Neil Stannard

The Pianist's Guide to Practical Technique, Vol. 1: 111 Technical Studies from Music You Want to Play Volume I (The Pianist's Guide to Practical ... Studies from Music You Want to Play I, 2014) Neil Stannard 1st edition

Put away studies by Czerny. Put him and the others into a closet and turn the key. Instead, use these passages from music you intend to play?music by master composers?as building blocks for technique and musicianship. Suppose for a moment that we don?t accept the notion that a good piano technique requires strength training, or that it is even really possible to ?strengthen? the fingers to any noticeable degree in the way that authors of yore would have us believe. Indeed, those concepts have lng ago been long ago discredited. Suppose, too, we discard the notion that independence of fingers is a physical action and not instead a musical objective. Well, you might ask, for what then do we train? Let's use our knowledge of how the hand was designed to work in order to train for refined coordination. In this volume and its companion you will find ample material for just such a study. Here in volume I are threads of Bach Inventions, early Haydn episodes and mainstream Mozart and Beethoven. Here are morsels from standard repertoire that, if used as part of your daily regimen, will at the very least provide a colossal head start on a catalog of music you want to perform either in public or just for your self, and in the process begin building technique and musicianship.