Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum Do you actively avoid this:

He learnt it at a much younger age.

No kid pianist makes a live broadcast debut on BBC with the Liszt Sonata on a big stage (I think it was the Wigmore Hall) until he's totally assimilated it over a few years, and performed it in smaller venues.

No, it isn't equivalent.

His teacher never played the Liszt sonata for him.

Just like my last teacher never performed any of the big-scale pieces I learnt with him - several Beethoven sonatas, Brahms's Op.117 - Op.119, Schumann's Carnaval, Kreisleriana etc. In fact, he never played more than a couple of bars of any of them for me during lessons.

I never had any idea how he'd play any of them himself.


Of course he'd have heard recordings of it before.

But he didn't learn the music by listening to recordings - once he started learning, he avoided listening to others (like most concert pianists) until he'd finished learning it.

No matter what age he learned it at he almost undoubtedly had heard recordings and/or live performances before learning it. So my point remains.

I didn't say his teacher played the Liszt Sonata from start to finish for him. But he certainly could have demonstrated parts for him. Whether that was a page or little two measure sections he was still influencing Grosvenor's playing. More importantly, he most certainly made some verbal suggestions which I think are clearly no different from getting ideas from a recording.

Do you think Grosvenor forgot everything he heard on probably many recordings before he started learning the piece? If not, which I assume would be the case with someone of his ability, he could certainly be influenced by what he heard before he started learning the piece.

I think it's clear that many professional pianists are influenced to at least some degree by recordings/live performances/lessons before or during or after studying the piece. It is not to the extreme of a relative beginner who listens to and tries to copy everything in a performance while learning a piece, but they are influenced never the less.

I don't know how you listen to recordings and performances, but when I listen, I get the whole conception of the piece as well as the details - and I'd recognize it again as being from the same pianist if I hear his subsequent CD, and often, even years or decades later if his conception of the piece is sufficiently unique and different from others'.

Hearing tiny snippets from a teacher is nothing at all like this. As I said, I have absolutely no idea how my own last teacher (a concert pianist) played any of the works I learnt with him. (Note: I didn't say "pieces he taught me" - because after sight-reading them initially in front of him during the lesson, I'd go and learn them by myself, then play for him in subsequent lessons. In other words, I learnt them by myself, and he then gave suggestions on how I might make improvements. But my conception of the pieces were wholly mine, and he never tried to push his own interpretation on me.)

Of course he would remember some ideas he'd heard before, and maybe even use them (consciously or not) in his interpretation.

What I'm saying is that he didn't learn any of his pieces by the process of deliberate listening to other pianists.

Incidentally, he enjoys playing (as encores) Cziffra arrangements, of which the only recordings ever made were by......Cziffra. But you can hear that his playing & interpretations are quite different from Cziffra's.

Non answers to what I said.

I could respond to virtually every point you wrote but I'd just be repeating what I've said before. Just one little example in response to your very last sentence. There are numerous YouTube recordings of various Cziffra arrangements. And if Grosvenor's playing is "quite different" is doesn't mean he wasn't influenced by Cziffra's or someone else's playing of the piece. It just means he didn't copy it. You said your teacher made suggestions, and if you adopted them, whether they were conceptions of the whole piece or details, that means he influenced your playing of the piece.

The bottom line is that most pro pianists are influenced by recordings/live performances and lessons before, during, and after learning pieces.

I have no idea what you're arguing about, unless you just enjoy arguing.

No musician lives in a vacuum, and I never said that pianists aren't influenced by others they've heard. After all, that's the whole point - including of listening around the music they're learning (Casta Diva when learning Chopin, Don Giovanni when learning Mozart's K330) - to understand what the composers themselves were about and what in turn influenced them.

All I'm saying is that concert pianists generally don't learn by deliberately listening to other pianists play their pieces before they have learnt them and developed their own interpretations.

If you're arguing that classical pianists should learn their pieces like jazzers do instead of direct from the score, then I'd say - you are wrong.

Incidentally, the only YT video of the Cziffra arrangement I'm talking about is by.......Cziffra.

This is the adult beginner forum. I'm 6 weeks into learning how to read music and nowhere near being a concert pianist (Remember Fun with Dick and Jane?). If I can speed things up by listening to the same piece by different pianists, I'm going to do it. I'm 61 and don't feel I have time to waste. Just saying. Everybody has to do what they feel is right for them IMO.

That being said, If my sight reading skills were advanced, then no I don't believe I would need to listen to other performances as the composer / piece should speak to you directly from the page with no translation needed.

Am I wrong in this assumption?

I didn't really follow this thread, but I'll answer the question. No, I won't, I'll actively try to listen to different interpretations and try to find one that I like and then try to copy it.

The advise to not do that might be O.K(ish) for a professional, but if I'm not mistaken this is the "Beginners Forum", aka nobody here is able to "inperpret" a piece on a level that comes even close to anything a professional in a recording does. You won't sound like Kissin just because you listen to him interpreting a piece that you are learning, if you can come even close to what he is doing you aren't a beginner but either a professional yourself or a very advanced pianist that has been doing this for a long time.

Those recordings are light years ahead of anything that I will ever be able to achieve, if I can get some resemblece of what the pianist there is doing, it's going to elevate my playing considerably. Very likely everything that I can come up with myself will just sound bad. You know, that's why we go to teachers, so that they help make our own really bad interpretations better. And if you are doing what your teacher tells you, you are copying him. The teacher is just telling you to interpret the piece as he or she would.

Also, the idea that you can come up with something completely new that nobodody has ever done before is pretty pretentions. Chances are, no matter how you "interpret" it, someone else already did it that way.

I think Grosvenor goes definitely one step further than being influenced. He explicitely says he is actively studying other versions in detail and with the examples, it is clear that he is looking at how other pianists specifically manage certain parts. Now he is not necessarily playing them exactly like that but he is retaining the concepts and adapting them more or less. At this level anyway, any pianist has the capability to adjust the fine details to its own sensibility, but nonetheless, it is interesting to see how the creative process of Grosvenor is fueled by external ideas.

Interesting issue

Contrary to many, I do post listen.

I study a piece, I get my feeling of it, I get to the point where it needs perfectioning. I don' stumble upon notes but at this point I may need to play faster and with more expression

Then I start listening to a lot of different interpretations.

This gives me many ideas but kind of preserves my own take on that !

M.

Seems to be a lot of references to “ professionals” when this is the “ beginner” section 🙄

Do you think Beethoven watched Mozart videos on Youtube? I think not. LOL

This thread has evolved into something that I’d more suitable for the Pianists forum and is of little benefit to the beginners on this forum. They don’t need to read what an advanced or concert pianist does, but what they should do as an early learner.

Can we start a new thread for advanced pianist discussion on the Pianists corner and discuss the appropriate path for beginning to low intermediate students?

My teacher has always encouraged me to NOT run out and start listening to recordings of newly started pieces.

So what happens if you study the absrm pieces that come with the cd of every piece in the book.
Are some saying don’t listen because it’s detrimental or are we talking just some of the YT versions?

Here’s what I would recommend for a relative beginner:
- try to play the right notes and rhythm without listening first. You want to develop the ability to read the score and play it without ‘knowing’ the music
- then listen to the CD: what did you get wrong? Do you know why? You may need to count the rhythm out loud - maybe you missed an accidental
- if you are working on dynamics, highlight them in the score. Work on them on your own
- once you give it a try, listen. What is different from what you did? Is there a reason?

The biggest risk of pre-listening is that you need to learn and practice slowly. That can conflict with the up to tempo piece in your head.

My teacher warned me there is a lot of bad recordings of exam pieces with bad rhythms etc that are put out whenever new syllabi appear.

My personal opinion is that it is not harmful to listen to get an idea of how it should sound, as a beginner your limitations will stop you sounding like what a professional pianist sounds like, whatever their interpretation; and a more advanced pianist will have their own ideas and voice, and if they are influenced it will be because that version has struck a chord.

Things have got lost in translation - not unexpected, if you go from English to Urdu to Aramaic to Mongolian and back again via Esperanto.



So, just to recap, as a perpetual classical student myself (the day when I stop learning is the day when I admit I'm old & decrepit, which of course I'll never admit, though I'm old & decrepit): I'm talking about near-beginners in most of my posts here, except when things got derailed by mentions of Ben and Vladimir H et al, and things got messy.

To repeat what I'd already said in a previous post: the reason why classical pianists learn their pieces directly from scores is not because that's the way it had been done since time immemorial (because Bach & his big family weren't around during time immemorial), but because all their music is preserved on manuscript paper (until they're replaced by chips) and the whole world is there waiting to be discovered. Practically infinite resources, in fact. All the information required for learning classical music is in the scores - you just need to bring in your own learning & personal interpretation to bear, including of course what composers expected of their performers during their own time.

If you always rely on hearing someone else play it first because you are unable to learn any classical piece accurately entirely from the score (I'm not talking about interpretation - just the correct notes & rhythm), then you'll always be limited by what is available on YT etc. But of course, many adult learners never go beyond that (and don't want to go beyond), so it's not a problem for them. And if you don't think you're missing anything by not being able to do that, that's not a problem for you either.

(BTW, if you have no interest in classical, just pretend I don't exist, and never existed....... )

But - if you're aiming to go real high in classical, you're going to need to be able to decipher music scores (of music you've never heard before), make sense of them, and make music out of them - with no help from recordings. Lots of amateur as well as professional classical (and non-classical) pianists do that all the time. For instance, I have a musician friend whose interest is classical but gets his main income from accompanying all sorts of music, often at short notice: he'd be called one day to play the piano in the stage pit for Sweeney Todd (the sweet angelic barber of Fleet Street who loves pies ) to replace an ailing colleague, and he'd be expected to practically sight-read a score he'd never seen or heard before, playing alongside musicians who've been playing the same stuff for years. As for amateurs (like me), I'd be called upon to deputize for the indisposed accompanist in a Christmas concert......only to discover that I'd be expected to sight-read pop songs I'd never heard before (or knew existed) in my long life, from fully-written out scores as well as lead sheets. Do I admit defeat? Of course not.......(when the going gets tough, the tough gets going, etc ). And of course, in my spare time (when not learning new scores or practicing), I sight-read through everything I can get hold of, for fun.

Which is why, if you do RCM, ABRSM or AMEB exams, you have to be able to sight-read. You never know when you might called upon to accompany the great Jonas Kaufmann in his debut in The Fair Maid of the Mill.......



If you think: "I'm not going to be able to sight-read that!" - of course not. After one year of lessons - this is the level actually expected of the average student:

I think the main point is that if even a pro pianist can benefit from listening to others, it is even more suitable for a beginner or an intermediate pianist. I think it is perfectly applicable to all sorts of pianists with varying levels.

I often play music that I haven't heard and will continue to do it, not because of any benefits (or lack of) in doing things that way but because I enjoy doing it. In fact I started doing it when I was 'self-teaching' in a 'relative vacuum' (i.e. no teacher, no internet, not that many recordings partly because I usually preferred to buy recordings of orchestral music, and, in those days they would be very difficult to find anyway) and it was (and still is) part of the pleasure in playing the piano.
Never listen beforehand? I doubt if I'd be dogmatic about it, but it does take some of the fun of discovery out of things and I really don't take a great deal of pleasure in imitating other people even though at times it is, unfortunately, necessary.