Re: Etudes with beginning students

[unknown-user]

We obviously disagree on the extent of etude use. The Mozart is, in some places, quite pianistic. Not as much, the Handel. Exercises do not have to be boring, it depends a lot on how they are constructed. We also have clearly different experience, as I learned a great deal of technique from repertoire, and even more from exercises, and much less from etudes.

I don’t miss the point of repetition in etudes, one page of it is good, but four or five pages if the same figure is not. Of course, what you say about all the great harpists of the twentieth century being raised on etudes is just not true. You would have to exclude, as far as I know, pretty much most of the pupils of Carlos Salzedo, Lucile Lawrence, perhaps Alice Chalifoux, Lynne Palmer and others.