Hands Separate - how useful is it?

[lettersquash]

I was just looking at Bach's Two-Part Invention No.8 and wondering how much time I should spend working on it with separate hands. I've just about got to grips with No.1, and this question came up for me. I can play the parts separately with considerable ease, but when putting them together I realise my brain is doing something important and different, and I wonder how useful it is running through the HS routine again and again only to have to slow down and master this new skill of combining them (like the old rubbing the tummy, patting the head trick). There's are a couple of particularly tricky bits in Two-Part Invention No.1, one where the left runs down from a Bb and the right up from a C#, and it's the fingering mainly that I struggle with, and the other where the two parts are both playing quarter notes, but the direction of travel isn't the same. I can run through those without a hitch HS, only to be where I was before when I try HT.

Would you just set off and work through No.8 (or a similar canon-structured piece) together (it is after all only two notes to deal with), or do a short amount of HS first, or do you advise putting significant amounts of time into HS? Cheers.

[debussychopin]

Hands separate is a vital part of practice and understanding fully the piece you are involved in. The question is , to what degree? It will depend on you on a case by case basis; there is no blanket statement on to how much you need to work on hands separate.

Lot of the pieces I work with I need to really work on segregating the hands to hone down on the differences in articulation for each hand  (or even finger(s) ) I may be required to display in a piece (especially in a Beethoven sonata , etc ..Bach inventions as well) , and some pieces are more intuitive so that I work on HS very minimally. Maybe a measure or a certain small section I may use it to weed something out , but , to your discretion /judgment on what may work best for you. Dont just do it because you heard you need to spend certain percentage of the time on it  and so forth.

[brogers70]

Personally, I like working HS. I do it even after I've got the hands coordinated HT. There are lots of uses for working HS. It's great for trying out different fingerings and ways of moving your hand, wrist, and arm, looking for the most comfortable and efficient way to move. You can focus on phrasing and shaping a single line so that you have a clear mental image of how you want it to sound, even when it's combined with the other hand. I find that when I learn something only HT, I don't end up giving the same attention to shaping individual lines in each hand, so the piece comes out more mechanical and less interesting. If you have trouble putting the hands together after you've learned HS, you can be sure that it wold not have been any easier to put them together if you just started HT. Eventually, coordinating the hands will get easier. It just takes time.

[lettersquash]

Thanks very much for those replies. I hadn't thought of either of those important aspects: voicing and shaping each part just focusing on it alone; and the physical aspects of hand movements and fingerings (although I try to figure out fingerings early on if I can to avoid problems later). ATB, John.

[ranjit]

I personally spent more of my time practicing hands together, at least with the invention I learned. I would often play one voice, then the other, and then both simultaneously. That way, you prime yourself to hear both simultaneously, and it isn't mechanical. The only reason I could imagine playing an invention HS is if I really want to work on touch or phrasing of a single melody line in isolation -- it's also quite boring to listen to. I think it's ideal to play the piece, while alternating your conscious attention between both of the melody lines, or even playing one melody line while singing the other (this can be torture if you're not familiar enough with the piece ).

[timothy42b]

There's are a couple of particularly tricky bits in Two-Part Invention No.1, one where the left runs down from a Bb and the right up from a C#, and it's the fingering mainly that I struggle with, and the other where the two parts are both playing quarter notes, but the direction of travel isn't the same.

"Dropping notes" helps with that, and you have to have worked each part HS first.

HS also lets you build speed you can't work on HT. 

[ted]

....HS also lets you build speed you can't work on HT. 

You can if you acquire the trick of not being constantly aware of the note coincidences implicit in notated music. Surely this is precisely the difference between slow and fast playing and why the former cannot guarantee success in the latter.

As far as maintaining my technique for improvisation goes almost all of it is one hand at a time on the Virgil Practice Clavier. The exception is when I want to develop some difficult coordination issue between the hands but that doesn’t happen very often. I realise the original poster is talking about playing pieces and what I do might be irrelevant but the broader, general question of how the brain connects motor and musical control of the two hands during playing intrigues me.

[antune]

Hope this could be helpful!

[lettersquash]

Okay, I hope you'll forgive a moan. Right now, I appear not to be able to play even the right hand of Invention No.1 on its own. I mean, it's only two months I've been practising the thing. I know I have made some gradual progress, but it's desperately slow. It feels like I'll never get to the point of being able to play a single piece through, and I'm having second thoughts about the decision to keep the piano. Maybe I should slow down, not that I'm playing it particularly fast, or maybe I should speed up, or maybe I should work HT. I'm all out of ideas, quite frankly. I don't know if I'm working on too many pieces so I come to each with too long a gap or with too many other things in my noggin, but if I just play one piece I'll be even more bored stiff with it than I already am! I'm wondering if my 59-year-old brain just isn't up to the task. ...Bored...yes...I think that might be part of it. I've made more progress staggering through the Goldberg Aria in two weeks, with its complex voicing, grace notes and trills, because it's gorgeous, difficult and thus fascinating. Hmm...

Sorry, it's probably just a bad day. 

[timothy42b]

You can if you acquire the trick of not being constantly aware of the note coincidences implicit in notated music. Surely this is precisely the difference between slow and fast playing and why the former cannot guarantee success in the latter.

That is an intriguing insight and goes a whole level deeper than what I was thinking.

What I was thinking, and described poorly, is that for the beginner HT must be done so much more slowly that the individual hands never get the speed challenge.  If for example your best HT is 75% of your HS speed, you may never challenge HS enough to improve.  And for many beginners 75% is an exaggeration, it might be more like 50%.

But you went beyond that into the why.    I need to think on this some.

[ted]

It amounts to a personal conjecture, Timothy, and has no foundation, as far as I know, in accepted musical practice. Improvisation, unless we set out to imitate notated music, is naturally asynchronous, it seems to me, with notational subdivision of the time line a tiny, discrete, optional subset of the continuous rhythmic universe. I might be talking nonsense, heaven knows, thirty years working at a factory and fifty years without formal training scarcely permit my being too forthcoming about anything musical. However, I find something peculiarly enervating about this mental data stream of regular pulses, inculcated in all of us by early musical training. It is an artistic option, but is neither omnipotent nor essential, and forced coincidental playing of hands together reinforces it, perhaps to a destructive degree.

[timothy42b]

However, I find something peculiarly enervating about this mental data stream of regular pulses, inculcated in all of us by early musical training. It is an artistic option, but is neither omnipotent nor essential, and forced coincidental playing of hands together reinforces it, perhaps to a destructive degree.

Hmm.  Perhaps because it's difficult to do, and the only way to succeed HT is to artificially force that mental data stream you described. 

You should come to one of my handbell rehearsals.  Strangely enough there are people completely immune to any regular stream of pulses.  Hee, hee. 

[lettersquash]

Wow, quite a discussion going on, way over my pay grade, but I'm interested in it and enjoying it. It was useful having that moan about my slow progress, too. Is it French in which the verb to bore is reflexive? I was boring myself with my approach to the piece, I realise. The challenge, I think, is simply to find a new way to explore it. Perhaps I was going too fast, but I had also slipped into the habit of playing the whole thing through (HS or HT). Yesterday, I made quite a bit of progress on the difficult parts, and it looked like I was near the "finishing line" - the moment when it falls into place and I can play the piece at even a reduced tempo with reasonable confidence - so today I wasn't thinking much about learning, about exploring and deepening my understanding of it, just trotting along to finish the race. It should be easy, now I know that, to find a new way to approach it. I think tomorrow (my partner's gone to bed) I'll work on chunks, probably HT, at a slow tempo. I read somewhere on here how repetition is what helps the brain learn stuff, so going through even two pages of complex sensorimotor processing is a lot. Chunking should help, but the more important lessons are probably (a) about finding a new approach, to stop boring myself, and (b) not being impatient and thinking I'm almost at the finishing line.

[ted]

...Perhaps because it's difficult to do...

"Oh dear", as Ireland said to Bax in the Ken Russell film. It isn't difficult for me Timothy, just supremely uninteresting and musically destructive. When I took composition lessons with John Wells he told me my music was "out of time". "Yes John, I know, that is the sort of sound I love !" I replied.

Anyway, I suppose we had better allow the discussion to revert to helping the original poster.

[timothy42b]

Anyway, I suppose we had better allow the discussion to revert to helping the original poster.

I agree, but I don't want to leave with you thinking I meant playing in time was difficult for you personally. 

I meant that for many people coordinating hands together adds a layer of difficulty that is partly ameliorated by using the crutch of strict time. 

[lostinidlewonder]

Learning separate hands is usually no problems but it is the process of putting them together which stumps most. There are many tools you can use to bring both hands together efficiently. For example, you could play one hand as written and only some of the notes of the other. You should experiment to find where is the point where the addition of notes in the reduced hand causes you to make errors or hesitate. You can also disect the phrase and practice small enough parts at tempo with both hands and have controlled pauses inbetween groups, then aim to remove the pauses. You could play one hand completely while humming the other hand, etc etc.

If you post a specific part to look at we can perhaps discuss some ways in which you could work towards getting it both hands fluently.

[lettersquash]

Incidentally, no worries about diversions like the one above on my account, it's all useful. If I understand what's being said, I agree that riveting the left and right parts (or several parts) together in rigid time misses something that - is there a name for it, relative rubato? - can add, which can be a conscious effort or might be intuitive. It's also usually easily discernable from failed attempts to play the notes together in time.

I think my question has been answered, although longer discussion might bring to light other useful points. I'm a returner, after 40 years or more, having had lessons as a teenager, and as such I'm trying to remember - or relearn - how one approaches learning the piano. There's a lot on here already about that, and I've read a fair bit. There are also a lot of contradictory views, and some of it will be personal style, intentions, skills, etc.

In the back of my mind - having read something emphasizing the importance of HS practice - was the thought, maybe if I just kept playing HS long enough, my brain would assimilate the two hand movements so well that HT would hardly cause any problem at all. Several comments suggest that this is unlikely to be the case, and that there are positive reasons to practice both ways, and that there's a significant cognitive drain that combining the motions and voicing them brings.

I'm already aware that some pieces are almost harder to play separate hands on, because one part directs the other or because the musical sense is broken. There is probably something to be gained in reading skills by overcoming that and just reading what's written on one clef, but it is often harder to do. Similarly, the idea of dropping notes out of a part to see where I'm having problems seems to me to construct a new problem, which, while it might have some technical advantage for learning, would seem to be likely to be harder rather than easier. One is having to read the music and rewrite it at the same time. There will be exceptions, I suppose, such as playing a series of bass notes while ignoring the chords in the left that alternate with them, then perhaps putting just the chords in. Trying to play just some notes of a contrapuntal line as in Bach seems like more work than just playing the notes. The is especially true in my case, because what I trip up over is discovering that I've missed a crucial finger change and am now running towards an impossible switch...or, sometimes, towards realising I've just found a much better fingering! In some of the Bach I'm learning, for instance, the trills will have a 132 marked in the score, and, although I kind of get the logic and could learn it that way, I find an easier fingering that really doesn't cause any problem in the following passage, even allowing for increasing speed. Bach was, I read, a stickler for following correct formulae about fingering, and if I were training to be a concert pianist 20 years from now the discipline of developing the correct fingering at every point in a piece might be vital, but that doesn't apply.

The posted video (thanks antune) was a big help in that the pianist said very clearly that if you're not able to play without mistakes, it's more than likely because you're playing too fast. Part of my "boredom" was a rush to finish learning pieces and I didn't realise it but I had made the wrong judgement that I should now be able to push the tempo up a bit more. To slow down would feel like increasing the boredom and going backwards (because on a good day I could play it a little faster). I must slow down to make faster progress, perhaps. Less haste, more speed. (The content of the video itself wasn't on an area I struggle with at all. I can come up with good interpretations of pieces till the cows come home if I can get my fingers to go in the right places.)

[ranjit]

In the back of my mind - having read something emphasizing the importance of HS practice - was the thought, maybe if I just kept playing HS long enough, my brain would assimilate the two hand movements so well that HT would hardly cause any problem at all.

There is an illusion in piano playing, that your brain ends up learning how to split itself in two. This is not quite true, at least in my experience. What happens instead is that the brain learns to perceive all of the elements going on as an integrated whole. You simultaneously perceive the multiple voices as well as their interrelationships. If you have quadruplets in the right hand, and triplets in the left hand in a piece, you might be led to believe that your brain needs to learn to process two rhythms simultaneously. But as far as I can tell, you perceive the polyrhythm itself. You are aware of what the second hand is doing while playing the first, and vice versa.

There is probably something to be gained in reading skills by overcoming that and just reading what's written on one clef, but it is often harder to do.

You would learn how to "type out" notes, which may be a good idea if your problem is to simply recognize a note name quicker, but for most purposes I've found that it's better to read something with musical context as the ultimate goal is to get a sense of oneness between the sheets, the sound produced, the musical effect you're trying to generate, as well as the hand movements. Recognizing groups of notes and ideas ("words") as opposed to the "letter" names.

Trying to play just some notes of a contrapuntal line as in Bach seems like more work than just playing the notes.

It probably is, which is one of the reasons why it's useful. In the Bach example, it can give you a better insight into the movement of the bass line vis a vis the melody line for example. That can train your ear to hear how it works, and then once you put it back together, you will be able to follow both lines simultaneously. Counterpoint is call-and-response -- hearing the call-and-response is the key to memorizing as well as interpreting the score imo.

Trying to play just some notes of a contrapuntal line as in Bach seems like more work than just playing the notes. The is especially true in my case, because what I trip up over is discovering that I've missed a crucial finger change and am now running towards an impossible switch...or, sometimes, towards realising I've just found a much better fingering! In some of the Bach I'm learning, for instance, the trills will have a 132 marked in the score, and, although I kind of get the logic and could learn it that way, I find an easier fingering that really doesn't cause any problem in the following passage, even allowing for increasing speed.

Regarding the "impossible switch", the idea is to drop notes and play the remaining with the correct fingering. The fingering must be worked out beforehand -- by worked out, I mean you need to see the music phrase by phrase, and figure out the fingering for each phrase and then play the notes with that fingering, not that it needs to be worked out on the score. I haven't usually needed to work out fingering which may be because I have improvised a lot (part of the reason for doing so was to figure out appropriate fingerings on the fly) so now it's intuitive to me what fingering to use at least 95% of the time. But the key is to see each figuration/hand position as a whole imo, and then figure out the best way to do it. Sometimes, as in that 132 example you quote, the fingering might suggest a certain pattern of accenting the notes and there can be subtle differences in sound production. I'm not necessarily saying you're wrong, but that is something to keep in mind. It's tempting to play all kinds of trills 232 or 121, but I have found alternative fingerings to have their uses. It's a red flag if you think your fingering is "much" better imo. It probably means you haven't thought through the full ramifications of the fingering, (which is perfectly natural since you're still a beginner).

Right now, I appear not to be able to play even the right hand of Invention No.1 on its own.

The right hand of the invention isn't too difficult, so if coordination of the right hand is an issue, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to combine both hands. If you're just starting out, I would highly recommend playing a lot of really simple pieces in a quick time frame. Incidentally, for the first year or so when I started playing the piano, I almost never used sheet music but relied on my ear and synthesia. However, the idea was to develop a real understanding of how to play melodies musically with my right hand, and hopefully accompaniment with the other. So I went about transcribing every single melody I heard or could recall on the keyboard. I even made a list of songs I knew, and went about transcribing the melodies one after the other. So overall I might have played hundreds of melodies (with my right hand) in the first year. I think that's really important to develop fluency. Once you have achieved some level of fluency, you will be able to play each hand individually, immediately, fingerings will become far more intuitive and so on. You will keep developing over the years, but I felt that I had more or less completely sidestepped having to write out fingering suggestions -- I don't think there is a single time I have ever written a fingering on a score. And it frees you up to focus on other things.

[lettersquash]

Thanks for that, ranjit, it was also very helpful. Regarding the brain comprehending music playing as a whole, that fits with my experience too.

On fingering problems, I think I'm often suffering from a tug between my intuition about how to play a piece and the fingering the editor has suggested. However, I am still a beginner, indeed, and a rusty one, and probably haven't done as much improvising as you (and certainly I've only ever transcribed a few pages), so I guess my prediction ability is poor. That is often what fingering on the fly is about - knowing where you're going to have to get to, and how fast, etc., and (my biggest lack) enough theory knowledge to see the black notes ahead of time, to avoid a clumsy thumb on one, etc.

I gather from reading that this is one of the purposes of going through scales and studying music theory, so that your fingers are already trained to deal with the runs you'll encounter in pieces. I'm a little sceptical, because of the number of times I see patterns in pieces where the fingering doesn't seem like it could possibly relate to how you'd play the scale that the notes are from. Decisions are clearly made on the flow of notes and the biology of the hand (and, as you say, because different fingerings may give different accents). Of course, there are plenty of examples of partial scales in musical lines, but a heck of a lot that are all over the place.

[brogers70]

I gather from reading that this is one of the purposes of going through scales and studying music theory, so that your fingers are already trained to deal with the runs you'll encounter in pieces. I'm a little sceptical, because of the number of times I see patterns in pieces where the fingering doesn't seem like it could possibly relate to how you'd play the scale that the notes are from. Decisions are clearly made on the flow of notes and the biology of the hand (and, as you say, because different fingerings may give different accents). Of course, there are plenty of examples of partial scales in musical lines, but a heck of a lot that are all over the place.

It is true that learning scales and theory will make the fingering for scalar passages more intuitive, and make it less likely that you'll forget which notes are sharped or flatted in a passage. Still, there are many, many other reasons to work on scales and to learn theory.

Scales are great because once you learn the fingering, which should only take a couple of weeks to get used to, you'll have years and years in which you can use scales to improve your technique. By which I mean, you can concentrate entirely on, say, wrist flexibility, or how your arm moves, or getting your fingers relaxed and off the keys as fast as possible, or learning to do different articulations in different hands, or even polyrhythms. And you won't have to worry about what the notes actually are because they'll already be second nature. I've been playing for almost 25 years and I still love working on scales.

Theory is great because it will help both in sight reading and memorizing. When you recognize typical chord progressions quickly, you can clump things as you sight read - if you already know how to finger a first inversion major triad you have a lot less to decode than if you have to read it note by note. And when (and if) you are memorizing, thinking in terms of chord names and progressions and cadences will help you reduce lots of small pieces of information (individual notes) that would be very hard to remember into a few big pieces of information.

You are quite right that you'll only rarely find a piece of real music that contains a four octave up and down scale in both hands, but you will often find scalar passages with fingering pretty well aligned with the daily scales you practice. And, in any case, there are other good reasons for working onscales.

[j_tour]

Scales are great because once you learn the fingering, which should only take a couple of weeks to get used to, you'll have years and years in which you can use scales to improve your technique.

One of many very thoughtful insights in your post.  You put a terrific spin on it that I wouldn't have thought of:  it's true in that one doesn't (or probably many people don't) mechanically do scales the rest of one's performing life, but one does (or one can) derive a good bit of practical enjoyment from the mere diversity of fashions simple things can be played.  Yes, even just scales played from the tonic and so forth.

nd you won't have to worry about what the notes actually are because they'll already be second nature. I've been playing for almost 25 years and I still love working on scales.

Indeed.  I still like playing some of the 2-part inventions of Bach in various ways, even though I have to use the sheet music much of time:  as quickly as possible, or perhaps differently.  As slowly as possible.  Anything that is amusing, I find, can be rewarding, regardless of one's "level" of playing.  Not always, but it can be.

Scales are the same way.  In fact, much of the C maj or the D min. 2-part inventions are not much more than adept manipulations of scalar fragments.  Some of the sinfonie as well, such as the C maj.

It's really an abstraction from the music, working at the mechanics, but it's rewarding.  I've been doing for a little more than twenty-five years, and arguably never really got great at it, but, it doesn't matter:  it's an inexhaustible resource.

Namely, there's always something that can be done, even with simple materials.  "The mind plays tricks on you.  You play tricks back.  It's like a giant cable knit sweater you're trying to unravel, and someone keeps knitting and knitting and knitting and"...and so forth.  It might take a certain kind of personality, but as one observes among musicians, there are all kinds of people who can play of different dispositions.

[lettersquash]

Thanks guys, I'll try, but I find it hard to comprehend that people can learn to see music the way you describe. I don't know how much this is down to my unwillingness to put enough effort in (er, probably!), but I suspect it's more difficult for certain types of musician to do. I have - I think - an unusually good ear for music. It was commented on several times by teachers when I was young, which makes it particularly difficult to force myself to learn certain aspects of musical skill, which come naturally to others. I've got an accute sense of tone (thought not absolute pitch) and rhythm. I can play polyrhythms and have written some stuff in compicated time signatures.

But I lack somewhat in whatever kinds of mental skill are used in learning the dots, and from there (I guess) the skill of recognising chords (in melodic forms or not) and theory elements, etc. It maybe related to mental arithmetic skills, I don't know. So I almost can't believe that someone can remember how to play, what is it, 36 major triads (allowing for inversions) - oh, no, it's more than that, 72? - and recognise what they look like on the page! Maybe it is just practice and I've only come back to reading music for the last two months or so. I still find myself saying "grass" or "cows"!

I'm trying now to really work on the reading, which seems I can only do by finding new material, or I just learn it by ear and muscle again.

One thing that I've not seen in all the instructions on learning scales, bizarrely, is whether you should be reading them from a score - my dim memory of 45 years ago suggests that I didn't do this when I was with a teacher, just watched my fingers...or then stared into space once I was better at them.

Incidentally, while I'm learning pieces I try to look at my hands as little as possible, so that I find intervals by feel (with more mistakes, but that's how you learn), and I try to make sure I'm reading. That "reading" does of course become "way-finding" after a while. I guess maybe lots of this would help me see words and phrases in sight reading too. Hmmm...

You are quite right that you'll only rarely find a piece of real music that contains a four octave up and down scale in both hands, but you will often find scalar passages with fingering pretty well aligned with the daily scales you practice.

Well, maybe a few, but I'm still unconvinced that this is really all that realistic. Short scalar passages are more often the norm, in my experience, with larger interval jumps, chords, etc., all over the place, and since these often start in odd places, I would have thought it is usual for the fingering to be completely different from how it is if you set off to do a scale (even when you practise a scale from somewhere other than the root note, because, IIRC, you're still supposed to play the "correct" fingering for that part of the scale). But most music isn't really scalar. Just as one example, on Bach's Invention in C (No.1), there's a passage where the notes go up two steps and down one again, in what I imagine is a G scale, from E on the bottom line of the treble to the E above, including an F#, and the fingering on my score suggests repeated pairings - 1, 3, 2, 4, 1, 3, 2, 4, etc., so that can have no relation to the fingering of the scale of G you'd play.

[brogers70]

Well, maybe a few, but I'm still unconvinced that this is really all that realistic. Short scalar passages are more often the norm, in my experience, with larger interval jumps, chords, etc., all over the place, and since these often start in odd places, I would have thought it is usual for the fingering to be completely different from how it is if you set off to do a scale (even when you practise a scale from somewhere other than the root note, because, IIRC, you're still supposed to play the "correct" fingering for that part of the scale). But most music isn't really scalar. Just as one example, on Bach's Invention in C (No.1), there's a passage where the notes go up two steps and down one again, in what I imagine is a G scale, from E on the bottom line of the treble to the E above, including an F#, and the fingering on my score suggests repeated pairings - 1, 3, 2, 4, 1, 3, 2, 4, etc., so that can have no relation to the fingering of the scale of G you'd play.

Yes, that's why in the part of my post before and after the bit you quoted I mentioned all the other, better reasons for learning scales.

[j_tour]

So I almost can't believe that someone can remember how to play, what is it, 36 major triads (allowing for inversions) - oh, no, it's more than that, 72? - and recognise what they look like on the page! Maybe it is just practice and I've only come back to reading music for the last two months or so. I still find myself saying "grass" or "cows"!

Well, sure.  There are certainly any number of composers, theorists, and indeed players who probably conceive of things in a combinatorial sense.

I don't suppose the average pianist thinks of various inversions of triads, in, say, E major, as necessarily distinct.  I certainly don't, except when trying to deliberately use some forms for a particular sound, usually in a cadence or when modulating.

About your last sentence, if you're not already aware, at least one famous theorist put words (for what purpose, I'm not sure) to the subjects of the fugues from Bach's WTC (I&II).  Maybe as a mnemonic, or just a divertissement, but it's a valid method.  I know I use some odd visualizations to recall voicings or patterns in octatonic (W-H diminished) scales, which aren't based on anything but, perhaps, necessity.

One thing that I've not seen in all the instructions on learning scales, bizarrely, is whether you should be reading them from a score - my dim memory of 45 years ago suggests that I didn't do this when I was with a teacher, just watched my fingers...or then stared into space once I was better at them.

I wouldn't know what's the "best," but on stage or, these days, just plinking around at my place, I don't really think about it that much.  Except in live performance I've learned not to bizarrely gaze at the guitarist's fingers:  yeah, I can play a bit of guitar, but I can't really easily decipher which chords by looking quickly at the hands.  Just kind of a distraction.

Well, maybe a few, but I'm still unconvinced that this is really all that realistic. Short scalar passages are more often the norm, in my experience, with larger interval jumps, chords, etc., all over the place, and since these often start in odd places, I would have thought it is usual for the fingering to be completely different from how it is if you set off to do a scale (even when you practise a scale from somewhere other than the root note, because, IIRC, you're still supposed to play the "correct" fingering for that part of the scale).

Yeah, I think that's right:  it's not realistic, and even in the C maj Invention of Bach, no, you won't be using the same fingerings for every line. 

But, IMHO, that's part of the point of, if one wants to call it such, the exercise of being facile with developing fingerings that diverge from the "standard" (and, as you know, even that is not settled). 

Here's just a simple example of something I was into maybe a year or so ago:  taking bebop jazz tunes and playing the "head arrangements" (really, just the melodies and some harmonies) divided up between LH and RH. 

So, take Bud Powell's "Parisian Thoroughfare," in F.  It's a very simple, but quite fast melody, at least in the A sections.  But, put it in the LH and see how fast you can do it?  I can't visualize what I do for the LH, but it's certainly not much like the regular F major scale.

Or, all the other "rhythm-changes-adjacent" tunes in Bb, some of which are, by idiom, played in octaves split between the hands (as one chooses, it's just a popular sound). 

No, one must develop a way of playing these things, but while I don't have any proof, having a baseline familiarity with key and at least one way of adapting the hand or the Griff to it, is nothing but an advantage.  A significant one, probably.

[lettersquash]

Yes, that's why in the part of my post before and after the bit you quoted I mentioned all the other, better reasons for learning scales.

Sorry, I did not intend to ignore the other reasons you gave, I was just worried I might go on at too great a length and seem overly negative about your view.

I'm happy to reply to that part. I assume it's this:

Scales are great because once you learn the fingering, which should only take a couple of weeks to get used to, you'll have years and years in which you can use scales to improve your technique. By which I mean, you can concentrate entirely on, say, wrist flexibility, or how your arm moves, or getting your fingers relaxed and off the keys as fast as possible, or learning to do different articulations in different hands, or even polyrhythms. And you won't have to worry about what the notes actually are because they'll already be second nature.

I'm not sure which of those are particularly difficult to improve using the pieces I'm learning or have learned, whether of others or my own (my own obviously involve the risk that I don't stretch my technical skills, just do what feels easier - I do that, playing quite a lot of octave-and-fifth bass chords, for example). But once I can play a piece - indeed, to some extent I do this as I'm learning it - I can concentrate on my fingers and arms, my relaxation, etc. These elements of playing, I suggest, should be part of our consciousness while we play anything. Now, I'm not saying that running up and down scales, or other exercises of the sort won't improve technique more, in various ways, I accept that they do. It's more a question of relative cost/benefit, given my relatively casual ambition.

My engagement in learning to play the piano is delicate (I'm like that with a lot of things, unfortunately). If I make myself sit and work at something potentially boring, because of its repetitive nature, or for which the benefits are long term (or doubted), it might spoil my enjoyment of the whole activity. I find working on just a few pieces risks the same, and I have to find new things all the time to try out, because those engage my brain and enthusiam. If I develop your enjoyment of scales, there will be no problem, of course. I'll give it a try and see how I get on.

j_tour, my question about whether to read scales from a score wasn't about performance - who performs scales? - what I meant by "what's best?" is more what the standard advice or teaching protocol is. Do teachers and books on piano playing generally tell students to work through scales as written on a page? I've read quite a number of things about playing scales, with all manner of different opinions about fingerings, which order to learn them in, how many to work on at a time, for how long, etc. Nobody ever seems to make it clear whether you're supposed to just sit and play them by ear or "TTSTTTS" (WWHWWWH) or follow the score...I mean as a general rule. The last resource I looked at presented scales on the page, but only to show the structure of them. Nobody ever (in my limited experience) really says anything about whether you are training yourself in how the scale LOOKS written down. They generally talk about training your fingers and "memory". The reason I asked is because of the emphasis that's been put on scales teaching you how to recognise tonal structures in sight reading. That suggests that the look of the scale on the page is important and raises the question of how - if you don't do that - you then learn to associate patterns of notes with something you learned when you were playing the scales without the notes in front of you, which could happen at one remove, I realise, as one gets better at reading music. There would be a second process where the brain would put the two together. There might be moments where you play a run and go, "oh, that's a C# minor scale - my fingers are already used to that!"

[ted]

...But I lack somewhat in whatever kinds of mental skill are used in learning the dots, and from there (I guess) the skill of recognising chords (in melodic forms or not) and theory elements, etc. It maybe related to mental arithmetic skills, I don't know. So I almost can't believe that someone can remember how to play, what is it, 36 major triads (allowing for inversions) - oh, no, it's more than that, 72? - and recognise what they look like on the page! Maybe it is just practice and I've only come back to reading music for the last two months or so. I still find myself saying "grass" or "cows"!...

There is also the important but often overlooked truth that the name for a keyboard subset, chord or scale, is not the entity itself in the sense of sound, location or grip. I can use myself as an example of what I mean. Say, for example, during improvisation I play the subset known as an E flat ninth. I don't mentally register its label at all, even less its voicing or position, that would be a hopeless and indeed, redundant mess of what you rightly term "mental arithmetic". When playing or creating music I do not clutter my mind with useless facts. I am no doubt going to attract fierce criticism if I say that names and labels are a waste of time for me. Many of the sounds I enjoy have no recognised descriptions or labels anyway and if such do exist I do not know them and have no desire to know them. I know their sounds, keyboard distributions and haptic grips all right but labels ? No thanks.

There we are, I dare say that has consigned me to the untouchables with both the classical theory boys and the jazz brigade at one blow !

 

[lettersquash]

There is also the important but often overlooked truth that the name for a keyboard subset, chord or scale, is not the entity itself in the sense of sound, location or grip. I can use myself as an example of what I mean. Say, for example, during improvisation I play the subset known as an E flat ninth. I don't mentally register its label at all, even less its voicing or position, that would be a hopeless and indeed, redundant mess of what you rightly term "mental arithmetic". When playing or creating music I do not clutter my mind with useless facts. I am no doubt going to attract fierce criticism if I say that names and labels are a waste of time for me. Many of the sounds I enjoy have no recognised descriptions or labels anyway and if such do exist I do not know them and have no desire to know them. I know their sounds, keyboard distributions and haptic grips all right but labels ? No thanks.

There we are, I dare say that has consigned me to the untouchables with both the classical theory boys and the jazz brigade at one blow !

Well that's certainly fine by me. People think and experience most things in very different ways and have different skills and struggles. I empathise with what you're saying to some degree, or rather, I did. I have spent all my life ignoring a lot of theory. I'm now toying with the idea that there may be a rich other world of comprehension (which many experienced pianists here talk about) that I've ignored, and really I've ignored it because I'm lazy and it seems difficult.

On the other hand, some people are very different from me. Maybe they manipulate names and symbols in their heads much better, so approaching music is from that direction - how does it work?...

Like I've seen so many videos on how to write music, or how to play music, and of course they all come from the theory end (because you can't really teach the other stuff). This must be the preferred way (or only way) for some people who don't have such good auditory mental processing, but will also appeal to those who are blessed with both talents. They learn which notes and chords to play via the theory, and they get a pleasant result applying those rules.

I come mostly from the auditory end of things. I've written stuff mostly by finding shapes on the guitar neck (my main instrument) or keyboard, often not knowing what chords they are. But you can't read music that way - do you read? As soon as you do that, you've got to know some names, presumably.

[timothy42b]

I come mostly from the auditory end of things. I've written stuff mostly by finding shapes on the guitar neck (my main instrument) or keyboard, often not knowing what chords they are. But you can't read music that way - do you read? As soon as you do that, you've got to know some names, presumably.

I'm fascinated by the mental processes involved, and maybe the only one.

I think that for me it is the opposite.  When reading music, on brass or on piano, I can reproduce the ntoes on the page with no awareness of theory.  But as I'm trying to learn to play tunes by ear, I have to know what key I'm in, what note I'm on, what the interval is to the next note.  Perhaps at some point that will become muscle memory and be related to the subconscious - I imagine we can all sing a familiar tune without caring what note we are on.  But I find that if I'm playing a piece by ear and forget where I am I quickly crash.  This happens as the piece starts to become familiar.  I think I posted an example the other day. 

[anacrusis]

I think hands together and hands separate both have their merits. If something is very difficult and you get overwhelmed, slow down, hesitate, get tense etc trying to do both hands at once, hands separate can be very important so you don't ingrain a bunch of bad habits from the start.

However, if you play something that is at a technical level you have mastered you can usually play it on sight, hands together at a reasonable tempo without hesitating or stumbling. In these cases I do not think hands separate practise is that important.