I agree, of course, about the (lack of) musical content.
I disagree about the stamina thing: as soon as you nail a problem in its essence, a commando approach is required to nail it once and for all. Being able to play it as written is not enough, so you do it in all keys, preferably in one session (a tempo and without interruption, this will take only 34 minutes of your precious time).
P.S.: I found B flat, for example, rather awkward for this particular drill (that's what it is, nothing more), especially further on when you get full-handed chords.
Paul
On a side note:
If one can't play this exercise right away a tempo without trouble, then getting this up to tempo with maximum tone control is NOT achieved by practising rotation. The underlying skill (assumed to be already present) is actually chord repetition technique with the fingers which we went through already in previous exercises in the third volume of Hanon. Many students (and their teachers?) don't seem to understand this, and most clips on YouTube with demonstrations of this exercise are simply abominable in all respects. A very good way to practise this exercise and get truly "virtuoso" results is "finger tapping":
1) hold each chord or double note in question for the length of 4 thumb repetitions (we will do sixteenth-note or semiquaver repetitions) and repeat this pattern throughout the exercise. This will be the tempo at which you can ultimately play the exercise (times 2).
2) hold the thumb note for the length of 4 chord or double-note repetitions (we will do sixteenth-note or semiquaver repetitions) and repeat this pattern throughout the exercise. This will be the tempo at which you can ultimately play the exercise (times 2).
Now combine (=play as written) without thinking too much about HOW you should accomplish the end result but do not exceed twice the tempo you had while practising the separate elements. Just a tiny bit slower is actually advisable to avoid a fight-or-flight-kind of tension. There's no way for anyone to experience "fatigue" in this way.
P.S.: A tiny bit of forearm rotation comes in NATURALLY as soon as we approach the speed of a drum roll.
Paul
On a side note:
If one can't play this exercise right away a tempo without trouble, then getting this up to tempo with maximum tone control is NOT achieved by practising rotation. The underlying skill (assumed to be already present) is actually chord repetition technique with the fingers which we went through already in previous exercises in the third volume of Hanon. Many students (and their teachers?) don't seem to understand this, and most clips on YouTube with demonstrations of this exercise are simply abominable in all respects. A very good way to practise this exercise and get truly "virtuoso" results is "finger tapping":
1) hold each chord or double note in question for the length of 4 thumb repetitions (we will do sixteenth-note or semiquaver repetitions) and repeat this pattern throughout the exercise. This will be the tempo at which you can ultimately play the exercise (times 2).
2) hold the thumb note for the length of 4 chord or double-note repetitions (we will do sixteenth-note or semiquaver repetitions) and repeat this pattern throughout the exercise. This will be the tempo at which you can ultimately play the exercise (times 2).
Now combine (=play as written) without thinking too much about HOW you should accomplish the end result but do not exceed twice the tempo you had while practising the separate elements. Just a tiny bit slower is actually advisable to avoid a fight-or-flight-kind of tension. There's no way for anyone to experience "fatigue" in this way.
P.S.: A tiny bit of forearm rotation comes in NATURALLY as soon as we approach the speed of a drum roll.
Paul
I mostly agree, but the odd thing that I've found since reinterpeting Taubman is that overholding exercises (which they hate) are the very place where rotation is most important. Subtle rotations completely transform the freedom of finger movement, in any possible configuration of holding and lifting other fingers that I have yet found. The key is that fingers always generate what I call positive movement while moving a key- ie finger is always expanding rather than shrinking or stiffening.
With that in mind, I also like to exaggerate rotational movement in a very slow preliminary version of the tremolo- but always so the hand is growing out through the arm motion rather than being squashed by rotational collision. You can either do a very slow rotation where the finger generates far more movement than the rotation. Or you can do the rotation followed by a slight retraction- like cracking a whip. This "throws" the finger out into length, so it separates out from the arm as it gets to the key, rather than get squashed down by rotational downforce.
With either of these it's a totally different thing to this nonsense of a hand that merely "supports" rotations- which looks really quite stiff on many of their demonstrations. Rotation either helps to make room for genuine creation of movement or even assists it by throwing a finger out into length (Taubman demonstrations always look to just jam up to me). From here, it becomes a valuable addition to training movement, rather than the interference that it can so easily turn into. I want to write a blog post in the near future that links rotation to the concept of positive movement soon, as it's completely transformed the meaning of rotation for me, to link the two issues.
My goal with my post was not to argue against rotation as such. I agree that it has its value the way you highlighted it. What I really wanted to say is this: while proponents of the arm weight schools may assume that this is "of course" an exercise in rotation, both Cortot and Liszt in their technical exercises categorize this kind of tremolos as FINGER AND CHORD TECHNIQUE, which throws some light on how to solve the problems we encounter if we really want tone quality.
Hanon also placed this tremolo exercise at the very end of his book, implying that we can't solve the problems therein unless our fingers are able to do everything that comes before that, even trills with double notes of all kinds. :=)
Paul
My goal with my post was not to argue against rotation as such. I agree that it has its value the way you highlighted it. What I really wanted to say is this: while proponents of the arm weight schools may assume that this is "of course" an exercise in rotation, both Cortot and Liszt in their technical exercises categorize this kind of tremolos as FINGER AND CHORD TECHNIQUE, which throws some light on how to solve the problems we encounter if we really want tone quality.
Hanon also placed this tremolo exercise at the very end of his book, implying that we can't solve the problems therein unless our fingers are able to do everything that comes before that, even trills with double notes of all kinds. :=)
Paul
Yes, if rotation is supposedly meant to replace finger movement, that's definitely a mistake in approach. I've found a lot of uses for rotation in aiding free movement of the fingers, but the idea of rotation directly accounting for the movement of the key is simply nowhere in this approach.
