Warming Up Piano Exercises.
Warming Up Piano Exercises.
Is Hanon really necessary? What other options would we have?
As long as we are progressing within our piano skills, we must have heard about Hanon and his studies or etudes to warm up and train your finger dexterity.
Hanon composed a series of sixty exercises named studies to train the dexterity, strength and agility of the fingers and wrists. Belonging to end of the XIX Century, The Virtuoso Pianist is Hanon’s most well-known work. However, nowadays, its application to the piano pupils seems to be questioned. And that is exactly what we bring to discuss. Is Hanon necessary? Are there any other options?
Anthony Elward, Senior Piano Teacher at WKMT, brings this new article, in which he definitely thinks is not necessary to learn all of it, and there are many other ways to train our finger dexterity and strength, as well as our wrists than only with Hanon. At WKMT, we truly recommend Hanon for this practice, however, we also like to see other points of view, and Anthony’s deserves a read too.
Anthony considers that the usual exercises we goto Hanon for are the double trills and octaves. However, he reflects the idea of the romanticism era of music and composers to bear in mind as other options. Such as Chopin and Liszt for example.
Read it fully through the link posted above and get in touch with other points of view for your near finger and wrists exercises. Whatever the option you use to train yourself will be good as long as you keep the consistency. Remember that using studies to train is good too as repertoire. So in that case, you are improving your piano skills, training your finger dexterity as well as studying new pieces.