Just about everyone who has ever heard anything about learning to play the piano has heard about scales. The quintessential image of the young piano student is of her dutifully practicing her scales. For hundreds of years, scales have been a mainstay of piano pedagogy. For the beginner, scales are routinely given as an "exercise" and often comprise a substantial part of the early piano education.
But, as with so many things, it is high time to question old beliefs and assumptions. Are scales necessary to acquire good technique at the piano? If so, how much, and in what way should they be practiced?
Yes, it is necessary to learn to play a scale passage smoothly, efficiently, and, eventually, with speed. The aspect that people hardly ever mention, however, is that it should also be musical.
Scales, however, are just one piece of piano technique. There are also chords (well over a hundred different chords), both blocked and arpeggiated; there are octaves, trills, and many more. If you intend to play mostly the music of Mozart and Haydn, for example, you will encounter many scale-type passages, and so it would make sense to practice scales. If you also intend to play Chopin, Brahms, Schumann, Rachmaninoff and others, you will encounter technical challenges that go far beyond scales. Chopin wrote two sets of etudes which are intended to expose you to many of the technical challenges of his compositions. They are also beautiful pieces which in no way just sound like exercises. Although the beginning student is light years away from playing Chopin Etudes, the concept of learning technique by playing beautiful music is one that I completely embrace and advocate.
If you are spending a large amount of time on scales and not much on other aspects of technique, you will be limited in what music you can eventually play. More importantly, if the teacher insists the student spend hours upon hours just on scales, that student will likely grow to hate it and eventually quit.
For the new beginner, I give some scale work, but not in the traditional way. I have them play scales using both hands, but just four fingers in each hand, omitting the thumb: do-re-mi-fa with the left hand, and sol-la-ti-do with the right hand. This method will work for every scale and there is no need to learn complicated fingering for the various scales. I want them to play all twelve major scales (over the course of a few weeks), largely using the ear, so this doubles as ear-training. However, I also show them the pattern of the major scale, with half steps occurring between mi-fa and ti-do, all others being whole steps. This way, if they have trouble doing it solely by ear, they have the "formula" to find the notes for each scale. With this method, they begin to become familiar with all the scales upon which the pieces they play will be based. (We also do minor scales this way a little later on.) In my opinion, having a beginner learn to play scales the traditional way is actually far too complex, and their technique will likely be very jerky and un-musical. In addition -- I can't stress this enough -- they should not be using a book to learn scales, where they are just reading notes and fingering. If you take away the book, they may not be able to play them. It is essential that the student internalize the knowledge of the scales, over time, of course, because this will also be internalizing the understanding of tonality, upon which our music is built. This is how they begin to learn music theory in an applied way. Scale work comprises maybe 5% of their practice time. The bulk of their time should be spent playing actual music, either by ear or reading.
Another significant problem with scale work as it is traditionally given is that it stresses "finger technique." I talk about this in previous posts. Although it was (and, unfortunately still is, to a great degree) believed that technique is all about the fingers, this is simply not true. A brilliant technique incorporates and integrates the arm, hand, and fingers. When music is played solely with a finger-based technique, it WILL sound stiff and mechanical. Sadly, this is how many people are taught. If you spend hours and hours practicing scales with this type of technique, you are really learning to play un-musically. You can't think that somehow when you encounter a scale-type passage in, say, Mozart, you will flip a switch and play musically.
The traditional approach to playing scales in another example of using old, outmoded ideas. Please see my post titled "Are you using 300-year-old ideas?"
If you are someone who spends a great deal of time on scales and wonders why you aren't achieving the results you desire, I hope this will help.
