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I've been practicing #91 of Carl Tausig's daily exercises, and I've found it helpful. (It consists of 12 four-bar sequences in which both hands play simultaneously, in contrary motion, the same pattern of major, minor, diminished 7th and dominant 7th in broken chords of fourths and fifths. Each of the 12 leads into the next seamlessly due to the resolution of the dominant 7th into the major key one semitone higher ... thus reflecting the chromatic progression by semitone in all keys.)

I can't remember what brought this exercise #91 to my attention such that I printed it in isolation from the rest of them! I wondered if any other members have broad familiarity with the Tausig exercises and have benefitted from them (and, of course, which ones). Thanks in advance.

I've taken a look at these exercizes. God help you. If you can play any of these you deserve a medal. Have you ever seen his The Ghost Ship? Great piece and not nearly as difficult. Anyway, they're worth a try.

My take on “piano” exercises:

So long as you approach them to simply get the blood flowing (warming up), and you don’t do more than 20 minutes (max) it’s fine; considering there is no discomfort caused by overstretching and other extremes.

Your repertoire should take care of the rest, and unlike mechanical, repetitive, unmusical “exercises,” you become a better musician every time you play your repertoire; especially if you’re always analyzing and extrapolating from this here piece what you can you use in that there composition; so you see, in the end, you’re not just a better piano player, but a better musician.



P.S.

“Strength,” as it relates to the piano, is overrated; “speed” is nothing without accuracy; and finally, choose wisely, for them acrobatics might look cool to the audience, but in the end, your fingers pay the price (stay away from repertoire that only intends to showcase; for there is a misconception about the true nature of vituosity, which shan’t be about physical prowess, but rather about mental power).


IMHO!

This is indeed one of the most valuable exercices, as it combines Russian pattern ( contrary motion) and arpeggios. Highly recommended by Hamelin . Contrat motion is one of the best exercice for synchronisation and essential as an exercice for Bach’s music.
If you want to make it more difficult so the exercice with LH legato and RH staccato) then work the same with legato , non legato like that you kill 3 birds with one stone as you work out arpeggios, synchronisation and articulation . Btw pedal, absolutely forbidden here at practice time . Enjoy ….

I’m sorry to persistently burst your bubble(s), but you leave me no other option.

This Hamelin, whomever he was, is dead wrong!

Scales in contrary motion might give that illusion, but in the end it is no more than yet another creative way to play scales; something that rarely, if at all, shows up in “real” music; unless anyone o’ y’all can show me ‘The Chopin Etudes in Contrary Motion.’ And I’m not talking about an isolated passage that happens to go in contrary motion, but rather about entire etudes.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again (maybe this time it’ll stick), Bach ‘e una cosa mentale’, and mindlessly banging at the piano straight, and/or in reverse (contrary) will get you nowhere with him.


IMHO!

I thought that this day would never come, but all of a sudden, today, this day has come. The day that I wholeheartedly agree with Pete14! I quit playing contrary scales more than two years ago and I have not missed playing them even for a tiny second. I also did not need them for playing Bach.

Thank you kindly for your on-topic response. I was wondering how the conversation turned so quickly to scales and 'mindlessly banging'! Yes, I too have found that #91 is very versatile because of the varieties of articulation and rhythm and dynamics that can be used. And FWIW since posting originally, I've taken a look at Tausig's other 'Daily Exercises'. I felt fairly skeptical about them generally, and I do now see why #91 stood out as exceptional for its potential usefulness.

For people who do like (or feel benefit from) working on contrary motion skills, I'm curious to know your thoughts about exercises, even self-crafted ones, that exploit the piano keyboard's natural inverse symmetry around D and A-flat. I don't believe I ever paid attention to that basic fact until it came into my awareness via YouTube!

I have no issue with you busting my bubbles as you say. First of all , I guess you are joking when you say you don't know who Hamelin is

" Scales in contrary motion might give that illusion, but in the end it is no more than yet another creative way to play scales"

Well, dear Sir, you will have to prove that you left hand is as agile as your right hand , prior to making these type of assertions. Majority of players have a 'weak' LH . Start playing the concerto for LH from ravel , just for yourself, to change your own mind and realise your LH is not as good of what you thought it was. go on , the score is not that difficult to read, the difficulty is essentially in having a very good LH, but this is not a problem for you , so you master it quickly ...

The contrary motion by the way is not specific to scales but is a mental exercise to develop independence and to balance activity of the LH , vs RH. Maybe watch the video of the unknown Hamelin

Now , on a serious notes, one should not confuse exercises and etudes as they achieve a different purpose
and since you talk about Chopin etudes, you bring the subject on the etudes. Scales and arpeggios are fundamental exercises ( not the only ones ) to build piano technique; In other words they are the foundation , the mother of all exercises. Chopin etudes achieve a different goal. They were the first material considered as concert etudes including beautiful harmonies . But there is no way , you can master op 25 no 6 if you don't practice double thirds scale prior to working on this etude. Same some op 10 no 1, if you think that you can master it flawlessly at 176 bmp, without practising fast arpeggios on the side, well , I will be the one to disrupt your bubble !!

The road to master Chopin Ballade no 1 is : Technical foundation exercises -> Chopin etudes -> Ballade no 1. That is the way , it is musical conservatories student learn it . I also recommend you read the Alfred Cortot study edition of the Chopin etudes, in which he introduces the specific exercises needed to develop the necessary dexterity required for each etude.



Cheers

I have seen this video but I'm still not sure what is the advantage of playing in a mirror image like this. I get that you can practice the LH more but why does it have to be this unmusical chromatically inverted stuff? What's the advantage of playing Chopin op. 10, no. 4 in a mirror image as opposed to, say, just practicing the left hand of the Revolutionary etude or any other piece or exercise for the LH?

Thank you, Bart!


We’re not so different, you & I.

It’s fairly simple as Hamelin explains in the video , in many pieces , the LH plays more an accompaniment role where the RH plays the melody and the tricky part . So when piano students are placed in a context where the situation is reverted , they struggle .Also in Bach ‘s music you have many examples of symmetrical inversion . One example amongst many : prelude 6 of WTC book 2 .

That doesn't answer my question at all. Instead of doing this I could practice pieces and etudes targeting the LH and still produce something musically satisfying. What is the advantage of specifically doing this kind of exercise as opposed to etudes for the LH?

One thing which could be useful is to take the LH part of a difficult piece and mirror image it to the RH so that you can "teach" the LH the correct movements based on your presumably better RH. But what you are suggesting is the opposite, to take the RH part and invert it to play an unmusical sort of exercise for the LH. That I don't get.

Because it is very focus exercise , the symmetrical aspect is very important for coordination . if opposite scales are part of the grading system in various countries it is for a reason . Again , taking the risk to repeat myself , this is part of the foundation for piano technique , playing multiplie pieces will obviously develop your technique as well , but are not a substitute for the foundation .
On an anecdotal side , Liszt interrupted his European tours for quite a long duration as he felt he needed to develop his technique ! The outcome the famous Liszt exercices , which will give you an headache if you already discard the value of standard practice
But maybe instead of Liszt ‘ or Hamelin’s advice you prefer to follow the recommendations of some posters ( no name dropping) whose best argument to advise you not to do it is because they don’t do it themselves

I was hoping someone would provide valid rational arguments not sleight-of-hand appeals to authority. I do use exercises myself but I know exactly why I'm doing them and what is their specific purpose.

The goal of technical exercises is to provide you with short, quick, & direct means to achieve all the techniques, abilities, and skills necessary for virtuosity.

The intention is to prepare the pianist for any and all technical challenges they may encounter beforehand, so that they don’t have to struggle with those technical challenges when they encounter them. If you already can play scales, thirds, fourths, fifths, sixths, sevenths, eights/octaves, ninths, etc, in parallel, contrary, interlocking motion, already have the agility for highly complex & unpredictable prestissimo, leggiero, pianissimo, fortissimo, etc. fingerwork, can play chords of any size or any amount of notes - at any speed, interlocking, alternating, contrary motion, etc. - with ease, can handle large leaps with accuracy and easy, and have all aspects of technique already at your disposal…then *any* piece you encounter will be easy for you from a technical point of view. And there really aren’t that many different aspects to technique. You only have ten fingers, and there’s only certain things you can do with them, no matter how challenging the piece - every challenge you encounter will already be possible for you. That hurdle having already been jumped, your only issues will be the musical aspect.

The reason many virtuosos have such a large repertoire is because any piece they encounter is within their technical ability already, including the most challenging works. Thus they can learn those pieces with ease because they aren’t spending time trying to master the pure technique, but instead, are focused on making the music.

However, if you don’t have all aspects of pure finger technique already mastered, then, when you encounter something you aren’t prepared for in the music, it’s much more difficult to learn a piece, because your time is equally spent trying to train your fingers to do something they could/should already know how to do, instead of solely focusing on the music.

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Moreover, the idea that you can simply gain advanced technique by focusing on a particular piece isn’t logically supported. Very few pieces contain every technical challenge the pianist might incur. In the aforementioned argument about wanting to develop proficiency with your left hand - the example of learning Chopin, Etude Op. 10, No. 12 - the so-called “Revolution/ary” Etude - isn’t enough. The only thing that etude teaches is fast fingerwork. What happens when you encounter a piece that requires double notes, played in any manner of parallel, contrary, or interlocking motion in the left hand Or a piece that requires left-handed fast octaves; or large back and forth leaps; or crossing hands? The Chopin Op. 10, No. 12 isn’t enough. So now any time you encounter a piece that has a different challenge from that one, you’ll have to struggle with that challenge.

Or you can try the method of just using music to learn technical challenges - thus potentially having to learn dozens of pieces - some that you might not even really want to play that much - simply to ensure that you have a complete technique. But if you’re going to be so much more “musical” just because you’re learning technique by playing through dozens of pieces - think again. Spending hours trying to master complex passage works and technique in a piece isn’t particular “musical”. When learning an advanced piece, spending time going over a particular cadenza or challenging section, at a snail’s pace, in order to make sure you have everything right, and doing it over and over to gain proficiency…there’s nothing particularly musical about it. It’s not musical until one masters the technical requirements and can play it as written.

That said, it’s much, much easier to tackle technical challenges and get straight to the musical elements, when you already have the technique the piece requires in your skillset, and don’t have to worry about trying to master the technique while learning the piece - and a great way to do that is short, simple, easy to learn exercises rooted in easy to remember patterns that introduce those challenges, and let you develop the coordination, skills, stamina, and dexterity in a short amount of time.

You’re also benefitted in having your technique built completely by technical exercises when you want to learn lots of repertoire or have to accompany someone. Say you need to learn several pieces at a time for a performance, an audition, an event; if there are technical challenges in those pieces you aren’t prepared for, it takes longer to learn them, and there’s no guarantee you’ll have the technical issues worked out beforehand. Whereas, if you have done technical exercises that build every aspect of your technique, anything you encounter in the music will be easier to accomplish, because again there’s only so much that can be done with the fingers, and exercises cover it all. Same if, say, a person asks you to accompany them; you may have to work harder and cause delays by tackling technical issues you aren’t prepared for, if you’re waiting to learn techniques only from a piece you encounter.

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Also, the idea that practicing pure technique is unmusical is, to me, a fallacy. There is no music without technique. They are not mutually exclusive.

Even playing the most basic music requires some level of “technique”, in as much as being able to move your fingers to the right keys at the right time. That’s technique. Instruments don’t play themselves. We play them, and this requires some “technique”. Even if you play electronic music, you still have to know how to plug the instruments up, which methods to use, what software and programs to download, and how to best use them. There’s technique even in that. This idea that music is separate from technique, or that technique is unmusical is illogical. You can’t have one without the other.

While the goal is music, music cannot be achieved without technique, no matter how simple (a beginner playing out a basic melody using only their pointer finger for each note) or grandiose (a virtuoso playing the Transcendental Etudes, Prokofiev Third, & Gaspard de la Nuit) that technique is. And thus, even practicing technique is musical, because it is one of the foundations and building blocks of music

Technique is music; music is technique. Only when they are combined do we get a musical result. If you have no technique, you can’t play the instrument, no matter how “musical” you wish to be. And those with poor technique are limited in the musical options they have.

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Finally, nearly EVERY great keyboardist has done technical exercises. From Mozart, to Beethoven, to Liszt, to Rachmaninoff, to Horowitz, and on and on. And on. Over centuries, regardless of background, technical exercises exist in the training of great musicians.

Very, very, few, and very, very, far between are the pianists who don’t do them. Nearly every great school of keyboard training, every great conservatory, every great teacher advocates for them. Those who dislike them are a minority. And I think that’s an indicator. Outside of Martha Argerich, who is a prodigious unicorn with a seemingly heightened level of natural dexterity and coordination, the pianists who don’t use them are few and far between, and typically only stopped using them because they have such a huge repertoire that they can use it as their exercises….

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…And that brings me to my closing point:

I think it’s important how you practice them, and I don’t think you’ll need them as a serious training tool forever, as you progress in ability:

- I’m not an advocate for hours and hours of them. I tend to advocate for about 20-30 minutes of them for the beginner/intermediate/hobbyist, and perhaps an hour for the very serious musician who is competition bound or preparing for tour.

- Nor am I an advocate for all of them. There’s a select few I enjoy from the Hanon, “Liszt exercises”, Czerny, and Philipp.

- I also think that there’s a point, as mentioned above, when your repertoire is large enough that you won’t need exercises as much. I think the goal of exercises is building the technique. Once you have the technique built to the desired level, and have a repertoire large enough and challenging enough - and you play it all regularly enough - that it keeps your skills developed, you may not need exercises as much, at which point they stop being a serious training tool and start becoming a potential warm-up or something to do occasionally.

Lots of words Taushi, a lot of which I agree with, but you still haven't answered the question specifically about the mirror image exercise from the video above. I don't see the specific use for that. It's like practicing the RH part of your pieces with your LH. That's just the same as using pieces to train your LH. Each piece still has only a limited number of technical challenges just the same. What is the specific benefit of practicing this way?

BTW, I am not dissing technical exercises in general, as I already said. I use them and see their benefit but if you're going to do them each exercise has to have a purpose.

Much of my statement was just an opinion on the general thread discussion about the usefulness of exercises.

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As for that specific question, Hamelin briefly addresses it in the video: the goal is to essentially create equality of ability between the hands, in a reality where the right hand is typically more often challenged than the left.

*Typically*, in much of the repertoire, the left hand has a smaller role than the right hand, and is often limited simply to a “supporting” role, resulting in the right hand *typically* being stronger. Taking particularly tricky parts of a piece, and playing it with both hands inverted has three benefits:

- It trains both the left and right hands to be able to do exactly the same thing, ensuring that the left hand is capable of anything the right hand is capable of at exactly the same speed.

- It trains both hands exactly *the same way*. Typically, if you do the same exercise, be it a mere technical exercise or a challenging part of a piece, with both hands, you run into the issue that the left hand can’t do exactly what the right hand is doing, because the hands are essentially reversed versions of each other. Generally, this problem is answered by having both hands go one direction, then having both hands go back the other direction, ensuring that each hand gets two exercises per challenge. This offers a simplified version which gives both hands the same challenge, the same way, by using contrary motion.

- It challenges the mind. Contrary motion is particularly challenging because neither hand is merely supporting the other, both hands are doing the same thing but in different directions, which causes one to hand to focus on two extremely complex things at the same time, that are very similar but reversed versions of each other.

It’s not the same as using pieces to train your left hand, because:

- you’re not just building the left hand to some independent…you’re ensuring the left hand can do EVERYTHING the right hand can do in a circumstance where by default the repertoire tends to create a stronger right hand, thus guaranteeing equality between the hands, and

The problem with “using pieces to train your left hand” is that, typically, much of the repertoire does not have a left hand part that is as challenging or more challenging than the right hand. So, even if you’re very proficient with your left hand, you’re still likely to be *more proficient* with the right hand. And even though there are a few pieces that challenge the left hand more, they are encountered so rarely, thus played less often, that the challenge is still lesser.

Even in exceedingly difficult repertoire that taxes both hands, this is the case. Consider Feux Follets by Liszt, Scarbo by Ravel, Rachmaninoff Third Concerto, Vers La Flamme by Scriabin, for example of popular fingerbusters. Even in these extraordinarily difficult pieces, the right hand still exceeds the left’s difficulties more often than not. Even in one of the few pieces that I find somewhat equal, such as Mazeppa by Liszt, the right hand difficulties slightly edge out the left because of the amount of chords in the right hand, and the central section with the righthand doing the double note arpeggios. Name nearly any piece that isn’t specifically designed to challenge the left hand, and you’re going to have a more difficult right hand, because typically the right hand carries the melody and thus is embellished and build up more. And the amount of times you’ll encounter a piece that truly challenges the left hand - say Ravel’s Left Hand Concerto, for instance - is far, far less often than the amount of times you’ll encounter something challenging for the right.

And yes you can use left hand pieces to build up your left hand, but invariably, you will still be using your right hand more often and for more difficulties, hence an inequality.

So, this particular exercise, is about answering the problem of dealing with the general trend of inequalities in the challenges that the left hand faces. Speaking of technical exercises, they can help alleviate those issues, because most technical exercises, especially those by Hanon and Philipp, and many of those by Czerny, as well as those attributed to Liszt, make the left hand do exactly what the right hand is doing, either by going back the same direction you started and presenting two challenges-in-one, or by using contrary motion for one equal challenge. But even then, there are limits, because the most virtuosic pieces are often more difficult…or more creatively difficult…than most technical exercises. This answers that problem.

I’ve also found it a great way to build up the musicality with which one uses the left hand, as people are too often accustomed to using the left hand merely as an accompaniment. Now, one is challenged to do very melodic things with the left hand also. It’s also a great mental and coordination challenge.

As the original poster, I'd like to point out that my inquiry was about something very specific - and addressed, on-topic, by I believe just two members - and not a 'general thread discussion about the usefulness of exercises'. It was quickly derailed, unfortunately, but, given the relatively low traffic on this forum, I suppose I should be grateful for any responses at all ... especially as a newcomer, a category of poster that doesn't seem to be taken very seriously.