😂😂😂😂😂

Lmao😂😂😂😂

You should read his Memoirs , which are a very informative reading ( and fun , too ) and he says exactly something different.

@@cooltrades7469 he's obviously joking about it

Realistically, (I could look up his financial conditions when his kid was born but confirmation but I won't), he wanted the extra money because he had a kid and wife to take care of.

I thought that was Louis Armstrong. Trumpet chops decay rapidly, so I believe it.

I thought that was Itzak Perlman

And I thought it was Rubinstein.

Funny to say, an indian master musician was reported to have said "If I don't practice one day, I hear the difference; if I don't practice two days, my disciples hear the difference; if I don't practice for a week, the audience hears the difference". I think that this is experience of all persons committed to music. Personally, if I don't practice one day I feel the difference too, at least in the first twenty minutes of practice when I start again. It is a very annoying sensation, so I practice everyday.

@@PatriciaGoodsonpianist Ha-I guess a lot of them, or none of them said it

So many lie about as if we don’t know.

I know a few pianists who don't practice, but their music is sublime.

It also requires knowing ergonomics. Sitting upright, not slouching. Head upright, not bent way forward. Shoulders relaxed. Forearms level to the keys. Taubman technique very helpful - vertical landing of fingers as well as rotation to help make note connections easier. I recommend watching some youtube videos on it.

In your wet dreams, sugar... 😶

@@Pogouldangeliwitz seriously??)) She is the of the most popular pianists today🤭

Yuja Wang "BEST pianist 😮??!!!!!!!!!???????". She has very fast fingers and a big big brain (and a good manager...) but in the romantic repertoire she misses the most important : the respect of the styles of the great composers and the sensitivity of the touch to beautify their music. (In the modern and contemporary music, she is excellent though) . The young Japanese pianist Nobuyuki Tsujii is certainly THE BEST pianist of that generation : same age as Wang, same virtuosity (despite his blindness...) BUT he's got all the rest which makes him give true and deep emotions to the audience whatever he plays...

​@@GingerIndiana Are you president of his fan club?

Weissenberg said the most difficult thing was to play a slow movement as simple as possible. Can Wang do that?….

Was that merely limiting yourself to 2 hours a day, or was there more pieces of his advice that helped you improve in such a way?

Yes but I bet he didn’t start out with two hours. I bet he initially did more and when he got to a certain accomplished level then practiced for two days!!!

I couldn't agree more! Same here. I practice no more than 2h30 and noticed that my brain keeps on "practicing" (=integrating) hours and hours after the actual practice time. 80% of my piano playing happens in the brain. And brain needs rest in order to process and integrate.

​@@darthvader7684 Here's one of the articles I wrote on this subject about how to practice effectively (and efficiently): 1. Less is more. I still struggle with this. I play close to a thousand pieces, but I've mastered only a few of them. 2. Go straight to the problem passages. This is how I mastered those few pieces; and how I practice the other pieces. Don't play through from the beginning. I mark my scores with asterisks at all the problem bars or circle the tricky notes and practice just those passages a little each day. Nothing else. For instance, I've got most of Beethoven's Moonlight 3rd mov off pat - the arpeggio passages are easy peasy. But I've always struggled with bars 9-10. So I always start here, and work on it by trial and error: not just dotted rhythms but also wrist rotations to try to get the weak fingers (in bar 10) to play the notes rapidly and securely. It's also all about relaxation (of the elbow and wrist), but also about maintaining the tension (of the fingers, so they don't collapse). It's NOT about strengthening the fingers. That's how I tried to play this passage in the past and that just makes you play unevenly. BTW, YOUR FINGERS DO NOT NEED TO BE STRENGTHENED. This is the most damaging fallacy to playing piano and results in people practicing scales and etudes like Hanon. All the force comes from the weight of your hand (and arm, mostly). Your fingers just need to be strong enough to support the weight of your hand without collapsing. That's all! Curiously, I can play it just right after a few minutes of working on it. But when I try to play it from an earlier starting point, my fingers collapse on me again. It's probably a vestige of my previous bad playing of this piece that's still very ingrained in my physiology. I'm having to unlearn those habits. Anyway, this approach actually speeds up the mastery of a piece. There may be a dozen or twenty difficult or problematic passages in a piece. Once you've dealt with one, leave it and move on. You practice just the problematic passages until you've whittled them down and "conquered" them. And occasionally come back to check that you've got them just right (and the way to make sure is to play them slowly and deliberately a few times to "iron out" the glitches. If a "done" passage is still problematic then add it back into your list of practice tasks for the next time. It's a kind of virtuous circle of perfection. 2a And then when you're playing through the piece just for enjoyment, stop and work on any glitch there and then. Don't just keep going. This is hard to do, you just want to move on - something I do often. But if you're in "practice mode" then you must stop and not carry on playing until you've reworked the problematic passage a few times (and perhaps re-mark it on your score for future "immediate" practice). 3. There's something you need to strive for that I don't know how to explain clearly. You need to get to the point where your hand and fingers feel strong and secure at every passage. I don't mean physical strength and dexterity. It's more something like a confident "reflex" action, akin to plunking your whole hand down on the keys (perhaps in a fixed chord position) and the right sound occurs naturally. It's a physical feeling of abandonment, but with the security of knowing that it's just right. You can replicate this feeling by placing your hand on the keyboard (either the white notes from C or the first 5 keys in the Emaj scale... because it fits your hand so much better)... and then just rotate your wrist in a flicking action. You're not "playing" the notes (that's when you press down each finger individually, which is the wrong way of "playing"). You're just making a wrist action that's easy and natural (such as when throwing a pair of dice). It feels natural and strong and secure, and it sounds natural, secure and right! Try to play every passage like that. Practice playing with abandon, even exaggerate and deliberately play wrong notes (at least whatever notes your fingers happen to land on when you’re leaping about). The trick is to play like that - with abandon - and to get your fingers to land on the right keys automatically without your mind controlling them. Do this with Chopin or Joplin. And do it with your eyes closed. You’ll be amazed at how easy your pieces will become… in time. 4. Sometimes when practicing, one has to exaggerate the mechanical aspects of playing. But try as much as possible to always think musically about every passage, even when practicing a few notes. I always try to have an image or an emotion in my mind of what sound I'm trying to achieve. The Moonlight is a good example of this and something I still struggle with. Beethoven is coming to terms with his deafness. So it's a sad, mournful and angry piece. I try to make certain passages sound like crying or sobbing (like bars 61-62) Some of the other passages (like the syncopated section starting at bar 20) seem to be quite jaunty and could be played that way if it were a jazz piece. But I’m constantly having to control my urge to play it like that and ask myself, what emotion is he feeling at this point? I try to make it sound like he’s sobbing, in a jerky uncontrollable way - and I even play this passage with an “incorrect” slightly out-of-time and jerky rhythm to try to get it sound that way. You can have more than one image of a piece, of course, and play it differently depending on which image or “story” you want to convey. 5. Finally… take your time. You can’t rush it. There are so many neurological and physiological developments that need to take place, and it happens gradually over a long period of time. You’re kind of growing a grape vine within your body, but training it to grow in a certain way. It needs “training” (it’s called that when growing vines too). and gentle watering over time. Aim for small increments of improvement. Work on a problem passage to the point that you’re playing it a little better than before. That’s your only goal. The larger goal of mastering the piece will take care of itself! One of my current projects is Liszt’s Bmin Sonata. Many of the passages are unplayable! But after several months of chipping away, some of the impossible passages like the very stretchy arpeggio runs starting at bar 18 (I have small hands!) are now trivial to play.

​@@11kwright Maybe. Some (genius) kids just love to spend all day at the piano (or whatever their instrument is). But I'm not sure one makes much progress just by "doing the time". I also used to love going to the practice rooms at university (and I was allowed to skip classes at school or come in after hours to practice on the grand piano in the assembly hall) and spend hours at a time. But I didn't make progress. I was mechanically sound in my playing, albeit very uneven. I realized much later that I had devoted thousands of hours to practice and ingrain bad habits and erratic rhythms, and "lock" any possibility of progressing and improving. I had a huge repertoire of pieces that I played consistently badly and always too fast! It was a teacher in Jerusalem (who was preparing me to enter the conservatoire) who showed me how to play for the first time. His teacher was taught by Rubenstein, so many of the ideas handed down to me were essentially Rubenstein's. I made more progress after a mere three months of just 2hrs per day (an hour in the morning, an hour in the evening) than I had made over the previous five years! I didn't go to the conservatoire in the end because I needed to spend the next few years unlearning and eliminating all those bad habits. This was so difficult to do that I even had to stop playing completely for a year or so in an effort to "forget" the muscle memories that were so strongly ingrained in my mind. And then to slowly start from scratch. I got impatient and reverted to my bad old ways. But, eventually, over a period of 20 years (!) of trial and error, and lots of pedagogical book reading and "inner game" thinking, I figured out what must obviously come naturally to the likes of Evgeny Kissin and all those other little child prodigies. In fact, the epiphany was when I saw several 6yo kids playing pieces by Bach or Chopin or Liszt even with such ease, but that I was still struggling to master despite years of practicing. They have such small hands and virtually no muscular strength and can hardly reach the pedals even - so what are they doing right, naturally, that I wasn't doing in my playing? About the same time, I also came across Edna Taubman (which has been extended and modernised by Edna Golandsky). There are plenty of videos on KZfaq and a subscription plan to view around 160 instructional videos on the Taubman Approach. Anyway, so I've developed a best-of-practice (no pun intended) approach to practicing and playing the piano, aimed at not-so-talented people like me - see my reply to darthvader, above... :) golanskyinstitute.org

Good point!

Composing music was RECREATION to Chopin?! 🤣😃😲😲

@@funshine817 As compared to the repetitive nature of practice? It was recreation for him. I read a Georges Sand quote about how he would often get into a trance just improvising at the piano, coming up with wonderful pasages. Just imagine that we have record of a fraction of what Chopin did. Boggles the mind. Also, if you read his letters, he was very enthusiastic about composing. His high standards must have frustrated him at times, but I can't see how someone could have made so many gems if he didn't love what he did. Seriously, I don't understand your cackles. Please explain.

@@gtd9536 Cackles was rather rude. Not cool. I LAUGHED simply because I was so AMAZED that Chopin considered composing recreational, as I find it very mentally difficult. Sheesh.

Rachmaninoff's concertos are sensational. I love all of them, 1, 2, 3 and 4. But curiously, I love Anna Fedorova's performances way more than Rachmaninoff's. 😹 it is still Rach, yeah, but it's Anna too!

Considering that there are many different versions of many of his pieces floating all around Europe, all of them authentic, and many pieces of his with 3 or more published versions, it did seem as though composition was like playtime for him!

Haha. Evasive these artists are. But he's probably right. I just don't know how they're able to access pianos on tour

@@stefanbernhard2710 they have hosts who have pianos where they can practice

I wouldn't quantify in clock terms how much I pratice my instrument, because telling someone "I practice N hours a day" may convince him that you must practice that "N" hours a day. Since everyone has different needs and timings, I'd rather say "I practice as much as I need to feel that I have practiced enough to be better than yesterday".

Thanks for sharing!

I had a friend like that in high school as well. One day, I went to his apartment - there was not a single place you could be without being able to reach a piano. This was a small apartment; just the kid and his Soviet parents. There must have been 8 (yes, eight) pianos in that small space. There was an electric keyboard in the bathroom. This was long before the Internet and showed the old Russian way to success. When I saw that, I totally "got it"!

@@ananda_miaoyin that's a lot of pianos lol

@@ananda_miaoyin That is weird.

@@fionabegonia7802 They were Communist Soviet refugees. This was their way. It was weird but he was SO GOOD.

This is absolutely true.

That's good advice! I made on video on my violin channel about time management in practicing. kzfaq.info/get/bejne/p9ulZKiWva-Viok.html

Yeah right, so it's all about quantity and not quality.... not impressive.

Two contemporary cases in point: Yuja Wang, Daniil Trifonov. Also, any exceptions to this rule are so rare as to be rightly considered irrelevant. Mozart, Argerich, Baranboim, Kissin. All of these could do amazing things which they were still single digits in age and working, most probably, not more than 2-3 hours daily. None of them, even in their teens, were likely to be practicing so little, realistically. You're just not going to get thru the rep. IMO!

@@TerenceMarais Kissin is on record saying he practiced for fun all day

@@chester6343 Yeah that's right. From a very young age he was apparently playing for fun all day. At age 5 or 6 he would spend only 20 mins actually practicing. But by the time he was 9 or 10 this had already expanded to 3 or 4 hours of daily practicing, and whatever other time he could just playing.

@@TerenceMarais he was 12 when he performed both Chopin concertos so I imagine he was practicing most days in excess of 4 hours, whether that be just playing music he enjoyed or studying technic, he was a product of the Russian school system so would likely be very very well versed in hanon in all keys.

@@TerenceMarais How can you know ? Did you live in the same house ????

Wait…you’re talking about practicing 3-6 hours a day and call yourself “fanatic amateur” player? I’d say you’re more of a “FANTASTIC” player if this is the case! Nothing “amateur” about that regimented schedule! Kudos to you fellow musician! Keep up the good work! We need more people like you! 🙌🏼

Itzhak perlman only practiced the violin 3 hours a day

@@hugogustafsson4815 I suppose you were in the room?

@@russellgrant1535 It's what he says himself and it is what he teaches, dont see why he would teach wrong on purpose

"Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard" - applicable to almost any skill.

She said she has never practiced scales or done piano exercises. She only practices pieces.

The top musicians seem to start with prodigious talent then add rigorous practice on top. Those of us with limited talent will plateau at an intermediate level no matter how much we practice.

or alternatively, he was prodigiously talented for discipline...

@@christopher.stewart Ha, now you're onto something. Many great musicians also chose their parents well, to have musical instruments and music teachers around them from birth.

@@christopher.stewart Yeah, good point.

@@TerryClarkAccordioncrazy The parents factor was there for sure. The entire family are very accomplished. Great people.

Same. When I sit to piano, the time flies too fast😢

Thanks for sharing! It's always interesting to find out how musicians in different genres practice.

Thanks!

As George Sand, Chopin's lover said "He was as delicate and frail as a communion wafer". I can't imagine him doing 5-6 hours a day anyway.

Thanks for sharing. I did a video on my violin channel about time management in prating an instrument. You might end it interesting. kzfaq.info/get/bejne/p9ulZKiWva-Viok.html

Thank you for your honesty. Yes, you can practice in your mistakes.......I think one thing Horowitz does is he imagines the sound.......makes a change.....and is able to implement it.

There is no reason a trombone player (any type) can't play many hours a day. It does require some endurance, but that just comes with practice. There is no such thing as a useless exercise or useless scales or arpeggios. Music is built all around scales and arpeggios. Arpeggios are the bread and butter for building flexibility. So long as proper technique is applied, every moment on the horn is useful. Just as a body builder benefits from every lift, the lips get improved tone, range, and power for every minute on the mouthpiece.

@@mouthpiece200 A horn requires listening to the output, changing input, etc. I know many keyboard players who never listen enough to change their sound.

@@sundancer7381 I'm aware how horns work. Hard to effect much in the keyboard though except pressure.

After 1000 s of hours at the piano . You can bet .

This was taught to me during my college years for classical guitar. Many hours with the score, charting out the picking and fingering/fretting for each note. By the time I would get through the entire score, the piece was mostly memorized. At this point I'd pick up the guitar and be able to work on dynamics, phrasing, tempos and everything else that turns notes on a page into actual listenable music.

I practice ear training and melodic analysis on my right hand. Thumb is do up to pinkie (so), etc. After decades, audiating away from instruments seems to create a NEW mind-body connection. A kind of Guidonian Hand before I even learned what it was.

Thanks! It means a lot to mean!

My son's piano professor is superb, as one would expect from someone twenty years invested. As a family man with a small child, he admits there are certain very challenging pieces he could perform, but never will due to the time required to perfect them.

Absolutely. A person has to practice. But if you don't have the musical gift, no matter how much you practice, you won't be.......Keith Jarrett. The 10,000 hour rule was just something Malcolm Gladwell dreamed up for his books. Malcom is a journalist, not a scientist. Another example is Bruce Lee. He was naturally talented to be a fighter, had the attitude of a fighter, grew up in a fighting atmosphere (Hong Kong) and was in the right time and place for his career. Practice (and he practiced to an extraordinary degree) served him well. Another person without those factors can practice martial arts all he/she wants, but that person won't be......Bruce Lee, Cynthia Rothrock, etc.

Glad you enjoyed it!

Glad you enjoyed it!

They probably felt you are not one of those kids who needs this information?

@MishaSkripach Perhaps. I was good at other things, like math and science. But there was something about skills I had to learn, and that wouldn't come so easily, that I just didn't get. And this is about skill acquisition as much as musicality. Simple things like breaking the skill down to small parts and being patient during the learning process didn't come naturally to me.

@@josa720 Majority of teachers don't possess much skill themselves, some do, but those usually take on very gifted pupils. So, you had no sourse really. It is a very hard path, and only those who are equipped by nature could persevere with results. For the rest it is a grand waste of time and effort.

Thank you!

Glad it was helpful!

Yes, that is my experience as a performer too. Thanks for sharing.

You’ve got that right!

there are recordings from the 19th century but yes, still long after Chopin unfortunately

For some people, life is music, and being without music is like being without life.

Happy to hear! Many thanks!

First of all, practice slowly to learn the piece. Then bring out phrasing - ie the larger structure of the piece. Only go faster when you know how to play the piece and its phrasing.

Happy to hear!

Super story, thanks!

@@bibipelictalks You're welcome! Laretei also retold the story of a colleague who played Bach's Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue in concert - from memory of course - and accidentally skipped a large chunk of the Fugue due to all the chromatic passages and recurrence of the theme: "it's like driving down a road where you recognize all the signs and bends...". 😀

@@louise_rose that’s a good one too!

I agree. They're able to spend less time practicing now, because they practiced a lot when they were younger and established their technique then. It's more maintenance and learning new pieces for them now, whereas most of us are still struggling to overcome technical challenges when we practice.

Thanks! Happy you like it!

Please recommend me your teacher! :)

This isthe problem with grades, they let people pass while having no technique, and who cannot memorise pieces. Ridiculous. Teendagers think they excel at piano , as they have grade8, when in fact they cannot play!

@@MishaSkripach they can play basic pieces in the sense that they can get most of the notes right and follow dynamics on the page. But the pieces below grade 8 are short so technical limitations in flexibility, stamina, tension, strength etc. can go under the radar if the student is talented and practices. It’s when they start playing whole sonatas or big virtuosic works like Liszt, Chopin, Rachmaninoff, Ravel etc. and start getting tired, injured, make lots of mistakes, don’t feel physically strong enough or suddenly hit a developmental plateau (especially if they breezed through the grades), that’s an indication that they have unaddressed technical problems.

@@sacrilegiousboi978 The technical problems are evident at any grade piece, if a child has them: for example, playing by memory must be a standard. Playing with correct hand positioning must be a standard. Nobody should be allowed to pass the grade if their physical movements are wrong.

@@MishaSkripach yes, if they are spotted by someone knowledgeable eg. a conservatoire professor or professional concert pianist. But they tend to go under the radar because most regular teachers (the ones that ordinary primary schools provide) for think they and the student are doing a good job if they can play most of the notes, regardless of how they’re doing it. examiners for grades assess all instruments so don’t know about specific techniques and therefore don’t assess it. This is why they (the student) and teacher can suddenly become confused when they ace the grades and suddenly they are struggling to make the jump to big virtuosic stuff. This is what happened to me. The teacher who transformed my technique was able to teach his son and get him to Grade 8 in just two years because he was that good a teacher. Most primary school piano teachers rarely have students that get to Grade 8 because they don’t teach them proper technique.

Was about to comment basically this, it sounds more like he is drawing attention to the merits of doing things outside of practicing all the time, especially during the summer, rather than the merits of practicing less all the time all year.

@@Someonedoingnothing yes I agree; could be a lot of factors encouraging somewhat fewer practice hours in summer!

It’s possible he was talking to the aristocratic students whom he taught. Those people were not trying to become professional musicians.

@@pjbpiano yes; very possibly this could have been a factor! (However, while I don’t recall that much about Chopin’s disposition toward aristocratic versus more “plebeian” students, my - perhaps very flawed - sense of the matter was that Chopin would have expected every one of his pupils to become the very best pianist they were capable of, and being very pro-aristocratic, may have held his aristocratic students to a higher standard, expected and demanded more of them. While I suppose he would have respected a “Countess so-and-so” saying a countess had other priorities besides just music, and accommodating that stance, I sense his respect for the aristocracy and non-democratic leanings (“nobility” in the combined multiple senses of this word) perhaps more than any other ethos/spirit suffuses his music, would have led him to place his highest hopes and expectations in the “nobility.” Indeed, his performance ideals and focus were the elite salon, not the professional concert hall orientation. I’m confident you’re familiar with “Chopin, Pianist and Teacher” as well as the “Cambridge Companion to Chopin”, but if not I think they are amazing resources for this topic, brilliant collections of original documents and contemporary scholarship on Chopin’s musical/aesthetic and pedagogical ideals and preferences.

I did and I'm still ok. My teacher told me that 8 hours a day is not enough. He was right. Now I can play with perfection and since I didn't pursue the symphony orchestra as a goal, 6 hours is plenty.

Not true at all. It's about having proper technique. The Taubman Technique corrected a lot of physical problems I developed over the years.

°They° say that sitting is the new smoking, and even if that is exaggerated, there is a lot of truth to it. If you play for 12 hours and sleep for eight, you're going to pay for it in some way, even if you have vigorous exercise and weight training in the other four hours. Our bodies are not meant to be that stationary.

The reason this works well is that when you practoce, the lactic acid from your spine flows into your arm/hand muscles, and this causes fatigue, both in your arms and spine and body overall. It can also cause aches and pains. When you rest, it flows back again, and your body recovers. Always break. Never more than 2.5 hours in any one stint. Best do 3 of those with breaks in between, then all 7.5 hours in one go. You will put rockets on your heels this way!

@@yourtransformationgenie I would say do 30 minutes and take at least a 5 minute break. Stand up and walk around the house/building. Do something different away from the piano. Then come back and start over. The best time for learning is the first 30 minutes or so. If you practice 2.5 hours, straight, then you only get that first 30 minutes ONCE. Take a break every thirty minutes and you can get that super-charged 20-30 minutes of peak learning time over and over throughout the day. What Sathrandur said is important too: a couple hours in the morning, a BIG break, then another session in the evening. Practicing hours and hours straight is a total waste of time. Your brain gets fatigued and all this information gets shuffled to "temporary" storage in your brain and not long-term memory. Starting over and over in short bursts makes your brain think this is new important info, instead of hours of the same boring thing that it starts to just toss into short-term memory...and is lost in no time.

Natural talent is important indeed, but with vast amounts of practice, even regular people may seem gifted.

@@mouthpiece200 Depends what you mean by gifted. To become a top-level classical soloist takes both vast amounts of intelligent practice AND initial natural ability. Think of the many thousands of kids who sacrifice their childhoods practising all hours to achieve their dreams as pianists or violinists - the vast majority fail. So yes, you can become highly competent if you only have average ability, but you can't become a top level classical virtuoso - they are almost all identified well before their teens and placed on elite programmes.

@@mouthpiece200There’s a Grand Canyon between genius and merely gifted.

Yes, the ability to hear the music internally really helps.

Glad you enjoyed it!

True🙂