Don't Get Trapped by Hands Separate Practice! | feat. "Of Foreign Lands and People" Schumann

[@PianistAcademy1]

You can check out the full, 1.5 hour masterclass on this piece here! pianist-academy.thinkific.com/courses/of-foreign-lands-and-peoples-masterclass

[@antoniomaccagnan7200]

Great food for the musical brain. What I love about your teaching technique is that it can be applied at any level.

[@PianistAcademy1]

Thanks, Antonio!

[@bethanywakim6175]

Would you recommended practicing Bach inventions sort of the same way - separating out the voices?

[@PianistAcademy1]

100% yes. This principle is especially true in contrapuntal work. But if I’m honest, even teachers that will typically stress this in Bach seem to miss a multi-voice approach to learning and understanding other repertoire.

[@jdbrown371]

I almost always practice both hands together when playing music. About 1% of the time I'll do separate hands but only after playing hands together. There's usually some specialized reason for practicing hands separate.

[@PianistAcademy1]

There are a couple of very poignant moments in my music education, and one, during the final year of my undergrad… my prof asked me when the last time was that I had played a melody in a Mozart Sonata alone… separately… just that hand, just those notes. I confessed that I had *never done that. To which he asked, how do you expect to truly understand it if you’ve never played it alone? How would you know the detail of every pitch, the color, the tone, the intention, and how it fits into the bigger picture? You can’t get that any other way that experiencing the beauty of *just that line, by itself. That was one of those lessons that has stuck with me, very vividly, since. We usually think of “hands separate” as being done only for technique reasons, but it can be so much more than that. That’s why this video is about “textures separate” not “hands separate.”

[@serwoolsley]

I never liked separate hands practice in the way most intends it, waste of time imho, i do it just a bit at the beginning but hearing some ppl it seem they'd want you to do it for a week straight! At the end when you try combining hands you end up the same as not doing it. I might come to that later when i need to better understand the layers as you said

[@PianistAcademy1]

You have a perfect spot to begin applying this in the piu mosso of op 27 no 1 😉 you might not need to separate out the voices more than once or twice given your current level of preparation, but you will phrase those bars differently through this lens.

[@serwoolsley]

@@PianistAcademy1 indeed! Now is the time to start polishing

[@keys6]

Hand separate is most beneficial for learning chords with pedal in the left hand. This really helped me as I am not great with pedal.