Why Technique is a Lifelong Journey
Technique. From the first lesson where we’re taught how to sit at the piano and how to shape our hands, technical training is part of every pianist’s journey. Whether it be specific exercises such as Hanon, Czerny or Dohnáni, scales, chords, and arpeggios, or concert études, a good portion of a pianist’s life is spent in pursuit of solid, reliable technique. Anyone—including household pets and falling inanimate objects—can get the piano to sound. Creating unspeakable beauty through the ways our fingers work the keys? That’s achieved through technical training—training that involves outside guidance from good instructors, repetition, and a deep understanding of how best to use our bodies and fingers when we play.
Sadly, however, many instructors fail to teach their students about the connection between technical exercises and creating music. This shows up in the many pianists who mechanically tear through exercises and scales but haven’t learned to translate that finger work to playing musically. The disconnect occurs, in part, because it’s easy to equate technique with simple mechanics. This, however, is a limiting definition. As Andras Schiff once wrote,
“A pianist with good technique is someone who enjoys a lively imagination and has the means to convey it in his performance. Sound production, the graduation of colors and matters of touch, all fall under the banner of ‘technique’.”
I don’t know about other pianists, but it wasn’t until I got to university that I learned the reason for technical exercises was to create beautiful music. Before college, all I’d seen was the drudgery of the exercises—starting with the hated A Dozen a Day series of books—that felt boring and unmusical. There, in the studio of Leonard Richter, my piano professor, I finally realized that technique isn’t a single, shining monolith, but rather a collection of tools we craft for ourselves and learn to use in our quest to create beauty through notes.
The late pianist and pedagogue, György Sebök once stated, “A musical mind can guide your body: otherwise it is difficult to solve only technique as such.” This understanding of technique takes it out of the realm of simply acquiring physical prowess and points us right back at the only reason why any of this matters: the music. It reminds us that the best technical training starts with the ears. This is because, as my former teacher (and Sebök student) Jill Timmons once pointed out, when we’re seeking a certain sound at the piano, we’ll work like mad to create it. We’ll find exercises that address our weaknesses. Sometimes we’ll create this training out of sections of the score. In this way, the goal stops being technique for technique’s sake and becomes a quest to do everything in our power to coax the music to life with our fingers.
“Music is the cure for technique,” György Sebök also said. And what I’m learning as I grow older is that technique in the service of music never stops being a moving target. We evolve, new pianos and performance halls introduce change, and new compositions or composers ask us to look into our technical toolbox to find just the right way to breathe life into the notes. Many times we discover that we lack the tool we’re seeking and we set about acquiring a new one. Every change to our hands and bodies asks us to make adjustments to accommodate our humanity. We learn to be patient with the music, and with ourselves. We learn to be honest and curious about the process. In this very real and earthy way, we learn that technique is a lifelong journey, not an acquisition; an exploration, not an accomplishment. When we learn this, we become musicians, not technicians.