I came across some rather insightful writing on the topic on scales/etudes/technical studies that I figure is worth sharing. It's written by somebody going by the screen name of "Bernhard" over at PianoForum.net, but I do not know anything about this person except for what he wrote. I saved those two or three posts, but I cannot find them on the web now. I played my fair share of scales in my youth, and, to a large extent, I agree with Bernhard's view on scales (scroll about 60% into this post to get the scales discussion).
Bernhard's writing below:
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How did technical studies first come along?
It is simple. The fastest way to acquire technique is to identify the most difficult bars of a piece and work on them first of all. Any experienced pianist /teacher knows (or should know) that. Most inexperienced pianists/students ignore this (even if they have been told many times).
So, imagine for a moment Professor Czerny trying to teach his young and headstrong pupil, 10 year old Franz Liszt to play a Beethoven sonata. Franz is impatient. He wants to start at the beginning and go to the end of the piece (he can already sight read well). He does not want to spend time repeating over an over that single bar with arpeggios in the left hand. What is more, Professor Czerny is never happy. Not only he wants to Franz to repeat the arpeggio endless times, as he now wants him to do it with different rhythms, different accents, transposing in all keys. And this is just one bar, for crying out loud!
Professor Czerny is not indifferent to young Franz predicament. He remembers his own lessons with Herr Beethoven, the famous musicus. No exercises. Just a piece thrown onto his lap and the direction: Bring it ready next week. Not much discussion of technique at all, but oh! What interpretation insights! Yet he was grateful for his previous teacher to have told him many of the little practice tricks he now tries to impart to his own students and that allowed him to master the difficult pieces Herr Beethoven assigned to him. Has it to be like this? Dry technical tricks on one side, and beautiful interpretation on the other with no middle ground in between?
That is when he has an epiphany: The left hand has to endless repeat that arpeggio, so why not add a simple melody on the right hand to make things a bit more fun? Yes, why not write a little piece that will incorporate all the repetitions, all the rhythm variations, all the accent variations and so on? Yes, little Liszt will be so excited when I show him this!
And so professor Czerny sets to work. He believes Herr Beethoven's 32 sonatas to be the pinnacle of piano music. So he sets out to identify and isolate every single difficulty he can find in these sonatas. And around each difficulty he builds up a little pleasant tune so that the task of learning these monumental works of music will be nothing but fun!
And he proceeds to compose over 50,000 of those fun pieces. For generations of students to come to have fun in the process of learning the piano.
Unfortunately for Professor Czerny (and all music pedagogues that came up with the same ideas) there are a lot of problems with this approach:
1. No one finds Czerny (or technical exercises) fun. Granted, they may be more fun than the alternative approach (work on the difficult bars without musical context), but this is more or less like saying that going to dentist is fun since he has all those nice magazines on the waiting room.
2. A Czerny study is completely specific to the Beethoven sonata difficult passage it was meant to conquer. Just playing any exercise, or set of them, will not help technique in general, because there is no such thing as technique in general. Technique is always specific to the piece you are working on. True, octaves, trills, scales and the like are common enough in most pieces, but even then they may have to be played differently according to context.
3. Czerny left no instructions on how to use such exercises. This is of course part of a tradition of secrecy amongst guilds of musicians/teachers in past centuries. You may buy the scores, but you still need the teacher to make it work. So once you have played all the 32 Beethoven sonatas perfectly and acquired all the technique, if you go back to Czerny it will be pretty obvious which exercises are taken from which sonatas. But then you will not need them anymore anyway! So if you are to benefit from them you need a knowledgeable teacher. But this is almost impossible to find since the knowledge was passed from Czerny to his pupils, and as the emphasis on teaching went from technique to interpretation at the start of the 20th century, the tradition was lost. Leschetizky may have been the last one who really knew this stuff, but since he never took on beginners, and since he rarely taught technique (Although Paderevsky was put on a regimen of Czerny for a couple of years) it all died with him.
4. Therefore, most likely your teacher will be giving you a Czerny exercise that has no connection whatsoever with any difficult passage of specific pieces. Go on, ask your teacher: Why am I doing this study? If the answer is: because your assigned piece this summer is the Moonlight sonata, and this particular exercise will get you through bars 1-4 of the third movement, the teacher knows what s/he is talking about. If the answer is on the lines of: "It is good for you, it will develop your technique." S/he knows nothing. (S/he can still be a good teacher, but you will waste a lot of time doing things for no purpose whatsoever). What if the teacher's reply is: "This study is good to develop your facility with double thirds." That is better than the previous answer, but then you must ask (most of all yourself): "Does any of my pieces requires double thirds?" If you have no piece currently on your repertory that requires double thirds, why should you be doing this exercise? This may uncover the teacher's hidden philosophy that one should spend time acquiring all kinds of irrelevant (for the moment) techniques to be (or not to be) used at a later date. And this is really bad philosophy.
5. Although Czerny is better than Hanon (which in my opinion is not only useless but also completely misguided, don't get me started on that one!) the sad truth is that as music, Czerny studies are crap. Would you perform them for friends and family? Would you like to share them with anyone? Actually there are a couple of them that I actually like, but I never played them for their "study" value, but simply because I like the music. Compare with Chopin etudes. Yes, they are studies, but they are also superb pieces on their own right (and in fact you probably need easier studies to acquire the technique to play them). And if you want easier studies, then go for Burgmuller, Heller and Eggeling which are actually musically satisfying.
6. But now not only you have to learn your assigned pieces, as you have to learn studies that may or may not have any relevance at all to the technique you need in your pieces (more often than not they will be irrelevant).
So what is the alternative?
1. Find a piece you desperately want to be able to play. This is your job. It is not your teacher's job. Your teacher cannot divine your tastes. If you are assigned pieces you don.t like it is your own fault. Notice that a piece you want desperately to be able to play may or may not be a piece you like. But want to play it you must. Simply because without such compelling inner need you will not be bothered to learn and practise it.
2. Identify the most difficult passage in the piece: all the technique you will ever need to acquire to play the whole piece will be in that passage. It is usually short, and it does not occur too often in the piece (this is true even for advanced pieces). This is your teacher's job. This is what you pay him/her for. S/he must be able to point out to you straight away the difficult passages. S/he must be able to show and teach you all sorts of practice tricks that will assist you in mastering the difficult passage as quickly and painlessly as possible. S/he must be able to provide you with a choice of movement patterns that will get the job done. S/he must be able to observe your playing and tell you exactly what you are doing, if it is right or wrong, and to assist you in correcting the wrong stuff. With such an approach technical exercises may not be needed at all. The technical exercise will actually consist on the several ways you are working on the difficult passage. If a technical exercise is assigned (and in some circumstances they are helpful) it must have a direct bearing on the difficulty you are trying to master.
3. It is your job (no one else can do it for you) to follow your teacher's instructions in [2] above to the letter.
4. Therefore you must trust your teacher completely. You must admire him/her. You must worship him/her. I expect nothing else from my students (not that I get it though). And the reason for this is simple: you will not follow instructions from someone you do not regard as a master.
We are talking of course of beginners or intermediate students.
The difference between beginner/intermediate and advanced level is not on the difficulty of the pieces one can play, but on the ability of the student to do all the above work without the close supervision of a teacher.
If your teacher still needs to tell you where the difficult passages are and how to work on them you are still a beginner and not ready for advanced classes. On the other hand there is something very wrong with a teacher that treats you as an advanced student (by dropping a piece in your lap and telling you to bring it ready for the next lesson) when you are not one.
[THEN somebody asked some follow-up questions and got the following responses.]
There are several questions here. Let us go by parts.
Quote: "I know where my trouble spots are when i am practicing."
Very good. Many people do not know even that. Now what are you going to do about it? How are you going to tackle these troublesome spots so that they cease to be troublesome? If you think you know the answer, ask yourself: Is it working? If it is not, do something else. If you are lost about what to do, ask your teacher. After all you are paying him! And then again ask yourself is it working? And if it is not, is it because my teacher does not have a clue or because I am not following his instructions to the letter? Piano playing is highly complex, but it is not complicated. You should experience difficulties (a Chopin study will never be easy) but you should have no problems.
Quote: "He just tells me to practice scales and arpeggios, and how to practice them of course."
There is a lot of misunderstanding concerning the practice of scales. So let us clear some of them.
1. Scales (and arpeggios) are absolutely essential. Anyone claiming not to know scales does not know anything about European music of the past 500 years.
2. Scales are completely useless as technical exercises.
3. How come? These two statements are certainly contradictory.
4. Not at all. Scales are important for two reasons only:
a) the most important: scales will get you familiarised with the concept of key, without which music understanding is impossible. And if you do not understand what you are playing you are a typist, not a pianist. This means that your scale practice must be geared not towards finger dexterity, but towards knowing the scales back to front. You should be able to identify the predominant scale in any two bars of music by simply looking at the notes. You should be able to see the modulations as you play.
b) Scales teach you a way of fingering. But if you follow the orthodox fingering (e.g. Hanon's) you will not be deriving much benefit from this.
5. Scales rarely use the fourth finger and almost never the fifth, which happen to be the weakest fingerings. So how can scales be good as exercises? Only if you want to exercise fingers 1, 2, and 3 which do not need the exercise anyway.
6. 99% of the pieces that involve scale runs will be restricted to one hand at a time. It is rare to find a real piece where you have to play a scale both hands together. So why practise scales with hands together, unless you are tackling a piece that demands it? Moreover, in most pieces the scale fingering used in the piece is not the orthodox fingering. This is true even at a very basic level. Just have a look at Mozart's K.545, first movement. If you have really practised your scales ingraining the orthodox fingering, tackling that sonata will be a nightmare, since you will have to spend extra time relearning the appropriate fingering. Which again goes to show that there is no .general. technique that you can learn in isolation. If you sent your children to school and instead of being taught English they were taught .general. sounds and syllables that may come in hand in case the child wants in the future to learn any possible language, what would be your response? Yet everyone seems to accept this absurd idea when it comes to development of technique.
7. Therefore, if you want to practise scales, have as your aim to learn the scales (meaning: the notes of the scales; identifying immediately the tonic, the dominant, the subdominant and the submediant which are the most important degrees). You want to be able to immediately bring to mind these things the moment someone say the name of a scale. Someone says Ab major. Can you tell immediately all the notes of the scale [Ab, Bb, C, Db, Eb, F, G, Ab]? The key signature (Bb, Eb, Ab, Db)? The tonic? [Ab]. The dominant? [Eb] The subdominant? [Db] The submediant?
The leading note? [G] Can you tell immediately that the most likely modulations in a piece written in Ab major will be to Eb major, Db major, F minor, C minor and Bb minor? Can you do that for all the 24 major and minor scales without a moment's hesitation? Because this is the stuff that really matters. I have seen people ripple scales trough the keyboard and being unable even to tell me the name of the scale. This is the equivalent of being the fastest typist in the universe, but who cannot read, so everything s/he types is gibberish (but fast, very fast).
Quote: "Though he says i should be learning Chopin or Liszt etudes (which I absolutely LOVE!) because I am not ready technically. Should i listen to him?"
You are paying him, so you better listen to him! If you are not going to listen to him better pay someone you are happy to listen to. No one is ever ready technically to tackle any piece. Every piece has new technical challenges that must be met afresh. If you are a five year child trying to play the octave study you are not ready physically: your hands have to grow. That is a different matter. If you are a pampered 7 years old who never had any major distress in your life you are probably not ready to tackle Janacek's "On the Overgrown Path" which he wrote as an investigation of grief after his only daughter died. But this is simply because you lack the life experience to understand what that music is all about. But most importantly, you will not want to play these pieces anyway. You will only be technically ready to tackle the Chopin studies after you master them! And then what is the point, you already mastered them.
Quote: "Would it be the wrong thing to do to just go ahead and learn a chopin etude?"
Do it and you will find out! In the meantime consider this:
Chopin had no piano teacher. He had a music teacher (who was a violinist) and he attended the conservatory where he had composition lessons. But as far as his piano technique was concerned, it was pretty much self-taught. His teachers at the conservatory left him alone. In fact there is a letter form the head teacher who says as much: "Musical genius, leave him alone." But Chopin lived in a small village in Poland, a real cultural backwater. Whatever impression he may have caused in his compatriots, the real test of fire was Paris, the cultural centre of the world then.
Chopin was acutely aware that his piano technique was different. In fact when he arrived in Paris aged 19, he went to a recital by Kalkbrenner, the most celebrated pianist in Paris. After the recital Chopin was dismayed. He thought of himself was the worst pianist ever. He did not dare to appear in public. Things were so bad that he actually went to Kalkbrenner for lessons. Kalkbrenner heard him play. The diagnosis was not good. Chopin had too many bad habits and a very deficient technique. He proposed that Chopin becomes his pupil and if he obeyed his instructions to the letter, he could promise that he would be able to play properly after a period of four years. At the time, the dogma regarding technique was that nothing should move but the fingers. They should be brought up high and work like little hammers. Wrists should be stiff and arms should not move. Coins were placed on the backs of the student,s hands to avoid any movement other than finger movement. Does that sound familiar?
Thankfully, Chopin came to his senses and refused Kalkbrenner's offer. He went on with his "defective" technique (which is surprisingly in accordance with modern ideas of arm use, weight, relaxation, etc.) to dazzle Parisian audiences. And here is the interesting thing: you could not possibly play Chopin's music with Kalkbrenner's limited technique. Chopin's music was a shock in his day. No one had ever heard anything quite like it. At the time he arrived in Paris the music being played were the compositions by Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, and people like Clementi, Hummel and Moschelles. The best way to recreate the impact that Chopin's music created is to spend a month listening ininterruptedly to Hummel and Moschelles piano works. Then when the month is over, listen to one of the Ballades. If it does not blow your mind nothing will.
What eclipsed celebrated pianists of Chopin's time like Kalkbrenner, Crammer and Moschelles was not so much his piano playing, but his piano music. Not one of them could play it. They did not have the technique for it. And they had no idea on how to go about acquiring it.
Chopin was keenly aware of this, first in a negative way (he must have been lacking in self-esteem) but later embracing fully his own originality. So he did what Czerny did in relation to Beethoven sonatas: He created a series of technical studies that could only be played if you had the correct technique. You see, the Chopin studies are only difficult if you play them the wrong way. If you play the way Chopin played, they become a breeze (well, not a breeze perhaps, but it becomes possible). And there was one pianist who understood that straightaway and that was Franz Lizst (to whom Op. 10 in dedicated).
So the Chopin studies are the gateway to playing any Chopin piece.
So here is the question you must answer: Why do you want to play these studies? Do you want to play them as "studies" or as "pieces" in their own right? Depending on your answer your approach will be different (by the way, there is no correct answer).
Quote: "And recommends that i practice Liszt technical excersizes every once in a while because they will strengthen my hands and improve my technique."
I can't say that I care much for Liszt's technical exercises. As for strength, it is never about strength. If you want to develop (totally unnecessary) finger strength, work in a bakery making bread dough by hand. I doubt it will improve your piano playing though.
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(End quoting Bernhard.)
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