16th Clit Comp iz Live

I’m much more curious about Chochieva’s teachings and what she passed on from da Plate.

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im having a lesson on czerny w her soon ill let u know :wink:

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Set up a secret cam, or something. Pleeeeez!

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she compared it to ballet dancers who have to work on their technique a lot at the barre. the idea is you have solved all the technical problems on etudes, so you have a solid technique which you then take to repertoire, having all the tools you need. that means the whole 299, 740, then moscheles and moszkowski. i said no way you really did them all and she said yes that was my childhood :joy:
the idea is you solve all the technical problems working etudes, so you have a comprehensive, solid technique which you then take to repertoire, having all the tools you need.

my main teacher before was not into etudes and just worked on hard passages in my pieces when difficulties arose. of course, reasonable minds can disagree, but ive always been self conscious about my technique, so im going to do a bunch of the 740s for her over then next few months. we’ll see if it helps :slight_smile:

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Arrau also was against finger exercises and felt technical difficulties should be overcome in repertory.

I have this belief that those who are naturally super gifted when it comes to tech won’t make good teachers because they don’t know why what they were taught works. They’d probably have the same success with any other reasonable teaching method. Whereas those who had to put blood, sweat, and tears into developing a reliable tech have more insight because they had to bring more conscious awareness to the process of conquering challenges. They probably can’t play a sub 1:10 chop 10/2 like a Rudenko, but they can analyze why he’s mechanically efficient in that piece.

The Arrau draw his power from spiritual communion…

…with his weighted keyboard :sunglasses:

Yeah, but unfortunately most in most standard rep - the positions are not “copy-and-paste” and you have to discover new tools of approaching textures…

I’m not against doing some etudes early on but you’re better off tackling building hard ass real rep than doing “fleshlight sexual stamina booster wanks” with unstimulating rep

(Just my opinion).

Etudes? How about straight to the Liszt Paganini and go from there :sunglasses:

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Plus there are plenty of unique difficulties in standard rep that you’ll never encounter in mechanics-oriented etudes.

Yeah, like in that doc I was watching, there was a clip where he was going over his edition of the Brotha Zonz, and he was mentioning something about the difficult the creating a certain crescendo in 2 bars in a particular passage.

Here’s the part about technique, timestamped.

https://youtu.be/1Wrb-VTrjKI?t=2663

Here’s the part about the difficulty in Op. 31 No. 3

https://youtu.be/1Wrb-VTrjKI?t=2739

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“I recently came across an interview with Rachmaninov from 1910 in the Etude, a popular American magazine published by Theodore Presser from 1883 until 1957 that covered many musical topics and included contributions from many pianists over the years.
Any thoughts about playing the piano by a pianist as great as Rachmaninov are cherishable but what struck me most in this article was his belief that young pianists should study Hanon for up to five years during their formation and that they should play scales with the metronome in their exams:
“Personally, I believe this matter of insisting upon a thorough technical knowledge is a very vital one. The mere ability to play a few pieces does not constitute musical proficiency. It is like those music boxes which possess only a few tunes. The student’s technical grasp should be all embracing.”

“It struck me because, although many of us have spent gruelling hours in the practice studio grinding through pianistic callisthenics of this kind, most pianists, when reaching maturity and having professional careers, discount their use: ‘Oh, they’re all a waste of time … You can study technique in the context of the pieces you’re practising … Scales, arpeggios … useless!’ And so on. I’ve heard such dismissive statements countless times from colleagues, both teachers and performers.
What’s curious, though, is that those doing the dismissing have often done the exercises in their early years. They say their rejection of them comes from later experience, yet who is to assess how much benefit they derived from the exercises before they decided to trash them? Who can say if those pearly passages they are able to play today were made more lustrous by a facility developed years before?
I do think there comes a time when exercises are less useful, and time can certainly be wasted for young pianists if they rattle through Hanon mindlessly for hours on end. But I remember clearly my early teachers guiding me towards Beringer, then Joseffy and Pischna, then Hanon (although to be done in keys other than C major) and later other invented exercises of their own. Gordon Green, Derrick Wyndham and Adele Marcus all had their own drills. I still use my own adapted version of the latter’s exercise passed down from her own teacher, Josef Lhévinne, as well as others I have stumbled upon, fiddling on backstage pianos.
I’ve never doubted the importance of such workouts in the early years, provided that they are done correctly, because playing the piano is about muscles and tendons and reflexes and joints as well as emotions and intellect. Reading an endorsement from one of the greatest pianists of all time reassured me. It’s important to remember our roots, and to remember what nourished them in formative times.”

Stephen Hough

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sorry sorry TM I’m gonna trust Rach and Pletnev instead and I’ll keep practicing Czerny :wink: :laughing:

brave :sunglasses:

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id offer to b molested for this finger tech, tru

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Better than being molested for dis kinda fingah tech :wim:

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I’m guessing this refers to the early years of piano study, not when a mofo is playing Ravel’s Sonatine, etc. If you can play Chopin 25/6, why do a Czerny exercise for thirds? Why not just try and perfect 25/6? Or why work on exercises dealing with passage work for the left hand in Czerny’s Op. 718 (i think that’s the one for the left hand), when you are capable of playing Chopin’s Op.10/12? Just perfect that etude.

Then again, I don’t know anything and take my advice with a grain of salt. It’s just surprising that someone who study Czerny at the conservatory level. I’d imagine that would be done with my year 6-7 at a musical school.

Czeyner La Mente Musical enters the room

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Zlata told me to :laughing:

she also told me an anecdote:
a friend (sorry can’t remember who) was staying with Rachmaninoff over the summer as he prepared for concerts the coming season. he had been mostly composing, so he wanted to get his fingers back in shape. what did he do? czerny op. 740, hours every day, the whole opus in different sections.

I do play op 25/6, but the piece isn’t a thirds etude. its a beautiful poem, for the piano with gorgeous harmony and aching melody, which just so happens to have thirds going like crazy in the upper part. you don’t learn or better your thirds by playing that etude, imo. i worked on the czerny thirds etude from 740, and it helped! there’s soooooo much to think about in the chopin, and it’s stupid to practice it in a mechanical, non-cantabile way. when you do the czerny, THATS when you can really be an athlete and analyze every elbow/writst move and finger placement you need to master to have clean, solid, reliable thirds with your hand totally relaxed. then when you work on chopin you can focus on playing a beautiful piece of music and leave all your technical insecurities with mr. czerny.

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Pretty thorough answer by some Russian pianist on Quora:

Do accomplished pianists play Hanon and Czerny regularly?

There is no general answer possible. As a professional concert pianist (classical) I can make the following observations, They are personal, and valid for me and perhaps for others, but not necessarily universally applicable, or even acceptable.

(a) Hanon has been used non-stop everywhere, in every country. In Russian it is “Ganon” with an accent in the second syllable.

I would like to take an unorthodox position, and state that the true value of “Ganon” has little to do with physical technique or independence of fingers, or muscular co-ordination. There are other ways, and perhaps better ways of achieving this.

The genius of “Ganon” lies in its amusicality or anti-musicality. His exercises are meant to have no music in them whatsoever.

They help create a blank canvas on which true music can be painted effectively. With a totally blank canvas, the first tiny speck of true music shines like the sun.

To create a blank canvas, you have to play the repetitive, mindless exercises with total neutrality, with total synchrony of the hands, so that all the notes played simultaneously sound as one. Total control of volume, so that all the notes are at the same level dynamic level in each hand, and from beginning to end. No bar lines, no accents, no phrasing, no change in articulation once you start. The duration of each note is to be timed - your choice to make it overlap legato, adjacent legato, very slightly non-legato (“jeu perle”), timed gap between notes (less than half, half sound half silence, more than half). Different tempi, with a metronome. This procedure is much more demanding than you imagine at first, but it removes all bumps, inconsistencies, all possible suggestions of any structure or prosody. Everything sounds absolutely the same with the chosen parameters of volume, tempos, articulation. In other words, you have become a master at eliminating all human elements that could possibly lead to any meaning or any expression. At that point true music starts. ANYTHING you do to change this total vacuum rings out for the whole world to hear with a sigh of relied, to hear it as golden music pouring out, note by note.

To achieve this, you need supervision. You need a great teacher who can advise you how to listen and what to listen for. In addition, there are also the human mechanics (“technique” if you wish) that I have deliberately ignored mentioning. Only a teacher who has all the solutions can explain in demonstrations (and words) as to how he/she does achieve the goal agreed upon.

You do not play just one or two of the exercises. You play them all, and in 12 keys, with a metronome set at varying speeds to control EVENNESS of sound, absolute matching of the hands, and no accents whatsoever so that total neutrality is obtained. All notes become absolutely comparable (identical) at any dynamic level chose. Does that have anything with building muscles and co-ordination? Not really - the aim is to learn to listen and control every micro aspect of sound, even the way the notes are joined from the end of one note to to the beginning of the next. If that improves your muscle control - fine. But that is no the goal of using Hanon’s “Sixty Studies” effectively.

(2) CZERNY Studies. His genius lies in the fact that wrote aphoristic architectural studies, which enable us to create structures in sound that can be overwhelming in their simplicity and cogency. More complex compositions - Bach, Mozart, Beethoven - start where Czerny ends. Czerny’s exercises teach us about making meaningful music in the way that anatomy teaches a medical practitioner to make correct diagnoses and embark on a correct therapy. A visual artist practices visualizing three-dimensional shapes an draws them to sense proportion, perspective, foreground, middle ground, background. The visual artist also learns how to distribute details of his/her vision on canvas. A writer learns the relationship between structure and content, and the discipline needed to hold a story, a poem, a novel from escaping into chaos.

Czerny’s studies are music’s embryo. Beyond Czerny, one enters into the realm of “Preludes” - vignettes devoted to a single idea only. Here we have a veritable surfeit of riches. J.S.Bach writing for his wife and children, Leopold Mozart for his son and daughter, Robert Schumann for his children, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Kabalevsky. The closest to Czerny’ studies would be Muzio Clementi’s “Gradus ad Parnassum”, a beautiful introduction into more advanced technique and the dawn of the Romantic era.

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Daim, this guy has interesting sheeyat to say on a lot of stuff.

The fatty method.

Shred for 5 minutes every couple months.

Hope for best :sunglasses:

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