Abby Whiteside on Piano Playing: Indispensibles of Piano Playing and Mastering the Chopin Etudes and Other Essays

The best book on playing the piano... - ...not practising the piano! I ve had this book about a year. When I first read it, I thought it was gibberish and found it difficult to understand exactly what Abby was talking about. However, re-reading it recently has been nothing short of a revelation. So much so that I read it three times, each time getting more out of it. I ll admit that Abby wasn t the greatest writer. But I don t share the opinion of some that she s unreadable. When you get it , everything becomes clear and makes perfect sense. Imagine trying to explain how to run to a child who can barely walk. It may be confusing that she used the expression top arm to mean upper arm , for example, at least so it seems. But on a careful reading I don t think she meant merely upper arm at all. I think she meant the upper arm AND the shoulder joint. Big difference. Having read almost all the books on piano technique I can only judge Abby s ideas by the results they produce, and in the space of only a couple of weeks of carefully applying her ideas, my playing has become freer, with much less effort and tension and consequently very much improved. In other words, more musical, which, after all, is what it s all about. In the context of her teaching the supposed heresy of dumping meaningless scales and technical dross such as Hanon make complete sense - which is a major liberation in itself! In my experience, great pianists can be appallingly bad at attempting to describe how they do what they do. Their playing is so far above anything to do with technique that attempts at descriptions in layman s terms become reduced to the glaringly obvious, and even contradictory. Arthur Rubinstein once remarked that he hadn t a clue how he did what he did, and I can well believe him. As I said above, this is a book about actually playing, not practising, and as such is priceless. I m left with the impression that Abby Whiteside may well have been a genius teacher, and I m sure it would have been an amazing experience to have had some lessons with her. In any event, a huge debt of gratitude is owed to her for putting down these ideas by those of us who are searching to make the best of our talent and to do justice to the other geniuses whose works we try to bring to life - or in my case, since I m a jazz pianist, to try to bring more freedom to my improvisation. Some of us need all the help we can get... Unfortunately, it seems that some reviewers have entirely missed the point of this book. Ultimately, Abby s is a unique approach, deeply concerned with the beauty of music, self-expression, and communicating through the piano in the most efficient way. It s an awesome book and the only one on playing, as opposed to practising, that I ll keep. There is so much garbage written about piano technique. It would be an injustice not to read it carefully and then re-read it again and again - till the penny drops...

Your piano teacher was probably wrong! - Yes, the prose style leaves a lot to be desired. The same points are re-iterated endlessly, to the extent that, like a stick of Brighton Rock, you can open it pretty much anywhere and read the same thing. In some ways, that s just as well, as you have to read it quite a lot just to work out what she s saying. This is more than an annoyance - it s probably the single biggest factor in impeding the spread of Whiteside s ideas. If more people knew what she was on about, I doubt there would be any other piano method.Because it works - to best appreciate how spectacularly it works you need to be a post-grade 8 pianist who bought the Chopin Etudes one day, and spent the next two and a half years trying to get past the first page without incurring carpal tunnel syndrome. The answer is in this book - eight hours of daily slow practise will not help if you cannot understand what you practising, and Whiteside provides that understanding.There is no cop-out here - even with the right technique, the Chopin Etudes still require many hours of study (those who claim that Whiteside was anti-practise are simply creating a straw-man argument). What careful reading of this book will do is ensure that your practise is relevant to the problem at hand, and ensure that you use the right muscles for the task.

A curate s egg - Beware! - I found this a very dangerous, yet ultimately very useful book, which has changed my thinking quite radically about playing technique, that in spite of disagreeing with just about all of Whiteside s conclusions. The value for me was that she asked all the right questions and the rationale behind her answers/solutions is spot on. I would recommend this book to any advanced pianist who despite a good technique fails to manage that final hurdle re. Chopin etudes and the like.

Lacks an extensive analysis of the scores - There is in the most of the book an dissertative speech on piano playing, but few real scores, and just microscopical passages in the Chopin Estudes. If you want to submerge in the Estudes, buy the real scores, then there are several other books on the dynamics of playing it.