I don't have an hour for Basics either.

Written by Stephen Brivati
Published: January 26, 2015 at 8:38 AM [UTC]

I found something like these words on Youtube:

"I think you need to do some scales. Get away from the music. Forget the music because everything can be an exercise. The exercise improves your technique to be able to express yourself. It is a misconception. We are not expressing Schubert. You are expressing your feelings. Its not what's written, it's what you feel. But you have to have the mechanism organized so you can feel free to express yourself."

The speaker is Pinchas Zukerman, and he is giving Helena Baillie a viola lesson. You can start at 3.12 to get right to them if you so wish.

They express why I feel so passionately about Basic things to perfection. In my last blog, the perfectly reasonable recurring point about there "not being enough time to do Basics as well as everything else," cropped up again. In this blog, I am going to try to get around this issue, in the hope that more people will take a second look at what Basics has to offer rather than consigning it to the piano stool. So, first clean up your piano stool and buy it a potty......

The negative response to Basics is often couched in one-hour terms, as in "If only I had an extra hour to spare." Most people don't. But we can approach the problem from another angle. Suppose you adopt my suggestion and just do one exercise from each half of the book every da , for perhaps three days or whatever feels right. Then tick it off and go to the second. Set a kitchen timer for five minutes and read the first page. If you don't have time to do the exercise, who cares? When that ping goes, reset the clock and go to the second half. Reading, digesting and doing the little exercise is probably not five minutes work, so you might even want to stop the clock early. In the space of ten minutes, you have absorbed and perhaps put into practice two crucial aspects of playing and your technical knowledge of the instrument has increased quite substantially. It's quite possible that in the two areas addressed you now know more than your teacher!

That is worth ten minutes, I think.

But even this idea does not fully address what Basics can do. Exercises feed into your playing, both consciously and unconsciously. Let's consider the latter first. Suppose, hypothetically, you are practicing two hours a day.  You want to spend half an hour of that time on scales and studies and the remainder on music.  You have just reduced your time spent on music by ten minutes. Is that good or bad?

 If we recognize that exercises are a short cut to fast and effective improvement in both pieces and scales, then we can answer positively. The unconscious integration of your new knowledge into your playing has already improved the sound you are making by one ten billionth of a degree and increased your satisfaction by a similar amount. It has also decreased the amount of time you might need trying to locate a tension problem so the time saving is already eating away at that ten minutes. But you have just started. In the second half of the week you switch to the second exercise in each section. Now the input can really begin to make a difference and the time saving starts to increase exponentially without you realizing it.

However, it's when you get to the point where you start to consciously apply an exercise you have worked on in this ten minutes that you start to make huge gains. This process may take a little longer, but it will happen if you are consistent in the procedure. Suppose, for example, you are playing a work that requires you to crescendo and increase intensity across a long note. Your teacher has told you this but, as is fairly typical I'm afraid, not told you how to achieve this. Whereas in the past you have fumbled around trying to express the music musically and got more tense and screwed up, now you can remember exercise 39 and move from the fingerboard to the bridge using the slanted bow. This is pretty easy basic knowledge, but in all the years I studied, not one teacher at any level discussed this idea with me!

Or perhaps you are wanting to focus on intonation as the main area for improvement. You can save a lot of time by playing exercise 255 for five minutes in the key of that piece. The actual time on the music would decrease slightly, but the amount of faulty intonation would have decreased without you working on it so more time and space is available for higher order skills. 

I could carry on giving examples all day but I think the approach is clear enough. One starts slowly and carefully with the minimum investment of time, and once the incremental but consistent improvement in performance becomes obvious, one wonders what one was spending time on before. Sadly, the answer might be not quite as much as one originally thought.....

Cheers,
buri

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