I have been considering your questions for a while now. The main problem is that it is very difficult (and lengthy) to provide a satisfactory answer in writing. All this is easily demonstrated in a couple of minutes. I do not want to leave you empty handed though, so I will explore a single one of your questions and hope that you will be astute enough to expand the conclusions to other areas of technique.
This is an interesting statement. I was always told that the 4th and 5th fingers are weaker (in whatever sense of the word) and that the 3rd and 4th fingers are less flexible with respect to each other because the share the same ligament(?).
Although this is true, there is a completely different way to look at this problem, one that provides a completely different set of solutions. In short, if you regard the 4th finger problem (if it is a “problem”, that is) as weaker and less independent than the others, then you may try (as did many of the 19th century pedagogues) to remedy the problem by submitting the poor 4th finger to all sorts of weird gymnastics and unnatural movements in order to “improve” its strength and independence.
If then you learn that it is actually anatomically impossible to do so, you are in a dead end: the 4th finger cannot be made stronger or independent – logic tells us.
But then you see pianists which clearly have overcome the problem: their 4th fingers seem to be as strong and as independent as the other ones. So clearly there is a way to deal with it. Unfortunately if these pianists have been raised in a regimen of Hanon/Czerny/Pischna/Dohnanyi/whoever for several hours a day – which is a very common pedagogy – they may attribute their success to such practice regimen – when in fact it has nothing to do with it, as we shall see.
Unfortunately (and in other aspects, fortunately) piano learning is a master-apprentice relationship and therefore highly authoritarian. Independent thinking is frowned upon. The student has no time for investigation – after 300 years of piano playing everything has already been mapped out and we do not want to waste time trying to rediscover the wheel – or so our teachers may tell us, and since this makes sense and since we are paying for this advice we tend to follow it unquestioningly.
But the human body/mind/spirit does not work this way. We are crafty and sly. We never truly “obey” to the letter our teacher’s instructions (and this goes for everything, not only piano). We may even consciously try to do so, but unconsciously we do not. And this is ultimately our saving grace, for
any teacher’s instruction – no matter how good - is always defective and incomplete and if we truly followed to the letter we would never raise above mediocrity level (in any subject, not only piano).
In all my years of teaching, I have changed my mind about the way to go about things infinite times. In the beginning I was always bitter with student’s attitude: “If this student would just obey my instructions he could progress beyond his wildest dreams”. However, a few months later I would realise that what I was teaching could be improved upon (or was downright wrong), and I was very glad indeed that the student had not obeyed my instructions to the letter. And this is still the situation. There is no guarantee that what I think is the best way at this point in time may not be superseded tomorrow by some even better way.
At the same time, I learned to trust the student’s unconscious to come up with the best solution for that particular student – a solution that many times can be transferred to others. The astute teacher/student will be very observant of unconscious movements (another reason to play fast before playing slowly, since the speed allows the unconscious to bypass the conscious controls).
As an example, consider this 5 year old, who when presented with a passage where she had to play a G followed by the C# below it with fingers 5 and 1, insisted on playing it with the thumb on G, and then pivoting on the thumb and playing the lower C# with the 2nd finger. At the beginning of my career, I would have tried to correct the fingering and perhaps launch in a big preaching on how the “correct” fingering was important. And I might have stayed in that particular rut forever, and still be preaching the same. But what if the fingering that little girl was using was actually better? In time I realised not only that it was better, as that it was the common way a 17th century keyboardist would have approached the same problem. In fact this realisation came to me because at the same time I was trying to learn a Scarlatti sonata in which a passage seemed completely intractable no matter how much practice was put into it. Then I had this simple but revolutionary idea: “What if instead of piling up hour upon hour of practice on something that was clearly not working,
I tried a different way?” So I tried the little girl’s fingering. And Lo and behold!, 30 seconds later the passage had been mastered.
The day I learned that (perhaps) the most important aspect of practising is investigation of the proper movements, and that
there are no set techniques – that is movements in piano playing. You have to figure it out for the passage in question and for your physicality in particular. This means that the basic idea behind technical exercises - that there exist a limited number of “optimal movements” that you must practise in isolation and acquire before you can tackle a piece of music – is completely unsound. From that day I dropped technical exercises and have never looked back. As a result, my technique (and my student’s) improved in a way I had never thought possible before.
So to sum up this long digression:
1. When tackling a new piece (or a new scale, or a new arpeggio) spend most of your time deciding how exactly you want it to sound – this work is to be done away from the piano: studying and analysing the score, listening to several CDs of the piece, going to recital where the piece is played, asking your teacher and fellow pianists to play it for you.
2. Once you get to practise/learn the piece on the piano, spend most of your time investigating movement and movement patterns (this includes fingering) that will result in the sound you decided upon in 1 above. Pay attention to the way your unconscious wants you to move; do not try to impose on your body movements learned from tradition (on the other hand do not avoid such movements simply because they come from tradition – even if it is a tradition you disagree with). Once you hit on the precise fingering/movement pattern (fingering always imply movement), then and only then you are ready to practise it in the sense of repetition. If you do so, you will see that it takes just about 30 seconds of repetitions for the passage to be perfect and
learned forever (I am considering a small passage: one or two bars). However, to get to these final 30 seconds, may well have taken you a two hour session of investigation.
3. If your final set of movements/fingerings is such that you must be constantly practising it for hours everyday otherwise it will “escape you”, there is something wrong and inappropriate in that set. It has no importance whatsoever that your teacher can do it, or that Glenn Gould can do it, or that Horowitz can do it.
For you and for that passage it is the wrong technique and no amount of practice is going to change that perceptibly. Have you noticed that many pianists specialise? Some will never touch Bach – even though they may play Rachmaninoff perfectly. Others produce exquisite rendition of Bach, but they would not dare to play Chopin in public. The explanation is simple: Their technique (= way of doing things) is limited. They are trying to approach every passage with the same technique. Technical exercises are simply not varied enough to cover everything. I always laugh at Hanon’s subtitle (“The virtuoso pianist”) and at his absurd claims that everything in piano technique is contained in those silly 60 exercises. The bottom line is: Anything that is taking an inordinate amount of time/effort to do
at the piano should be taken back to the investigative stage and figured out. Proper technique will allow ease of playing and mastery of a passage in very little time. And one you get it, you will never forget or have to practise it again – just like riding on a bicycle (Yet professional cyclists practise every day, and that should give you pause for thought: they are not practising, they are
training towards exhibiting a peak performance – and the same is true of piano – once you learn a piece, you don’t practise it anymore: you train for a peak performance)
(he he – the summing up was longer than the digression)
[to be continued…]
Topic: "Repeated note-groups"