To Hanon, or not to Hanon – that is the question! Do Hanon exercises provide the biggest bang for your buck?
The traditional approach
Some insist that Technical Exercises like Hanon are vital whereas others even go as far as to say they are most likely dangerous. To make things worse, proponents of both sides are able to quote world famous pianists who share their view. So, what is an amateur to do?
An entire generation of pianists grew up with Hanon’s ‘Virtuoso Pianist’ exercises, supplemented by Czerny studies and exercises plus a healthy slice of scales and arpeggios. If you search online, you’ll find a whole set of extremely respectable names telling you that this is the way to learn piano. It has worked for centuries so don’t try to fix something that isn’t broken.
Other options
However, you’ll also find those who depart from this viewpoint. Probably the most notable name is Martha Argerich – arguably the greatest living pianist. She doesn’t believe in scales and technical exercises – advocating that technique is learned from playing pieces and fixing technical problems within them.
We then also have examples such as Sviatoslav Richter. He was largely self taught into his early twenties and apparently his father despaired that he wasn’t doing the traditional exercises so ‘necessary’ to build good technique. Fortunately, his mother supported him and left him to his own devices.
Are we practising in an unrealistic manner?
Personally, I don’t like prescriptive technical exercises such as Hanon. I honestly can’t see the point in subjecting myself to doing five finger exercises in multiple keys with both hands playing exactly the same thing. This very rarely happens in actual music anywhere and certainly not for a prolonged period of time. Even when both hands play in unison (such as in Chopin’s Revolutionary Etude in a couple of places) it is hardly reminiscent of a five finger exercise.
Creating exercises
Nonetheless, there are many occasions where we will find parts of a piece awkward to play. This is where I use the strategy of creating exercises out of the difficult passage itself. Naturally, this is perhaps easier said than done. What, for example, constitutes an exercise? How many exercises should you devise for a tricky passage? Where do you even start to look?
To help illustrate this, let’s look at Handel’s Allegro. If you’re a regular reader, you’ll know I’m working my way through Melanie Spanswick’s Play It Again Piano Book 2. This is one of the pieces proposed by Melanie.
Find awkward passages
For me, there are a few places that I initially found quite awkward to play. Basically, my passagework has always been weak. This is perhaps because in my younger days I learned very little Bach and even less Mozart. Even Clementi as a composer was a very recent discovery for me. I was much more drawn to Beethoven, Chopin and Debussy.
As a result, what I have found is that getting passages such as these even and controlled isn’t very easy. Simple repetition, slowly or not, makes little difference. This is where creating the exercises comes in.
Look for patterns
If you’ve got hold of Rami Bar Niv’s Book, The Art of Piano Fingering, then you’ll be familiar with his advice around looking for patterns within music. These patterns will often help inform on the best fingering to use aside anything else. What they also do I discovered is help you develop exercises too.
In the excerpt above, there is a clear 5 finger pattern repeated 3 times almost identically. This then points to two things. First, I can most likely use the same fingering for each occurrence of the pattern. Secondly, I can use that pattern as the basis for my exercises – by simply looping that pattern. This then gives 3 little exercises that can be practised daily for a couple of minutes.
Look for joins
Next, the biggest technical challenge here is likely moving from one 5 finger position to the next. It is of course possible to simply ‘lift and shift’ the hand. However, then the legato is lost unless the pedal is used. Therefore, I created a second set of exercises based on creating a pattern around the ‘join’ between each position.
I then combine these exercises with other techniques such as rhythms, strong fingers, staccato for this small passage.
This means that when I initially started learning this piece, in fact I didn’t spend any time during my practice ‘playing through’ – I spend the entire time doing ‘exercises’. However, these exercises are now directly linked to the actual piece of music I’m trying to learn as opposed to building some abstract technique in isolation.
As an added bonus in this piece, this same pattern is found elsewhere too so the same approach to exercises can be re-used
This approach can be used in many pieces
This same technique can be applied to pretty much any piece of music.
For example, with Liszt’s Liebestraum No. 3, I found that the very opening bars exposed uneven and overly loud arpeggios in the right hand, so to fix that issue, I practiced the right hand alone like this.
Another example is Debussy’s 1st Arabesque.
This particular passage is notoriously tricky. There are umpteen ways to convert it into exercises – and Graham Fitch specifically mentions this passage in his Piano Practice eBook series. You can again pick these up on Amazon.
If you’d like to see some ideas in practice, then I’ve linked the YouTube video below for you.
I’m sure you’re getting the idea by now. It’s simply a case of picking out the bits that you find difficult to play reliably and working out how to exercise your fingers and brain around them. Of course, you can get as creative as you like here. You can for example play some exercises with both hands in unison – even though the end result doesn’t call for this. This can help the stronger hand ‘teach’ the weaker hand on occasions.
What is your preference?
Of course, an obvious rebuttal is that ‘if you spent your time practicing Hanon, you wouldn’t need to do exercises to master this type of 5 finger passage’. I’m sure there is some truth in that. However, I have limited time and need to find what gives me the most ‘bang for my buck’. Equally, I need things that keep me the most motivated whilst practising.
I’m convinced that if you try to learn varied repertoire then you can develop your technique well enough doing this. That’s one of the reasons I’ve been following the Play It Again Piano course.
Let me know what works best for you!
