10 years ago by
A Pianist
I kinda figured out form your latest posts that you are an amateur pianist, right?
Well, no. If you'd understood my posts you should have figured that after hours and hours of practising and playing for years I can barely play a note
I don't consider myself a pianist at all. Of any description. I'm no more a pianist than I am a trombonist, except for the desire and effort I've put in to being the former and that I own one of the instruments and not the other. But a pianist? I'd love to, any ideas of what to try next?
Imagine if you will someone sitting and playing, say K545, and the playing is sloppy and the person has played / practised it quickly, slowly with and without Alan's legao exercise, sitting high, sitting low, with a metronome, without, trying to relax, trying to use arm weight / rotation / Zen chants and so on and so on through pain and tears of frustration and clouds of depression - in a plethora of different ways. But after all that, it still sounds as shit as ever. Whatever has been tried. Worse, after the 5 hours of playing it yesterday, they now need 2 days of just using the left hand because the right hand is ever more and more painful. Now rinse and repeat for invention #1, C# minor nocturne posth, minuet in G, Clementi sonatinas and a myriad other pieces and excerpts of pieces, with the same lack of results.
So that when you hear any of them you might scratch your beard and say what sounds wrong , do I address that? Who teaches the fundamentals of playing the piano?
The fact that your playing has not improved in years does not have to do anything with your teacher, tendonitis or whatever.Only thing that stops you is you head<the way of thinking and understanding facture and technique>, and lack of practicing.
Well, i don't know you and have never heard your playing so those presumptions may not be right.
Why call them 'fact' then?
In that case i invite you to come here in Novi Sad and play for us and i am sure we would work things out.Or at least, find out what is yr problem.
I'd love too and I appreciate the offer. But the same thing that means I get to play the piano for hours and hours also means I'd struggle to find spare cash to get to London for a lesson, let alone to buy a flight to visit another country and pay for a lesson there.
But first you'd need to trust me that I'm not hoping to be Horowitz in 5 minutes after watching your DVD and that the pain in my arm is real and is something that whoever was watching would need to be clued up to spotting why and solving.
I certainly am clueless about playing the piano from that respect, specifically the physical act of playing, but I'm not a fuckwit, I know it takes time and effort.
I also note that many people make progress and play without pain.
I'm not asking for something that's impossible, it's not about "overnight" it's about it being perfectly reasonable to expect progress.
Horowitz didn't play like shit and then like Horowitz after 10 years with nothing inbetween for him.
He went through a progressive process...that's what my expectation is - practise and playing leading to some kind of progress. That's perfectly reasonable. Not necessarily linear, and not every day, but over a reasonable time span I should have expected progress.
On the other hand I'm more and more reaching the conclusion that some people can play and some can't and I must be in the latter category.
Why? Because it's plain that people can play with the material that's available, so logic suggests 2 scenarios either (a) I've yet to come across the info required or (b) the magic info doesn't exist and what I've seen is it, at which point what I'm struggling with simply doesn't affect people who are musical and can play the piano.
I'm happy with that, but if you can name me someone to play to that lives a few thousand miles closer to confirm that's the case, I'd appreciate it.
Scenario (a) means I carry on playing, it's the slither of hope...(b) is where I am heading.
If I could play without pain, and with a modicum of control over the resulting sound I might even find more in the DVD than I have.
Now, sure, I can bash my way through a few pieces that an absolute beginner might not be able to. Reading, learning and playing notes, at least for relatively easy pieces isn't the difficulty.
But the results of that playing are shit.
What it boils down to, the key thing, is
Playing those notes, not 'just how they sound on the day' and 'with pain' i.e how it is now, but with whatever dynamics I choose to .
That is what I cannot do - and most importantly I have no idea despite how I'm supposed to move my arms / hands etc to achieve that.
Hours and hours of playing CDEFG in different ways just conspires to leave me even more confused. Sometimes it feels comfortable, but then how to play softer and louder or staccato or legato with my hands in that position...sometimes I feel I've got control, but then why does it hurt? Sometimes I think I've got it, but the next day I'm back at square one. Sit higher / Sit lower...get the mirror out...are my hands moving like Alan's
Hours and hours and hours for years and years going over and over the same ground, getting nowhere...and with the pain steadily getting worse and worse and the frustration with the whole process slowly grinding away at me.
To the point where I loathe playing the piano...I hate every aspect of it, I hate the results of my playing, I hate the depression it causes, I hate the frustration of not being able to play. I hate the pieces that I ruin. But I still have a compulsion to play.
In fact, the single thing that keeps me going is that I cannot think of a something else I'd rather do. Playing the piano is, despite the loathing I have for it after years of failing miserably to do it, still a slither better than sitting and doing nothing at all - so I've still a slither, a tiny reason left to keep at it and a slither of hope that I might get better.
But, please, don't tell me that it won't happen overnight, because I've done this for years now. And please don't tell me the pain won't affect my playing, because I've have had to use nothing but my left arm sometimes for days. If I had any use for my right hand other than playing the piano I would have had to have given in by now simply to allow me to do that other activity. As it is, I have for years pretty much done nothing else other than play the piano.
Can I find a teacher who purports to know? No. Does it matter? Well you say not but you didn't say 'Try this' you suggested I fly 1/2 way around the world so someone can watch me play - To me that suggests you think a teacher matters.
As for tendinitis not affecting my playing? That is, and I'm going to be frank, a clueless thing to say. Since the DVD seems to equate each aspect of piano playing to walking, how about you get Alan to kick you in the nuts and then film his dulcet Canadian tones saying "If I kick this goatee bearded buffoon that suggests pain isn't an issue in the balls, he'd walk like this. We don't want to walk like that at the peeyano"
Again, dvd is not an over night solution.Its purpose is to explain the popper use of pianistic aparature and to make you life easier.Any many others...
Given the time I've spent with it now that's not an issue....I think, at best, Alan's explanation of what the DVD is more accurate. That's to say when I read his posts I get the impression it shows specific things that will solve some problems that his students have faced. That was the most accurate thing I've seen so far to describe it.
But see how much that differs from what you have just said above.
I can if you like give you hundreds of questions as examples of aspects that it doesn't begin to address, let alone answer. It's also, fairly obviously, only touching on some aspects.
And
I'm not suggesting my comments are more than that - but if you want a debate on the merits of the method as described in the DVD or the other info I offer here, start the thread by all means. It probably would be interesting. But it won't change my experiences of it, will it? As I've said in this post and in the other threads, the idea that I suck isn't alien to me, neither am I unwilling to accept that conclusion. But if some information or exercises or whatever can change that, then it will, even if everyone else who does the exercises or reads the book / posts says 'Nope, didn't help me' - equally, if some information or exercises or whatever don't change it, then it doesn't - it's no more profound than that.
What I will say though is that the DVD is, IMO, nothing close to giving the explanation you claim it is here, it's nowhere near comprehensive enough for that. It's not as bad as the guy who suggested to me I might find one sentence in it that's useful.
The best argument you may have is that your exposure to the book and to Alan means you know stuff that is arguably visible in the DVD, but not explicitly stated
Neither is it a solution to injuries as it claims either afaict. Indeed as I said in that thread, I can't see how the DVD purports to address injuries other than at the beginning where the claim is made.
But does any of that 'what the dvd is or isn't matter? No, TBH the only thing that interests me is whether something does or doesn't or can or can't cause me to make progress at playing the piano. Whatever it is, I just want to know what it is and enjoy the results of hours of effort of that then work rather than what I have now.
Anyway, we will make some videos of lessons<step by step...you can even call it tutorials>, which will be available for download.Maybe you will find that helpful.
I hope so and I shall appreciate it if you do.
