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King Cole:

SPECIFIC answer here.

1 - First, play and video record your hands and feet (to see your use of the pedal) while playing the Piano I part (first 2 pages and the first few bars of page 3) of the following score in tempo. You MUST play it on an acoustic piano AND the piano MUST be a tuned/regulated piano. (good quality audio and video please)

http://imslp.org/wiki/Special:ImagefromIndex/01173

2 - Post this recorded video of yours here.

3 - I will watch your playing and then give you the SPECIFIC answer that will make you a VIRTUOSO.

Cole: ^^ You might need to know Hakki a little bit to interpret that post properly. ^^

I think that a good teacher goes beyond being a help. I think to develop virtuoso technique extensive technical instruction from the highest level teachers is virtually required and almost no pianist with great technique has achieved this without this extensive technical foundation through a teacher's instruction. The only great pianist of whom I'm aware who may have been almost completely self taught was Godowsky.

IMO one of the main reasons there were/are so many Russian pianists with supreme technique is that many or most of these pianists began at a very early age being drilled by the best teachers in the systematic Russian school of playing.

Which is why I'm so desperately in need a teacher! It's very difficult to improve once on is on their own...

Have you played piano with orchestras, etc? Or are you referring to trumpet?

I am asking to try and get more of an idea of your level. I am guessing trumpet, since you say you have played piano for about 5 months. More on that later...

Your teacher, is he/she a classically trained pianist? Just because someone has played in the White House does not mean they are a good teacher. I would try and find a classically trained teacher who can guide you. I have seen many jazz/popular pianists who know nothing about technique. They can get around the notes pretty well, but that won't get you to where you want to be. When looking for a teacher, find someone who can tell you how to correct what you are doing wrong. They can tell you the movement that is involved in this, and a few different ways to practice to achieve that movement. If a potential teacher says to you, play it like this and just demonstrates with no further guidance- RUN!



This depends on the person. (And why I was asking about your level at piano.) If you have played trumpet for even decades, you are still probably only comfortable reading one clef at a time. You need to be doing lots of easier reading pieces to build up your ability to read two clefs at once. It is no use to slave away at one Chopin etude and not be able to apply those techniques to anything else. (This is just repeating what many other posters have said already).

IMO, you need to work on simultaneously building up your technique and reading ability. Get an appropriate method book and start going through it for reading. For technique, do scales/arpeggios. I hate to beat a dead horse, but this is where a knowledgeable teacher comes into play. Someone needs to show you what a thumb pass is, and other basic technical things. Know that one book of technical exercises will not suffice to cover the reading. A lot of exercises like Hanon will not challenge your reading ability that much. They are very patterned and not geared towards helping you become a better reader. On the other hand, many technical exercises that are meant to be more musical (Czerny 821 for example) would be too difficult for you to read to gain any significant technical benefits. This goes back to needing a method book with appropriate reading pieces.


I think a lot of the things you mentioned in your examples you gave for how to achieve virtuosic technique are all correct, and this is maybe why you are confused on what to do. You need slow practice. You need fast practice (but more slow, haha). You need some metronome practice. You need lots of repetitions. You need scales, you need hands alone/together. You need lots of repertoire. There is not an quick fix or straight-forward way to getting to be a virtuoso. You have heard several different paths because it is a combination of all these things that will help you. If you could sit down and play through Hanon from mind numbingly slow to fast and be a virtuoso- well a virtuoso wouldn't be that special because many more pianists would have reached that goal.

As to how long this would take? I don't know. I put in 6 hour days at least a few days out of the week (still practicing multiple hours on those other days) and have been doing so for a few years. I am not a virtuoso. It is dependent on the person. How long would it take for you to be proud of your accomplishments? Work your butt off for a month and I bet you will be happy and motivated to do it for another month...and another, and another.

I'm a bit ambivalent about that, since I like to imagine that I have improved on my own. Not that it's been exactly easy, and not that it might not have gone faster and better with a teacher, but still, I sense some real improvement.

And too, it makes a big difference where one is to begin with. There were so many obvious areas of improvement for me that it was a relatively easy matter of just choosing something and getting to work on it. I knew what was needed, and I had a pretty good idea of how to proceed.

And having PW as a sort of backdrop has helped - a lot of good ideas get bandied about, some of which I have applied directly in my practice. Sometimes it is just getting reinforcement of things I already know, but maybe haven't used as much as I could...practicing in rhythms, for example.

I'm a bit ambivalent about that, since I like to imagine that I have improved on my own. Not that it's been exactly easy, and not that it might not have gone faster and better with a teacher, but still, I sense some real improvement.

Deadlines I've found are a great motivator.

Is there any way of knowing if one has the requisite talent to become a virtuoso? Or does one just forge ahead? I've wondered this a lot. I know that I've got some talent, and I work really hard, and I steadily improve. But at some point will my talent "run out"? Will I just hit a pleateau someday and stop getting any better? I hope not...

I must say a lot of people want to know what level I am and as I said I've started 5 months ago so the skill level should be obvious and I'm not going to post any video of me just yet. Compared to my trumpet skills I feel like a clumsy kid on the keys and yes RachelEDNC I had trouble reading bass clef for a couple months but now only the really high and low notes take more than milliseconds to interpret thanks to some iphone apps and drills.

I have a teacher and he's an accomplished pianist. He hasn't taught much about body/finger movements some thumb under etc but he's persistent in that there is no perfect fingering and alluded to the fact that Chopin used his third finger like his thumb (This he learned when he studied at that Chopin institute place where he played from several of his original manuscripts). He stresses creativity and expression. He says he doesn't want me to play like him and that I have to find my own voice. He also says he hates judging these days because they are lessening the role of expression in grading and focusing more on technique. I was stunned but after some time I saw its merits of what he ways saying. He even played Chopin's op.9 no.2 regular than he played it with waves and waves of clever arpeggios, pauses etc., giving a overwhelming grandiose sound, it was stunning. I digress.

I agree with many of you in that you need a teacher especially one that'll push you and keep you accountable.



Persistence seems to be common theme.

Kreisler I must say you have been the most insightful especially in that previous post. This last comment does raise questions however. If "..brute force and repetition" has proven to work with an amateur is that not the recipe to become a "pianist"? And when does one consider himself/herself a pianist?

Hopefully more posts will keeping coming in but a revelation I'm having is that a virtuoso is someone that can do it all and to do it all you have to practice it all. So what are those skills that one should be proficient in? Obviously sight-reading but what about improvisation? What about ability to perform new techniques? For instance if I say arpeggiate the F dim 7 chord and E major (octave) chord at the same time should they be able to do it at a blistering speed at first try?

It seems that this guy can probably do it all... lol. How long does it take to get this good? <-- Not a serious question

You want to learn technique at a high level and it seems like your teacher doesn't give you much in that area.
I think you misundertood Kreisler's post.

He said brute force and repetition might work on one piece. (And the piece he mentioned was really far from what most would call a virtuoso level.) Most would say that in order to play more than one or a few difficult pieces within a normal lifespan one has to develop an overall virtuoso technique. Unless I misunderstood Kreisler's post he said that it take more than repetition and persistence. You need to find an excellent teacher.

"Talent" is the byproduct of "work". The harder you work, the greater "talent" you will have.

I'm sorry but this is horrendously false. You're confusing talent with skill. Talent is simply the natural ability to do something. Skill is the product of talent + hard work.

I think talent is almost exclusively used to mean ability that is innate and independent of work. I think just checking in a dictionary will verify this.

Yes.

And sometimes there's even a certain level of skill without talent.


Yes.

IMO a lot of this discussion isn't caring about definitions and meanings. That's OK, as long as people don't care about definitions and meanings.

Now this is my first piano teacher so I can't measure him against anyone else, but he seems like a great teacher who is more concerned with helping me find the genius that lies within me and he seems to have a plethora of experience in teaching others although I think a lot of his other students are much more advanced than me (for the time being). Would a teacher really go through every single motion of the finger, forearm and shoulder? What does it mean to teach technique other than the obvious stuff?



So repetition and persistence wouldn't work for someone who used it successfully on one piece already? It seems to me if that person in question continued that trend with subsequent pieces they would become more and more proficient.

But Pianoloverus since it seems like you are a seasoned veteran, if you had a student just starting out who practiced 4 hours a day what would their ideal practice breakdown look like knowing everything that you know now because I understand that a teacher is essential to success but most of the time a student is not with his or her teacher. Indeed most of the time that student is alone with the piano!

If you want to get a big technique you should get a teacher who will teach you technique from the beginning. There is technique involved in playing even the simplest pieces or even a single note. Not all teachers will do this, and it's probably not appropriate for every student but it's what you want. I think the best chance of developing a big technique is by studying with a teacher who explains the correct movements of the fingers, wrist, and arms from the beginning.

If you watch most of the best pianists I think one can see there are basic movements that most of them do despite any differences in their technical approaches. I also think it's obvious that most of these pianists were trained from an early age how to do these movements.

For example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InXYHOLEbSE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eL8rPM3Kl2w

I'm using your post, but in response to both you and Joel:

Find me someone who has all the talent in the world, but has never touched a piano, and then have that person play the Rach 3 note-perfect in time with a proper orchestra, and then I will agree that hard work has nothing to do with it.

To me, "talent" is an overused term by those who, by choice or by accident, do not work hard enough or correctly enough to get where it is they want to go.

I'm going to use a quote Bobpickle posted up a few days ago about a completely different subject, but ironically enough, I think it fits here:

“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan "press on" has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race”
--Calvin Coolidge

I agree with the former president. Unless you're missing a hand, in which case, playing with two hands is out of your realm of possibility, there are only two ways to get where you want to go (and/or to reach the pinnacle of your endeavor): hard work and persistence.

But it's not a "to me" kind of word. It's objective with a specific meaning.



Nobody is arguing that if you have talent, you don't need to work hard. That's obviously not true. One's level of talent is their capacity for potential skill. If someone isn't born with the necessary talent for become a world-class virtuoso, no amount of blood, sweat and tears will change that.

But it isn't, really. I really hate getting into semantics, but if you look up "talent" in the dictionary (which pianoloverus seemed to think would be necessary, so I did it), you get everything from, "a capacity for achievement or success," to "natural ability".

I argue that there is no such thing as "natural ability". There is only "ability". That is, you are capable of doing what you have already done. No one sits down at the piano and, through sheer natural talent, plays Liszt on day one. You learn, you work hard, then you do well.


I'm not sure if this is in response to the Coolidge quote or not. If it is, I'm not sure you followed what Coolidge was saying. He is saying that "talent" and "genius" are meaningless. Only hard work and persistence will achieve results.

So, in order to debunk the theory, we must find some people who are highly successful, but have no talent. The trouble is, success is so often defined by and closely associated with talent, that we see successful people as talented in their field, and hence cannot find this separation. Why? Because there is absolutely no measure of talent in existence. We can't measure potential. It's not possible. We can only measure results. So, it is impossible to separate "talent" from "results".

We can, however, find plenty of "talented" people who never made it, who were never successful, who could have done anything but didn't. So, there, we can prove that "talent" is certainly not nearly as important as hard work and persistence. Can we completely deny it? No, for the reasons I pointed out earlier.

But if you're looking for a way to acquire a skill set, you're much better off counting on hard work and persistence--because they pay off.

Why has no one here spoken about natural musical ability? There is no point in playing the piano if you have no innate musicality. Playing notes fast in a virtuosic manner is just a matter of practice, lots of it. But why bother, if your playing sounds like [censored] because it is mechanical. Talent, in the case of a person attempting to be a musician, is inborn. You either have it, or you don't. No amount of persistence, hard work, and years of practice will make a silk purse out of a cow's ear. You may become a virtuoso piano player, but you will never be a pianist.