The Olympic motto is: Citius, Altius, Fortius: faster, higher, stronger. French statisticians believe that around the year 2027 that will be history.

Jean Francois Toussaint of research company Inres in Paris has evidence to demonstrate that "breaking records" will come to an end across all disciplines as we human beings are faced with the finite reach of our physical capacity (excluding the occasional freak incident of course).

We have all witnessed how the music and piano world has become patterned more and more after the sports world: children started on rigorous programs at very young ages, focus on developing raw physical warhorse capability, incredible virtuosity, importance of competitive matches to further one's education or career, single-minded dedication required just to qualify oneself. This has had predictable side effects: cookie-cutter sewing-machine-like performances devoid of musical interest, the end of the development of all-round musicians who can compose, improvise and really make music when they play, loads of talented individuals being side-tracked or walked over when they don't or can't play the hard ball game with the same maniacal dedication, minuscule chances for even the best to be able to work at what they are training for, etc.

Yet, it would seem that this focus on super-human virtuosity has the seeds of its own destruction. Unless we replace the concert pianist with a Nancarrow style pianola there will soon be no more up up there to achieve towards. Virtuosity is a dead end.

How much richer the piano and music world would be if more young students could develop depth instead of height. If playing were judged more on other, more musical dimensions than climbing a Mount Everest repertoire because it is there. If pianists were trained first to be musicians and also as pianists who bring something creative, vibrant and of higher added-value than simply yet another sterile-laboratory-perfect rendition of museum pieces that have been recorded (better) many times before.

Great technique is a necessary tool to express the pianist's ideas. I also don't agree that young students are only taught the technical aspects of playing. I heard many of them play for the last two weeks at the Mannes IKIF and most were highly musical in addition to having great technical ability.

tJ, all so true. I would dispute 'We have all witnessed how the music and piano world has become patterned more and more after the sports world:'. We did it first. There were professional pianists long before athletes.

Virtuosity is often confused with bravura, which is playing with explosive drama, especially in fast passages that require tremendous muscular dexterity.

But there is a whole other level of virtuosity that focuses on touch and tone, which brings not only the music but the piano alive in many wonderful ways. This type of virtuosity can be expressed - in fact often is expressed - in very slow passages that require a delicate touch.

I find concert audiences will pay a lot of money to hear experts at the second type of virtuosity, and often these artists use the first type of virtuosity as an underpinning, not as a goal. They'll play Liszt so that all the technical difficulty disappears, as if he were the easiest composer in the world to play, and then they will concentrate on tone and touch to bring out so much more in the music.

We should have no fear that tone and touch have some mechanical limit. So if you are correct that faster and stronger playing will reach a limit, then students will have to concentrate on the other type of virtuosity, which is ultimately what mature artists require anyway.

Unless they had piano competitions in ancient Greece, I think athletes came first.

That being said, I generally agree. The question will remain - what comes next? My personal hope is that quantity becomes less important and quality takes center stage. Maybe we'll start watching the movies for the dialogue, listening to music for the beauty and cleverness of the ideas, and reading books that aren't on Oprah's list.

Hi TJ,

Your gushy "if only" concern about young pianists developing more "depth" has it’s origin in universal keyboard illiteracy ... the antiquated notation can’t be sight-read off-the-cuff ... after initially identifying the notes and getting the fingering right , it is only by the labourious process of dedicated practice (engaging muscle and aural memory) that a reasonable rendition is achieved.

The same can not be said of literature where reading is a universal skill .... there is no need to practice reading Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” ... reading is instant ... there can therefore be no similar argument castigating the written word.

Both require a tuition period to learn the skill ... literature is quickly savvied by a 6 year old scholar and reading gets easier with every passing year ... the sight-reading of keyboard music however can NEVER be mastered because of the dot-and-carry-one symbolic format
of the universal notation ... just as algebra does not afford a snap result.

IMHO your "if only" is better targeted at an improved notation format ... which gives everybody the skill to sight-read music like a book ... any dithering counter-argument that literature is that much easier to read should open up a dictionary to remind themselves of the thousands of quite different words in our vocabulary ... and framed on 26 letters of the alphabet against music’s lowly repeating 12 basic notes.

It doesn't matter if faster or stronger reaches a limit because as long as the pianist has enough of these abilities to play a particular work, more would be irrelevant. It's not a contest with records to break like athletics.

Of course they did. The Olympics included the arts.

Wow. There's an outlook for you.

Who said "everything that can be patented, has been patented?" About a hundred years ago. And even whosit over at IBM thought he saw a world market of about six computers, right? The telegraph company saw no use for the telephone.

OK. Classical virtuousity may be self-limiting. So is formal ballroom dancing, IMO, but tell that to the techsowhatsit-called-now dancers, or breakdancers, or rappers, or anybody who saw anything on YouTube and decided there was an opportunity...

Personally, I would not be betting large chunks o'change against continued human development on ANY front.

But then again, there have always been people happy to believe the end is near. That's just as much a constant as continued development.

Nobody has ever successfully "proved" humans will not be able to do something in the future.

I thought the piano was invented around 1700.

I agree wholeheartedly
Certainly there are. Thank goodness.

However, in general, often today's 12 and 13 year olds are expected to play the repertoire of yesterday's 18 year olds and 18 year olds are expected to play what conservatory graduates were working on before -- and all CD quality note perfect if you please. To meet that very physical challenge something has to give and in my opinion often does and that is too often musicality or developing their own voice and all-round musicianship.

Records have been broken, so to speak as the bar has steadily been raised. At a certain point however, students won't be able to effectively break more records by moving back the timeline with another 3-4 years, or adding yet 3 more workhorses to their repertoire, or taking that much higher tempi, etc. just like a weight lifter cannot take so much weight that his bones break. We are finite beings living in a finite world and there are very real limits to what we can do physically.

Tell that to the brilliantly talented pianist who comes in #2 or #3 in the "X" competition and winds up starting a teaching practice while her competitor at #1 starts his brilliant concert career.

Yes. Those sound like complimentary goals.

This was in fact the point.
Perhaps the answer will wind up being the "end" of classical playing being the general path today to be replaced with this "something new". In the meanwhile, I would like to see more of what Numerian describes:

Which still begs the question for me: how do you get to be one of those mature artists if the few or almost only way you can get on the carousel is to compete in the madness of the international competitions that often require "playing with explosive drama, especially in fast passages that require tremendous muscular dexterity" while developing such technique also gives them the required apparatus to "play Liszt so that all the technical difficulty disappears, as if he were the easiest composer in the world to play, and then they will concentrate on tone and touch to bring out so much more in the music"?

I think that *if* it is true that today's 12 year olds play what used to be 18 year old repertoire it's not necessarily a bad thing. It's just like the continually younger and younger chess Grandmasters appearing on the scene. I heard an awful lot of musical playing from the IKIF students, so I don't think it is so rare.

In general, when you're talking about a very young pianist, it may be easier for them to develop advanced technical skills before advanced musical skills. Maybe some of the teachers on the forum can voice their opinion about this.

About my last point you discuss...if a pianist has all the technique needed to play any piece perfectly from a technical point of view, more technique is not necessary and wouldn't make him stand out in a competition where another pianist had the same level of technique. If both had plenty of technique, their musicality would have to decide the outcome.

This is interesting. Are there statistics about the career choice / "fate" of the young virtuosi? How many develop into concert pianists? or how many even go into music schools? while at it, what happens to music school graduates? DO they stay in the music field (academics +?/- teachers) or do they end up having to move on to other career choices? Do music schools maintain statistics? (I have to say that music schools are not well represented in high schools or among career guidance / counselors.. They do not know much about them)..

You might be interested to know that physical laws impose a reasonably well-understood limit to athletic performance. Using these principles, one can calculate, for example, how fast different members of a family of animals can run (eg how fast a cat can run compared with how fast a lion can run). One can also calculate the speed at which a person or animal switches from walking to running. Trends in record athletic performances tend to follow the predictions of such calculations, which are based on metabolic and physiological measurements as well as basic physical principles. There is an interesting book on this subject: On Size And Life by McMahon and Bonner. How Animals Work by Schmidt-Nielsen is another interesting book on this subject but is less directly related to this discussion.

Using basic physics, I have calculated the exact instant that I will need to take a nap: right now.

Just ordered McMahon and Bonner. Big it up for nappers!

I am totally in agreement with you, especially after hearing a young man (who was on his way to a competition) play with dazzling speed and sound, but almost no musicality. My ears were ringing but the music left me cold.

In a previous thread I mentioned that Western judges are looking for mechanical, accurate, fast virtuosity while Russian judges will forgive a few mistakes if the pianist captures the soul of the music. I agree with the Russians. I would much rather hear a simple melody played beautifully than a thunderous rendition played at lightspeed without any understanding of what the music is saying.

Well, there's only one solution to the dead end, isn't there? Start kids on rigorous exercises as infants. Be very strict with them from the start, initially allowing them to play only exercises until they're ready for Liszt, so as not to waste time with less virtuosic music.

That, coupled with the ever growing wealth of life-extension technology, may put push the dead end far, far, away, or eliminate it all together.

But that would be just awful, wouldn't it?

You mean she has a book list?

Where did you get this idea? I think very few if any of the judges at important competitions feel this way. Certainly not the majority.

Maybe we need to start hiring prenatal piano teachers?

So is this kid unusual or just part of the general trend of this thread? If I find reviews of his performance in November I will post them.

Piano Prodigy -upcoming recital in Berkeley

Sorry, but there is no such thing as a dead end. Think of it as a mathematical limit. Ever approaching, but never quite reaching perfection.

That said, the longer people are stuck listening to the same so called "cookie cutter perfect museum recordings" or whatever you called them, the more likely things are to change.

Even thats not necessarily so likely though, because by the time we reach 2027, there will be a whole new generation of young pianists/teachers, to which everything will be new and fresh.

My son was quite musical and started playing in local Festivals and Competitions at the age of 8 or so. Many of the really high powered students of the Russian teachers (the kind that are on a piece for 6 months at that age) were not around the following years. They were burned out at an early age. I wonder if they ever returned to the piano. Musica 71

From my very Russian piano teacher and others in this forum as well.

All I know is that I was recently at a fairly important international piano competition (I was a student at the competitoin's institute) and it was a complete travesty. It simply had to be fixed. There were three finalists, and two of them gave astounding, utterly musical, riveting, unpredictable, beautiful performances. Time simply stopped during Mozart (he had the balls to play a "simple" mozart sonata in the final round vs. Petrushka and Liszt) and the Rachmaninoff was among the best we've ever heard. After the mozart, one finalist got a standing ovation and four curtain calls (the only standing ovation of the entire competition). The third finalist played everything the same - liszt sounded like debussy, beethoven sounded like debussy, etc. There really was no other way to describe it except completely bland boring playing.

Guess who won? Not the musical people, that's for sure! God forbid they use a smidge of pedal in Mozart! Oh the horror, rubato in Bach! Apparantly the ONLY quality the jury (who was comprised of some very big names) was looking for was "playing it safe". And in my opinion, pianists "playing it safe" and playing what they think the judges want to hear instead of what they feel is exactly the reason classical music is dying.

I am quite jaded after listening to this competition. The audience actually gasped in horror when the winner was announced and refused to stand for several minutes.

It was just really bad.

"The audience actually gasped in horror when the winner was announced[.]"

Now that's funny.