Modern Piano Performance And Teaching Practice

Piano music reflects the attempted changes of all creativities, techniques, and aesthetics during the twentieth Century. In particular, the piano notes of Prokofiev are strong and aggressive, yet containing a high degree of inconformity in the background of the lyric. Practicing songs is an important basis for learning piano. To us, learning piano is like building the foundation of a skyscraper, so we need to persistently practice in order to improve our ability to learn. According to our understanding, in the field of piano education, most apprentices pay great attention to the pieces of the classical period and the romantic period, resulting in a "one-sided" phenomenon. But in fact, the twentieth Century piano music, which is relatively close to us, is a direct reaction of societal, politics, cultural and thoughts. In the twentieth Century, through a variety of music styles, rapid development of social thought can be reflected. From impressionism to expressionism and neoclassicism and the like, the spirit of innovation are shown, forming a strong contrast compared to the musical styles of the eighteen and nineteenth Century. In particular, the characteristics of modern music exhibits the pursuit of exploration, foundation, and innovation, especially paying attention to free structure, peculiar rhythm, discordant harmony language, complex multi-tonal and atonal, singular sound effects, which offers great stimulation. However, the creative qualities listed above are not pursued by all composers; in fact, some composers advocates for the combination of classical music and contemporary composition techniques in order to create more excellent music. Prokofiev emphasizes a never-seen-before masculine style, lacking the slightest tenderness. He completely outstretched romanticism and departed from all traditional principles and subtle approaches, in which the piano is used as a percussion instrument, so that the music is full of richness and sound. The writer uses Prokofiev’s "Four Etudes" as an example of the modern performance and teaching practice for analysis. First of all, the text introduced the different periods of Prokofiev’s life and his musical works, including Russian period (1891-1918), overseas period (1918-1936), and Soviet period (1936-1953). Secondly, the background of "Four Etudes" and its corresponding period are simply explored, then the teaching material of "Four Etudes" is analyzed and technically explained in order to see how this piece of work influence, inherits, and develops piano education. Prokofiev has succeeded in creating his unique musical style and technique through this piece. The author, after referencing relevant texts about piano techniques, hope to provide the practitioners more practice methods and to observe the relationship between the sound and materials through a detailed analysis of the music. Therefore, according to the author, we should be more in touch with the modern musical style and expand our understanding of modern musical style in order to understand piano music more comprehensively and thoroughly in the spectrum of historical tracks.