technical exercises

A Dozen A Day • All Year Round

Products featured here are selected for review by ANDREW EALES
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Edna-Mae Burnam’s six books of technical exercises, A Dozen A Day, quickly established themselves as classics in the piano pedagogy literature, and in the decades since their first appearance back in the 1950’s, their short routines and iconic illustrations have found their way into the hearts (and fingers) of developing pianists around the world, selling some 25 million copies.

In her introduction to the books, Burnam gets straight to the point in explaining the value of A Dozen A Day:

“Many people do exercises every morning before they go to work. Likewise, we should all give our fingers exercises every day BEFORE we begin our practising.”

The joy and the genius with which the book’s famous and ever-popular stick characters convey this message cannot be overstated, and is a testament to the book’s enduring appeal and generation-busting brilliance.

I have been using these little books with my students since I first started teaching in the 1990’s, and although they have featured less prominently in my studio in recent years, they continue to make their appearance, and offer a hugely useful resource which can be used from the very first lessons, and right up to advanced level.

Encouraging a fresh look, publishers Willis Music brought out a bumper edition back in 2017, which I am going to be focusing on in this review. A Dozen A Day: All Year Round offers additional attractions for teachers, which I will outline, but I would still steer students towards the individual books, appropriate for each level.

Lang Lang’s Daily Technical Exercises

EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES

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Lang Lang’s Daily Technical Exercises is a new addition to the Lang Lang Piano Academy series published in the UK by Faber Music.

Subtitled, “Warm-ups, work-outs and scale routines to develop technique”, the book is introduced by its global superstar author with this encouragement:

“Everything you play should be performed with love and musicality, so all of these exercises are designed to be satisfying exercise patterns that lead you smoothly through all the key centres. Enjoy your scale practice, and your piano playing will take off!”

Piano Studies for Technical Development

EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES

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Pianists and teachers tend to have a variety of views about the value of “studies”, some strongly advocating daily practice of finger exercises, others suggesting they have little value away from the context of specific repertoire, in which case bespoke studies developed around tricky passages are preferable.

Personally I’ve always taken a middle path here. All aspects of playing need consideration, not merely finger independence, tone control, and fluency, important though these obviously are for pianists. Scales, arpeggios, exercises and studies can all be helpful, but must be executed with an understanding of why they matter, and what is being developed.

I’ve never found it difficult to understand or explain the benefits of the enjoyable little exercises in the Dozen A Day books, and my students almost always find the Burgmüller Op.100 both musically engaging and inspiring to play (my recording of them is free to listen to here).

But I’ve never been a huge fan of Hanon, Czerny, et al, and have tended to agree with my teacher’s teacher, Ernö Dohnányi, who wrote (with irony, in the introduction to his own book of finger exercises!) –

“In music schools, piano tuition suffers mostly from far too much exercise material given for the purely technical development of the pupils, the many hours of practice spent on these not being in proportion to the results obtained. Musicality is hereby badly neglected and consequently shows many weak points.”

Perhaps it’s no surprise then, that when Gayle Kowalchyk and E.L. Lancaster’s two books of Piano Studies for Technical Development landed on my desk for review, my initial gut reaction was to excuse them from the short-list for consideration. Until … I took a closer look.

Let’s find out why I changed my mind …