|  |
| Customer Reviews: | | Average Customer Review:
Write an online review and share your thoughts with other customers.
5 of 10 found the following review helpful:
 A book on piano practice from an admitted non-pianist? -- Save your money, this is a horrible sham of a book! Sep 19, 2009
I am very surprised this book was ever published. Mr. Chang is not a performing pianist, nor is he an accomplished piano teacher; thus, he appears unqualified to write on piano practice and performance methods. Mr. Chang admits his alleged source for most of his ideas is Mlle. Yovnne Combe, who taught his two daughters piano. Mlle Combe, was herself not a noted pianist, but suppossedly a student of Debussy who served as a transcriber of Debussy's new compositions reportedly as he played them on the piano. While some of the information about Mlle. Combe may be true historically, it does not qualify Mr. Chang to write a book on piano practice. Neither does Mr. Chang's background in Physics. If so, then we should be reading books about piano performance from many other physicists, instead of proven classical piano masters. And why stop there? We would expect better books about tennis written by physicists, instead of tennis players. Better books about basketball by physicists, instead of basketball players and basketball coaches. But of course, none of this is logical or reasonable. Ideas in the book such as "thumb over" and his discussions on flat fingers are not founded on any experience as a pianist, but on odd hypothetical theories that don't work. No pianists uses "thumb over." I discussed some of Mr. Chang's ideas with Kenneth Amada, a Leventritt and Queen Elizabeth of Belgium International Piano Competition finalist and prize winner (and student of Moritz Rosenthal, Edward Steuremann, Isidor Phillip, etc.) and he couldn't believe how wrong and nonsensical the ideas in Mr. Chang's books are. Moritz Rosenthal was a student of Franz Liszt, Johannes Brahms, and Karol Mikuli (a disciple of Chopin). Steurmann studied under Ferrucio Busoni, and Phillip under Saent-Saens -- these are the greatest composers and pianists in history, who themselves descend back to Beethoven, Haydn, etc. as direct-lineage disciples. So Master Amada, a former major international prizewinner in piano and student of the most famoust piano mentors in America in the 1920s to 1950s is "in the know." He also retired as chair of piano at The University of Iowa. Who do you listen to? Someone who's suppossedly/allegedly observing his kids' piano teacher (and isn't even a pianist or accomplished piano teacher with credentials) or one of America's most decorated pianists?
On close examination of Mr. Chang's book, it appears that either the ideas are simply erroneous, or appear derived from other popular books. In other words, his pronouncements on piano practice are either tragically incorrect and misguided, or they are unoriginal. Lots of advice on overcoming fear appear in many other books. And since Mr. Chang is neither a concert pianist or an accomplished teacher of piano, he has as much right to comment about piano as anyone who has taken a couple of years piano lessons with a local high school teacher: i.e. no right at all. Although there are many positive reviews of this book, I sense they come from friends and easily influenced readers -- many of whom admit they are not pianists at all. Quite simply, this book is a great disappointment. I bought it out of curiosity, and agree with reviewers who point out the book as extremely poor. Readers would be better served by reading interviews of the world's greatests pianists, as well as books written by actual pianists. Mr. Chang is not only not a great pianist...he is not even a classical pianist of any mention. He is neither a famous teacher who has produced students who have won international prizes. I am quite puzzled how a publishing company would pick up a book of pianistic nonsense written by a non pianist. I guess Andy Warhol was correct: "anybody can be famous for 15 minutes" in the modern world. Do yourself a favor. Save your money. I own every book available on piano performance and pedagogy currently in print, and not only is Mr. Chang's book the worst, it cannot be considered comparable. Every other book is at least written by someone who is a serious pianist. The claim made on the back cover of the book that "piano pedagogy had never been researched, documented, and analyzed properly" is ludricous and untrue. There is for example "The Art of Piano Playing: A Scientific Approach" by George Kochevitsky; A Symposium for Pianists and Teachers: Strategies to Develop the Mind and Body for Optimal Performance ed. by Kris Kropff, and many many other books on piano written by actual concert pianists or genuine piano teachers qualified to write about piano. In addition, every great book on piano learning has at least one chapter or major section devoted to piano practice. Many truly outstanding books exist written by pianists and accomplished teachers of major piano conservatories. This book is NOT one of them.
Some readers appear to wish to reject serious piano performance and practice books because they sound "elite" (translation: too hard for the beginner). The answer is that instead of learning from books, you should find a real piano teacher, and not waste your time trying to learn piano from a person with a physics degree and a couple of years ("if" that many!) of piano lessons, but who is not an accomplished pianist and/or piano teacher. (Publishing a book does not make you an accomplished piano teacher. It just means you convinced someone to publish a book. An accomplished teacher should have many students winning piano competitions, attending the most prestigious summer camps, like Aspen, playing on national radio or television, etc.) Piano is a refined instrument requiring years of genuine performing experience and knowledge to master. Only masters at the keyboard and/or piano teaching should be writing about piano performance and practice methods, not non-perfomers. This book should be avoided at all costs. There are many books on basic piano practice written for the beginners and intermediate levels. They are much better written than Mr. Chang's book, which frankly is poorly written because he is babbling about piano matters he doesn't appear to have genuine knowledge about.
5 of 5 found the following review helpful:
 Exellent content but totally disorganized Jul 19, 2009
There's a great deal of valuable information in this book - but oh for a really good editor. It is sometimes like a stream of consciousness, long paragraphs hung together without a coherent plan of organization.
That said, if you play the piano, definitely buy it - but be prepared for a lot of frustration in order to glean out the nuggets of gold contained in the book. Go through it and make copious notes and bookmarks, then organize the material yourself so you can use it effectively.
Example: There's a description of how to go at learning Beethoven's Fur Elise that has loads of excellent suggestions. However, it's not identified in either the Table of Contents or the Index. I had to spend many frustrating minutes leafing through all the pages to find it again after a space of 3 weeks.
Also the layout is visually boring and dense, like a typewritten manuscript. It's tedious to read, and the content is extremely verbose.
Review update: 9/18/09. I have now pretty much finished going through this book and reiterate that there's some really invaluable information and exercises in it. It's well worth the struggle to extract its value.
6 of 7 found the following review helpful:
 The only book on playing the piano which can really help you Apr 04, 2009
Dr. Chang's book is not perfect - as he says, it's a work in progress - but it's a tremendous contribution that sheds major light on a series of related topics which, up til now, have remained as mysterious as the dark side of the moon to every other author, for a century or more.
Piano technique and virtuosity are, by their very nature, rather mysterious: they seem to arise in 'geniuses' while being withheld and kept out of reach from the rest of the human race. Can that really be? Or is it actually just a matter of proper training and teaching? Dr. Chang held the first view until he saw his two daughters making extraordinary progress under French piano teacher Yvonne Combe, who had once long ago been Debussy's assistant. At first believing that his kids were just amazingly talented, he then turned his scientist's eye to take a closer look and reached the opposite conclusion: his daughters learned to play extremely well because they had been trained correctly by Yvonne Combe, the teacher whom he acknowledges on his book's title page.
Like all good scientific work, those real-world results and phenomena form the basis for Dr. Chang's book: starting from phenomena that seemed hard to understand at first, the extraordinary results brought about by a master teacher drew Dr. Chang's analytical eye - causing him to analyze exactly what was going on, then carefully setting down his observations, ideas and the techniques he observed in this book, and in an effort to help others accomplish the same things.
Dr. Chang carried all this out with the objectivity and meticulous attention to detail of a master scientist, which he certainly is - his book, at first offered for free on the internet, becoming a major gift to the rest of the human race - or at least, to that segment of it dedicated to learning how to play the piano!
In this work Dr. Chang sets out a number of incredibly important insights about practicing and playing the piano which you will find nowhere else.
He discusses the basic piano techniques for accomplishing the shift of fingers and weight around the thumb - the "thumb over" technique as he calls it, which steers students - especially beginners - away from the "turning the thumb under" that all beginners are taught when playing scales, and which becomes a profound handicap even in intermediate playing.
He also talks about speed in arpeggios, leaps and octaves in a way that I have only heard discussed from one master teacher, Artur Schnabel's assistant in the 1930's. Dr. Chang has come to the same conclusion by analysis, but he is right: the 'infinite speed' of the rolled chord that leaps from octave to octave becomes the basis for playing arpeggios at virtuosic velocities - not the impossible task of turning the thumb under (which stops you and makes the gesture impossible) and pushing down the fingers on the keys individually. I only offer this as a sample, superficially described here, of the profound kind of insight you'll find in Dr. Chang's work.
If you follow what he says, it will transform your playing. There is no other source which will give you this kind of practical information.
Note on competing works: to put Dr. Chang's work in context, you have to start from the embarrassing, universal fact that nearly all the other books on the topic of piano practice and piano technique are pure swamp gas and snake oil!
Why? Famous pianists are the worst in trying to analyze and describe what they do - and you can see the results as their prose turns notoriously vaporous and vague when dancing around the practical issues of how they achieved results. Even the most famous share precious little in the books you will find under their names (and notice that all have been ghost written, usually by non-experts who know little about the piano or how to play it).
Then there are the other authors, some of whose names may be familiar: most, sad to say, are either deeply confused or just quacks selling worthless twaddle, a situation that's been going on in some cases for many, many years.
I could name them by author, but you can find them yourself - all listed on this Amazon page under "Customers who bought this book also bought..."
Beware of that Wall of Shame. Avoid them all. I own them all, and except for a few small excerpts from some of the books by known artists, all deserve to be shredded. They will waste your time and consume years of your life with no result.
Here's a tipoff: without exception you will find that these other books are all written in impenetrable, purple prose aimed at concealing their lack of content behind a cloud pretentious verbiage (this is true of music technical writing and criticism in general, btw).
By contrast, Dr. Chang's book is written in the clearest English he can bring to bear on a topic that's subtle and hard to describe verbally with precision (he also has online videos to demonstrate clearly what he means).
To properly appreciate Dr. Chang's contribution, consider what he's up against - decades of pure nonsense.
Dr. Chang is a different kind of writer from all the others: a top professional scientist who worked for years at elite Bell Labs, he's a trained, hard-eyed objective searcher after truth who questions all the swampy and gassy assumptions found everywhere in the worm-eaten piano technique literature.
He found much of it to be nonsense, and he was right. As an aspiring pianist struggling to learn the keyboard, Dr. Change realized early on that he was getting a lot of bad advice. His book prevents you from suffering the same fate.
PS NOTE to unhappy one-star reviewer Jian Zeng: You are having a problem understanding what Dr. Chang is saying. "Thumb over" is simply a term to contrast with "thumb under" - a practice taught to all beginning piano students when playing scales, but which becomes a tremendous handicap to even the intermediate pianist. "Thumb over" - yes, it means the thumb has to move from one key to another, but by shifting sideways when the hand is in the proper attitude: elbows slightly out, with the hand angled with wrist close to the extremes of the keyboard and fingertips closer together, as if your middle fingers of the flat hand were angled so as to nearly touch each other.
This is hard to describe in words, but very easy to see. When the hand is in that attitude, there is room for the thumb to move effortlessly even before it needs to. Beginners are taught to tuck that movable thumb *under* the stationary hand, which is painful after a while and will prevent virtuoso playing faster than baby steps.
Good luck and keep trying - Dr. Chang's book will help you get the results you seek.
8 of 14 found the following review helpful:
Impractical Mar 31, 2009
The author had a lot of interesting points in his book and you may feel really mind-blowing at first. eg, he is strongly against Hanon and Czerny series which had been used for hundreds of years. He took dozens of pages logically arguing why they were good for nothing, and then claimed that his method can be many times faster.
However, when you actually apply his methods, you will find many movements IMPOSSIBLE at all. eg, he stated that you should never move your thumb under other fingers, but directly move it to the destination piano key (the thumb-over method, as he named it). However, the fact is, no matter how fast your can move your thumb, it still needs time to 'jump' from one key to another, and during that interval all fingers are off the keyboard. How could one perform a good legato in that way?
I Googled the term 'thumb over', most results are about his books. Others may be indirectly related to it.
The author has no video on his site supporting his points, and no reliable source of information indicates that his method has proven to be correct.
Sorry for my bad English, but that's just my 2-cents. So use your own judgement.
7 of 8 found the following review helpful:
Best Practices on piano practice Nov 13, 2008
This book is set up as a scientific research thesis, therefore the author goes systematically into great detail on piano practicing techniques, and includes numerous cross-references throughout the book, plus a long list of references to other resources at the end (of which many are reviewed by the author too).
Mr.Chang does not claim to re-invent the wheel, but he does succeed in making this a broad overview of 'Best Practices' (once you get used to the many acronyms used in the book - the book would have been twice as long if they were written out every time - it becomes an 'easier' read).
The book starts with an introduction chapter of 'success stories', which may sound a bit like marketing talk to sell the book.
That said, the content of the other chapters is what matters more, and although many aspects sound like common sense (e.g. starting to practice hands seperate - HS), the key is: when to play what, and how.
Despite the strictly scientific approach, the main goal is making music (that's one of the reasons that Mr. Chang prefers Bach Inventions over Hanon exercises).
If there is one word that jumps out all the time, it is: speed (but not speed just for the sake of speed). Many of the practice exercises described in the book are dealing with getting you up to (and above) final performance speed (and why).
A lot of attention also goes to mental play (MP) as a key to memorizing, avoiding blackouts, learning absolute pitch, etc.
This book has an online version which is kept up to date by the author. It also includes e.g. a short video sample on TO (thumb over playing of scales).
I wish there was a full length video about all the techniques explained in the book.
Or even better, what about making a documentary showing the progress of student(s) over a long period of time.
And even though I found it a little strange that the author reviews his own book in the review section at the end, and claims it to be a must read, I must admit he's right.
|
| | |
|
|
