UPDATE: I mentioned "MrMusicarta," Bob Chappell's British piano website [...] written to him, mentioning my abandoned efforts to create melodic-minor versions of Hanon, and he replied to me:"I also gave up on the minor Hanon – not worth the effort, i.m.h.o.. Much more productive ways to channel one’s energies."
dogperson - I've been working on Czerny op. 599 for a few months now.
Instead of trying to do Hannon in all keys it’s better to just learn actual music
You may have heard that it is desirable to play Hanon "in all keys." If you believe this...
I have developed this long-term routine with the aim of doing Hanon in all keys while spending as little time on it as possible. Obviously I am a Hanon lover, but I agree with anyone who says that it should only take up a small proportion of your practice time.
Well, this sounds crazy, but one could do both learn his or her scales or little patterns while doing real stuff.You know, it's not impossible.I agree, my respect for a technician would diminish if he or she couldn't execute some nice scales in octaves or so forth, but that has, in many cases, very little to do with general musicianship.But. still, it should be one of the first goals, IMHO.
Yeah I guess it’s possible but in all 24 keys as you said would take like infinite time. I do piano for a living and there’s no way I could imagine doing Hannon in all 24 keys while doing repertoire at the same time it’s ridiculous. But why would your respect diminish? Everyone can do scales and Hannon but not everyone can do large scale rep. Besides the goal for scales and Hannon is supposed to help you play actual actual rep. But if you have the rep why would you need to actively practice all these exercises? If you had to pick would you want perfect Hannon and scales or actual rep? Eh I don’t think of it as a goal I think of it as one of many pathways to a goal
I think we're on the same page: it's a means to an end.But, looking at piano including all the variations of genres and so forth, no, not everybody can automatically play scales the way people who come from a European art music background can. A lot of good and great jazz improvisors can, of course, but by no means everybody in all kinds of improvised music in the popular styles.It doesn't mean they aren't monster players in other respects, or great improvisors, but, sure, I would consider it strange for people who spend a lot of time developing the technique needed to play Beethoven, Bach, and, really, any composer you could name to have a lack of facility with some of the building blocks used throughout repertoire.For Hanon, I really don't have much of an opinion: I do extract passages from repertoire and make up some little exercises for myself, in addition to running scales occasionally, but it certainly doesn't enrage me if someone likes the Hanon patterns. Power to them and I wish them luck.Just like everything else, if it were me, I'd be conscious of keeping a close eye on how much time I'm spending on fundamentals versus the real work of making music, but I can only say what my own preferences are in this regard.
Oh I didn’t know we were talking about other genres besides classicalBy facility do you mean the ability to whip out all the scales and arpeggios at any given moment or just the technique to be able to play the music? Cause if you don’t have the technique to deal with the building blocks of repertoire then you just can’t play the repertoire. I play rach 3 but I suck at scales and arpeggios cause I don’t practice them and never have. But does that mean I can’t play them? And what about the person who has perfect scales and arpeggios but can’t play ‘difficult’ rep?I agree with everything else you said
Well, in some ways I'm always thinking about piano from the kinds of things I do, so classical but also just more general American roots music. I don't insist everyone follow me in that viewpoint, but it's just how I think about technical work abstracted away from classical repertoire. You know, on the one hand, it gets me closer to playing more real repertoire, and expands the amount of things I can play, but on the other hand, it expands my ability to do things in jazz I wouldn't otherwise have the skills to do.I'm not sure if I draw such a tight line between technical work (the real basic building blocks: scales, passage-work, obviously all kinds of inversions of chords, specialized things like repeated notes and so forth) and the repertoire, thinking more about it.They're just two sides of the same coin: I think it's obvious if you don't have the chops, you're going to fall down on so many basic pieces as to be extremely limited. I'd take it so much for granted that, yes, it would raise my eyebrows if someone couldn't pull out some well-executed basics.Not sure if many people would want to do that, if they're already deep into repertoire, committed to memory.Maybe as a cheap party trick or something.I don't know: that's really about as far as I'm willing to think about it, but always open to corrections or suggestions. (Even though I always pretty much think I'm right )
The conventional ideal of glassy smoothness in everything I find spurious to my purpose, with rough figures being far more productive of good ideas owing to the unintentional accents within them.
...Having said that, I know good classical and jazz players who swear by big daily doses of the same old scales and Hanon, so in the end it might be just a matter of what one’s deep musical objectives are.
So, if you improvise, and it's not classical, and it's not jazz (I'll include all the subsets of popular music under that umbrella, as is my wont), do you have a link? I'm curious what that might sound like.
Three complete ones are here:https://soundcloud.com/super-bearSend me a PM if you wish to know more about it, as the original topic has been disturbed enough.
I suppose I'm just one of those guys (in embryonic form).j_tour -- I'm barely at a grade 2 level in terms of repertoire. Playing Bach inventions is still a long way off for me, much less transposing them.BTW I get the impression that some of you are not actually reading my posts, but rather just skimming them, and making inaccurate observations as a result. Or perhaps I am not writing clearly enough. In any case I'm not bothered overmuch -- I'm not like James Joyce, who said in an interview: "The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works."
Topic: I Cover the Hanonfront: How to approach learning Hanon "in all keys" 