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I would say its good the play czerny etudes and other technical exercises, it can help you to have better technique to play your pieces, but really the technique is specific for each piece you play, so every piece requires its own technical focus.
An interesting discussion. My teacher assign pieces out of Hanon & Czerny Etudes. Music exercises tend to be boring but we need them to improve our playing techniques. We'd limit music exercises to 10 min of an hour practice, 20 min max.
The proof for me is when I get stuck over particular section while learning a piece and get frustrated, I switch to a relevant Czerny or Hanan exercise for 30 minutes or so before going to bed and the next day, I mysteriously breeze past the problem. I'm in month two of returning to piano after not playing for 50 years and I am getting of mileage out of exercises and just plain sight reading sheet music before playing the pieces. I am much more focused on exercises right now than repertoire but I am quickly building up my sheet music and CD collections. Listening to a master play a piece correctly keeps me humble but inspired. There is no glory in murdering a masterful composition which I am doing a lot of these days.
Since I have artrithis in my thumb its very hard to do scales. On or two is ok, but many repetition doesnt work. So now I am turning to Burgmuller. Please give some more examples or more in depht info about etuds.
Étude is the French word for Study. They are basically exercises to develop your technique, much like scales would. Lots of (especially beginner/intermediate) etudes feature scale and arpeggio patterns. Burgmuller’s Arabesque comes to mind. The entire thing is basically sections of an A Minor scale. Burgmuller is a good choice for beginners and intermediate players (range from about grade 1 ABRSM to grade 5/6), but some of the exercises still may cause you pain. You know your body more than I do. If you think something will cause you pain, don’t do it. If you start to feel pain, stop. There are lots of ways you can improve away from the piano. Learning music theory, listening to pieces, finger independence exercises. What standard are you roughly? If you let me know I could probably give better advice. How long have you been playing, and what books/pieces are you working through?
I am having a really difficult time learning Shostakovich Fugue No 7 (3 voices). I understand and hear all three voices. The problem I have is I've been practicing this piece for over a year now and each time I play it, daily now, It's like I'm looking at notes I've never seen before. I'm just trying to learn a page at at time by playing thru it. The difficulty is that the LH has to take a lot of the RH notes and jump back and forth to base clef notes. And even some times there are clef changes in the middle so that the notes seem to be going up the scale when in fact they are going down the scale. If my mind wanders for a split second a wrong note is played. Can you suggest ways to play this beautiful piece of music?
If I take this video correctly, a novice shall practice the Hanon book (the most boring finger technique pratice) along with Burgmuller to learn piano techniques.
Not really, I never teach Hanon to any beginners. I use a Dozen a Day instead with scales and arpeggios and Burgmuller later on. But it all depends on the student. If I see that they hate the exercises, I will try to motivate them with nicer pieces pieces instead.
It depends what you define as technique. As I said many times in my videos, apart from mechanical finger exercises, most 'technique' exercises are pieces too. Like Burgmuller, Chopin, Bertini, Gurlitt. Hanon and some Czerny can be considered just exercise but many Czerny opuses are beautiful pieces too.
