his dad bought him a P90.
Near the end of his last visit a few months ago I gave him a copy of what I’ve written on this piano forum and his dad gave him a copy of Whiteside’s “Mastering the Chopin Etudes”. By the time they actually walked out the door he told me that he had read what I had written. I asked a couple questions and, by his answers, I knew that indeed he had done so.
Enough explanation.
This morning I got an e-mail message from my friend and he casually mentioned in it that he had talked to his son on the phone and his son said that he had been working on “a Chopin Etude in C” and “knew the first two pages pretty well, but he is struggling with the third page.”
Well, I was pretty surprised and startled (and jealous!) by this. I wrote something that I thought might help and then went to the Piano Forum to get a little entertainment with my morning coffee before sitting down to play. I read m1469’s very interesting post and this statement caught my eye and prompted me to post:
“I have been approaching everything with the attitude that there is something completely easy, straight forward and simple about playing. I just have to discover what that is for me. Wow! What a difference this makes!”
I experienced this myself many years ago and I now firmly believe that this marks the most important awakening a pianist can, and must, have. My golfer-friend’s son must also realize this in order to play Chopin and this is what I wrote to try to help his see it:
“...... the Etudes are difficult only in that they require a specific overall body/hand rhythmic technique (the "it" for each Etude). The notes (usually 90% of the notes) in between the important notes should be added only after the impotant ones are learned within the proper "it". At this point he'd be well-served to spend at least an equal amount of time reading what Abby and I wrote, as he does "practising" any Etude. He first MUST HAVE a real understanding of the "it" - a very dynamic, uninihibited (!!!!), rhythmic "tornado" - which Chopin himself cannot now talk about, but which has to be "unleashed" on these pieces.
Think of one of these pieces as a large refrigerator that you have to move up a short flight of stairs. A person is pointing a gun at you and telling you that you either get that thing up the stairs or he's going to put a bullet in your head. Yes, your fingers will be touching and "moving" the refrigerator, but they are merely a contact point - only part of an "end product" - of a very big force that your entire body will be applying, and, remarkably, this "it" will be something which first starts as a "conception" or "plan of action" which you have "conjured up" in your brain to accomplish the task - at first a mere "thought".
This "thought" is what Chopin tries to convey through his Etudes - at his time a completely new way (technique) of playing the piano. The works of Chopin and Liszt immediately demonstrate to the player the woeful inadequacy of any "finger" technique and should cause the student to take great pause to figure out how these things can be easily played. THAT"S the tough part.
One should not slowly learn notes under the mistaken impression that speeding things up will make all things clear. One must decide “up front” - "Ah, THIS is what he's trying to show me!" - and NEVER release that thought when "practising".
In the case of the Etudes, an intimate understanding of the "means" really is of far greater importance than a production of the "end". The "end" is merely a stream of notes. (A photo of the refrigerator at the top of the stairs with you standing next to it.) What's important is how did the TORSO/ARMS/HANDS have to move to get the fingers (at the periphery of the whole mechanism) to contact the keys in order to create that stream. (How the hell DID you get that refrigerator UP there? As you can well imagine, it didn't have much to do with the fingers - just as htting a 350 yard drive doesn't have much to do with them.)”
Myla, good luck in your piano study. I think you are absolutely "dead on" with your new-found "attitude" and that, because of it, you’re about to make remarkable progress in you endeavor. If you haven’t already done so, please read some of what Abby Whiteside has to say about playing the piano:
https://www.abbywhiteside.org/
Topic: Forcing it, or letting it happen