Unquestionably Beethoven is one of the most influential pianists and composers in the world. With his revolutionary personality, he alone had changed the whole trend of piano playing, yet still have time to compose many of the greatest works in the world.
When I was reading I found out how differently 'pianist' meant back in Beethoven's time and in our time. They were all expected to compose, improvise and sigh-read. Nowadays we are barely required to do any of those. We can play a piece without knowing the harmonies or even notes. In comparison with Beethoven and his contemporaries, our playing are way lack of creative power. How different would the perspective be when one approaches the piano with the knowledge and ability to construct the music he/she's playing. In my point of view, the reason that led us to nowadays' custom is simply being economical. At some point in the history, probably starting from Liszt, the act of playing piano itself earns far more than any other part of the music industry, thus pianists are solely trained to perform. I think this is still a true phenomenon in present.
Although Beethoven dedicated most of his time creating music, he also had the desire to write technical studies for solving pianists' problems. From the fragments he left for us, we can see how much his distinctive approach to the piano differs from his contemporaries. While most of his contemporaries are still indulged in Mozart and Hummel's school of piano playing, Beethoven emphasized the involvement of the arm as well as body movement. The significant of his piano study fragments I felt is that the exercises themselves forced you to play not only with fingers but the whole arm. Although the pedagogue value of Beethoven's exercises is not particularly remarkable, the master still has left us an enormous resource towards piano playing - Carl Czerny.
Cznery basically inherited most of this ideas from Beethoven. Thanks to him we will never again run out of exercises for practice, and thanks to him we all spend much more hours of our childhood and youth in front of the piano. I found myself was raised rather according to the traditional stream: Bach, Clementi and Czerny. These are the names that I grew up with. When I tried to recall the days I was messing with Czerny, I found the studies not as beneficial to me as Cznery said they should. Part of the reason would probably because I'm not talented enough, but the other part I think is also because I wasn't taught and did not understand the philosophy of the technique behind the studies. I won't doubt the function and effect Czerny's studies could bring, but I strongly believe the studies have to be taught both physically and mentally, even at the very young ages of the students.
It is interesting to see Czerny himself suggested "we shall gain nothing by torturing the young Pupil with Compositions which must appear to him as old fashioned, unintelligible, and tasteless, or as too difficult and troublesome". I don't know if Czerny could have imagine 99% foe the young pupil (at least from my experience) indeed found his studies BORING! Anyways, my point is, having seeing Czerny saying that opens up my mind towards introducing, or indeed compromising to students more interesting pieces, e.g. pop music, musical, or even 'high school musical'..?, which obviously they''ll so much more willingly practice. It's just sometimes quite frustrating not being able to find substitution for Czerny. Could anyone suggest, what other choices do we have apart from Czerny, preferably more interesting, for students before being able to play Chopin's?
In terms of didactic literature, there are quite a few substitutions for Czerny. Although not billed as "exercises," various albums for the young exist in a variety of styles. Kabalevsky, Prokofiev, Muczynski, Bartok and Liebermann all composed important children's albums to develop a technique and ear for 20th century styles. Catherine Rollin and Robert Vandall have also written intermediate level preludes in a romantic style (as preparation for the works of Chopin.) And Alec Rowley wrote an important set of intermediate preludes and fugues as preparation for Bach.
ReplyDeleteThe pentascale and chord approach (and multikey approaches) found in most modern methods addresses preparation for pop and jazz styles, and there's quite a bit of didactic literature for students interested in popular styles.
I think the problem is more one of bias. It's sometimes difficult to get classically trained pianists to take composers like Jon George and Eugenie Rocherolle as seriously as they do Kabalevsky and Clementi.