Building technique by easy pieces

[onwan]

Hi, what do you think about building technique by playing relatively easy pieces?

I'm in intermediate level with my technique and repertoire. I'm looking for some pieces that could help me to progress in playing the piano, especially with interpretation, but also finger independence and to be able to learn new material faster.

I really hate practicing Czerny's etudes (299, 740) with no emotions - also it doesn't help me to progress in the interpretation.

My idea is to go through few sets for children/young - Tchaikovsky, Schumann, Heller, Bach...and parallelly practice some "my level" pieces, such as Beethoven's sonata, Chopin etudes, Rach...

Do you think it is a good idea or just waste of time? And should I concentrate just on pieces my level?

[outin]

I guess playing more music is never a waste of time. However I am not sure what you expect from building technique? I always learned new playing techniques from new pieces that presented new technical challenges. If you however meant some routine finger practice type technique building, it's not something I do deliberately whether scales, arpeggios or pieces. I get my finger exercise from playing baroque. Many of those pieces are rather simple, the challenge is tempo and preciseness and coordination. So in this sense the answer is yes.

[brogers70]

Practicing easy pieces is great. By easy pieces I mean ones in which it's easy enough to hit the right notes that you don't spend 90% of your time worrying about that. Practicing easy pieces allows you to focus on phrasing, voicing, tone; it gives you things you can play for friends or small audiences to build up your ability to deal with stage fright. There are lots of easy pieces that are very beautiful. And there's lots to learn by working on them; just listen to a great virtuoso play some "easy" piece - you'll have lots of work to do to get to that sort of a rendition of it.

That does not mean you should give up trying to progress to technically more difficult pieces. My impression, though, is that people are more likely to want to get to harder pieces too fast. The best thing I ever did was to take a full year off from working on technically demanding pieces and just work on playing very simple "Music for Millions" classical pieces as beautifully as I could. When I went back to more difficult things I had much better tone and phrasing and way more comfort at playing for others than I had before I put myself on a temporary diet of easy pieces.

[lostinidlewonder]

Studying many easier pieces helps mostly with sight reading skills. It also helps to practice the many learning tools used to solve a piece. To improve your technique you do want to use pieces you can predominantly control but which are spotted with some challenges here and there, or perhaps just pieces which use ideas you have experience with but want to get better at. Too many people study pieces filled with difficulties, they can get through it and learn much from it but it really is a frustrating path to take if that is all you do!

[onwan]

Thank you all so much for your comments. I was looking for this supporting words. All my life I've been practicing pieces above my level, struggle with them and sometime get frustrated. Now it is the time to change it.

[j_tour]

Here's one way to think about it:  what kind of technique?

On the day of Little Richard Penniman's death announcement, yeah, you can build that sort of technique by going through the records. I assure you, nobody learned American roots music out of some book or method.  They just built their technique on repertoire.  Some better than others, but 100% completely from recordings and repertoire.  Some folks had a little fancier groove from their legit stuff, but by no means most.

But it's not the same technique you need for playing and improvising on Bach.

It's related, of course, but the more important question is what technique?

That, you'd have to sit down and think about questions like "why do my fingers hurt when I do this?" or "what's the difference when I make a trill using fingers 1,3 versus 3,4, and why should I care?"

That's what a teacher is for, or if you know good people, just ask him or her.

But yeah, I'd say just play anything and everything you can:  it's not going to hurt you, at least probably not with the kinds of simpler pieces you should be reading and playing regularly, and at worst you'll be a better rounded musician and sight reader than you were before.

Is it optimized for efficiency?  No, not really, but vita breuis ars longa.