Famous Pianists and Their Technique, New Edition / Edition 2 available in Paperback
Famous Pianists and Their Technique, New Edition / Edition 2
- ISBN-10:
- 0253348552
- ISBN-13:
- 9780253348555
- Pub. Date:
- 04/26/2007
- Publisher:
- Indiana University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0253348552
- ISBN-13:
- 9780253348555
- Pub. Date:
- 04/26/2007
- Publisher:
- Indiana University Press
Famous Pianists and Their Technique, New Edition / Edition 2
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253348555 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/26/2007 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 640 |
| Sales rank: | 453,398 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Famous Pianists & Their Technique
By Reginald R. Gerig
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2007 Reginald R. GerigAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-34855-5
CHAPTER 1
The Meaning of Technique
"Music is technique. It is the only aspect of music we can control." So states Nadia Boulanger. She believes that "one can only be free if the essential technique of one's art has been completely mastered."
The thorough development of the basic physical tools has been of the most vital concern to keyboard performers and pedagogues across the centuries. It is hardly necessary to argue its importance. The historical piano technical literature abounds with admonitions from the great; and while they all stress the urgency of attaining this goal, they do not lose sight of the fact that there is something more. The technical objective at the same time becomes the means to a far greater end — the projection of a meaningful interpretation, the re-creation of fine piano literature with heart and mind, as well as the physical element, totally involved. The spiritual and the physical interweave, even interfuse. There cannot be a truly great performance without a masterful physical technique. It becomes the great liberating force for the pianist.
Note the following descriptions and definitions of technique scattered throughout the literature:
Tobias Matthay:
Technique means the power of expressing oneself musically ... Technique is rather a matter of the Mind than of the "fingers". ... To acquire Technique therefore implies that you must induce and enforce a particular mental-muscular association and co-operation for every possible musical effect.
Josef Hofmann:
Technic represents the material side of art, as money represents the material side of life. By all means achieve a fine technic, but do not dream that you will be artistically happy with this alone....
Technic is a chest of tools from which the skilled artisan draws what he needs at the right time for the right purpose. The mere possession of the tools means nothing; it is the instinct — the artistic intuition as to when and how to use the tools — that counts. It is like opening the drawer and finding what one needs at the moment.
There is a technic which liberates and a technic which represses the artistic self. All technic ought to be a means of expression. It is perfectly possible to accumulate a technic that is next to useless.
Ferruccio Busoni:
NO, technique is not and never will be the Alpha and Omega of pianoforte playing any more than it is with any other art. Nevertheless, I certainly preach to my pupils: provide yourselves with technique and thoroughly too. Various conditions must be fulfilled in order to make a great artist, and it is because so few are able to fulfil them that a true genius is such a rarity.
Technique, perfect in and for itself, may be found in any well-constructed pianola. Nevertheless a great pianist must first of all be a great technician; but technique, which constitutes only a part of the art of the pianist, does not lie merely in fingers and wrists or in strength and endurance. Technique in the truer sense has its seat in the brain, and it is composed of geometry — an estimation of distance — and wise coordination.
Thomas Fielden:
"Technique can be defined as the acquired skill in physical craft which an artist brings to bear in expressing his own spiritual individuality."
Sidney Harrison:
"I am satisfied that we cannot make a sharp division between technique and interpretation. As the technique gains in command and confidence, it actually seems to prompt the imagination to bolder and bolder flights."
Ivan Galamian:
Technique is the ability to direct mentally and to execute physically all of the necessary playing movements of left and right hands, arms, and fingers. A complete technique means the development of all the elements of ... skill to the highest level. In short, it is the complete mastery over all of the potentialities of the instrument. It implies the ability to do justice, with unfailing reliability and control, to each and every demand of the most refined musical imagination. It enables the performer, when he has formed an ideal concept of how any work should sound, to live up to this concept in actual performance. A technique which fulfills these ultimate requirements can be called an accomplished interpretative technique. It is the fundamental goal for which one must strive, because it, and it alone, opens the way to the highest artistic accomplishment.
While the famous pianists and theorists of the past and present have all attempted to ascend Mt. Parnassus — some with greater vision than others — they have not agreed on the specific road to be used in acquiring a fine interpretative technique. Most, perhaps all, would agree in principle with Ivan Galamian, the master violin teacher, that "naturalness" should be the "first guiding principle" and that "'right' is only what is natural for the particular student, for only what is natural is comfortable and efficient," He goes on to express his distress at the number of unnatural technical theories that have come and gone. The history of piano technique includes numerous examples of such methods, proclaimed the only right road — the natural way. They enjoyed great vogue but, under the test of time, fell into disrepute.
Naturalness is, without a doubt, the final determinant of a valid piano technique. Such a technique operates in harmony with the laws of nature — with a special regard for those laws concerned with physiological movement and muscular coordination. The great pianists, with their almost supernatural musical and physical endowments, often discovered them by instinct. But, throughout the course of piano technical history, those not so blessed frequently sought in vain for a natural technique that the great pianists themselves could not fully explain. Prejudiced against or simply indifferent to objective intellectual inquiry, the many followed systems erected upon preconceived technical notions — biased methods, contrary to natural law and distorted in perspective.
It is hoped that this historical study of the development of piano playing — through the examination of the contributions of many of the most famous pianists and influential theorists — will help to guide present-day pianists into a broader perspective of piano technique and into a sound recognition and understanding of its fundamental, "natural" principles.
Surely more than one system has effectively presented technical truth and no one method holds a patent right to truth. Perhaps it might be said that there is a more or less absolute body of technical truth and each theorist and master teacher of integrity has tried in his own way to discover it, to make it his own, to pass it on to posterity. These means have differed greatly, but can be grouped freely into two broad categories. We can discern both an empirical and an analytical approach to piano technical knowledge. Too often the proponents of one have fought the other and failed to see that both are valid and even complementary.
Many of our finest master teachers are or have been empiricists. Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, and Liszt all found technical truth through practical, intuitive experience. They passed it along without labeling it or exploring its ramifications. In more recent days Rosina and Josef Lhevinne, Artur Schnabel and Vladimir Horowitz could be cited, along with a large number of others, as being primarily empirical in their teaching. One of Schnabel's students wrote of his approach: "It was his constantly expressed belief that if you knew exactly what you wanted, you would find — invent if necessary — the means to achieve it."
Another Schnabel student, Leon Fleisher, puts it in this way:
It's your musical ideas that form or decide for you what kind of technique you are going to use. In other words, if you are trying to get a certain sound, you just experiment around to find the movement that will get this sound. That is technique.
After an interview with Horowitz, Jan Holcman discovered Horowitz's position:
It is a mistake to suppose that Horowitz has some mysterious "tricks" for learning technique. Despite long years spent with his instrument, he is not able to explain how he attained his own stupendous mastery, "as I can't explain how I learned languages." There are some hints, however. While studying with Blumenfeld (who in turn studied with Anton Rubinstein), Horowitz received no recipes for technique. The way to technical perfection led, in a significant measure, through various purely musical approaches.
Sometimes the empiricists have a dread of any detailed analytical approach for fear it may spoil the freedom, the spontaneity, the freshness of the musical interpretation. Almost a hundred years before Horowitz, Modeste Mussorgsky (1839-1881) wrote along these lines:
Maybe I'm afraid of technique, because I'm poor at it? However, there are some who will stand up for me in art, and in this respect as well. For example, I cannot bear it when a hostess serves a good pie she has prepared and, while we are eating, says: "A million puds of butter, five hundred eggs, a whole bed of cabbages, 150% fish...." You are eating the pie and it tastes good, then you hear all about the kitchen ... and well, the pie grows less tasty.
Ernst Bacon, the contemporary composer and pianist, expresses a somewhat similar point of view today:
Learned books have been written on the physical aspects of piano playing, notably those of Matthay, Breithaupt, Ortmann, and Schultz, all of them rewarding to whomsoever is given to probing into the anatomy, physiology, neurology, and the mechanics of the arm and hand, as they affect piano technique. But while they may stimulate and satisfy "scientific" curiosity, they help the student of piano no more than would an analysis of the larynx, the lungs, the diaphragm, and the sinuses, help the singer to sing. In aiming to enlighten, too much mechanical self-knowledge mostly confuses. Piano playing will never be a science. If it were, it would cease to be an art.
A good rule is that the teacher should introduce conscious devices only when they are needed, just as the doctor prescribes medicines only when the body cannot take care of itself.
The theorists Bacon quotes might well answer in rebuttal that, while it is perfectly true that piano playing will never be a science, there is no reason that its technique cannot be based upon scientific knowledge. And where do you draw the line in determining which of these facts should be utilized and which not? Why should not all pertinent information be employed by the mature student in developing an enlightened piano technique? Conscious, physiological introspection applied in the practice periods can surely lead to sound technical habits that do not need to be given a second thought in public performance. Many analytical treatises exist in the historical literature which may well speak for their rightful place in the student's consideration. Writing twenty-seven years before Bacon, Arnold Schultz summarized well the analytical point of view:
The general hostility to the idea of method derives much of its vitality, I believe, from a half-conscious and almost universal suspicion that there is a fundamental incompatability between a mind interested in the mechanical phases of playing and a mind filled with what is loosely known as musical temperament. There is a fear, furthermore, that a persistent use of the reasoning mind in reference to the objective phenomena of technique results finally in the deterioration and atrophy of the subjective emotions upon which the interpreter's art depends. This is not, I believe firmly, too bald a statement of the case. It explains the widespread custom of camouflaging purely technical instruction with references to expression marks and with what are often entirely gratuitous rhetorical flights on the beauty of the music in hand.
Schultz freely accepted the introspective nature of music — an objective, analytical view of technique is of vital importance, but must be complemented by a mind which continually "looks inward rather than outward." He further wrote:
... And even so far as the thought processes involved in the analysis of technical touch-forms are concerned, I myself am anxious to concede — in fact, to insist — that few things are more grotesquely alien to the meaning of, say, the Beethoven Appassionato, than the concept of a fixed fulcrum.
Nevertheless, anyone who has puzzled at all deeply over the personal aspects of his art knows the rich complexity of the problems he encounters and the relative uselessness of broad distinctions. It is one thing to recognize the extremely objective personality and to dismiss him from music, and it is another thing to assert that all personalities showing strong objective interests are unadapted to musical expression. It is one thing to say that scientific curiosity is vastly different from subjective sensibility, and quite another to imply that an extreme curiosity and an abundant sensibility cannot coexist in the same personality. If one's own intuitions do not rebel, then the facts of history afford the proof against too facile thinking. Leonardo da Vinci was not only a painter, a sculptor, and an architect, but he was also an engineer; and although the spiritual subtlety of his "Mona Lisa" has overshadowed his mechanical achievements in popular fame, nevertheless he is recognized as the first to have formulated the laws of the lever — laws which are integral to the analysis of piano technique which follows. The giant among German literary figures, Goethe, made valuable contributions to the fields of botany, anatomy, and physics, some of which he himself regarded as equal in importance to his poetic achievement. Closer to home is Johann Sebastian Bach, who, in his invention of "equal temperament" for instruments of fixed intonation, surely served his art as a scientist; and Alexander Borodin, whose name remains almost as important in the annals of chemistry as it does in the history of music. It would be folly to assume that the creativeness of these men was impaired by their scientific activity; it would be only open-mindedness to assume that they were the better artists for it.
In the chapters which follow, both empirical and analytical technical approaches are thoroughly explored and shown to be entirely compatible. It is hoped that the reader's desire may be strengthened to study in greater depth and breadth the original source writings sampled in these pages.
CHAPTER 2The Early Clavier Methods
Before the technique of the early piano can be adequately studied, it is mandatory to investigate that of its predecessors, the harpsichord and the clavichord. In fact, the clavier touch was transferred directly to the early piano. The harpsichord, which achieved its greatest influence and usage during the eighteenth century, has an action in which the string, when the key is depressed, is plucked by a plectrum attached to an upright jack. The plectrum, also called the quill, early was made from the quills of bird feathers and even from small pieces of metal. Leather has been most frequently used, even down to the present day. Recently plastic has been used with considerable success. The tone quality will vary with the material used.
The point of tone is reached very quickly in the key's descent — a third to a half of the way down. Little force is needed to pluck the string; the action of the fingers is adequate for most of the literature. If two or more sets of strings are coupled to the same manual or keyboard, more plectra will have to be activated simultaneously. Thus more resistance will need to be overcome in the touch. Volume is largely predetermined by the registration and the construction of the instrument and cannot be significantly increased by the application of greater force. Some hand and arm movement is needed in chord production, but with no more of the weight of the arms brought to bear than is necessary. Too much force, even with a finger action, is undesirable because of the loss of sensitivity and control and also because of the resulting percussive noises which are more noticeable than those heard in the piano action. The arm needs to be suspended over the keyboard in a weightless manner. It serves as a stationary base for the action of the fingers. The movement of the arm, necessary in controlling horizontal placement of the hand, should be executed in a quiet, graceful, and curvilinear manner.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Famous Pianists & Their Technique by Reginald R. Gerig. Copyright © 2007 Reginald R. Gerig. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Foreword by Alan WalkerPreface and Acknowledgments1. The Meaning of Technique2. The Early Clavier Methods3. The Beginnings of the Piano4. Mozart and the Early Piano Technique5. Hummel: The Culmination of the Viennese Era6. The Dynamic Beethoven Technique7. Czerny: Technique Personified8. The Early Methodology9. The Lyricism of Chopin10. Liszt and Virtuoso Technique11. The Schumann Circle12. The Beginnings of Modern Technical Methods13. The Leschetizky Influence14. Russian Nationalism15. The French School16. Breithaupt and Weight Technique17. The English School: Matthay; His Pupils and Colleagues18. Ortmann: Piano Technique Comes of Age19. Contemporary Technical Thought20. The Perspectives of an Enlightened Piano TechniqueAppendices1. The Aesthetic Imperative2. Mental and Psychological Control3. An Intellectual Grasp of Basic Technical Knowledge4. Isolated Movements5. Coordinated Movements6. Muscular Coordination7. The Kinesthetic Sense8. Posture9. Means for Specific Technical Development10. Historical Concepts and Perspectives of Piano Technical Thought11. Supplementary BibliographyBibliographyGlossaryIndexWhat People are Saying About This
"Professor Gerig's amassing in one volume of such a gigantic overview of various schools and approaches to piano technique is awesome. His book has value not only for the scholar as an extremely fascinating historical tracing of various major performers, composers, and pedagogues, but an equally vital use as a reference work for the performer involved in the art of playing the piano."
Professor Gerig's amassing in one volume of such a gigantic overview of various schools and approaches to piano technique is awesome. His book has value not only for the scholar as an extremely fascinating historical tracing of various major performers, composers, and pedagogues, but an equally vital use as a reference work for the performer involved in the art of playing the piano.
"Professor Gerig's amassing in one volume of such a gigantic overview of various schools and approaches to piano technique is awesome. His book has value not only for the scholar as an extremely fascinating historical tracing of various major performers, composers, and pedagogues, but an equally vital use as a reference work for the performer involved in the art of playing the piano."--(Joseph Banowetz, Professor of Piano, University of North Texas)
"There is no book like [Famous Pianists and Their Technique] in the English or any other language; it covers the gamut of technical development from Diruta or John Cage. Every important pedagogue is discussed in detail so it is easy to understand their unique contribution to the development of piano technique."--(Maurice Hinson, Senior Professor of Piano, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary)
"There is no book like [Famous Pianists and Their Technique] in the English or any other language; it covers the gamut of technical development from Diruta or John Cage. Every important pedagogue is discussed in detail so it is easy to understand their unique contribution to the development of piano technique."