I was watching an interview of a young Martha Argerich on YouTube some time ago. She made the remark “je ne fais pas de gammes” – I don’t do scales.
So many scales and so little time
All pianists will have memories of learning all of their scales, Major, Harmonic Minor, Melodic Minor, Chromatic in octaves, thirds and sixths. As we move through the grades, the scales requirements become progressively more demanding not only in terms of variety but also in terms of speed required. The same applies to arpeggios – root position and inversions. I remember practicing them for hours on end as I prepared my various grades.
When I came back to the piano, one of the first things I thought about was re-starting the practice of all of those scales …. sigh! I did this for a short while, but then took the bold (you might swap bold for silly?) decision to stop – what value was I actually getting from ploughing through octave after octave of scales?
Do you use them often in repertoire?
Our teachers tell us that we need to learn them because much of the piano repertoire and technique is based on them. Well, I’m not entirely convinced. I don’t know many pieces of music where you play a scale or arpeggio in the way we have to practice them for our graded exams. I struggle to think of any example where you have even one octave of a major or minor scale to play using the same fingering you spent all of those hours perfecting.
Take for example the first movement of Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 15 (K.545) which we all recognise, this piece has lots of ‘scale based’ passages in it. However, you generally need to use a different fingering than that you learned for the scale itself as you need to end up on an appropriate finger to play the scale that follows. Here if you used the ‘standard’ fingering, you’d end up on your pinky or thumb and needing to start the next scale also on that same digit … Equally, most chromatic passages wouldn’t use the standard chromatic fingering because you’d end up on the wrong finger for what comes next.
Why learn them?
Don’t get me wrong, I do think that there is tremendous value in beginners learning scales and arpeggios. Scales help learners to understand different Key Signatures, learn where the sharps and flats are, learn the shapes of chord inversions from arpeggios. I think they also definitely do help develop basic evenness of touch, hand position and all of these things. However, is there any real value on pushing them to their absolute limits if all you have at the end of it is the ability to play scales at lightening speed. Of course, it looks good on a YouTube video (and I’ve watched some) !!
Getting back to Martha Argerich, her response to the interviewer wasthat she didn’t need scales to maintain or improve her technique as the repertoire she learned and played had sufficient technical challenges to work on and it was overcoming these challenges that added to technical expertise. I can almost hear one of my old teachers now … “but that’s Martha Argerich – she’s a genius, we’re not allowed to do the things she would do”. There’s likely wisdom in that statement too – but hear me out …
Other alternatives
My view is that for we returning learners, we paid our debt to the scale bank all of those years ago so, unless we want to refresh our theory around which notes are in which scales, I think we can utilise what little time we have to practice in better ways. For example, rather than spend hours working on bland scales or exercises, let’s do as Martha suggests. To learn Fur Elise, let’s see what it gives us:
We have a C Major scale, spend the time working on Bar 31 – here you’ll get the same need to think about fluidity of playing, evenness of touch, speed (it’s not lightening fast but it’s far from slow). OK, descending only, but still a scale.
- Next, you have Bar 77 which is an A Minor arpeggio – practicing this part alone pretty much covers any ‘white note’ arpeggio (major or minor).
If you want to do exercises on rotation, you have Bar 32. This can be played with forearm rotation which is highly recommended by many teachers.
For exercises on repeating notes, you have Bars 59 onwards. Using different fingers for repeated notes
In short, in this one, iconic piece of music, you have a comprehensive range of ‘technical’ challenges to which you can devote your 10 or 20 minutes per day of ‘Scales, Arpeggios and Technical Exercises’ time, and at the end of it you get to play a beautiful piece of music which everyone will enjoy listening to. How many of your friends will want to listen to your fantastically executed scales ? Let me know what you think.
