Intonation being the tuner's task, the piano is free of one of the greatest
difficulties encountered in the study of an instrument. One needs
only to study a certain positioning of the hand in relation to the keys
to obtain with ease the most beautiful quality of sound, to know how to
play long notes and short notes, and [to attain] unlimited dexterity.
Chopin
Mistakes in customary approaches to 'pure' technique
To those who are studying the art of playing the piano I suggest some practical
and simple ideas which I know from experience to be really useful.
As art is infinite within the limits of its means, so its teaching should
be governed by the same limits in order to give it boundless potential
[...] So we are not dealing with more or less ingenious theories,
but with whatever goes straight to the point and smoothes the technical
side of the art [...] People have tried out all kinds of methods
of learning to play the piano, methods that are tedious and useless and
have nothing to do with the study of this instrument. It's like learning,
for example, to walk on one's hands in order to go for a stroll.
Eventually one is no longer able to walk properly on one's feet, and not
very well one one's hands either. It doesn't teach us how to play
the music itself - and the type of difficulty we are practicing
is not the difficulty encountered in good music, the music of the great
masters. It's an abstract difficulty, a new genre of acrobatics.
Chopin
Categories of technical study
I am not, let it be understood, dealing here with musical feeling or style,
but purely with the technical aspect of playing, what I call
the mechanism. I divide the study of piano mechanism
into three parts.
1st. Teaching both hands to play adjacent notes (notes a tone
apart and a semitone apart), that is, scales - chromatic and diatonic
- and trills. Since there cannoot be devised any fourth
theoretical combination of adjacent notes, whatever we invent to be played
using tone and semitone intervals has to be a combination or selection
of scales of trills.
2nd. Notes farther than a tone or semitone apart, that is,
intervals of a tone and a half upwards: the octave divided
in minor thirds, with each finger thus occupying a key, and the common
chord with its inversions (disjunct notes).
3rd.Double notes (in two parts): thirds,
sixths, octaves. (When you can play your thirds, sixths and octaves,
you are then able to play in three parts - as a result [you have] chords,
which you will know how to divide from you knowledge of disjunct intervals
[category 2 above].) The two hands together will give four, five,
six parts - and there is nothing more to be invented for study as far as
mechanism of piano playing is concerned.
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