Happy just-past holidays to you all, my few lovely readers!
Without exception everything worth doing in this excruciatingly long/short span of this breathing/heartbeating business we’re invested in is right on the border of whim and compulsion. Implausible that they can be neighbors, but there they are, peering over the fence at each other whenever anything matters, i.e. one’s challenges and pleasures (and is there much else to do with your time when the essentials of feeding and funding are done).
New year, holidays, horrible Xmas letters with horrible personal updates, arrogant resolutions… this is where this post is now veering. Whim is going to try to led a cup of sugar to compulsion in an effort to get me to post regularly. An effort of greater benefit to me than to those of you who continue to gamely check in now and again, but still. And now that I’ve reestablished one pointless goal, perhaps– and moving from blog to piano– I have a little room to let slack a little one line of somewhat aimlessly grim discipline). Here whim and compulsion stop bickering over whose property line that especially distracting shrubbery is on and can enjoy each other’s company for a while… Bartok sure came up with some admirably weird yet genuinely instructive pedagogical volumes, didn’t he? A composer that’s meant so much for me for decades, for reasons I don’t even understand fully (Where/why did I pick up the Bartok? Not sure, but at any rate, aged 12 spinning.. what would it have been…Flipper? don’t remember the particulars there, but I do remember also spinning string quartet #4 and not being able to shelve it for long despite pleas/advice to do so. ). At any rate, whether “for children” or whether the Mikrocosmos that I realize is going to turn brutally unmanageable soon, tears of uncomprehending shocked pleasure that with whatever degree of ghastly ineptitude I can start in a small way working at this stuff.
JINPR 
I hated Carl Czerny as a kid, the bastard. I think it’s because I was forced to play so much of his material back then. I had this tough Armenian lady for a piano teacher who made me play Czerny a lot to get technique down.
I like Czerny now for that same reason. Also, Chopin is my favorite composer ever, and he took a lot of influence from Czerny. Still, those exercises I had to do as a kid were tedious as hell.
Czerny is much hated by many piano students indeed…
While I do think his little etudes actually sound a ton better than the stuff in an average vanilla modern beginning piano book, there is something that can inspire an attitude more athletic than aesthetic about the stuff. I found a metronome marking from a while back penciled in the margins by one now easy piece and was all excited that I could go 4x as fast now (not that I’m sounding 4x better..). FASTER YARRRRRRRRRRGH! PASS THE GATORADE.
Basically yea to Czerny, nevertheless, I say. On the other hand, I have to confess, I am very, very slack about keeping up with the Hanon…..