Playing The Piano For Pleasure, The Classic Guide To Improving Skills Through Practice And Discipline By Charles Cooke Book

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Excerpt:

“Repertoire

HOBBYISTS, notoriously, are collectors. There are fanatical collectors of
stamps, jewels, paintings, antiques, clocks, matchbox covers, Currier & Ives
prints, odd-shaped bottles, autographs, entries in a bankbook, and gold
ormolu prism chandeliers. The hoarding instinct is as strong in humans as in
squirrels, and not confined to the fall of the year.

Hobby pianists are no exception. In fact—I’m going to be snobbish now
—they are collectors of one of the least perishable of all commodities.
Good music will not merely outlive the paper on which it is written; it will
outlive the oils of Raphael, the frescoes of Michelangelo, the sculpture of
Praxiteles or even of Epstein. Good music is immortal. Amateur pianists
have an advantage over professionals in that they collect for the sheer,
uncomplicated love of collecting. And they have an enormous advantage
over other collectors: they participate every time they enjoy their
collections; they must—themselves personally—bring alive their various
priceless exhibits.

We love and respect our friends each differently because each
friend is different from every other. Every musical composition we collect
becomes our friend—while we are thinking about learning it, while we are
learning it, and transcendently after it is learned. It differs from every other
composition as humans differ from each other. Like our human friends, it is
a warmth in our heart. As with our human friends, we love it more in
proportion to the intimacy with which we know it. As with our human
friends, the closer we draw to it, the more we find in it to value and to value.”

“Tobias Matthay always warned his pupils to beware of “lazy, automatic
repetition of passage without thought or meaning, totally lacking in that
concentration without which nothing can ever be learned or understood.”
He called such practicing an attempt to teach a passage to the piano.
We are going to take Matthay’s warning deeply to heart. Our entire mind
is going to participate in every repetition of a passage.

As a result, this is never going to be dull work: it is going to be lively and absorbing.
Predominantly, we are going to practice slowly when setting fractures.
“Slow practice is undoubtedly the basis for quick playing” (Josef
Hofmann). “Let me recommend very slow playing, with the most minute
attention to detail” (Teresa Carreño). “Slow practice does not guarantee
concentration, but concentration—especially on problems to be solved—
necessitates slow playing” (Egon Petri). “The worst possible thing is to start
practicing too fast: it invariably leads to bad results and lengthy delays”
(Ernest Schelling).

Even in prestissimo passages, piano playing is a series of individual
movements fluidly running together. Slow practice enables us to grasp,
mentally digest, and physically execute each Individual movement that goes
to make up the whole.

Work from the notes until you no longer need to. You will find that you
soon memorize a passage without having consciously tried to. I don’t
recommend, at this stage, the use of the many Memory Aids that I’ll discuss
in the next section. However, once you have got in the way of searching for,
and findings memory aids in your work on pieces, you will naturally apply
this occasionally to fractures. But repetition itself quickly memorizes
fractures. After a fracture is memorized, continue to keep the notes in front
of you for a while, so that if your memory does play you a trick you can put
yourself straight with a glance. Finally, dispense with the notes altogether,
drop your eyes permanently to the keyboard, and settle down to setting that
fracture.”