Why bother doing Etudes? (Teachers)

[Nemesis]

Etudes can be approached as musical pieces in themselves or they can be approached purely from a technical point of view or they can be approached as a combination of the two. However, there is a growing wisdom that lifting technically difficult sections out of the repertoire you are currently studying and converting those difficult sections into small technical exercises to practise before re-insertion in the piece works much better, helps you to stay focused and also achieves the same technical mastery of the instrument, perhaps in an even shorter space of time.

The important thing in the above approach is being wise enough to know how to convert the sections into technical studies and that is where a good teacher can help if you don't know how to do it. Like all professions, there are good, bad and indifferent teachers.

[cconsaul]

I have always understood that the whole concept of the etude was to allow the author to create a piece of music to help him or her overcome a particular problem they were having with their own technique. Sometimes they were also written to help a student get over a hurdle or escape a plateau. My point is, that an etude is a path to take, a direction to go in, a shortcut past what might otherwise be an insurmountable hurdle. Even if it is not impossible to overcome, the time and effort that mastering the etude takes, is an investment in your future as a competant musician. Etudes are created for the same reason that roads are built, trails are cut, markers are left, and histories are written. It is a way of saying, "This is where I have been, this is the most economical way to get there that I know, and these are the steps you take to help you on your way past an obstacle I have already overcome. The less time it takes to get to a level of competance, the more time we have to forge our own trails, leave our own markers, add to the overall store of knowledge and experiance available for future musicians, and even achieve a small measure of immortality by including our thoughts and experiances in the minds of who follow.

[Nemesis]

The Chopin etudes for piano are musical gems in their own right and form part of the standard concert repertoire. The Paganini Caprices are also part of the standard repertoire for violinists but they are etudes in their own right.

I presume the context for this discussion are the standard etudes that one would encounter as part of a method of teaching?

[axefreak]

I am a teacher and I agree with you. practice makes perfect, everything else is relitive. play what inspires you to play more and get better.

[Athanasios Ziros]

From my teaching experience (1997-2002) there are some students that are capable of becoming good CG players-performers and others who have a limitation of time or passion or potential and just want to have a nice time for a year or two. I would say that if you belong to the first category only studies would allow you to reach your potential (think of an 100m athlete: years of practice and only 10 races a year!). On the other hand if you favour a lighter aproach then you can pick fewer studies (like some of Sor's) which are beneficial for your skills but also have nice melodies.

[Lane]

To be fair, though, it's not always obvious in looking at a piece labeled a "study" what exactly it is that you're supposed to be studying. I quite like Sor's pedagogical pieces, but many of them seem to fall more in the category of nice little pieces of music rather than technical studies. You really need a competent teacher or a good book (like Tanenbaum's guides to Carcassi, Sor, and Brouwer) to get the purpose and use of many studies. That's not the case with, say, most violin studies: if you even casually sightread through Kreutzer #9, it's obvious that it's a string-crossing exercise.

I agree with you 100% that the purpose of etudes is not always obvious. I got a copy of Segovia's Sor etude #1 did a harmonic analysis, fingered it, stumbled through it to check if the fingerings would work. Then I read what Tanenbaum had to say and I had missed so much it was a joke. He talked about the voices, balancing voices, compositional devices, etc... My inital understanding was one dimentional and Tanenbaum's was three dimentional. This really opened my eyes to the hidden beauty of Sor's writing. Yes, get a teacher and Tanenbaums's books.

Lane