Mastering the Chopin Etudes

My mantra is that if only I can live long enough I will master the Chopin Etudes.  I have been saying this for decades now, in a spirit that reveals more hope than conviction ... until now.

There are many things I've been learning that buoy my belief that such mastery is still open to me, most recently with Chuan C. Chang's wonderful book on the Fundamentals of Piano Practice, but today I had a particularly wonderful breakthrough that I will describe below.

 
Abby Whiteside, a famous piano pedagogue of the first half of the 20th century, wrote an influential essay called Mastering the Chopin Etudes, those formidable knuckle busters, the mastery of which is commonly regarded as a kind of union card for would-be concert pianists.  I enjoyed the essay but it did not guide me very precisely or profoundly in my desire to master those 27 daunting and beautiful pieces.

First allow me a word about my musical background.  I was given an early start at music, thanks to my parents, who were symphony string players.  They enrolled me in a Dalcroze Eurhythmics class when I was not much bigger than a toddler, and then put a violin under my chin when I was five.  I started piano lessons at six with an Austrian Countess, a forbidding and regal grande dame.  Madame Altswader was said to have known Brahms when she was a little girl.  At my first lesson, when my eager attention wandered, she rapped me across the knuckles, and I was so astonished and offended that I rapped her back!  Madame stormed out of house, aghast at such an insubordinate and cheeky child.  No doubt I was a product of Doctor Spock's permissiveness which so steered the parents of Baby Boomers to allow their children to develop an attitude of laziness, lassitude, and lack of respect for authority.  

While I worked at music in a desultory and distracted way throughout my childhood, I did not practice much, and I had not a clue about what animates music, not in any technical sense, until I was well into my twenties.  I could play some hard licks, and I was genetically doomed to be musical, but I knew nothing essential about the bones and muscles under the skin of music.  While I liked music as a child, I was really crazy about airplanes, not music.  The music bug bit me only when I was in my late twenties, after I came across a copy of Ward Cannel and Fred Marx's How to Play the Piano Despite Years of Lessons, (surely one of the greatest titles of all time), which gave me my first glimmer of insight into how music really works, and inflamed a love for music like a virulent infection.  

When I went back to school, after the Army, after my corporate jet job in Saudi Arabia, and then, back in the States for another couple years until the last dirtbag commuter airline went bust, it was to New College of Florida, at Sarasota, where I majored in piano performance and composition.  By 30 I had finally begun to grasp some music theory and learned to play all my scales and arpeggios, but by the time I entered my first music competition, I was already nearly too old to be allowed to enter any more contests.  When I graduated from college, I suddenly remembered unhappily that man needs to eat, so I went back to flying, got married, had kids, and continued to work at music when I could. 

Now, back to my mantra that if I can but live long enough I will master the Chopin Etudes, and the wonderful breakthrough I experienced today.

William Westney, author of The Perfect Wrong Note, a book I got as a gift from my younger daughter, makes a distinction between what he calls honest mistakes and careless mistakes, when we're making music. 

The careless mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.  For example, as we're sailing through a piece of music we play a wrong note without attending to the mistake.  Perhaps we're thinking, well, I'll get it right next time.  Or maybe we even go so far as to stop ourselves and then play the right note after missing it, but we play it right just the one time before moving on. 

What we learn from this kind of mistake is a practiced routine.  The routine we learn is to play the wrong note and then the right one.  So when we perform the piece, sure enough, we have learned to play what we have practiced, which is first to play the wrong note and then the right one.

The honest mistake, by contrast, may happen the same way--we miss, say, the F sharp and land on G instead.  But this time we attend to the mistake, we bring it  fully into focus and figure out what's going wrong and how to play the right note.  Maybe we approach the troublesome spot by a few notes before it and try to notice what is going wrong and how to play the right note, and then we practice the right note again and again and again until we get it firmly in our hands and with a fully mindful grasp.

I had such a moment this morning.  There was a spot in "I Never Saw a Moor," a beautiful contemporary song by Richard Pierson Thomas that sets to music a text by Emily Dickinson.  I was approaching the repetition of the text at a big cadence from the dominant to the tonic of D flat, where the left hand goes from low A flats to a repeated E flat above it with an arpeggio following.  I play the E flat first with the 2nd finger and then with the 5th finger.  I kept missing the E flat when I switched from 2 to 5.  

I stopped and attended to the mistake and figured out what's going wrong and more importantly how to fix it.  

Well, there are two points here: the first one that I've learned recently, which is that when making a leap, it helps to move the hand very rapidly into position above the right note and then to descend on to the note, in contrast to trying to make the leap in just one motion and land on the note while still going sideways.  It is counter-intuitive to think this two-step motion is better, but this is indeed what I've learned from wrestling with those long, awful, and intimidating series of leaps in the first movement of the Brahms E minor cello sonata that I'm playing with my daughter.

Now, the second thing, and what occurred to me this morning, is that I can always play a black note with 5 if it's as an octave with 1. 

Think about that.  Aha!  Now I get it! 

While it's easy to play a black key with the 5th finger when the music is slow, at a lively tempo, I find that I can reliably play a black note with 5 when my fingers are stretched out, meaning, to the point here, when the long axis of the 5th finger lies across the black key, not lined up with, or parallel to the long axis of that narrow key.  By playing the black note with the little finger across the note I suddenly have, in effect, a bigger finger with which to find the narrow key .  

This insight makes it as if the key had suddenly been increased in size to make a much easier target to hit because, in effect, it is indeed bigger!  You're aiming at a target as wide as the key is long, not at a target which is only as big as the narrow width of the black key.  

It was as if I were trying to play tennis with a baseball bat and suddenly I get a real tennis racket instead! 

When I figured this out, I immediately applied the idea to a trouble spot in the C major Etude of Chopin from the first book, Opus 10.  Suddenly I could apply it to countless other trouble spots in the piece, and then ... my God, I've had a breakthrough this morning!  A genuine breakthrough, a significant advance in my technique.  Suddenly, I can play the C major Etude damn near note perfect and up to speed!  While I memorized this piece years ago, I still can't play it up to snuff.

Westney addresses the objection I frequently have against stopping at every daunting figure and working it out, which is that if we take the time to do this with every trouble spot we'll never have time to learn the piece.  

Well, no, that's exactly backwards!  When we take the time to work out the troubled spot, we get it right in the fastest and most efficient way possible, and we truly learn the damned thing!  We master it, we own it, and it happens so much faster than it otherwise would.  In fact, without attending to the trouble spots in this fashion, we never actually master a difficult piece of music.  

I have half a dozen Chopin Etudes I've worked on for years now without ever actually getting any of them truly up to snuff!  Now I've damn near got one, Opus 10 Number 1 in C, and it's one of the hardest of the lot.  Just one, but I almost have it.  

Suddenly I can see my way clear through to mastering this exalted work!

This is thrilling stuff!  I am dizzy with delight! 

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