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Alberto Guerrero, “The Discrepancy between Performance and Technique” I was playing in a recital many years ago and afterwards a student of mine said to me: “You don’t play in the same way that you teach. For instance, you teach that the fingers should be kept in such a position, that the wrist should be at a certain level, that the elbows and the shoulders should be this way or the other; and then, when you play you don’t obey any of your rules.” Though not quite convinced of the truthfulness of my reply, I said something about the fact that when one plays one is intent on presenting the music to the listener, trying to discover the emotion one feels and, if possible , transmit it to the audience so that the performance will have fulfilled its purpose, and that that was enough to occupy one’s attention, leaving no room for thinking with what finger or in what position a note should be played. That seems true enough. If we come to make the audience feel the emotion at the very moment in which we are discovering it in ourselves, fresh and animated by a new-born vitality, we should have given that something which is more than the notes, the time-values, the structure of the piece; we should have said something. The problem aroused by my student’s question remained still unsolved, though; and for a long time I thought of it until it formulated itself in this way: “Is it possible that when I teach the technique of the fingers and the wrist and the arms, and I make the student practise the five-finger exercise, and the passing of the thumb, and the firmness of the nail joint, the weight 127 appendix 1 07_beckwith_app.qxd 2006/03/29 12:24 PM Page 127 touch, and the musical touch, and the hundreds of things that we consider our duty to submit the student to; is it possible, I repeat (very much afraid of the turn that my sentence is taking), that all this analysis be in the way of the final purpose of making music at the piano?” The discrepancy between performance and technique has been observed many times. It would be interesting to recall a few cases. One of the best-known instances appears to centre around Franz Liszt: his pupils have stated that he taught to play octaves from the wrist lifting the hand exaggeratedly and throwing it to the keys; but, they say, when he played his famous octave passages he “shook the octaves out of his sleeve.” One of the most successful pianists of today, who studied with Martin Krause (a pupil of Liszt of great reputation in the first part of the century ) was showing me some time ago how, according to Krause, Liszt taught to produce the tone with a vigorous, thrusting movement of the forearm . This contrasts with the description of Théophile Gautier, the French writer. In one of Liszt’s concerts in Paris, according to Gautier, “his hands came and went ‘kneading’ the ebony and ivory of the keyboard.” In all artistic endeavours—and performance is an artistic endeavour— analysis is decomposing, disintegrating. When we analyze a piece of music and we divide it and subdivide it in sections, sentences, phrases, motives, we destroy its wholeness, its coherence. The performer reintegrates these elements, reconstructs the piece in a new synthesis that will have the seal of his personality. And, if he is a real artist, he will recreate the composition and discover his emotion with the audience. The same thing happens with our technique. We analyze our tools. We describe our fingers, hands, and arms as levers and apply to them the mechanical laws of leverage. We study their anatomy; what they are made of—the bones, the joints, the muscles; their physiology; how they work; relaxation, contraction. Some go so far as to give some muscles the exclusive function of producing a certain movement (a theory repudiated by scientific study). But, as Dr. Alexis Carrel has said in his book L ’homme, cet inconnu, the mechanical hand, the anatomical hand, the physiological hand, are not the hand; the integrated hand is much more than that: our hand is part of our mind. Through our sensitive nervous system our hands will tell us, if we only put attention to their messages, how much pressure the piano key will need for the amount of tone we...

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