Welcome to the Piano World Piano Forums Over 3 million posts about pianos, digital pianos, and all types of keyboard instruments. Over 100,000 members from around the world.
Join the World's Largest Community of Piano Lovers
(it's free)
It's Fun to Play the Piano ... Please Pass It On!
Hello. I have a question about using Czerny etudes in practice.
A while back I bought a copy of Czerny Op. 599. I started at the beginning and played thru the pieces, trying to adhere as best as I could to what is written on the page. The initial pieces are written without tempo markings, and I played them as slow as I need to in order to play the piece accurately. Somewhere around #40, Czerny puts tempo markings on the pieces. The first one is marked allegro, and I thought I should try to play it allegro (tempo > 120bpm). The best I could do after working at it for a time was tempo = 100bpm.
I continue to try and work at this piece to try and get it faster while accurate. Which is boring for me because none of these pieces are very interesting, and I haven't started any new ones, just repetitively play this one.
Question: would it be more beneficial for my practice to just play this piece to try it make it faster, or accept the (relatively slow) tempo I can currently manage and move on to some of the other pieces in the book?
I'm sure you need to move on. It seems you have reached your maximum speed for that etude at your current level, spending more time on it is inefficient now.
I'm sure you need to move on. It seems you have reached your maximum speed for that etude at your current level, spending more time on it is inefficient now.
I agree. There are other pieces and studies that you can work on. Leave this one for a while and when you come back to it later (in a few months) you may well find that you can play it faster than you can now.
"I'm sure you need to move on. It seems you have reached your maximum speed for that etude at your current level, spending more time on it is inefficient now." Exact. I think it's better move on. Eventually, in future, you try to came back in this exercice just for some days to practice and only to see if your speed it's a little better or no. But I think it's no good to try only one exercice and not to go in the next. Go to 41, and just one week or two, after go to the next. If you play too much one exercice, the exercice really seems to be "boring". For me it's not boring. Example n.41 I think is nice:
But even is seems "boring" I think is good to practice. To do scale exercices is not boring? Yes, certainly is boring, but is useful to do. When I played these exercices of Czerny I played more the one exercices in the same time. I used to practice 3 or 4 exercices. example 40, 41 and 42 in the same week. The next week I stopped with the exercice 40 and started the 43. So, for me, the practice of piano was less "boring". For me was possible to play until the number 80. Not possible to play the exercices after 80. Too much difficult for my level.
