Great Pianists on Piano Playing / Study Talks with Foremost Virtuosos. A Series of Personal Educational Conferences with Renowned Masters of the Keyboard, Presenting the Most Modern Ideas upon the Subjects of Technic, Interpretation, Style and Expression

by James Francis Cooke

Genius and Work

"The fault with many students, however, is the very erroneous idea that genius or talent will take the place of study and work. They minimize the necessity for a careful painstaking consideration of the infinite details of technic. To them, the significance of the developments of Bach, Rameau, and Scarlatti in fingering means nothing. They are content with the superficial. They are incapable of comparing the value of the advances made by Von Bülow, Tausig and other innovators whose lives were given to a large extent to the higher development of the technic of the instrument. They struggle laboriously at the keyboard, imagining that they are dealing with the problem of technic, when in reality they are doing little more than performing a drill in a kind of musical gymnasium—a necessary drill to be sure, but at the same time quite worthless unless directed by a brain trained in the principles of the technic of the art.

Questions in Style, Interpretation, Expression
and Technic of Pianoforte Playing

SERIES VIII

leopold godowsky

1.	How may the mechanics of playing be distinguished from the larger subject of technic?
2.	With what has technic to do?
3.	What channel in the study of pianoforte must the pupil develop most thoroughly?
4.	Name three epochs into which the subject of touch may be divided.
5.	How does weight playing differ from the high angular playing of the Czerny epoch?
6.	How should the fingers rest in legato playing?
7.	What may be said of the sensitiveness of the finger tips?
8.	By what device may pianism descend to a lower level?
9.	What qualities must the student preserve above all things?
10.	Will genius or talent take the place of study and work?

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