English Blog

Piano Exercise Book “Pischna” 10/9/10

October 11, 2010

We need to take our cars for maintenance, we trim our hair, some people pay a lot of money for nails, and we visit a doctor’s office for physical. I use “Pischna” for my piano technique maintenance. When I was 15 years old, I met a great piano professor who told me that I needed to redo my piano technique to move on to the next step. I took his words very seriously because I was thinking the same thing. The book of  “Pischna” was one  of our vehicles. It contains 60 exercises, and it takes about 1 hour to practice a whole book. It is not “Chopin Etudes Op. 10 and 25”. It is “a boot camp” type finger exercise book. To make these exercises more interesting, I wrote down a purpose for each exercise. I tried to focus on what I was going to accomplish.

I still use Pischna, especially when I feel my fingers are stiff or out of practice. A few days after I start practicing Pischna, I can feel my fingers are awake, nimble, and sensitive. But we have to practice it wisely, thinking about the purposes of each exercise and which parts of fingers and hands are the points of each exercise. Otherwise, it will be just a boring exercise! Also I try to feel the connection between finger tips and my brain. That is very important to me. I personally recommend to practice first few exercises from Pischna before daily piano practice. It can be great warm-ups.