Piano Technique Control, or:
On Listening

Reflections on Andras Schiff's Haydn recital at the Vienna Konzerthaus

On Thursday night (29 Sep. 2005) I attended an all-Haydn recital by the Hungarian pianist Andras Schiff. Mind you, I have no intention of getting into the business of reviewing concerts but simply to use them as occasions for reflection for the purpose of helping my students and my readers understand music better and become better musicians. (That goes for myself, of course.) When a concert is an object lesson not merely in piano technique control but, infinitely more importantly, in interpretation, as is the case with Schiff's picture-perfect performance, there's clearly no reason to hold back.

Here's his program:

Joseph Haydn:

Encores:

Franz Schubert:

Music students and audiences tend to get so caught up in matters of mere instrumental technique, which after all is nothing more than a communicative means. Those budding musicians on the lookout for the Holy Grail of piano technique control have no further to look than this fact: Listening is the foundation of all technique. (I'll keep adding articles on all facets of piano playing, so subscribe to this site and stay tuned for lots of valuable secrets -- it's free... and I don't even need your email address.) Everything in Schiff's playing, as for any musician worthy of the name, proceeds from the most acutely developed listening apparatus which is irretrievably interwoven with both the emotional content of the work at hand and the hand itself.

Suffice it to say that technique as such does not exist. In the German-speaking world, we use the term Fingerfertigkeit for what most pianists tend to confound for technique. Fingerfertigkeit merely refers to raw finger ability, that of moving the fingers quickly, evenly and articulately. That's merely the bare-bones beginning of technique, not its end: Technique is never an end in itself.

That's why I almost never prescribe technical exercises as such. In my teaching, I liken the practice of most Czerny or Hanon-style etudes to the mindless repetition of random syllables, as if that were the key to learning how to speak a language. No, the key to learning to speak is first having something to say! From there, one gradually acquires a greater command of language, and the greater that command, the more articulate and eloquent one becomes. It's precisely the same when playing the piano, or any instrument for that matter. In that sense, music is indeed a language, as is often claimed. (Of course, academic investigation of such a claim is infinitely more involved, encompassing as it were the history of the philosophy and semiotics of music, but for the present purpose the analogy should suffice.)

The connection between the inner ear and the playing mechanism (in other words, that between the listening apparatus and the playing apparatus -- the shoulders, arms, wrists and fingers) is therefore the essence of all musical execution, and every note of Andras Schiff's Haydn recital exemplified that fact. After all, ultimately, the only thing of any significance is not one's means of expression but what one has to say.

In that context, given that the task of the performing musician is to listen with the utmost precision and concentration for the purpose of delivering a coherent artistic message, Schiff's polite admonition of the audience for its contagious coughing fit in the ever-so-intimate F minor Variations was not only permissible, but in fact exemplary. Indeed, great music-making implies equal engagement between listener and performer. In fact, the insolvency of listeners' own listening faculties, in large part due commercial music's ubiquity in modern culture, is precisely why there exists a genre of popular music called "easy listening," which implicates itself by its very definition. (That's by no means an indictment of popular music, which encompasses after all a history and set of styles every bit as extensive as so-called "classical" music, but merely a recognition that some works of music, whatever their genre, reward the development of one's aural attention more so than do others.)

Listening to nontrivial music, on the other hand, where so much of the classical canon falls, is precisely not easy. (It's long, for starters.) On the contrary, it is demanding, just as learning a foreign language is demanding, and the demands of the greatest works are in direct proportion to their emotional rewards; indeed, that is what makes them art.

Fortunately for us, as Mr. Schiff illustrates, that effort pays dividends.


footer for homepage