It’s early morning here and I just got through sharing a finger exercise on Ovidiu’s Guitarflame site.  It got me thinking about how my teaching is often at odds with my colleagues.

{”Colleagues?  What colleagues?  The only folks at my school that have any sense left about them are the students…”]

  Here’s a confession:  –my teacher taught me to question the “rules” and to make my own choices.  I haven’t found any reason to discard this approach, either.

Here’s a partial summation of the Leschetizsky “Method” found on Kevin Purrone’s site:

1. Good fingerings are easy fingerings
2. Fingerings must fit the size and stretch of the hands
3. Loud tones should be played by strong fingers when possible
4. Do not avoid the thumb and 5th fingers on black notes
5. Alternating fingers on repeated notes in a slow tempo is obsolete.

So why do we force students practice scale fingerings if at times the “correct” fingering is not the easiest fingering?

Answer – Scales are fundamental building blocks for tonal music.  They should not become an obsession and should be taken with a few grains of salt (preferably adhering to the rim of the glass). 

The same is true for suggested fingerings found in edited music books;  take them as a suggestion and not as a commandment.

I’d bet money that many thousands of students quit music because they’re forced to play boring stupid scale patterns on their instruments which, in the long run, don’t really matter.

It’s better to spend your time playing good music.  Fun music.  If you don’t have any fun music, then go out and get some.  Not that crap that your teacher wants you to play;  if you don’t like their music (assignments), hand it back and say “give me some good music”.  Remember, the customer is always right.

Actually, I wish the customer was always right.  Because then maybe music educators would get a clue and stop doing things just because someone told them that it was “pedagogically correct” or is part of some God-forsaken “age-appropriate scope and sequence.”  It really chafes my donkey that we don’t spend every lesson helping students learn to not need us anymore.   And students are different;  what is appropriate/necessary/fun for one is not necessarily good for another student.   Technique is not the goal;  – expression is the goal.  The correct technique should be easy and should never become the most important goal in the lesson.

I’ve put in a lot of hours (musically speaking) over the years, but I rarely ever practiced.  Instead, I played.

I played.

 

Get it?

”Played percussively, the piano is a bore. If I go to a concert and someone plays like that I have two choices: go home or go to sleep. The goal is to make the piano sing, sing, sing.”

                                                  V.Horowitz