Sorry, I was a bit slow on that one. It's obviously the frontier mentality - the Sears, Roebuck approach to learning.

So... what's the point of this thread?

Does it have to have a point? What's your point posting?

kbk, whenever I get a new piece of music, first thing I do is YouTube it, get an idea for how it sounds. Also, aside from the techique videos you're always "raving" about, you can learn a heck of a lot from watching hand position of Argerich, Rubinstein, ect...

YouTube is a blessing for pianists, kbk....

Matt

Matt, was that fill in the blank or do we get multiple choice?

Why even bother playing music when we can just put on a CD? After all, Horowitz can play anything better than I can. Why am I even trying?

Why bother making love? There's recording of that too.

You can learn a lot even just listening to the youtube recordings by the great pianists. You can learn even more by watching also.

IMHO anyone who doesn't think this way thinks they have nothing to learn.

Hmm, I wouldn't dream of listening to someone else's interpretation before understanding a work myself. The idea of needing to hear a work before you play is not just barmy, but would seem to preclude any sense of excitement. Do you need someone to read the newspaper to you before you have a go?

Instructional videos are different. Presumably the maker will know how to put his/her point across effectively but performances?? Didactically it's pretty unsound.

If you're refering to my post I never said anything about listening to an interpretation before learning a work. I am, however, not against that except *possibly* for the most advanced students. I would guess that even many conservatory students do this.

And, if after you learn a work you listen/watch a very great pianist play and then don't change anything or learn anything new, again I would say you think you have nothing to learn. Hence, your "didactically it's pretty unsound."

Is this really a thread about YouTube then? Or more about whether listening to others' interpretations of a work either before or while studying it is a valid thing to do?

I'm more than happy to make my own mind up about a piece without the influence of recordings, but I do find it interesting to see what others' thoughts are - especially if I find lots to disagree with. I've been looking at some Chopin Études lately (must change my sig!), have trawled through lots of recordings, and only found one of op.10 no. 1 that I really like - and even that is faster than my preference.

I used to refuse to listen to recordings while working on pieces but I've mellowed a bit in my old age I don't think listening to others' recordings while preparing a work is anything to be frowned upon as long as the player doesn't follow an idol slavishly and comes to his or her own conclusions.

Stuart, your approach seems quite sensible though personally, once I've got to know a work inside out I never can find an interpretation I like.

The thread's about whether using Youtube videos as instructional guides, especially those ones posted of the good and great to illustrate matters of technique (drives me mad when posters do this - anybody could come up with 10 showing the reverse), is at all useful. What is going on inside and outside a performer during a performance is too complex to be used as a model for anything beyond interpretation and that is something so personal.

None of them could possibly be as good as yours.
:rolleyes:

I agree, once you have your interpretation the study of others' can be quite a resource but it comes after and through your own considerable effort.

Well often yes to some extent. The great and good need to record all 32 of Beethoven's sonatas in a few months to make a living. I can spend years on just one. I even have time to go to the British Museum and study the first editions and manuscripts not to mention everyone else's editions. It's how it works with amateurs.

I agree with kbk. I don't usually find an interpretation that I like either, and I try to wait to listen to recordings until I know what I want to do musically. At that point, the recordings give me an idea of what can be refined.

Recently I have been listening to recordings of pieces I'm working on to see if anyone else has accomplished what I'm trying to do. I was having an awful time getting the opening of "La Fille aux Cheveux de Lin" to sound extremely legato, and after listening to dozens of recordings I only found one person able to achieve what I wanted - and it was Michelangeli! So now I know that I'm not trying to achieve the impossible.

Sorry if I didn't clearify, listening to the piece gives me an idea of what I'm working for in a piece. I try not to work on musicality or interpritation till after I have the basic note structure and fingerings complete.

kbk, have you looked at the some of the documentaries they have on YouTube?

-Horowitz: The Last Romantic
-Inside the 6th Franz Liszt Piano Competition
-Argerich: Night Talks
-Andre Previn interviews Oscar Peterson
-Imagine becoming a concert pianist

...just to name a few.

"I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand."
-- Confucius

Maybe I'm strange, but I like listening to others play pieces that I play. Sometimes I find they have found something I missed and so I work it into my interpretation.

Ed

But recording them in a few months is not the same thing as learning them in a few months. Plus maybe the world's greatest pianists could learn them more quickly and have greater musical insight than you.

You need to check your source again. That quote is a western invention.

What he did say is:

"I have spent a whole day without eating and a whole night without sleeping in order to think--but I got nothing out of it. Thinking cannot compare with studying."

nm

I generally agree that when you are in the middle of working on a piece and still forming your own ideas about it, it is best not to listen other pianists playing it. Especially really great performances, because they often are just too compelling to resist being influenced. And it is good to avoid listening to other performances not only because of the influence, but because it will rob you of the experience of really discovering what you personally make of it, of figuring out for yourself "how it should go". And I think that experience is one of the most important and rewarding you can have if you are serious about music.

But, on the other hand, there's a major flaw in this idea if you try to make it a real hard and fast rule, because it would mean you can't listen to ANYTHING until after you yourself have mastered it, and that just ain't gonna happen. In fact, a recording or performance is often the thing that prompts me to start on a piece in the first place, so I'm sort of "pre-influenced" in those cases. That can't be helped, I guess.

Yes, learn them more quickly but why a greater insight? I'm probably higher qualified or at least equally so in the 'insight' side of music. I could probably do a far better job on historical and theoretical analysis than most, and to get an acceptable interpretation you need that input. What comes through when I listen to a work that I've study is rarely the composer. What I end up hearing is the performer's idiosyncrasies.

I doubt it though it's indubitably bastardized. I like you quote, good food for thought.
To some extent but it's very much a different and less rewarding experience.

Well, we aren't all alike, obviously. Although not exactly what you are talking about, I have often had the experience of watching a YouTube video and had my playing improve in some technical way from it. But for me, it's not very consciously directed - more often it just happens spontaneously, and sometimes it is really a surprise. I think this is because because visually we absorb a lot of information without realizing it, and being interested in playing piano, I'm just naturally attuned to what pianists are doing to achieve their results, and my subconscious mind has learned to sometimes take what I can use. But it's not entirely below consciousness, because I will often realize that one thing or another a pianist is doing has caught my attention, and later find that I'm doing something similar (or trying to, anyway). But basically it is a kind of learning by osmosis, and it really does happen to some extent.

wr, that sounds a bit on the dodgy side. The mere copying of the external form of an activity rather than a movement from inside is a surface approach akin to reading poetry in a language you don't understand, whether on the unconscious or conscious level.

It's some kind of extrapolation process, I would guess. How do we learn our native language in the first place, except by copying an "external form"? We aren't born with it. At any rate, all I know is that it happens, rather than knowing how it works, and that alone would make me a happy patron of YouTube.

You are born with language though. You parse your experience of the world from day one.

The issue of listening to a work before personally engaging (grappling) with it is an interesting one. A composition is for me an intimate communication between myself and the composer. That's the meaning music has for me. I just don't get the idea of an intermediary. As for learning a piece because you like how it sounds, yes we all do it, but we only persever if we find something of our own in it. In education it's called 'ownership of knowledge' - a bit old hat now, but still as relevant.