darin.wilson

Note: this is part of a series of posts chronicling my efforts to play through Hanon’s The Virtuoso Pianist in 60 Exercises. The series begins here.

After a pretty long haul, I’m finished working on exercise #4, and I’m moving on to #5. This is not to say that I can play #4 absolutely perfectly — that’s more of a lifetime goal — but I can play it cleanly enough at the maximum recommended tempo that I think I’m ready for the next challenge.

Besides, I really need to let this one go. #4 leaned heavily a 4-note figure that seemed deliberately to emphasize the weakest fingers in my left hand (the 4th, 5th, and to a lesser extent, 3rd). I sometimes feel like these exercises were written to mess with my own personal deficiencies.

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I know a couple of piano teachers who poo-poo Hanon altogether. When I told one of them that I was working on it, she looked stunned and said “Why??”. (Anyone who read my first post on the topic may well ask the same question).

She, like many, are of the mind that simply working through books of exercises doesn’t really buy you much. It is better, the thinking goes, to work on actual pieces of music and focus on the technical challenges that present themselves in the context of the music itself. Put another way, any technical challenges worth mastering can be found in the works of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, etc. Better to spend your time and energy there, since that’s what you want to be playing anyway. We probably won’t be hearing Hanon played at Alice Tully Hall anytime soon.

Plus, playing books of exercises is boring as all hell.

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Ah Hanon.

Mention the name to a pianist and see what kind of reaction you get. Some will
roll their eyes, some will lose all color in the face. Others will run screaming
from the room as images of piano teachers wielding rulers run feverishly through their minds.

“Hanon”, for those unfamiliar with the word, is the common short-hand term for Charles-Louis Hanon’s The Virtuoso Pianist in 60 Exercises. Wikipedia describes it as “a compilation of 60 exercises meant to train the pianist in speed, precision, agility, and strength of all of the fingers and flexibility in the wrists.”

Pianists who have actually attempted to play the thing would probably describe it in much stronger language.

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