JohnCW The thoughts of someone with real authority on this subject, Jools Holland. Jools could fluently play the piano before he could sight read, and has never played classical piano, He was making a living from it at school age. Of particular relevance to some of the themes of this thread is his comment in the video that good music is a mix of emotion and technique, the player requiring enough technique to perform the piece, but technique beyond that often "just gets in the way".
I found the video, while not short, thoroughly worth watching
Great post. I think this offers some good insight. I don't agree with everything he said (you can never have too much technique, in my opinion, so long as you have the creativity to know what to do with it), but the SUBSTANCE Of what he said rings true to me. And I agree on the sentiment that, again, classical music isn't needed to become an advanced pianist or even a virtuoso.
I think one of the reasons people have such a hard time divorcing piano excellence from classical music is because, for so long, the two have been tandem. Dare I say, the piano was the first "new" instrument built specifically for what we now generally consider "Classical" music - invented and developed in the 1700s during the Gallant, Rococo, and Viennese Classical/Classical proper periods, perfected during the Romantic and Late Romantic eras, finalized in the Impressionistic era.
And it's with this instrument and during these eras that keyboard technique reached it's zenith. And I maintain there's
no other genre where advanced keyboard virtuosity is the standard, and with vaunted amounts of repertoire to support it, like as with Classical music.
So that sealed the concept of piano excellence to classical music.
And then, of course, even with the advent of genres like jazz, where there was the presence of virtuosity - both technical and harmonic - was similar or equivalent to the Classical genre, there were, unfortunately, social, cultural, nationalistic, classist, elitist, and/or Ivory-tower ideologies that exhorted that Classical still be seen as the "superior" art form - the "one, true Art".
And, so the "conventional wisdom" - really rote ideological repetition - has always held that classical music is a necessary component to become a great pianist. But it simply isn't true. Demonstrably so.
When Art Tatum was introduced to the conversation earlier, things somewhat got lost in the weeds on semantics and comparisons- but I thought his introduction to the conversation was, most importantly, a superb support to the idea that advanced pianism is capable, sans classical training. Art Tatum - a jazz pianist who never studied classical and yet who was able to play with the same level of brilliance and éclat as his classical contemporaries - proves that case. And there were many other jazz pianists, modern pianists, and avant-garde pianists of similar ability who achieved superb musicality and technique but never studied classical.
And if the methods continue changing, as they are, we'll see more and more of this.
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There's also logical support to the idea.
We just toss all these music from the 1600s to the early 1900s together under the completely-minimizing and ill-informed brute-force generalization term "Classical", because it's easier to parse things that way. But the reality is, the "Baroque" people saw the "Gallant/Rococo" people as something new, alien, unusual, and frankly wrong. And then those people felt the same way about the "Classical proper" people. And the Classical people felt the same way about the Romantics. And the Romantics felt the same way about the Impressionists, and so on. We're able to group it all together in 200 years hindsight, because our ears, harmonic language, and mind have been programmed to all as chronological artistic evolution. But, at the time, all of these were considered distinct, separate, eras of music. And yet, the fundamentals worked for each distinct genre/style/era.
Also, keyboard technique didn't start with the piano or classical proper. It started with the organ and harpsichord and clavichord. It was adapted to the piano which had the same seven-plus-five layout, but there were still minor adjustments that had to be made because the piano plays and responds differently than the previous keyboard instruments. And yet keyboard technique adapted through these distinct instruments.
So we already see, even in what we now unfairly generalize as "Classical", how keyboard technique & performance was constantly adapting and developing, and not married to any particular instrument or any particular style, as Gallant was different from Baroque and Classical was different from Gallant/Rococo, and Romantic was different from those, and so forth.
Added to those facts, during the Romantic era, we saw keyboard technique truly standardized and divorced from the music of any particular style. Again, Liszt began working on the fundamentals as pure drills to develop piano technique, and it took him further than anything he'd done before that. He began working on a series of exercises, ultimately published much later and rather poorly (with some contention) by his pupil. However, Liszt's work spurred on Hanon (whose exercises become the greatest purely technical development tool), and later Isidor Philipp continued the method of divorcing pure piano technique from any genre. And I don't consider the Hanon or the Liszt exercises to be classical music - it's not music at all - it's pure isolated technique drills following the scales. Same can be said of the Philipp, which follow a particular harmonic/chordal progression.
Sheet music notation and learning to read it is another standardized system, divorced from any particular genre/era.
And, music theory itself is yet another standardized system, also divorced from any particular genre/era.
So, now, there exists very standardized methods by which to achieve advanced pianism, without ever studying any particular classical. A simple method could be:
- Teach a student basic fundamental theory - scales, note values, keys, keyboard layout, time signatures
- Teach a student to read sheet music
- Use Hanon (and perhaps Liszt and Philipp exercise also) to build technique.
- After basic fundamental theory, select pieces from various genres - jazz, 20th Century/21st Century, pop music, movie music, standards, avant garde, solo piano, new age, etc. Use the skills to learn the pieces.
- As technical, theory, and musical abilities progress, continue through the Hanon (Liszt/Philipp) through the increasingly technically challenging exercises. In each collection, the exercises get more and more difficult, and by the end of the book, the requirements are virtuosic. These exercises can built the advanced/virtuoso technique.
- Develop the musical side of things by increasing the repertoire consumed, to ever more challenging, imaginative, and creative repertoire.
- Repeat at higher levels
Through a method like this, one never has to ever actually play classical music, and yet can still become an advanced and even virtuoso pianist.
And that's to say nothing of what might be possible for those musicians with natural aptitude (like the aforementioned Art Tatum), who never even had to do all that to achieve highest advanced levels.
Thus, I think it's very possible (having already been demonstrated by numerous successful advanced non-classical pianists) to become an advanced and even virtuoso pianist, and yet never touch the classical repertoire. And, with more schools and conservatories embracing modern music, and applying the pure fundamentals without restricting students to pure "Classical", we're seeing it more and more.