Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner great podcast/blog about learning the Chopin etudes

I just stumbled the weekly podcast of a concert pianist, in which she chronicles her goal of learning the 27 etudes. (She has playing familiarity with about half of them already.)

She's articulate, honest, funny, and insightful. She talks in detail about hand position on 10/2, strategies for memorization, music theoretic insights, and many other ideas. It's a fascinating glimpse into how a pianist at that level organizes her time and energy. Highly recommended.

http://playitagainswig.com/

If not for your enthusiasm about it, I'd be discouraged enough by the playing of the 2nd etude to not want to listen further. In fact, I think I am anyway.

But I like her, and I like your enthusiasm.

(edit: I see that you deleted your reply to me, but I had already done this answer, so.....)

Maybe, but the thing is....and you could call it either snobbery or closed-mindedness, and you could be right, but you also could be wrong .....the thing is that I just don't feel it would be of value to hear any ideas about playing or practicing from someone who plays the piece like that, or at least who doesn't stop themselves after the first few measures. It's just very hard for me to imagine that someone with real good musical judgment and a decent-enough ear would let themselves keep going on, just like that (not to mention putting it online), because it would offend their own ear and brain. And if someone doesn't have real good musical judgment or a decent-enough ear, I find it hard to be interested in their detailed ideas.

I vote for close-mindedness.

Everyone does things differently. Can't you imagine that some people like to get a sense of their current state by just playing the piece all the way through, "as is"? You and I have no idea what it's like to be able to even consider this project. Maybe she has found that playing pieces through all the way, even at beginning stages, is helpful for conceptualizing the thing as a whole; maybe she imagines this particularly helpful in dealing with 27 difficult independent entities. Who knows?

So... there seems to be some good reason why a musically intelligent person would want to play it through, even when it's quite a mess. So I don't think that's really damning evidence against her ear or judgement. On the other hand, everything she says during the podcast suggests a tremendously good ear and musical judgement. So I think your conclusions are unfair.

As for criticizing her for putting it online... I think you're missing the point of the podcast. This is like a diary, showing the good and the ugly. If I were doing a similar thing charting my progress through my Chopin scherzo, I might have done the very same thing, playing it all the way through at an early stage, to get the current state of affairs. You might find such a thing boring to listen through, but I wouldn't want you to use it to question my judgement.

-J

WITH LIMITS.
And I bet you have limits about how you view such things too, in both musical and non-musical contexts. I could propose some examples if you insist.

I think you didn't quite get what I said. You said "a musically intelligent person." That has almost nothing to do with what I said, which was, "someone with real good musical judgment and a decent-enough ear." I'm not saying there's zero overlap between them, but the overlap ain't real high.

Perhaps it would have been clearer if I had said "a very sensitive ear (and brain)" rather than "decent enough ear." Indeed I think someone like that would not, absolutely could not, allow themselves to play like that for more than a measure or two -- even before we talk about putting it or not putting it online. They simply wouldn't be able to bear hearing themselves play like that.

I think the fact that you focused so much on the "online" thing in your reply shows how much you missed the point. My comment about putting it online was sort of a parenthetical, "also-by-the-way" kind of thing, as I again did it here. (In fact, it was about as parenthetical as you can get: it was in parentheses.)
The main thing was: the mere fact of allowing herself to play like that at all for more than a few seconds.


Well, I think I do.
I'm suggesting that someone with a highly sensitive ear and brain simply couldn't stomach doing it, and that if someone can, they're not.
It would simply feel offensive to them, and they'd stop themselves, just as we all stop ourselves from doing something that's offensive to us, unless it's somehow humanly impossible.

(Don't we?)

I'm not sure that the diary analogy works. Never having kept a diary and knowing about them only what I have seen and heard from/about others, I thought diaries were the extremely private musings of their author, secretly guarded from the eyes of the world. Surely the OP could get all the benefit she expects from this project if she were to keep the recordings to herself, analyzing her progress and comparing recordings at various stages of the project.

What is the point of sharing this with the world? Does she think that her discussion of her practicing techniques along with her preliminary attempts at these works are to be of some benefit to others? Talking about her practice techniques that have not yet been proven to work for her seems to have dubious public merit.

Regards,

Jason: A little P.S....


I DON'T THINK SO.

Part of the problem we're having, I'm pretty sure, is that you're looking at what I said much more broadly than I meant it, and it's not your fault, because I didn't specify. And the reason I didn't was that it would be very hard to do it.

I don't just mean "at an early stage"; I mean this particular kind of poor playing. To quote Mozart (from one of his letters) -- and I feel (almost) sure that the site won't have any problem with it, because after all I'm quoting Mozart (but let's see what the site's automatic filter does with it): "That kind of playing and shitting are all one to me." It's not just "early stage," and it's not just mediocrity; it's an indifferent, insensitive, unhearing, persistent kind of awfulness. Maybe that helps, even though I know I still haven't defined it, because I couldn't. But in any event, I'm close to 100% sure that your playing of a Chopin scherzo, at any stage, wouldn't be like that.

Anyway....nobody has mentioned any specific things that she says that they think are good. You spoke in general terms, and nobody else has said anything at all. If you or anyone has some specific things of hers that you think are worth mentioning, I'd certainly be interested in what you might say. But she's not someone I'd be moved to listen to directly any further, unless she were someone I knew, in which case I would, and I'd do my best to be polite about it.

(whaddaya know, the site's filter is fine with it!)

That's funny... I had just been thinking about the use of the verb "stumble on" to describe finding something... and if there was something more graceful to describe finding something unexpectedly!

The podcast reminds me of something that happened last week, that helped me a lot. I went to a (brick-and-mortar!) sheet music store that I'd just learned about-- owned by a former piano coach from Peabody. (Edit for nitpicky accuracy: coach at Peabody prep and Johns Hopkins, but MM from Peabody!) I arrived late on a Friday afternoon, just in time to hear the owner announce to the assistant that she had to start a 2-hour "emergency practice session" for accompanying a violin sonata. Apparently the regular pianist couldn't make it. So she disappeared behind a partition and I could hear her start practicing on this piece. (I didn't catch the name.) This lady was so hyper! (Someone who knew her, had warned me about that already!) She was talking the whole time, getting up, sitting back down, looking at a youtube performance by Menuhin to get a sense of the tempo, starting, stopping, making mistakes, grouching, laughing, thinking out loud about violin competitions, and who the girl was playing the violin, who she had studied with... but in the midst of all this chaos she was apparently doing these little micro-bursts of attention, and unbelievably, just in the 20 or so minutes I was browsing in the store, I could hear the piece coming together. But it was exhausting to listen to. I bought my books and left, wondering why I had arrived at exactly the wrong time to talk to this person, or if maybe it was better I was spared.

In retrospect, though, it did me a world of good to see the process of a pianist with formidable skills, starting from scratch and starting to make sense of the music-- in her own way-- with her own personality as part of the mix. She seemed to feel so completely at ease with the process and not intimidated. It's good sometimes just to see people "being themselves" as they start work on something. It's a mess. I don't know if the store owner would care to make a podcast out of all that, but I felt like it was just what I needed to see and hear, right then.

Pretty cool.
It's rare to get such a real-life condensed snapshot of someone else's learning process.

Who?

That is a very cool story cefinow..

But yeah, who? Stores would like to send her one of his patented tirades about not listening to music you are working on.

That jumped out at me for a millisecond -- like hey, she does that?! -- not just because of our discussions but because of what I think of it. (I'm with that other guy on this one.)
But only for a millisecond, because in that situation, you're in emergency mode. You're not looking for your deepest individual interpretation.

It still jumped out at me.

i listened to them a million times (so there stores) and then worked on them diligently for 10 years... granted not all of them, but most of them.. i adore them.

It was only about 30 seconds' worth of youtube! And I only knew what was going on because I heard her explain to the shop assistant... maybe assistant was standing there with eyebrows raised and emanating waves of disapproval!

Anyway, as it's my day off, I can head over there again en route to the hills and meet her properly and find out whatever happened, and what the sonata was! I'll be in my hiking clothes, though, and I hate stopping by anyplace even remotely snootzy while looking like a clodhopper.

And perhaps, as you said, just to check tempos.

In that kind of situation, I would have done the same.