tl;dr version: Do you use etudes (other than those that are so good that they are just treated like repertoire pieces) in your practice? If so, how / how much / for what purpose / etc.?
Here's the longer version ...
I've mentioned that I'm getting back into some classical piano after a break of a few years to work on blues and other non-classical styles. Before the break, I was dividing my classical practice into three chunks. Let's say I had an hour to practice:
- 20 minutes on "exercises," broadly construed. This includes warm-ups, scales / chords / arpeggios, very short sight-reading exercises, etc. These were all the kinds of things that were really easy to learn, in the sense of wrapping my brain around it, remembering it, etc., so I could just get down to doing the "finger work." Again, think of a simple major scale exercise. Not at all musically satisfying to me to play / hear, but allowing for some focused, almost meditative practice with clear payoff and not taking forever to get down.
- 20 minutes on etudes, mainly from the RCM etude books. More on that in a minute ...
- 20 minutes on repertoire, mainly from the RCM repertoire books. For me, these are the opposite of exercises: much harder to learn in the sense of wrapping my head around it (longer, more complex, etc.) but musically very worth the work, a lot of fun to play and hear when they're done.
My problem is that I really don't like practicing etudes. They seem to me to be the worst of both worlds: difficult to learn like a repertoire piece but musically unsatisfying like a technical exercise. And I just can't make myself spend the same amount of time on it as I would a repertoire piece, especially since I could just learn more repertoire!
Again, I'm not talking about etudes that transcend their etude-iness. 🙂 JS Bach is like that: it cracks me up that he was so good that even his little beginner pieces are such great music! I could work on that all day, but it's also the sort of thing that I'll find in the repertoire book.
Currently, I'm compromising. I'm still spending a little time on the pieces in the RCM etude book, but no more than 1 week each. I'm also not trying to learn the etude as a whole, but plunder it for exercises. I can tell what one or two technical things they are trying to teach, and then just take excerpts of 2-4 measures (or so, depending on the piece) and work on that in isolation. From what I've seen, that's not an entirely uncommon approach. And I least I can motivate myself to do it ...
Whew! So if you actually read any of that, what do you do / think / have to say for yourself?! 🙂
