1095: Czerny’s School of Repetitive Strain Injury

I did some actual honest-to-goodness piano practice today. It’s been some time since I practiced “properly” and I’ll admit that it wasn’t for a particularly long session today — I had work to do — but it’s a start at least.

I started learning the piano when I was about five years old and have been playing ever since. Since leaving university — and particularly since leaving the teaching profession — it’s fallen a little by the wayside, though, for various reasons. You never really “lose it” if you’ve been doing it for as long as I have, though — sometimes it just takes a little concerted effort to get yourself back to where you were before.

Why did I let it slide? Difficult to say, really. Poor self-discipline, mostly, but I also attribute it at least partly to feelings of anxiety and depression. If I get depressed, there’s really very little that I find myself actively wanting to do. Many is the time where I’ve spent hours at a time literally just staring at a wall feeling sorry for myself, even though I know how stupid that is, and that I’d probably feel better if I actually did something. As those who have suffered feelings like this will know, though, it’s not always that easy to get up and do something.

Music is a good outlet for such feelings, however, because by its very nature it is able to express a wide variety of complex concepts and emotions without the necessity for any words whatsoever. People more talented at improvisation than I am can just sit down at a keyboard and make something up to reflect the way they’re feeling — as a classically trained pianist first and foremost, however, I find this somewhat difficult and thus tend to rely mostly on music that has been composed for me.

This isn’t a lesser form of expression by any means — it may be slightly less creative, but you can certainly channel those emotions into a piece of music composed by someone else and put your own interpretation on it very easily. Particularly if the piece of music in question is from an era of music where the composers made a point of writing pieces that were particularly expressive and/or open to interpretation. It’s for this reason I’ve always gravitated more towards the Romantic and early 20th century periods than anything else — Baroque music still leaves me cold with its much stronger focus on technical expertise rather than expression, though some Classical period works for me.

Rather than jumping in to something I can’t quite play today, though, I decided to get out the books of technical exercises I got a while back but have underexplored somewhat. I can still run through all the scales back to back (though my accuracy when playing at speed needs some work) but sometimes (all right, most of the time) it’s nice to practice your skills with something that sounds a bit more like an actual piece of music.

I have a few books of technical exercises from composers with difficult to spell and pronounce names like Dohnanyi, Pischna and Czerny — it was the latter’s “Art of Finger Dexterity” books I went for today, starting from the first exercise in the first book. Its position at the front of the book doesn’t mean it’s a particularly “easy” one, mind; it involves rattling up and down scales at high speed in one hand while playing block chords with the other, then later shifting to parallel and contrary motion perpetually-moving semiquaver passages. It is exhausting, but oddly satisfying to play, particularly when you actually get it right. I was expecting my finger dexterity to be much worse than it was having had so much time off from a concerted effort to practice, but I was pleasantly surprised to find myself whipping up and down these passages without too much difficulty. Which is nice.

One of the things I’ve felt over the years with the piano is “I’ll never be able to play that” — either because it looks technically demanding, or it’s fast, or it’s in a difficult key, or whatever. With some persistent, consistent and regular exercise, though, I have faith I’ll be able to build my skills up somewhat and perhaps tackle some more adventurous pieces than I have done in the past.

Eventually, anyway. In the meantime, I shall continue to enjoy playing Final Fantasy and Persona themes for fun!