Piano method
Textbook for piano playing.
What it means
A piano method (German Klavierschule) is a textbook that builds up the path to piano playing systematically: from the first note through the basics of reading notes, posture, touch, and fingering to pieces of growing difficulty. It is thus at once teaching material and the expression of a conception of how learning is to happen.
Musical use
As a genre it arose with the spread of the piano in the middle-class household of the late eighteenth and the nineteenth century. With the instrument grew the need for guidance for learners without constant accompaniment by a teacher, and music publishing served this market. Older textbooks for keyboard instruments had other things in mind: they treated figured bass, ornamentation, and free preluding as self-evident parts of playing — abilities that largely disappeared in later methods.
Conceptions have changed several times. A purely technically oriented approach with extensive finger exercises long stood in the foreground; newer works start earlier with music-making, connect playing with ear training, improvisation, and ensemble playing, and introduce reading notes step by step. The selection of pieces has also opened up — alongside classical repertoire stand folk songs, contemporary pieces, and popular styles.
Alongside the methods in the narrower sense there are collections of études that work on individual technical tasks, and textbooks on individual questions such as pedal use or sight-reading.
Piano methods have existed since the eighteenth century; important early textbooks come from François Couperin and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. In the nineteenth century extensive collections of études arose, for instance by Carl Czerny. Today's methods combine technique, reading notes, improvisation, and repertoire and are geared to age groups.
Performance practice
Work with a method, but not only with it: add early pieces that give you joy, and play together with others regularly. Take technical exercises seriously but keep them short and connect them with a musical intention — a scale with an eye to evenness and sound brings more than twenty thoughtless repetitions. And do not skip anything out of impatience: the order of such works is usually well founded.