How to Apply Piano Technique to Pieces
A Chopin nocturne asks for many things in one bar. The right hand sings. The left hand travels across the keys. And the mind is already at the next note. To apply piano technique to pieces, you need all of that at the same moment, and again in the next bar.
Each of these you can practise on its own, in an exercise, hands separate, slowly. And each one works. In the piece they come at once, and something drops out.
Then mostly one skill gets blamed and goes back to the exercise. Sometimes that's right, and the skill does need more work. But when it comes back to the piece, it meets the same bar as before, with all the other skills in it. Putting them together doesn't happen by itself. You practise that too, on purpose.
Technique Exercises, Études and Pieces
Some people on the internet say technique is a waste of time and you should only spend time on the music. I think it's big nonsense! Learning technique away from your repertoire pieces "is extremely beneficial, because you will prepare your fingers for all the passages, and finger work, and arm work."
Learn technique only inside a piece, and two things can go wrong. You don't really understand the technique of the passages, "and you get stuck there." Or you struggle so long with one passage that you get an aversion to it, and "you start to spoil it."
Études help here. They focus "on only one or two techniques." Plus, you can spoil a Czerny étude, "and you can still sleep at night". Spoil a Mozart sonata or a nice piece of Chopin, just for the sake of practice? "Well that would keep me awake at night!"
And the exercises are "not something that's disconnected or separate from learning your repertoire." Take a fast passage in your piece. I would do first-phase exercises on it: lift the fingers, prepare, feel the stretch in the muscles, articulate. Later, fast and closer to the keys, the fingers don't lift so much, "but they still lift and articulate. It is still the same technique."
A Piano Practice Strategy
Any passage, fast or slow, difficult or easier: "you need to have a strategy." Here is mine. I play the passage slowly, and each time through I ask one question:
- Does the arm take these notes as one group?
- Are the fingers concentrated?
- Does each hand know its own function and sound?
- Am I thinking ahead, or one note behind?
- Where is the phrase heading (gravity point)?
Everything else I just notice. After several rounds the passage starts to feel coordinated. They are still different skills. I just don't manage them one at a time anymore.
The fourth question is about the mind, not the eyes. Is it already at the next note, or one note behind the hands? How you train that, I explain in thinking ahead while playing piano.
Try this
- Find a phrase in your piece that asks for several skills.
- Play it through, and focus on one question each time through.
- Let's say the focus is your phrasing: where the phrase starts and ends?
- Do I feel the tension of the phrase where lies the gravity point?
- If that makes all sense, go to the next question? Balance between hands perhaps...
In a real lesson the same skills come up fast. In a live training in July 2025, a student played for me, and within about a minute I went from the fingers to the arm to the phrase. The fingers: "A little bit more concentrated." The arm: "Try not to make the arm movement too much from the elbow, but more from here, from up." And then the phrase: "Always feel a little gravity point here."
What Your Piano Mistakes Tell You
When something drops out, the sound often tells you where to look:
- A little mistake: you just touch another key. "That means the distance in the fingers is not exact yet," and often the fingers are not concentrated enough.
- The arm movements hardly change the sound. Then look at the fingers too: when they are "more articulate, more concentrated, then the arm movements will have more effect."
That's where the piece can give you the exercise. "Even in a little Chopin Nocturne", a little fast scale: "You can make some exercises like that. Just using the composition."
How Long It Takes to Learn a Piano Piece
Putting it together takes days, weeks and even months in difficult pieces. When too quickly trying to do all at once good, chances are that all stays messy and you don't know where to even start fixing it.
Building up a simple étude in Super Fingers, I say: "You don't do this in one practice session. You do this over multiple practicing sessions." I can do it in one, "because I have more experience, and for me this is not a difficult material." If that étude is the level you're at now, "then you maybe need several weeks of building this up in this way."
And the next day? I start again in the first phase, "a little bit shorter", then the second phase, "over and over again". It may go a little faster and easier each time, "and then suddenly you notice it starts to go." What I do with that moment is in when a passage finally comes to life.
Developing Piano Technique Through Pieces
How do you divide the time between technique and pieces? "I would take a 50/50 division." But the two halves are not sealed off. A student asked me in a live lesson how to divide the time, and I said: "You're also working on technique when you're working on repertoire."
"Because it's never linear. So everything overlaps eventually." And it reaches further than the piece on your stand: "So when you're working on this piece, you're also working on, maybe in the future, some more difficult piece of Chopin that you like to play in the future. You're already working on that indirectly. Because you're building your technique towards that."
In short
Choose the phrase in your piece where the most skills meet. Work on it with a single question, and only add the next one when you hear the first answered in the sound. And start each new session again from the fingers before you put anything together.
Where It Shows Up
For the arm inside real music, watch the video recordings of Emil Gilels: "He used the arm exactly the way I'm teaching it." Evgeny Kissin uses the arm very well too, and Martha Argerich, "sometimes more in an instinctive way, but very good."
Every piece "has its own unique situations that you have to learn and look into." In the Academy, third-phase practice trains this: the movements together, at a tempo where they hold. Bring me those bars in a live lesson. We build them together, a question at a time.
