Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner Rose playing a different Hanon exercise in each hand

Well, the boy made a concert tour of Eastern Europe when he was 13, with the Mussorgksy Pictures being his calling card for recitals. During the tour, he soloed with 3 orchestras and made a recording of Beethoven 5 with a good Polish orchestra, and a very good conductor. He had coachings for a short while with Byron Janis when he was in high school. At 17, he was admitted to the Manhattan School on a full scholarship. At 28, he is now finishing up an MA there and getting ready to do contests. He has a going career as a concert artist in a small, regional way, and also teaches. A win at a major contest would certainly give his career a much-needed boost. If that doesn't happen, he can always consider an academic career in addition to what performing he already does. He would really like to compose those tidbits they use for video games (his first calling), and he may try to do that after school is over.

His sister got bored playing the piano when she was 14 and decided to become an actress. She formed a metal rock band with friends from her performing arts high school that they call, if I may put this delicately, "Va-jay-jay for President". They do local gigs and small club dates, and she does walk-on parts on TV and stuff in commercials in Hollywood. She just got an agent for her acting, so that might pick up. She's now 26, and I always thought she was more talented than her brother.

Yes, learning repertoire is important, but aren't scales, arpeggios, and other exercises important? To contrast your example, athletes do many exercises and skills to improve the various parts of their game. Also, every other instrumentalist (and vocalists) have exercises and etudes and warm-ups and things like that. Why do pianists get away with not doing those?

I don't think every pianist needs to learn how to do two Hanon exercises at the same time, but I think there are many Hanon exercises that are greatly beneficial to technical advancement.

Now that's impressive !! He should give it a shot and get it out of his system. Interesting !! Bored or not, I hope she is keeping up her keyboard chops because they might come in handy with her acting career.

This is very impressive, but I can see one potential downside: The mental energy it takes to keep two patterns going at once could distract from the point of Hanon in general: developing evenness. Hanon made them mindless so you could really concentrate on evenness.

Once you play with very good evenness, then the combinations can be a good mind game.

Not speaking of Rose here; just the general concept.

No worries on that score. She doesn't need to keep anything up. Nobody taught those two how to play anything; she and her brother started playing the piano when they popped out of the womb. She gives lessons for a day job, and she plays keyboards in her band. But she also plays all 5 Beethoven concerti too, and could before she was 15. That's not going away anytime soon.

Wow !!!

Well, not really. Or at least I haven't found this to be true.

These technical exercises are used primarily to acquire skills. Once you have them, it's not necessary to continue to labor over the need to acquire them.

I myself do not find exercises like Hanon, and a good portion of the Czerny output for example, to be of great benefit either to myself or my students, as the textures they focus on do not reflect much of anything you will find in the literature. The ones that do can be useful at a certain point. But once you can do them, I've found it's much more useful to perfect their execution in passagework that you'll actually play. The same thing goes of scales and chord textures. If you don't know scales, you have learn them. If you can't play scales hands together, then you must learn how. But once you do, and can, there's no need to go over old territory perpetually. to the contrary, you really need to get on with learning those textures in context because they are much harder than a straight scale or an A-flat long broken chord.

As far as warming up, pianists and most instrumentalists don't need to "warm up" for the same reasons as athletes and singers do. We need to warm up slightly to bring the central nervous system into a state of heightened arousal and neuromotor efficiency, and increase activation and firing in the motor units in the muscles. That's all.

Singers and athletes have to have that too, but they also require a metabolic change in the cardiovascular system to increase blood flow to the limbs about to do work. The vocal folds, for example, need to be suffused with fresh blood in order to phonate properly in every register. Otherwise they don't work. Pianists don't need that.

I agree. My "warming up" consists of no more than this: in the morning, I just make sure that the first few minutes at the piano are not too taxing: maybe some relaxed improvisation or more or less anything played slowly, with calm concentration and a lot of attention to muscular sensations (not just in the hands and arms, but in the whole body).

As for singers, I have worked with many first-rate opera singers who didn't warm up at all. This is specially common among the lower registers (bass or contralto), where the spoken voice can be very near to the sung voice in tone colour and pitch.

Learning a non-fretted string instrument is never a bad idea! Have you, by any chance, tested Rose for absolute pitch (aka perfect pitch)? It's not a huge deal if she doesn't have it. However, (1) if she does, she will take to the violin like a duck to water and (2) if she doesn't, the violin will really help her ear to develop fine pitch sensitivity and, in either case, her ability to render and shape melodic lines will be hugely enhanced, as I think someone else has already mentioned.

Don't worry about time. Rose seems to have the kind of gift that thrives on challenges and learning another instrument is a challenge that she would eat up without any adverse impact on her piano playing. Believe me.

For all it's worth, I wholeheartedly agree.

+1

Thanks for all the input everybody. This thread has convinced me that I ought to let her try out the violin as a 2nd instrument.

Rose does not seem to have perfect pitch. Almost a year ago now, her piano teacher suggested that I see if she could develop it. So I spent a few weeks working with her on this at the piano but she didn't seem to be getting any better at it and I could tell she was getting frustrated, so we dropped it.

Any other suggestions for brain exercise at the piano for her?

You're doing enough!

She's only 5!

Don't push it!!!!

This!

Starting the violin will exercise her brain in all sorts of new ways.

As for perfect pitch, don't get hung up on it. Some musicians have it, some don't. It's not a necessary requirement in order to become a good, or even a great musician. What all musicians should develop is relative pitch. Singing and learning the violin will help develop this naturally: later on specific ear-training exercises can be useful.

I hope she will always be able to treat the piano as a playground like this. I love her little comments. ("One More Time!!")

Yes this - even though Rose is 6 (not 5).

Does she have friends?
Does she engage in pretend play?
Can she navigate the physical and social demands of playing with other kids on a playground?

I'm not looking for an answer. I'm only making the point that well-adjusted kids have skills across all developmental domains.

I would not persue absolute pitch at all. My previous teacher has it and said it's more a curse as many pianos are not tuned to absolute pitch. Particularly older instruments.

Even modern pianos vary in pitch naturally , as humidity and temperature varies.

Also the concert pitch varies

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concert_pitch

Baroque music at A=415, but also highly depending on the instruments.
Modern orchestras often are using A=440 up to 443.

This seems pretty off topic to me, but...

Rose is the oldest of our 3 children. She has two little brothers, and she plays with them daily. Rose displays personality traits common to those which are the first born: desire to please, ambitious, etc. And our not-very-big house actually has a total of 7 people living in it at the moment because my wife's parents are living with us too. Rose is rarely lonely.

We do homeschool. This saves a lot of time for Rose. Far more can be understood by kids in much less time when they are given individualized attention. The resulting extra time can then be used for other activities - and this is mainly piano, singing, reading, and drawing for Rose right now. And yes, she also enjoys playing with her toys and pretending. Rose's main social activity with kids her age outside of the family is the local children's choir she sings in. She has several friends there.

I wish that Rose enjoyed the outdoors more than she does. I'm a former ultra-marathon runner and I wish that Rose wanted to hike trails with me. My wife & I are also really into gardening, and I'd like it if Rose were more interested in helping out in the backyard (we live in southern California so we garden year-round). But I don't push her into things like that and instead I encourage her to pursue her interests, which is mainly music (and I figure that her younger brothers may be the ones more interested in outdoor stuff).