Mechanically-informed practical piano technique

Finger strength is impossible? A soundbite debunked plus the role of the hand in octaves

2024-02-24T19:28:00.000-08:00

As the main part of this post, we'll be looking at the nature of the healthy hand motion used by Martha Argerich- to play powerful octaves with extreme freedom and minimal physical impact. In a short video lecture, I'll show why an attitude of trying to reduce the hand movement (that she greatly exaggerates) could actually subject the hand to far more stress, than movement with intent. First though...

"Fingers don't have muscles and cannot be strengthened. Your hands already have all the strength they need."

Like myself, I'm sure that many readers will have seen many slight variations on those words, repeated all over online piano forums. I was reminded of that when I stumbled across a photo of Bruce Lee doing a press up on a single finger and thumb of one hand. It turns out that there is also video footage.

If any of us teachers should choose to repeat that phrase to a student (to keep them from some truly extremist finger strength ideas), what will happen if they ever find out about this? Might they assume that, seeing as fingers "cannot be strengthened", they could reasonably have a casual go at it? After all, the statement says it would have been impossible that Bruce Lee first strengthened his finger to bear load, via gradually paced training. Will they then assume that everyone is likely born with hands that are already "strong enough"- thus severely injuring themselves? Maybe they'll even try some one finger pull-ups?

More likely, they'll recognise that they have been fooled by misdirection. They could also lose trust in the value/good faith of their teacher's words, more generally. Does it matter if the teacher feels serving up false information is for some "greater good"? Perhaps they'll find out about Wolff's law, which states that all bones can gradually increase in strength and density due to minute micro-fractures during training? Perhaps they'll realise that the idea that fingers don't "have" muscles doesn't particularly even work on a technicality? Does anyone try to argue that they don't "have" the money that's in their bank account? If it's time for their round at the bar, then maybe- although nobody seems to insist that Bill Gates doesn't "have" billions of dollars, just because it's not all sat in his wallet. We may reasonably talk about the external location of either. However, if one body part does rightfully "own" muscles that exist to control the fingers, it is logically those fingers. So it is reasonable to say fingers "have" muscles- that exist in the forearm, to act upon their joints (via a pull on tendons).

Most importantly, human brains always map movement and perception of strength at the joints, rather than from the strict location of the muscle. This is why it feels as if your arm "squashes" your bicep when curling a dumbbell, when your bicep is actually the root cause of a pull. Our brains sense from where the useful effect is, because that's easier to work with. Bruce Lee developed unusual strength in the forearm muscles that would act upon his finger joints, for sure. We can add background detail, but there is no argument that finger joints won't be stronger merely because the muscles are in the forearm. It would be like insisting that your arms can't develop a stronger ability to pull, because the lats are actually in your back. So what? Your arms still pull more strongly if you develop the external muscles. Muscle and bone alike can be strengthened to make more functional finger strength. Both would certainly need to be, before performing rare feats of extreme finger stabilisation (not that I recommend trying them anyway, of course!). In fact, even tendons and connective tissues are able to grow in strength to some degree, via conditioning. There is literally no point to be found that holds any value- only the very weak illusion that a point has been made, via a catchy (yet meaningless) soundbite.

For piano teachers, shall we now lobby to have the Internet censored, in order to prevent students finding out an inconvenient truth via Bruce Lee? Or shall we recognise that a person of moderate intelligence might see through the sham, regardless? Do we want students who feel weak to secretly turn to extremist schools of finger strength? If someone discovers that the "strength is impossible" claim was just hot air, then don't be surprised if they look for the truth elsewhere. You shouldn't grab any old weak argument, merely because it supports what you think others ought to believe. An argument that is full of holes only puts the conclusion into greater doubt. Maybe we'd look more trustworthy if we built a meaningful case around the truth?

On such lines, while the most old-fashioned ideas of finger strength really can cause significant problems, the role of hand strength is not zero either. It's would be a silly world in which everyone who doesn't value immense muscular exertion is then required to dismiss all strength as wholly irrelevant. It's not true that every last notion of hand strength is always dangerous, nor that it should always be aggressively smeared. Reality is more nuanced. Look at Argerich's hands when she plays octaves (particularly from the angle starting at 1:20).

Is there really an argument that anyone is just born with visibly strong hands that engage so powerfully and deliberately- compared not only to amateurs, but also to most other professionals? Or that any average hand already exists in a form that could attempt the same- without a paced process of physical development? It's almost as dangerous to imply there would be no need to pace strength development in pianism, as with a one finger press up. Pro-strength and anti-strength extremists tend to offer equally flawed and misleading simplifications. To make any sense out of what is plain for anyone to see, we will need to try to define a difference between healthy and safe employment of hand strength, vs generic straining (of the "no pain, no gain" style). I'd suggest:

It is healthy to gradually develop some "strength" of the hand in relation to movements (both explosive and gradual) that buy ease and freedom. Specifically, the grasping motion that helps support the palm up and and out of the keys via a hand arch (as we see in Argerich's octaves). This has little in common with the level of extreme finger strength that would be required to stabilise a large amount of static mass, as in the one finger pull up or press up. Think more of the type of "strength" that might be required for an explosively high jump by a martial artist. Or even low intensity use of muscular strength, to maintain an alert standing posture (as opposed to a lazy slump). It's generally less healthy to use sustained muscle tension to brace against downward forces from the arm. This is especially problematic if the bridge of the hand gives way under the arm pressure. Useful hand strength produces movement that relieves effort. Bad use of strength chiefly braces against unwanted movement.

Let's think about this in practice- starting from a common idea which is meant to prevent any need for hand strength. We are often told that if we use the hand merely to transfer arm energy (with little or no hand movement), you can reduce the effort for the hand. The following video demonstrates why this is a somewhat wishful ideal, that cannot adequately explain success. Rather than write text for the video, there is a detailed spoken commentary. However, I'll just add one thing. When the hand successfully resists collapse under arm energy, I point out that this is strenuous. However, I was perhaps a little too dismissive. I should also recognise that there would be some value in using it as an preliminary exercise (provided that the same approach is not used as a basis to play fast). More on that after the video...

I don't wish to tar all opposition to finger/hand strength ideas with one brush. Other words can be used to encourage the hand to move. I very rarely use the word strength myself, outside of this post. However, I have noticed that people frequently say that arm energy is a way to avoid a need for hand strength. Many say to minimise or literally avoid movement in the hand. Others simply fail to reference any need for it, while greatly emphasising the idea of arm energy. As I show in the video, losing out on the basic hand movement can make for real problems.

Yes, a model in which the hand aims to move the least, in the name of trying to work less, easily causes it to work at its hardest! It's a little like countries with such titles as "The Democratic Republic of...". Just because it's there in the description, it doesn't mean it actually works out that way. Anything that only mentions special hand alignments or positions to join the hand to the arm is incomplete. Real ease needs active clarification of essential internal hand movement. A static position is an initial way to help cut out genuinely irrelevant hand movements, or collapsing joints. However, if you don't then start to add the useful hand movement, you cannot possibly avoid having to lock your hand into unnecessary tension. Go fast and (unless your instincts provide the balancing hand movement) you're left with higher effort bracing. There can also be bad alignments and better ones. But there aren't alignments that are quite so magical, that the value of hand movement suddenly goes away. You can only try to minimise the necessary part of such a movement, after you have first learned to actually use it!

The reason I believe so many people are drawn to (genuinely) extreme ideas about needing to build enormous hand strength, is because opposing camps have so severely downplayed the role of movement in the hand, outright. This leads the hand to collapse and then brace in a disadvantaged position. The less you try to do with your hand, the harder the compensations tend to be. Approaches that encourage a passive hand may easily help to create the conditions in which a hand is most likely to feel weak, overworked and underpowered. It's not surprising that anyone feeling this might be enticed to an opposite idea- of developing enormous hand strength through high effort exercises. What if the only way to solve such a problem is a sensible middle ground? We need to create conditions in which the hand can act both safely and confidently, without fear. Even if we do argue against strength, we should at least concentrate on how to apply confident hand movement.

The reason we pluck upward and out of the keys, is to create conditions in which a clear hand activation could not possibly jam downward. When a hand is overworked by the grasp, it's typically because the arm doesn't make room for the hand to move freely. Once you can respond up and out of the keys, it should soon end the strain that gives a feeling of muscular weakness. It may be true that your hand is already strong enough for most things, or it may be that some strength really would need to be developed gently, over a period of time. However, unless your hand can do the basic movement with ease, the most urgent issue is probably the need to get out of its way. The strength you wouldn't want is the kind where the hand tries to move while being blocked by the pressure of the arm.

The ideal arm is not just generically heavy. Hand and arm should not have to be "connected" by a braced wrist. Both wrist and forearm alike need to be able to be very loose for the arm to respond freely to a good hand action. If you feel like it would currently be risky to apply movement of the hand, it's a fairly sure sign that you need to learn to lighten your arm. Ability to merely pile arm weight/pressure into a rather neutral hand isn't sufficient for technique. The up forces generated by hand motion are what keep a hand comfortably open, rather than always straining to survive a depressed slump. Arm weight should never go beyond what the arch of your hand can comfortably stand back up against. Although Argerich's hand is clearly stronger than average, the chief reason she can use a powerful hand movement is that her arm doesn't constantly weigh down heavily.

Don't think simplistically that all arm energy is always a positive or that internal hand energy is always dangerous and wrong! The goal of the hand is not merely to do the barest minimum to be able to pass on some huge arm energy. It's a trade off- between having the lightness to move your hand with freedom, vs the value of adding a little downward arm pressure. Too much arm and the hand cannot safely play it's part. In spite of becoming more cautious, it actually ends up working even harder. Most of us concentrate significantly on what comes from the arm, while easily overlooking the benefit of leaving enough room to be able to safely move the hand. A lucky few get this purely by instinct. Unfortunately, many others are likely to continue feeling that their hands are extremely weak- unless they learn to make room for some healthy internal hand movement.

Why sightreading doesn't necessarily improve your sightreading- a widely overlooked foundation skill that typically has more benefit

2024-01-31T08:28:00.000-08:00

I've already written a previous post on this topic. However, it's such a major issue that I decided to make another breakdown of some primary issues, in a slightly more concise post. So, do you want to be a good sightreader? If so, to understand the main foundation behind the skill, let's start with a simple indisputable truth.

The level of your sightreading (which we usually define strictly as a first ever attempt at new material) will always fall somewhere beneath what you could achieve by learning a piece over a long period. That is just obvious and reveals nothing. However, far more useful is to consider that it will ALSO fall short of your ability after "quickstudy" of a piece (which we'll define here as up to three or so short practise sessions). Your quickstudy level is typically the main yardstick in getting a realistic sense of your current potential sightreading level- especially so, if you consider sightreading to be an area of weakness.

If what you achieve in a handful of practice sessions does not reach a reasonable degree of comfortable fluency (which is commonly true of those who also struggle at sightreading), how could there be a chance of success when that little preparation is replaced by absolutely none at all? Also, consider now what traditional sightreading practice is supposed to be focused upon- ie playing brand new material only once, without ever stopping to resolve errors or uncertainties. Is there any meaningful reason to imagine that this could be an effective way to develop an initial foundation of quickstudy skills? Someone who is capable of good quickstudy will most likely do fine when given a single attempt. For others, however, it can create conditions in which sightreading is guaranteed to feel like an extremely unpleasant struggle, from which almost nothing seems to be gained. It's not surprising that they might thus feel inclined to avoid it.

Anyway, to summarise an important truth in rather blunt terms- if a pianist does not raise their capacity for quickstudy to at least the level they would hope to sightread at (and preferably a good deal higher), it follows that their sightreading skill can only be worse still! If you want the results of sightreading to even be adequate, your potential for quickstudy would first have to rise notably above that level.

At this point, I suspect that some will raise an eyebrow at the rather coldly direct language, so let's lighten the tone a little! I would certainly aim to find positives when personally addressing any individual and their skill level. However, the abstract working here is not criticising any actual person. The point is just to highlight a universal truth, for the sake of demonstrating a clear way forwards. Only when small amounts of preparation can be expected to give good results, can half-decent results start to arise in wholly unprepared scenarios. If most repertoire is exclusively based on weeks (or even months) of gradual preparation, to then attempt something only once ignores a gaping wide middle ground. It's not helpful to behave as if we have a dial with merely two settings- which move between very many hours of preparation or absolute zero. It is solely an issue of language that "sightreading" refers to a first attempt. It's easy to carry this over and imagine that these are the only circumstances in which it is possible to gain skill. However, that would be like assuming golf can only be improved by playing a round of eighteen holes. No. There are driving ranges and putting greens, before you have to test the overall product to the full. It's widely true in just about any field, that you don't best practice towards something by working exclusively within the exact narrow circumstances of the end product. That's only part of a good method.

So, if you want to be better at sightreading but are not currently good at quickstudy, there is a realistic route to real improvement. Don't try to obey the traditional sightreading advice and don't worry exactly what counts as sightreading. Develop quickstudy skills (by playing around with a wide range of moderate preparation times) and you'll have a real foundation, which you can later use towards greater focus on first time sightreading.

As an example, here's a film of myself playing an arrangement of Barber's adagio.

I'm a pretty good sightreader, but what this demonstrates is the product of some quickstudy (if you wanted to see some first time sightreading of Bach and Rachmaninoff, I included some in my other post on this topic). I found the score on the same day as the playthrough- which came after reading through two or three times (with only small amounts of practice to resolve a few errors at source). Is it perfect? No, I had a couple of slight slips in the notes (and didn't properly voice a couple of notes of an inner line). However, it was largely fairly close to what I intended, via just small amounts of time. There had been a few more errors on my first playthrough. I gained far more by going back to briefly repair them, than I would have by walking away.

It's often good to commit to finishing a piece once through, no matter how many errors. But you learn far more if you then go back and take control over those moments. It doesn't matter in the least that this is no longer strictly "sightreading". I don't memorise quickly (either in terms of developing muscle memory or a mental image of the notes) so I still have to process written notes if I want them be correct for the second or third time. Although there will be some expectations due to familiarity, to play again doesn't instantly stop using most of the same foundational skills. The reality is of another sliding scale of change. Also, we particularly need to consider anything that didn't actually work first time. When you feed your system with corrections, it greatly increases the chance of coping with similar demands, in the future. You don't learn much from something you have neither processed correctly, nor executed correctly, except when you take a little time to at least figure out how you could have.

When repeating something over and over, the benefits obviously do start to drop off. After some point, repetitions do little (if anything at all) for reading skills. Different people develop memories at different speeds, so there's no simple rule as to how much you can repeat before the main value has passed. However, what I'd say for sure is that you will never realistically lose the majority after only a single playthrough. In fact, I'd suggest that the second attempt of any passage is typically MORE valuable than the first, with regard to building your skill set- especially when you didn't get it right the first time. The sole exception would be where something was so easily within your level that there are simply no issues to go back over.

Although good sightreaders have to do some creative faking, it's important to remember that this is only the icing on the cake. To stretch the analogy a little, you could smooth over a few minor dents in the surface of a slightly imperfect cake. However, you can't expect to take a random blob of formless sponge, and then ice it over so skillfully as to give the impression of a flawless artisan wedding cake. On the same note, you can't simply fake your way around so severely as to survive without a basic ability to accurately process the primary foundations of a score. You don't get notably better at that by painstakingly spending six months learning a work, one note at a time. But neither do you get there by gritting your teeth to play to the end of a piece at any cost, and then walking away for good- regardless of how the result was. You may learn some mental resilience, but not the skills to translate a future score into a more accurate result. The best development comes when you figure something out efficiently and then walk away. If you can't do that in one session yet, do it over two or three, or lower the level of difficulty until you find music where this is possible. And keep repeating this kind of process until you expect to be able to learn pieces within a single sitting.

The time for a strictly traditional sightreading mindset is when someone can get good results from quickstudy, but has a specific struggle to avoid stopping and starting during their first attempt. That would be a sure sign that they should concentrate chiefly on a little more faking/guessing, in order to get past moments of uncertainty without stopping the flow. You can adapt the foundation of a quickstudy skill set into a sightreading mindset, by simply slightly loosening your expectations of accuracy and prioritising rhythm. Approximation can fill a few gaps. However, what you can't do is to take someone who has the skillset to process only a small minority of the information in real time, and expect a radical level of guesswork to magically fill in for the absent foundational skills. It doesn't give good results in the short term and it certainly doesn't cause any long term improvement of processing skill. Traditional sightreading ideals only complement primary background skills, while doing nothing to help generate those that are missing. These foundations are much better cemented by getting something right on a second or third or pass, than by getting something wrong on the only pass ever made.

Sightreading should not even be seen as an altogether different thing to quickstudy, but simply as the most advanced version, on the end of that scale. It's quickstudy with quite so little preparation, that there isn't actually any at all. However, if we say faking makes up ten percent of the whole here, the other ninety percent is simply seeing the information, picturing the meaning and acting correctly upon it. Would you expect to improve at maths by turning up for a test, guessing more than half of the questions and being told you got a mark of less than thirty percent? For any long term positives to follow, you couldn't simply book another test and hope resilience might eventually win out. You'd want to get the paper back, and practice going over those questions that you'd had to guess at.

Let's take the analogy a little further. Say that a child had to prepare for a speed mental arithmetic test with ten questions that allow five seconds each. First, you'd probably want to ensure that they could score 9 or 10 with thirty seconds per question. Then you could start pushing them to try answering questions in just a few seconds and see how their instincts fare. If they now got a few more wrong, it likely wouldn't ruin their existing foundations. But what it a child typically scored 4 or 5 with thirty seconds per question? Would anyone think it would be useful to now push them to answer more directly and instinctively? Would seeing them fall to a score of 1 or so achieve anything? As a one time thing you could (possibly) argue that it might give them a sense of what they will be practising towards, as a future goal. However, if they were made to take the pressured tests over and over, that would be truly deranged as a learning method. It would be more likely to muddle and weaken their foundational skills further, than to improve them. As a famous quote (wrongly attributed to Einstein) says, madness is doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result.

Unfortunately, the traditional sightreading advice of simply ploughing through brand new material is almost perfectly analogous. It forces panicked responses, due to overstretching of foundations. We sometimes need to test ourselves, and do what we can to make it through. However, an excess sense of struggle is both mentally unpleasant and confusing. Deep progress also needs underlying skills to be advanced, via (slightly) more comfortable timescales that allow for corrections. When we recognise that true sightreading is only the most extreme end of the wide spectrum in which we can practise, we are much more likely to get results.

One further thought- I think part of the problem with sightreading advice is that it was usually given in the past by teachers who had students play numerous short exercises by the likes of Czerny etc, or at least plenty of sonatinas and easy duets etc. Whatever you might think about the physicality of exercises, this certainly meant a lot of quickstudy and thus plenty of foundations to bring into sightreading. Today, it is not so common. Exam focused students often tend to learn just three pieces per year- without having plenty of easier projects to dip into on the side. Something that is very popular today is also self-learners- who often jump straight to more advanced repertoire and try to painstakingly build it by a detail at a time. Such learners may never have spent any significant time on easy pieces, never mind got used to learning them efficiently. If sightreading feels like some kind of special outside thing (that is done solely in relation to sightreading exercises), you almost certainly need to view it in a whole different light. The best sightreaders never typically had to practice it as a special project. They just learned a wide range of pieces over a wide variety of timescales.

A brief post on "stretching", the open hand and the limitations of armweight

2022-01-02T07:04:00.005-08:00

I read a post today in a forum where a pianist spoke of having problems keeping their hand open but relaxed in the Chopin etude op 25 no 1, stating that they gradually accumulate tension that becomes too great to function. The likely reason for this is something that tends to show up the most in the wide intervals of this etude. However, it also applies to basically everything in technique so I thought I'd give a quick summary here, from foundation techniques to advanced.

People often say that stretching is bad and that you should think of opening instead. Often, it's also suggested that even any opening should be released as quickly as possible. I agree that thinking of "stretching" can suggest undue effort, but it's not magically solved merely by changing the word. We should look at the what the difference actually is, in more precisely defined terms. Also, I fundamentally disagree that you should always try to release any opening as quickly as possible. Done the right way (without needless effort) only the most extreme intervals urgently require the hand to avoid staying open. Anyway, what is the fundamental difference between "stretching" and "opening"? See here, on the simple third, between fingers 2 and 3.

When the arm exerts unnecessary pressure on the first note, even something so basic can feel strenuous. The pressure into the keybed both limits the ability of the arm to move and also reduces mobility of the fingers themselves. When the arm is free to move sideways with the next finger, however, it's effortless. The finger still "reaches" to a degree, but the arm can now assist it rather than hinder it. This is a quality that you want to begin to instill from your very first foundations of piano playing.

When we move up a level to a broken chord, the same issue applies. If the hand is held in position, as I show first, it will feel very strenuous to try to apply arm pressures to each individual key. There will be a strong sense of stretching and straining. However, it's generally completely unnecessary to counter this by thinking that you shouldn't stay in an open position. Just move better. If you apply the same smooth quality of arm movement, you can drift sideways in a continuous motion. See the difference in the fluidity of my demonstrations. First I move *to* each key and try to rest down. Then I move *through* and beyond each key, with constant arm sideways arm motion that doesn't stop for any individual note.

This will alternately take the thumb and fifth fingers off the keys, as they follow the arm movement. There will also be subtle changes of feeling between fingers, but my second and third fingers *never need leave their keys*. The hand is still open. If you feel any sense of tension from keeping that distance, it's almost a certainty that your real problem is about individual pressures into the keybeds, just the same as in the first exercise. A degree of exception might sometimes apply for smaller hands. However, if you want to do this quickly, then you can't afford to entirely lose the shape, regardless of hand size. The problem can't be fixed simply by running from readiness for such an ordinary interval. You need to remove *the excess arm pressures that cause you to strain*. The job of the arm is to follow through and beyond the new notes, not to stop to push down or weigh directly into any finger.

Last, I show some of the etude. Here we have a slightly different issue that will reveal a huge truth about both of the prior examples. If we try to feel the weight of the arm pinning the melody note down (as is often advised in traditional ideas), the arm is now basically immobilised again. The open position likely feels stretched and strained, once more. For this to work properly, you need your arm to be fully mobile around the fifth finger. Start by moving the arm around a clear contact in the keybed. Although the fifth finger still creates an essential join for the arm, it isn't a weighted feeling. It comes from ensuring *the fingertip actively pins that key down*. Arm pressure will stop the arm being truly free to move around that pivot and we get the same sense of strain that was caused before.

A finger has to be especially active to keep the feeling of an arm join. There is a constant process of adjustment, in order to ensure that the arm movement doesn't simply pop the finger off the key. These adjustments should serve to keep the level of pressure steady, no matter where your arm goes. If you have made the mistake of taking arm weight explanations at face value, you may find yourself letting the key pop up at first. However, if you want to be mobile and free with your arm, you're going to have to learn to adjust within the finger itself. Once you do so, the arm is again free to drift sideways through the following notes, with the melody clearly pinned down at all times. This simply cannot be accomplished if you think of keeping the keys down with literal arm weight. Notice how big the difference is between my example of getting stuck in weight, vs freeing the arm to go with the moving notes.

If you go back to the more basic first examples now, the ideal technique should come from exactly the same place. Whenever the arm is moving sideways, it's the job *of the fingertip* to keep the previous key pinned safely down, while the arm is moving sideways, and not weighing down. Watch how much the original finger has to adjust on that original basic third, when the arm is free. It's not a transfer of weight but rather a transfer of fingertip *contact* (which is chiefly sustained via constant adjustment within the hand). The weight is being carried sideways to prevent burden, in relation to the support of active fingers. Intent to just relax often actively prevents this from happening. Fingers that don't intentionally pin keys down with extreme clarity *cannot* fully free the hand to open, or the arm to move. Significant whole arm pressure occurs instead and causes all the problems shown.

The only reliable way to avoid "stretched" feelings is to be have very active control over depressed keys, coupled with constant sideways arm movement. Even slight breaks in the ongoing movement may allow the arm to weigh down on the fingers and create that feeling of exertion. With clearly grounded keys and steady sideways arm motion (without bobbling up and down) any necessary relaxation will almost certainly develop for itself, without risk of associated heaviness or instability.

If you get this technique right you will not have to fear a hand that generally stays open and neither should you feel "stretched". Obviously every hand has a limit. However, unless you understand how to use the fingers to keep keys grounded (while the arm drifts freely around the comfortable contact) you will not have any sense of where your easy limit actually lies.

Also, here is a video I previously made of the full study. To be honest, I'm not especially keen on the playing. However, you can see the sense of how the left hand thumb largely stays out- rather than feel that this is something to retreat from.

Prevention of the slow practice plateau- Why excessive slow practice can make for as little deeper progress as the piano-playing chicken

2021-01-10T08:46:00.019-08:00

Slow practice- what is it good for and what is it not so good for?

If we were to take the most common piece of advice regarding piano playing, it would almost certainly relate to the value of slow practice. If you observe questions on forums, virtually any request for help (no matter how specific) will likely be met with at least one generic recommendation to simply practise slowly and be patient- as if that is supposed to amount to some unbelievable revelation. Now, let's be clear, there are plenty of situations in which thoughtful slow work may be what is missing. Those who don't regularly use it are not doing themselves any favours. However, there are also plenty of common problems that are actively caused by excessive amounts of generic slow practice! The main body of this post illustrates the basic premise that defines truly productive practice. However, given how devoted some are to a mantra that slower is always better, it's also necessary to start with appreciation of the severe problems that can also ensue.

The myth is that when starting with repeated slow work, you are using the best available approach with which to build foundations for eventually playing at full speed. If someone tries to go faster and makes a mistake, they may wrongly believe that this means that they weren't ready for any faster practice at all, and that they must clearly stick solely with slow work for longer. This might seem like an excellent display of "discipline" and a sensible way to ensure that a foundation is built. In truth, such situations might more accurately be viewed as an unhelpful retreat from necessary steps, back into a comfort zone in which there is little meaningful progress left to make. I will show you why truly efficient practice should always include some elements of faster playing, from the very first session of learning a piece. For absolute beginners, it makes sense to allow a little more leeway (so they can get used to the basic feelings of playing the instrument and listening through sounds), but that still doesn't call for exclusive slow work. I'll give examples of how a more balanced approach to practice can be applied both to very basic examples and to advanced study. To start with narrow slow work risks setting up far greater frustrations further down the line. This will surprise many, but I'll explain why the time for the most extensive use of slow practice is in the intermediate and later stages of learning a piece- and not at the very beginning!

Before going to that, let's just acknowledge another common trend amongst amateur pianists. I'm talking of the kind of player who essentially "practises" almost solely in the spirit of performance style sightreading, rather than ever slow things down. They basically just approximate a performance rendition as best as they can. This involves playing through a whole piece (or substantial section) at a tempo in which there is insufficient time to pay attention to finer detail. While they may have a sense of the main features, issues will inevitably be glossed over- including notes, fingerings and control over sound etc. The results of this could be anywhere from a reasonable enough impression of the work, to the kind of playing that would see most listeners running to buy a pair of noise cancelling headphones. Either way, the results won't improve notably further by repeating in a full performance spirit, and neither is this what I'll be recommending as the alternative to a "slow is best" approach. Although these are two opposite poles of imbalanced practise, they actually share very similar underlying problems. Anyway, if you browse around Youtube, you'll particularly come across enthusiastic amateurs (as well as some supposed "prodigies") trying to force their way through the Flight of the Bumblebee, without having been through the groundwork that would prepare for a deeper sense of success. I don't wish to make an example of anyone, so here is a deliberately ropey simulation of the kind of playing I'm speaking of:

I show first a "proper" version (although, this too contains a tiny degree of imprecision- relative to the highest standard). Then there are couple of thoroughly "faked" versions. The second is the kind of thing that might be enough to fool a few listeners, but it is clearly far too approximate to be of any real value. The third is a little more subtle. On an off day, it certainly wouldn't be the worst thing that could happen in an actual performance. Nevertheless, this is really a plan B for surviving worst case scenarios. "Practising" mainly this way does not build towards reliability, but merely guarantees the need to fake at least that much in an actual performance. I was very much this way, before I realised quite how much easier I could make things. Such a learner is exactly the type who most needs to involve good quality slow practice. So why is that only one aspect of building strong foundations, and how can excess slow work cause problems?

Where slow practice equals bad practice

it's much less obvious when it comes to the problems associated with too much slow work. In order to understand this, let's start from a slightly silly exaggeration, before looking at what happens in real life. Supposing that we take a single finger and practise the Bumblebee, using only that one finger. Anyone who is capable of sufficient patience and mental focus should be able to get the part I showed with accuracy, if they slow things down enough. Even if you couldn't read the music, you could program a keyboard to light up the keys, and then peck at them like this chicken.

If you were to offer a substantial cash prize for full accuracy at any old low speed, there would be every reason to think that concentration could lead to a positive result after a single sitting. However, what would happen if you did this many times over and then tried to speed things up to a reasonable performance speed? Well, it obviously would never work. Even though every detail will have been understood mentally, you'd have to go back to square one and start again, with movements that would make it possible to flow through those same notes.

Imagine if you'd already spent a couple of weeks practising before you first tried it quicker! In this particular case, I doubt whether anyone would have wasted so much time without becoming suspicious. However, the foundation that is produced by normal slow practise can be as problematic. Arguably, the dangers are only greater in real life situations, because the flaws that you would waste time on would not yet be easy to spot. If you only go slow, you just won't find out what is wrong. It might not involve only a single finger, but it can still be based on fingerings or movements which could be unusable at even a slightly moderate performance speed. For instance, at a slow tempo you can afford to bob the whole arm on each note, without necessarily having any trouble. At a fast speed, the same style of movement will simply become frantic and lead to a sense of locking up. There are far more styles of movement that are good enough for slow speeds, than those which are also suitable to play faster.

You might notice that my camera work starts to resemble something out of a Jason Bourne film, by the end. All those jolts of the arm send corresponding jolts back through the whole body, via the force of the reactions that come back from the piano. Not only are such movements slower but they are vastly more physically stressful. All that hard work only serves to produce a low speed (scarcely higher than the maximum for one finger) and also a lumpy sounding performance. When a technique is based on individual prods, it's actually possible to get by up to an intermediate stage of learning. An equally common fault for slow practisers is to lock the arm in a static position- causing severe tension. You can get away with either fault for a time. However, you will eventually start repertoire for which your entire technique is unsuitable- both in terms of playing the notes and giving musical expression. This is why I try never to let even beginners get stuck in a "slow practice only" mindset to a new piece. Advanced technique doesn't come from using your arm to peck at notes like a chicken. Although doing so can have occasional value as one type of practice exercise, the primary role for the arm is to produce smooth horizontal movement that guides between the fingers as they play. Far from being the easiest place to learn this, slow practice is initially the hardest place of all to learn this technique- especially if you are going slow because you don't yet know the notes well enough to go any faster.

Closely related here is also the concept of mental grouping. When we do the disciplined slow practise, it might confirm a mental grasp of details, but it doesn't mean that we are organising them into patterns. Although some will instinctively start to make larger groups, there's no guarantee. Obsessive slow practisers have a tendency to fall into the trap of simply repeating a large number of isolated thoughts, on a note by note basis. Although slow work offers plenty of time to get ready for each note, it may not be used wisely. Think of the guy at university who is the last to arrive at 11am lectures, because he lives a couple of minutes away and thus sets his alarm for 10.55. When you press a key, do you yet have any more idea about what comes next than the chicken did? Often the mind only wakes up at the last possible moment, before an urgent thrust at the next key. When the tempo is slow, you could still survive this with both full accuracy and rhythm. Raise the tempo, however, and you now have a mental and physical frenzy that will not hold together under the stress of speed- thus triggering a desire to retreat straight back to slower work. Far from creating the best foundation, retreating to a long period of slow practise may produce scarcely more learning than will be achieved by the chicken, when it pecks at individual lights. It's specifically when we step out of the comfort zone and try going faster, that we gain the necessary feedback to start improving on our thinking- especially if that causes a concealed problem to come to the surface. This is where we finally get presented with a need to plan patterns. Which raises the question:

Why waste time slowly repeating hidden flaws that you are not even aware of, for an extended period? Why not find out about possible problems as early as possible, in order to solve them before they ever turn into difficult habits?

Targeted exploration of musical units- the important precursor to repetitive slow practice

Yes, I'm afraid that the only time you can guarantee that slow practice is likely to be useful is after you could also play a particular passage faster. This is what proves that you have the sense of larger thoughts and smoother motions, to start making the slow practise meaningful. It now becomes a chance to explore details within their required context, rather than only as isolated events. If this sounds back to front (like a Catch 22 that means only the super-talented might have access to this approach) I can assure you that it isn't. When we start by targeting moderate sized musical units (and save slow work on longer sections for the second phase of our practice), we can meaningfully compare fast and slow playing side by side, from the start. This has nothing in common with the player who fakes through longer sections. The units will always be small enough to both plan precisely and then easily monitor for quality. When we make mistakes, we will revert back to a slower version for immediate corrections, before varying speeds as required. The key is to start with units that you can reliably hold in your short term memory, as a single mental image. I'll come back to how to build the Bumblebee in the final section, but let's start with a relatively easy example of this targeted style of practice.

We'll look at the basic groups for the right hand, in bars 1-4. I have drawn square brackets at the top, which show our physical groups ie groups of notes that lie under the fingers all at once. Incidentally, I generally mark the majority of my fingerings via this method- so as to force thinking in groups rather than individual fingers. In this case, each group spans five notes between the lowest and highest pitches. Assign five fingers to five notes and any detail of fingering comes automatically, based on context in a bigger thought. In the film I first play two five-note clusters to reflect this- as the most global perspective possible for those four bars. Now, it wouldn't necessarily be "wrong" to start by breaking the music into two bar groups, based on these positions, and practise them separately from each other. However, it would leave out an important rhythmic join. In this case, our primary groups also require bridging across the two physical groups. Good early work will find the important musical groups and assemble them in the very first session. The primary musical joins in the score are shown with phrase marks. There are two particular principles here that are more important than the physical positions:

1. Musical units rarely finish either at the ends of beats or bars. The natural conclusion of a musical unit is almost always on the start of a beat, and most typically the first beat of a bar. Typical groups would be a bar of music plus a note, or a beat worth of semiquavers (16ths) plus a note etc. If unsure, it's usually better to add one extra note, just in case, rather than risk cutting off an important link. By aiming towards the main rhythmic features, even work on small fragments will contribute positively to your general sense of pulse.

2. A run of shorter notes can almost never be regarded as completed until they arrive directly into the destination of longer note. When short notes continue non-stop for a significant time, it is best to introduce temporary stopping points after (*never before*) arriving at strong rhythmic moments. This divides up the work into smaller journeys towards the main rhythmic divisions, with the lowest possible risk of causing habits of hesitation.

These probably won't make sense as abstract ideas yet. However, it should clarify the premise when I show how our practice groups come directly from these. Firstly, the most common early mistake is to play the four descending semiquavers and then freeze at the bar line. I show this first in the film, before connecting them to their destination. The next note is harder to find, of course. Also, the nature of beaming in music is problematic. In theory work it is convenient to distinguish beats and bars from neighbouring notes, with clear visual separations. In practical performance, linking across beats and bars needs to be the standard way of thinking, otherwise the pulse will break down. The notes which look most separated out (due to beaming and bar lines), often require the tightest rhythmic connections of all. Seeing as the the look of printed music is something that actively hinders our instincts, we have to be constantly mindful of the need to attend to these joins.

To play the four beamed semiquavers and then pause will defy both of the above principles for building coherent musical units. The last semiquaver does not establish itself as being a semiquaver unless the next note arrives in correct time. We might have played all four notes, but the last has no rhythmic meaning yet. It won't feel remotely complete, even as a smaller idea, because the notes just vanish into nothing when a strong beat would be due. The physical movement is equally incomplete, with no sense of being aimed at any major destination. If we either go slow or allow a separation there, we may have little sense of how to produce the needed motion. The link therefore needs to be built both into our earliest mental conception of the music and into the movement that we apply. In the video I show it first with a gap. It's okay if you do that once, but only if you immediately work on connecting up the whole unit (of four short notes to a long note) before going onward to the next unit. Generally, the destination of a musical group should be the first to plan, as the primary point of focus. If you understand it well, you'll be able to try it both slow and relatively fast. Compare both until it feels familiar and easy. "Fast" is a relative concept and need not immediately be extreme. However, you have to at least go fast enough to be sure that you have got it down to a sense of one fully premeditated action. If you are figuring things out halfway through playing, you haven't yet organised your thoughts. The arm should lead downwards and then back up to the high note, in one sweep. If you feel separate thoughts or movements (or if you make a mistake) always slow the playing down to take back control. Just don't go on to the next unit until you can get both get a very directed fast version and an equally directed slow version. Neither has value unless referenced against the other. The arm needs to guide us clearly through both versions- not by pressing down on individual fingers but by drifting steadily towards them. This drift of the arm is what makes the whole unit feel like a single process, rather than a series of conscious decisions.

The second time we get the run of descending notes, the destination is much harder to get to. The trick here is not to fixate on that note alone, but on the whole shape we are moving to. I don't start by pressuring myself to play the note itself, but simply make room to align to the overall hand shape. Again, pauses are okay before a trickier note, as long as we build in a true rhythmic join during the same session. The notes have to be able to lead to the F sharp as a rhythmic destination, otherwise our units will be full of holes. Again, going slow is okay for working out/correction, but you should check the same unit fast, to see if you have truly understood it yet. It's the slightly quicker executions that tell us where we stand. This piece is certainly not so hard that to just slowly muddle through couldn't eventually work. It's just a lot quicker to learn when we work to an active plan for covering the necessary difficulties.

Notice that the semiquavers are still going as we proceed into bar 3. The strictest application of our second principle would suggest we shouldn't stop until landing into the longer quaver A. However, we don't need to be so strict here. This is a great example of how we can use a strong rhythmic moment as a point of overlap, in order to keep our initial units small and manageable. Our previous group ended in the F sharp on a clear beat. Our next group will begin here. Because it is included in both, no connection has been left out! Just a single note of overlap is enough to ensure that our rhythmic connections are being set, even in this slightly fragmented early work. Because the main thoughts are directed towards dealing with all of the trickier connections, we will achieve much more than by just going slow or by hoping to do everything all at once.

The last thing I show is how the final two bars break down. Again, we should be acutely aware of the risk of stopping before the bar line and thus robbing ourselves of the most important link. A key difference this time, is that we should not even begin with a pause before the bar line! I show first on the film with a break between bars, but as an illustration of what not to do! Previously, we had particular difficulties that would make it initially forgivable. First there was a large interval and then there was a whole change of hand position, as we passed the bar lines. Taking the pressure off these makes sense at first, as long as we attend to the missing link. This time, notice that the note across the bar line is nothing more than a continued descent through adjacent notes. If we should stop in the middle of such a simple pattern, it is not caused by any difficulty. It can only be seen as a sign of operating much like the chicken ie in isolated events, without a sense of the pattern. We have to resist any tendency to allow our units to be dictated by bar lines, unless we are happy to progress slowly and with more difficulty!

Notice that if we do divide into bars, the last bar looks more complex. Nothing could make the second bar seem much more difficult, than freezing before playing the E. When we treat the strong first beat as being the natural conclusion of the previous idea, the notes we are left with form a very neat descent through a D major chord. I have marked these with a smaller bracket, inside the larger one. We aren't changing the basic alignment of the hand from before, so the original bracket stands. However, it's a good time to calibrate the hand into the more specific shape of those particular three notes. That's why I initially play it as a single chord, on the film, before doing the literal version. If the D major shape is already felt, the arm need merely guide us down through the three fingers of the existing shape. Although it would probably have been manageable to do the whole two bars in one go, breaking them into these two memorable concepts actually makes it even easier to assemble the two bar idea.

Following these preparations, it should now be easy to assemble the whole four bars in a slow tempo Note that the bars do work rather nicely here as a self-contained idea. However, if you should worry about connecting to bar 5, you could join the final D major unit to the first note of that bar- to fully comply with our two principles from before. Anyway, when we reassemble the music, this is where the traditional style of slow practise can now be done in a truly meaningful fashion- ie to explore the details (both musical and physical) of a fully mapped out journey. High quality slow practise is like deliberately slowing down a familiar walk to make a point of looking closely at the scenery. If we go slow because we frequently have no idea as to where we are really going, this doesn't even truly count as practising yet- let alone high quality practice. Many would fall into the trap of doing a slow trudge through a whole piece or section. Doing this many times over wouldn't guarantee a sense of how to truly join even the semiquavers to the downbeat of bar 2, let alone the other important links. It is vastly more productive to take smaller units and target them for early mastery, than to simply read through slowly. The sole way to be sure that your slow practise will count for something, is if you have already been through some of those focused bursts of quicker playing.

Extended slow practise should never be treated as a display of true discipline, before this varied work has been undertaken. If you can't yet do anything quicker, I'm afraid that slow-only practise should best be regarded as "chickening" out. I hope you'll forgive the awful pun, but you may indeed be operating more like that chicken than a good practiser, if you are avoiding difficulties out of fear. You're not likely to actually avoid the deepest and most meaningful mistakes. All you'll avoid is knowing about them. This is where slow practisers and the sloppier performance style practisers are opposite poles of the same problem. Both amount to repeating much the same broadly familiar experience over and over, generally in rather long sections and with minimal active intervention to fix things up. The only difference is that the performance style practisers are constantly exposing all their faults (before doing little about them) whereas the slow practisers are constantly keeping most of them concealed (before doing equally little about them). Yes, it's a simplistically harsh categorisation and analysis, but if you want to improve your progress then it's essential to be realistic about the likely results of any narrow practice style. What good practisers do is to take units and sculpt them into a desired form.

A way to summarise good practice would be to say that it is based on constant alternation between greater risk-taking (in order to check for faults to be attended to) and extreme comfort (in order to go ahead and attend to those faults). You have to be extreme at both ends. It's like having two completely contradictory personalities that you can switch on and off at a moment's notice. Indeed, there isn't necessarily any advantage to be being someone who falls somewhere in the middle. Balance is not obtained here by being neither quite one thing nor the other. That might give slightly better results than having an extreme tendency towards one side. However, you can also get stranded in middle ground. Such a practiser might be someone who neither truly explores their limits, nor ever slows down enough to fully solve problems. The balance of good practice is chiefly earned by being sufficiently extreme at both ends. Anyway, once you have checked that you can do any unit at various speeds (with both a few wild mistakes and patient corrections along the way), that's the first moment at which slow practice of an extended passage is something that you should genuinely want to congratulate yourself for. At this point you are indeed demonstrating self control- by restraining yourself from letting the fingers fly, and instead making time to listen to every detail (as if fascinated by the quality of each musical interval) within that established bigger picture. Slow practice of a bigger idea can now become a truly musical process and a chance to cement good quality movements.

Building the Bumblebee from basic principles

The Bumblebee might be a more difficult and advanced piece. Nevertheless, if anything it actually breaks down even more simply than the Bach example. Even if you don't consider yourself anywhere near advanced enough to play it, please continue reading anyway- if you want to appreciate how relatively simple the units can be, in advanced music.

The running semiquavers of the bumblebee offer no natural stopping points, so our 2nd principle of earlier is applied here- via points of overlap. These are assigned to the beats, in order to apply the principle of working past beamed groups of four notes. Our groups are always four beamed semiquavers plus one extra- to land directly on a clear pulse division. Our first group starts on E and consists of four descending chromatic notes, before they change direction back up to D. I descend from 5 but then go back up to 4 on D, for the change of direction. I show it slowly first, with minimal arm movement and only finger movement. Not because you should do this, mind. Rather, this is one of the most common faults to watch for in slow practise. This is exactly sort of problem that this method is out to catch to solve at once. Because I do it fast straight after, it makes it much easier to feel the need to place those finger movements into a bigger sweep of the arm. The forearm now follows along with the fingers and rotates back to the right for the change of direction. Some will describe this as if the arm does the fingers' work for them, which is another great reason for alternating slow and fast. This is an illusion that you can only hope to access through having access to efficient and precisely delivered finger movements. For many, it would simply be an unhelpful image to work from. The arm motion is there to organise and keep you free, but cannot possibly replace basic movement of the fingers. Again, this is exactly why we will try it faster at once. If attempting a flawed pattern of pushing the arm through lifeless/stiff fingers, we need to expose the fact that it is going to be of little use. If you do simply jam up under arm pressure, then you'll know that the fingers must first learn to move better via the slower version. Don't just slow down however, but actively concentrate on moving the fingers freely- with the arm serving as a guide rather than some steamroller-like pressure. Get this and you should also be able to go faster again without jamming up. Even if you do get a great fast version early on, slow down anyway and check that you can pace the same smooth guiding arm movement at a slower rate. Constant comparison helps both faster and slower executions to improve.

The other thing to note is that after reaching the destination, we also need to find a new group of fingers- ready for the following unit. Again, this is exactly the kind of thing that is easily missed from general slow practise of a longer passage. The location of our arrival note is perfectly placed for the moment of reorganisation of the other fingers. I didn't include this in my first executions, but once I was satisfied by a couple, I gave equal attention to finishing into a shape that is perfectly poised. I might not be playing them yet, but I still need to think about ending in readiness for them. This has to be a very quick adjustment, by the time we stitch things together- so start to include it in the very first sitting! Playing the D should flick the other fingers out and into a state of readiness. If you think of it as a place to "relax" then this will be a real non-starter. The goal is neither relaxation nor stiffness, but a state of alert readiness in which fingers feel primed for movement. I often like to tap the newly ready fingers against the surface of the keys, while giving equal attention to the support that they receive from the held note. We don't want to be rummaging in the dark for some magical balance of tension/relaxation. Focus on being ready to move freely and the sense of purpose will give the best clues. Comfort is a must, but don't mistake aimless relaxation for being a positive quality! That fourth finger needs to stay positively active, in order to assist the shift of position. Relaxation that doesn't prime for movement is only a bill for more severe future tensions!

Going through the following units, the idea is much the same. From the D we go down from 4 and reverse back up to a 4 on C. Again, the arm leads and we can do various speeds. Note that although the fast ones are most dependent on guiding arm movements, those movements actually become smaller at speed. Don't be fooled into thinking that you can get the same from a tightly held arm. When this happens, tension in the wrist will stop the tendons sliding freely, to move the fingers. This will negatively effect both fast and slow playing, unless we keep the arm free via motion. Slower executions are a chance to rehearse smooth arm movements in the most visible form. However, to go really fast, you have to appreciate the difference between reducing movement and replacing it with stiffness. We need that sideways movement- to avoid either locking into place, or jamming into the keys with awkward arm pressure.

Our third group may seem more different than it really is. This time the notes go all the way down from 4 on C, before 4 crosses over the thumb. Here's the slightly weird thing though. When we went to finger 4 before, we rocked to the right. We need to do the same again, even though the notes continue to the left. This reversal will allow the hand to throw open into the new position. Imagine rocking a little bit too far to the left and you will then be able to end by rocking back a little to the right. The note may be to the left, but the finger itself is still more to the right side of the hand, relative to the previous thumb. With this, it should feel pretty effortless to open up again. On the final group we'll pass 3 over- but again rock to the right while it plays. Every unit works in the same movement pattern- of four notes to the left and then a rotation back to the right, during the extra note.

With all of our little journeys mapped out and rehearsed, it's now time to put the whole thing together. Think of the destination notes from the smaller units as being like mini-landmarks within a now larger journey. We should have an excellent balance between very conscious references and notes that can be taken a little more on trust, in between those landmarks. When going slow, concentrate again on constant arm guidance. If that works out, you even have the option of trying them all fast. I show this next, but I would frequently recommend avoiding this until you have already done a few sessions- involving both the individual units (fast and slow) as well as the bigger segment at slow or medium speeds. The traditional idea of pacing the speed increase becomes very sensible- once we have already built the basic units and begun work at a larger segment. It takes some settling in of the foundations before we'd normally hope to do a significantly large unit quickly. Although you should understand the importance of early fast and slow work upon basic units, please don't try to force early speed upon larger passages that clearly aren't ready!

Anyway, this wasn't the first time I'd ever practised this so it went fine at speed. But what if you did start making errors? Well, had it not gone well, it wouldn't have been a big concern. This would merely have been taken as a sign to back off for now and do more with the building blocks first. Most likely the failed attempt would reveal that specific ones need further attention. To have a go at something and fail once isn't a big deal, if you respond sensibly. As I suggested earlier, to retreat to slow only practise is best regarded as an overly cautious and counterproductive approach. However, it's a very different matter to return to perfecting those musical building blocks, with both slow and fast versions of the manageable units. Do slow work on the longer passage only after refreshing those units at various speeds, or you will be likely to retreat to the wrong kind of comfort zone.

I finished on one final slower rendition and I can't stress enough the value of generally ending on slower and more exploratory practise. You might note that I didn't just play slowly but also flexibly. A strict tempo tends towards causing mindless and more mechanical practice. I was not running a mechanical routine here, but playing out of a specific desire to observe as much as possible. This is designed to refresh the conscious understanding of all the details, not just to repeat a routine. It feels more like "improvisation" than drilling. The notes may be fixed but you can explore the sound and the pacing, live in the moment. This wouldn't be possible with slow metronomic drilling. Stricter slow practise can take away from the smoothness and fluidity of movement and make for a less musical experience. The slowness doesn't even come from thinking directly about speed, but simply from desire to pay attention. When that desire is strong, the slowness comes organically. Because all the units have been very well mapped out and paced, the risk of this breaking the sense of flow is now very small. Thanks to the quality of the groundwork, it becomes possible to place finer details of the journey under a microscope- without that ever meaning isolated and awkward movements on separate notes. I can't stress enough that however much wilder practise we might be doing, you should never lose touch with the ability to consciously slow down a familiar journey. It's a chance to look at the tiniest little things, and listen to the intervals with a sense of fascination. This is where slow practise starts to take on a genuinely meaningful role.

Major and minor arpeggios in all inversions- a comprehensive explanation of how to understand patterns via fingering groups, for efficient practice

2020-11-16T20:47:00.037-08:00

Introduction

Quite a few years back I wrote a post breaking down scale fingering. When it comes to scale fingering resources, we are typically treated to reams of details, on a note by note basis. The normal approach is to simply read these off and repeat by rote until the scales are fluent. Instead of working that way, my post was designed to show a small number of defining features based on relationships between hands. With understanding of merely two basic unifying relationships, all major and minor keys (excepting only B flat and E flat major) can be covered within a simple premise, that will easily allow you to find any smaller detail by association. This saves a huge amount of time, that can be wasted when swamped in the least relevant details. Although nothing can altogether replace rote practise, the process is more efficient when we have a clear and simple vision of the foundation which holds lesser details together- ie thumb locations (particularly those where both thumbs coincide).

In a sense, arpeggio fingering is so much more straightforward that it doesn't actually require a similar post. I'll give a brief summary. When an arpeggio begins from a white key you should start with the lowest available finger. That will be the thumb in the right hand and the 5th finger in the left hand (which leaves no spare fingers unused beneath the starter note, in either hand). However, this 5th finger is a one off substitute, on what would usually be the thumb's note. In following octaves, both thumbs land here as your chief reference (until the right hand uses 5 at the top- again as a substitute for the usual thumb). You then just need to decide on the other fingers. All major/minor arpeggios are built on a basic hand shape of 1235 or 1245. Your sole choice is between 3 or 4. Looking at the width of the spaces between notes should usually make it easy to tell which fits a chord shape best. However, if the arpeggio starts on a black key, you must look to see if there is a white key included in the chord. If there are none, you can still apply the original principle- as if the black keys are really white keys. When white keys are available, however, you will assign your thumbs here, rather than to the starting black key. You can build the basic hand shape around this primary thumb location- in the same manner as if the arpeggio had begun here.

I've skimmed over a couple of extra details and that may be a little too condensed to make sense to all, right away (especially if you haven't already learned a few arpeggios to reference back to this). You may first want to start from a fingering chart and relate the details there back to this logic. Nevertheless, once you start to recognise the mechanics of this deeper premise, you really won't need much more. However, this post also runs far beyond which fingers go on which keys. Although studying this should soon ensure that you would never need to check an arpeggio manual again, the main focus is on making logical groupings of arpeggios for practice purposes- based on physical similarity. When putting similar arpeggios alongside each other, you will quickly come to understand them on a far deeper level. In fact, if you're the kind of person who doesn't particularly enjoy scales and arpeggios (but grudgingly recognises that they have value) you might assume that this post isn't particularly for you. Actually, you're exactly the kind of person who needs this- so you can get the basics ingrained permanently, with as little fuss as possible and only a bare minimum of drilling. The groups I'm going to show are extremely logical, yet far from obvious. It wouldn't be easy to stumble upon this approach for yourself. While plenty of the background is common knowledge elsewhere, I'm not aware of any other source that offers these groupings. Feel free to skip to the end section for the lists, if you don't find anything new to you in the middle section.

Chord positions vs hand positions

Before showing the specific organisations into groups, I'm just going to show how the number of black/white keys within a chord directly contributes to the features that determine which group a chord belongs in. Although an arpeggio can be played in the shape of the three different chord positions (ie root position, first inversion, or second inversion), only some of these are what I'll refer to as a "physically natural" shape, from which the thumb can pass. While some chords are best served by having a different hand placement for each of the three possible shapes, elsewhere we must recycle a single hand placement for two or more shapes. You'll see what I mean through the following examples.

Basic arpeggios with only white keys/only black keys:

In the key of C major, say, C is the lowest note in root position, with E as the lowest for first inversion, or G as the lowest for second inversion. In traditional approaches, as I said earlier, the standard fingering for any of these shapes starts from the thumb in the right hand and 5 in the left hand, as long as the lowest note is a white key. Seeing as every note of C major is a white key, we thus have three physically natural chord shapes to fit the hand directly upon. Our chord positions and hand positions are one and the same thing.

I show all of these at the start of the film above. Before practising the arpeggio in each shape, I first get my hand used to that shape by playing it as a four note chord. Then I go quickly up and down the notes of that chord, using plenty of side to side arm movement to keep everything free. Do this as the norm for every arpeggio you practise until you have such a good sense of the shape, that you can imagine it in full detail. There's no sense in even trying to play through a whole arpeggio, unless you can easily go up and down the basic chord shape within an octave. Once the hand feels fully "tuned in" to the shape, I execute the actual arpeggio by passing the thumb. Each of the three chord shapes has a new placement of the hand to match. Notice how the thumb always defines which shape we are aligned to. Rather than demonstrate super-slow, to save both your time and mine I only went moderately slow. However, you don't need to try to watch every small detail closely. I want you to put almost all of your attention on where the thumbs occur, and notice how this governs the shapes.

As an alternative, we could also take the way the hand was set to the root position shape and simply recycle that. Root position fingering (in terms of which finger was assigned to which key) can now be applied to the inversions of the chord. I show this next in the film. Although this might sometimes be an option, I'd have to stress that it can't truly replace what I showed before. Particularly when doing the first inversion arpeggio, it becomes awkward to turn around rapidly on 1 and 2 at the top. To prove this, I show a 1st inversion run right up the piano, similar to one that features in a Pletnev arrangement from the Tchaikovsky Nutcracker. I first match my hand to the first inversion shape and then try it with the hand set to a root position shape. It should be very clear how much more sweep is possible when you start and finish from a full open hand shape, by matching the hand position to the chord shape. I can survive it when I use root position fingering but the awkward reversal at the top stops it coming alive. It's physically more fiddly at both top and bottom, which causes greater caution and restraint. To truly master white key arpeggios, you absolutely need a fingering for each position.

Aside from the many arpeggios with only white keys, G flat major and E flat minor exist upon three black keys. Seeing as we have no choice but to place the thumbs on a black key, here we treat them no differently to if they were on white keys. With three available keys to put the thumb on, we again have three chord shapes to match with three hand shapes.

Arpeggios starting from a black key, with at least one white key

However, lets look now at E flat major (E flat, G, B flat). There are always three different positions available for a chord, as defined by the lowest note. However, according to the premise of traditional arpeggio fingering, we need to avoid taking the thumb on a black key- as long as there is a white key available. This is because the thumb is shorter than the fingers and it is generally more awkward to have to reach forward into the black keys, during thumb passing (I should point out that this rule is occasionally broken in advanced piano playing, although this lies outside of the standard foundations). In the following video, I start by including these "wrong" fingerings, just for illustration purposes.

Again, I start by getting the hand used to the shape of the chord. Notice that there's nothing awkward about merely being on any of the basic shapes. It's solely when going on to pass the thumb, that the thumb on a black key is seen to be a problem (I'm not bad at these, but you might notice my loss of legato on the 2nd inversion). Seeing as there is only one white key, we only have one superior option available. Regardless of which chord position we play the arpeggio in, our hand will be built around the thumb note G- in a first inversion shape. By the way, I show with my right hand, but the left hand will be building positions around the exact same notes. Our premise is universal, not specific to either hand. Unlike C major, it makes no difference as to which which note the arpeggio begins from. Instead of matching the hand position to the specific chord position that starts the arpeggio, we take the one physically natural shape (via the white key) and base everything upon it.

When we base fingering around thumb awareness, it's easy to find the other details from there. It's important to recognise that the thumb is always the main unifying feature of arpeggios and thus needs to be given far more attention than any mere starter note. For black key arpeggios where we have a white key available for the thumb, the finger for the first note is an extremely minor detail. The first note is only the most meaningful in our thoughts, if it also happens to be a thumb note. Giving more attention to a starting black key than to the thumb location will radically slow down understanding and progress. In fact, it doesn't even matter what finger you take on the first note. I took 2 on E flat, but any finger is fine- as long as it gives control over the sound and leads you comfortably towards the thumb and the following shape.

I have always found it rather odd that the ABRSM introduces the E flat major arpeggio in root position early on, yet waits until the advanced grades to include even a single first inversion arpeggio. It makes little sense to start E flat major in root position, if your prior experience is only of white key arpeggios in root position. They may both be root position chords, physically speaking, but the physical foundations have nothing in common. To go straight to root position conceals the true simplicity of the arpeggio, by prematurely throwing the student into the deep end. The natural course of events would be to first learn a white key first inversion arpeggio, such as C major. This prepares for the basic feel of a similar physical inversion. The next step is to also learn E flat major in the physically natural first inversion. The final step is to go back to play the arpeggio in root position- with an existing feel for the 1st inversion position you are headed towards. When a student doesn't begin with the fundamental physical shape for an arpeggio, the movement is bound to be awkward. This is simply due to feeling mentally and physically disoriented- not because the technique includes any remarkable demands.

Just a final point for this mixed group- B flat major is the only root position arpeggio that starts on a black key, where there are two white notes available. This means that when playing it in root position, you have two locations available for the thumbs. There are two physically natural shapes to form, around either the D or the F. As long as you practise the arpeggio in both of these inversions, it doesn't necessarily matter which note you choose to place the thumb on, when returning to root position. In this video I practise a B flat arpeggio in both available inversions.

Once these shapes are familiar, I can use either arrangement of the hand to execute the root position arpeggio. When using two hands at once, I recommend matching both thumbs to the same white key. However, note that many scale books put one thumb on F and the other on D. For me, this is the fingering equivalent of wearing odd socks ie if you're happy and comfortable with it then feel free, but it wouldn't be my idea of a default style. Don't do it just because a book says so! Take control over your thumb options and find your own preference. The same applies with first inversion arpeggios on a chord that has one black key in the middle eg. D major. There are two physically natural shapes based on each of the white keys. I show both from the thumb notes and then show the first inversion D major based on both possible hand shapes.

That covers the general concept of building everything directly from the physically natural shapes (ie. those in which thumb passing is convenient), before reusing them for other chord positions. What's left is how to organise the arpeggios together into logical practise groups via...

The 3 Groupings

We have three categories to practise, corresponding to the three basic chord shapes. This isn't quite as it might seem, however. As I said earlier, a root position chord of E flat major has nothing physically in common with a root position C major. When we practise in relation to the physically natural groups, E flat major would go into our first inversion group, even if we execute it starting directly from the root. The only physically natural way to use the hand is in the first inversion shape- thus it's in the first inversion category where E flat belongs. We get consistency when we work from the shapes built around our thumbs on the white keys. Getting the pattern is more complicated than merely taking every chord of a particular inversion and thinking we can therefore lump them in together. However, the root position group has the fewest surprises. We basically just omit those that would start on a black key (other than the two in group c, in which every black key functions as a "virtual" white key). Every arpeggio we'll look at throughout is built on the thumb/5th finger. The simplest way to order this is as follows.

Group 1- root positions

1a C maj, D min, E min, F maj, G maj, A min, B min

1b C min, D maj, E maj, F min, G min, A maj, B maj

1c G flat maj, E flat minor

I show what is happening in the following video.

However, I didn't want to waste your time by playing every arpeggio for you. I just play the chord shapes to show the same order as above. First, play open fifths ascending on the white keys, from C and G. Each of these will go on to create two root position chords- one minor and one major. Every fifth is on two white keys until we arrive at B. For B, the needed fifth is an F sharp, thus making it the odd one out. Group a is found by filling in the third as a white key and working through. Group b is slightly more complex. If the one in Group a was a minor chord, raise the third by a semitone and get a major chord. If it was a major chord, lower the third and get a minor chord. I show the process of adjustment first, but then play straight through the order of group b on its own. Every one of these chords now has a black key in the middle. Whereas the whole of the first group is literally identical physically (aside for the unique B minor), there are more subtle differences here. The minor chords have the black key very slightly lower than for the majors. The physical shape is not identical but merely very similar. To go deeper into fingering now, you might include this into your consideration for the left hand. Every right hand shape here is 1235, beyond question. In the left you may use 4s or 3s. You might consider 4 for such chords as C minor and 3 for such chords as A major. This naturally corresponds with those subtle differences of distance between keys. For myself, I mostly use 4s with occasional 3s, although with no particular consistency. I have practised them all both ways and can do either, so I'm now happy enough to simply do what feels right in a given moment- as long as my hand is properly set to the arpeggio shape. Whatever you should choose, putting these subtly different arpeggios side by side is a quick way to build a feel for them all. Finally, group c is the very small group of the two black key only chords.

I'd spend at least a week or so practising Group 1 alone (you might want to get that done first, before reading on, and then return for another group). That will mean you have worked at every single arpeggio in which the hand is physically matched to a root position shape. Those chords that were omitted don't feature ever feature in root position setup, for arpeggios. We instead see them in the other groups.

Group 2- 2nd inversions

2a C maj, D min, E min, F maj, G maj, A min, B flat maj

2b C min, D maj, E maj, F min, G min, A maj, B flat min

2c G flat maj, E flat minor

I show second inversion next, because it's mostly rather similar to what we already did. However, notice the one difference in the fifths. Remember that the premise is always based on narrowing down to chords with a thumb on a white key (excepting our "virtual" white keys in of group c). The thumb needs to be on F, so we get our perfect fifth by adding a B flat to it. Also, this time the left hand will definitely need to take a 5321 fingering to fit to all chord shapes. It's now the right hand that can choose between 3/4. We can carry similar reasoning over from the last group (although it's now in major chords the right hand has the smaller gap between a black key and the top, whereas in minor chords the bigger gap might suggest a 3). One extra thing of note is that this group contains the only physically natural position for B flat minor- so the other two forms for the arpeggio are built from this same second inversion hand shape.

Group 3- 1st Inversions

3a C maj, D min, E min, F maj, G maj, A min, B min

3b C sharp min, D flat maj, E flat maj, F sharp min, G sharp min, A flat maj, B flat maj

3c G flat maj, E flat minor

The good news on this one is that the fingering is very easy. Both hands should always be based on 1245. The widest interval is in the centre for each hand, so the spare 3rd finger is best left 'spare' in that gap. The bad news is that this is probably the single most difficult group to understand conceptually. You may want to read through the written chords quite a few times, before you start to practise the arpeggios in the sequence. However, there is still a pattern here that you can get used to. For the first group, there's another chance to merely cruise along on the white keys until you get to B minor- again the odd one out. For group b, what you need to remember is that our thumb note will always be marking the third of a major or minor chord, which has to have a black key as its root. Where E had been the 3rd of a C major chord in group a, the only other chord it can be the 3rd of is a C sharp minor chord. Note also the adjustment to get from group a to group b. If you come from a major chord, the middle notes slide up a semitone. If you come from a minor chord then they both slide down a semitone. You need to know your basic chords very well before this becomes easy to remember. However with a certain amount of repetition, it will become familiar. It's worth the effort, because even a relatively small amount of practise in this highly organised setup can give rather quick results.

Remember that this is truly comprehensive in setting the physical foundations for all inversions of any major or minor chord. We didn't directly practise all of these here, but we covered every hand shape that might serve as a foundation for the remaining ones. I've been working this way for many years and I can assure you that I checked every possibility. It's all there. With these down, you'll be ready to try using the common orders in method books, which can require you to dart between physical positions without the same consistency. By then it won't matter, as you should have the tools to cope with this.

All that remains for the other chords or inversions is to picture one of the practised shapes and either begin somewhere in the middle of it, or use a substitute finger to lead into it. For example in D flat major right hand we usually take 4 on D flats, but we can begin from 2 or 3, as long as there is a strong sense of the first inversion shape that we are headed for. If you do work through these groups systematically, you should find that it would barely take a moment's thought to picture the two different chord shapes around which you could arrange the hand for a B minor 2nd inversion, say. Also, I won't list them right now, but I also apply a similar formulaic breakdown of all the diminished 7th and dominant 7th chords- again arranging the thumb for every possible white key based inversion of these chords. You can take it further still into plenty of chromatic chords and ones that you might make up for yourself. Once you appreciate thumb anchors in just about any context, a very wide number of possibilities open up. Fitting your hands around the shapes of the keyboard becomes incredibly fluent, as if it were nothing more than some inborn natural instinct. Perhaps some pianists really do get there that way, but it's a lot easier to cheat your way there via systematic practise.

Yet more on what gravity can/can't offer, touch weight myths debunked, and the benefits of timed acceleration (in both snooker and piano playing)

2019-06-05T20:04:00.006-07:00

There are quite a few issues that I'm going to cover in this post, including an illustration of how the effortless power of a first rate snooker player has much in common with how a top pianist makes an effortlessly big sound. I'll show you the relevance of "timing", both in terms of how an expert snooker player strokes the cueball and how an expert pianist strokes a key (in order to pass on energy without any wasted force). In particular though, I also managed to assemble some extremely strong evidence of how limited gravity is for making a big sound from close contact. What these comments do not apply to is those situations in which there's time to play with larger flamboyant run up movements. It's certainly possible to harness gravity to help build momentum when coming down from a height (actually, it's impossible to descend without transferring stored gravitational energy into kinetic energy), so please don't misunderstand that any of my points are denying this. Here are examples of that technique in play.

Start this 2nd clip from around 5:50 in.

Later in the post I'll explain exactly what makes it possible to do this safely, including close-up video demonstrations of the basic actions (nb. it requires a lot more than gravity/relaxation alone). If you want to try the practical part right away, then feel free to skip to the videos and instructions at the end. To start with, I'm going to be be looking at playing from close contact, however. I have a strong proof that gravity can only generate a very moderate dynamic here (without additional acceleration through correct movements). Don't worry though, I'll keep the scientific explanations as simple and accessible as possible. The main thing I want to do is to convey quite how modest the result is when hoping to use gravity without any run up.

You may be a little shocked by this, but releasing even a literal tonne of mass on to the keys could not produce a significantly loud sound- if you begin from direct contact with the key!

The touch-weight fallacy

Before going back to that, I want to start by debunking an incredibly prevalent piece of misinformation about the level of force required to play the piano. Somewhere along the line it became trendy for people to start claiming that to play you require the equivalent of merely 40-60g or so of force. Their heart may be in the right place (and it's certainly true that efficient technique uses far less brute force than some people think is needed). But to imagine you can get results by literally stripping down to 50g worth of pressure is nevertheless a complete fantasy built on incorrect application of facts. As you'll see later, the most effortless results are earned by addressing the keys with the right style of positive input, not by simply choosing to put little in and then expecting a free lunch.

Anyway, what the static touch-weight of a piano key tells us is the amount of mass required to depress a key with quite so little energy or acceleration that it doesn't even produce a sound! Assuming you are playing anything other than John Cage's 4:33, you're going to need at least some of the hammers to succeed in arriving at the strings and often with substantial energy. A piano key may start with only a small resistance, but the moment you start trying to produce even moderate levels of tone, it pushes right back at you. By the time you are playing even fairly loudly there will be overwhelmingly more resistance to overcome. The relevant term is dynamic touch-weight. This is the term for the true force required to produce a certain level of tone. There's not a lot of clear information out there on how big this would be, although I recently got into a discussion about this on a Facebook forum that inspired me to start investigating more deeply.

Dead weight and volume

After this issue came up, another poster told me that he took a mass of around 680g and released it on a piano key (from direct contact). By his assessment, this mass (with far more than 10 times as much pressure as some people have tried to tell us is sufficient for the whole of pianism) produced no more than a rather moderate mezzo forte dynamic. Although I was already aware that dynamic touch-weight requires far greater pressures than the static figure, I have to say that this greatly surprised me. In fact, I cautiously took out a 2.5kg mass and tried releasing it on my own piano. Admittedly my experiment was somewhat compromised compared to a true scientific standard, owing to the difficulty of releasing the mass abruptly. However, not a single attempt was able to reach a notable dynamic. After seeing this, I was happy enough to trust his word of only reaching mf with 680g (particularly as he had been arguing that piano playing takes very *little* active force- a case which certainly wasn't helped by this result).

To give more context, if I "weigh" my arm on a kitchen scales, I exert a pressure equivalent to between 600-800g of mass. My arm itself has far more mass, of course, and this is admittedly based on too many subjective factors to be exact (hence the deliberately broad range). However, what I'm saying is that when I simulate the kind of pressure I'd expect to apply (while "resting" my arm via a held note at a piano, whilst maintaining an aligned wrist) it will not go past 800g without a notably obvious muscular pressure. I would have to start pushing significantly more than it takes to merely keep my arm out in front of me. By the way, I'm no Charles Atlas, but I'm not afraid to curl a 15kg dumbbell either. My arms are far from abnormally light. It might well have been assumed that 2.5kg would be substantially less pressure than a resting hand would apply, due to the arm's weight but, no. Check it yourself on a weighing scales if you don't trust me.

For the final experiment, I tried releasing my arm's weight down on the keys, to see if anything would be different. This is very difficult to assess objectively, so I channelled it through the end of a pencil. One reason so many people think gravity does so much for them is because of the pianistic instincts they have developed- in the actions of their hand and upper arm. By resting into an inert pencil it's a lot easier to eliminate any active contribution from the fingers. It is always going to be a little subjective and imprecise still (and this certainly can't be counted as laboratory conditions for actual scientific data). However, I'm confident that I have good ability to distinguish between notable pushing vs releasing my arm. When my arm is releasing you'll see the wrist sink downwards with gravity. If that doesn't happen when you try this, you are pushing forwards significantly (rather than solely dropping the arm's weight into the movement of each key). This is likely to become a big contributor to the volume being produced. You'll see at once how much more sound I can comfortably achieve when I wilfully deliver a more precise muscular acceleration to the key (even through the neutral pencil). If you want to see what genuine gravity alone does from contact, you must fight your every instinct to deliberately send energy into the key and simply release everything and observe. Notice how relatively weak and thin the sound is (even via a cheap camera phone which adds a lot of gain). At the end I also tried to go a little quicker. Bobbling on to every key with the arm alone is cumbersome and difficult. It's also hard to fully let go when you also have to get somewhere else in a hurry (thus the even weaker sound than before). When trying to genuinely pass on gravity alone there's no chance of speed or finesse. It would at least require some more active arm pressure but above all it needs living fingers that can move. One separate arm descent per note (plus a necessary reset to go again) is not something that is conducive to either speed or control.

Proof that gravity is ALWAYS this limited (from direct contact)

I'd already been considering the theory as to why dropping a mass from contact might well max out at a certain dynamic level, although what nevertheless caused real surprise is quite how low that dynamic limit proved to be. I'd anticipated something of at least forte or more, not a moderate mezzo forte. What I'd seen in practise now inspired me to dig a little deeper, to see if I could make a more solid proof that there is indeed a very low dynamic limit. As luck would have it, I could indeed. The thing about gravity is that it needs time and distance to create a large speed. Drop from a big height and you'll land on the keys with abundant kinetic energy already in play. When you start from a stationary contact, however, you have no starting energy at all. The only energy that you can pass on via gravity is that which is released over the 1 cm or so through which a piano key descends. The counter-intuitive part is that even a vast mass cannot generate much acceleration in so little time. Indeed, no free falling mass can ever accelerate at more than the basic gravitational rate (of 9.8 m/s squared).

Consider the famous experiment in which both a feather and a cannonball fall at the same speed (as long they are in a vacuum, to eliminate air resistance). They both equally represent the absolute upper limit at which any free falling object can accelerate. Strictly speaking a mass that starts in direct contact with a piano key cannot quite reach even that level of acceleration, because the key itself is putting up some resistance. Here the amount of mass really does matter. Below the touch-weight you can't move the key at all. Add barely enough and the key will first go down very slowly. However, as the mass gets larger the resistance becomes ever more inconsequential and key will start to move faster and faster.

HOWEVER, what we have to remember is that it edges towards an upper ceiling of possibility. Beyond a certain amount of mass the key will be moving at something fairly close to the rate of a free gravity drop. After this point you just continue to get slightly closer to the limit. No amount of mass may ever surpass this rate of acceleration, if it is acted on solely by gravity. To find the limit we can do a calculation of the results here. With even a huge mass released on the key, you would be looking at something marginally slower than a 1cm free fall (the basic distance by which a key descends). It would therefore take at least 0.045 seconds for the key to descend and reach a maximum speed of just 0.44 metres per second. To give some context, James Ching did an experiment in which he found pianists to take between a 10th and a 150th of a second to depress a key. This is very much in the slower (and therefore quieter) range of the available spectrum here. Even allowing for a degree of possible imprecision in these figures, both the observed practical reality and the mechanical theory are both clearly showing us that gravity is objectively incapable of offering more than very moderate dynamics, via close contact.

Briefly returning to forces, this graph (reproduced from "Pianos Inside Out" by Mario Igrec) suggests that you'd need around twice as much energy and more to produce FF or FFF, compared to mf. Clearly the weight of the arm is woefully insufficient, when we play from close quarters.

The missing ingredients

Somehow, gravity has become so widely viewed as the ultimate "freebie" that a lot of people wouldn't even stop to consider what else must be present in the mix here. They'll just assume my working must have gone wrong. I assure you it's air-tight, however. To see what's genuinely missing, imagine now if you dropped a bullet alongside your falling cannon ball. Again the speeds would be identical in a vacuum. However, if you fired it downwards from a gun, you would easily beat any object that merely falls. Gravity cannot begin to compete with the level of acceleration achieved by active propulsion. The idea of using only gravity to make a big sound via contact is pure fantasy. We should not be fooled into treating it as a good source of acceleration from a stationary start. Indeed, you don't even need to pack a weapon in order to beat gravity. Drop a ball from shoulder height and you should still be able to quickly swoop down and catch it. Yes, movement via muscular contractions can easily beat gravity for acceleration. Muscular pressures get a bad rap because doing it wrong leaves them tired, sore and overworked. However, the reality is that you cannot even get a basic result without instead learning to do them well. Pretending they have no role (or that you can get by on a mere 40g force) is not going to give you a thing (unless you're unbelievably lucky with instincts).

"Timing"- the effective delivery of movement from a run-up

At this point, I'm now going to show you the biggest secrets to making a gravity drop land effectively. The problem with colliding with a key whilst already in motion is that you tend to knock the hammer away more abruptly. That's because you get slightly slowed down when first meeting resistance. Experiments by Ortmann proved that a sharp blow from a distance can knock the hammer out of contact with the key before you reach the escapement level (where the hammer usually separates from the key, during a smoothly paced acceleration). It's a high force but tiny contact time. The full energy applied depends on both aspects, not on a single size of force. This means a severely forceful (yet brief) hit may reasonably transmit less overall energy than a longer one with lower force.

To clarify this distinction, imagine hitting a supermarket trolley as hard as you can with a baseball bat, vs resting your hands against it before accelerating it more smoothly away. A longer push can easily generate more acceleration and without the painful impact associated with a short but vast contact force. On this basis, some even believe that you can generate more sound by pacing an acceleration from direct contact with the keys, rather than dropping the arm in from a height. It's highly counter-intuitive but you can see and hear quite how much sound Nyiregyhazi could accomplish this way.

Start the clip at around 3:40 (where the sound is already huge, but he's really just getting started).

Interestingly, top snooker coach Barry Stark has published a video in which he works around the same basic concepts that I've applied to pacing the depression of piano keys.

As he says, it's not a conclusive scientific proof yet, but there are encouraging signs that (at 35000 frames per second) the well "timed" shots indeed seem to have a slightly longer collision with the cueball. The explanation for this would be down to pacing of acceleration. Top pros don't stab at the ball and stop. They are always trained to aim the acceleration specifically through the moment of contact. This is why a seemingly gentle stroke can generate huge power. Whether at the piano or playing snooker, it's not good enough to just reach a high speed and let the ball/key get in the way of that. You should pace it so acceleration is directed most specifically between the point of contact and release. This was why gravity was so poor at making sound from direct contact too. It cannot focus a special degree of extra acceleration into that small window of opportunity. Weight just stays as a lifeless constant, that offers no extra zip when it matters.

Accelerating the finger/cue tip through the contact means it can be less significantly repelled by the force of collision and thus could spends a little longer passing on energy before detachment. Even microseconds can make a significant change when we're already looking at a very brief contact. The longer you can make the contact via timed acceleration, the less absolute speed/force is required on average. The degree to which difference would show up would be very hard to prove, but it's certainly a theory that is consistent with Newtonian mechanics.

Applying the active acceleration of good snooker technique to chords/octaves at the piano

In snooker, all shots are made by collisions rather than "pushed" from stationary contact. However, at the piano we can work both ways. The real trick to landing arm drops lies in knowing how to push the knuckles AWAY from the piano key (rather than collapse them into it). This ensures the the peak acceleration goes to the fingertips and thus the key and that any excess energy can rebound safely rather than cause impact. When the knuckles are pushed away, the contact between finger and key is gaining extra distance away from every other moving part of the hand/arm- proving that it has the largest acceleration found in any part. When this is right at the business end, you can impart much more energy before loss of contact. Imagine a snooker cue where the tip actively shoots outward on a spring during contact- thus staying with it for longer. This is what our hands can do at the piano, to stay with the resistance of the hammer for as long as possible. They are not as rigid as a snooker cue, so if you fail to employ any of their activity at all, they will tend to give way (even when trying to be very stiff). Sending at least some extra motion from finger to key gives us an extra advantage that snooker players cannot access. The second issue is that a slight forward push of the arm can give some extra support from further back.

In this video I show three styles of movement, only the last of which is genuinely effective- please don't misunderstand that I'm recommending the first two ways to play! This is from contact first, before we proceed to the big arm drop.

The first group is mostly just collapsing the wrist with both gravity and a little extra active swinging down. This is not an effective way to pass energy and delivers little of the total energy to the fingertips. However, you should practise this a little, both to recognise the flabby sense of contact with the resistance (which prevents any good sense of acceleration through to the hammer's release) and to learn to let your wrist be capable of this type of looseness. The second group is based on simply creating a fixed structure and shoving the whole arm straight down on it. This isn't chiefly about releasing weight, but a very active pressing down of arm mass. The sound is loud alright, but this is a very awkward and unsafe way to play. The descent of the arm (via strong thrust) carries a lot of energy into an abrupt collision. This type of bad technique is almost certainly why people end up saying to use weight instead of pressure. The truth is that it's just the wrong way to use active pressure. That doesn't mean active pressure is wrong in general. It's essential for big sounds from contact! The problem is that the fingertips simply resist a very high energy arm movement- thus making no particularly good sense of acceleration through the contact, nor pushing safely back out of the key bed. It's all about a huge input energy plus stiffness, rather than a more sophisticated transmission of power. The sound is loud via brute force. Watch the wrist abruptly jam when the key lands, with nowhere for the energy to go. In truth, it's not wholly unmanageable if used sparingly (and you'll see concert pros who actually use something similar at times), but you'll get into serious bother indeed if you use this technique too much. It should preferably be avoided altogether.

The third demonstration is based on trying to push the knuckles up and AWAY from the contact with the keys. You must bond clearly with the resistance of the key first and then push try to push the bridge of the hand back out and away from this contact. I exaggerated the visible action twice, although the subtler version at the very end is condensed down more. It can even be far more subtle still. Anyway, this slight internal hand movement is what actively throws the tips of the fingers out, thus prolonging the contact with the key's resistance to the fullest opportunity. This is why my arm really doesn't have to push especially hard at all. Thanks to the hand action, what little the arm puts in is efficiently directed to the target of the key- without wastage. I could just as happily use this blend to produce a fairly big sound with next to no perceived effort whatsover, or to make a truly huge sound with only a relatively small and still very manageable effort. Only with many very loud chords in quick succession might this motion even begin to get tiring.

You can reduce the amount of visible movement but you shouldn't be aiming to throw it away entirely. There's minimal impact or exertion, because this continuation takes you AWAY from the collision. This is what STOPS the fatigue caused by heavier collisions. Observe how the arm doesn't crash its mass down into a thudding collision at all. At most, it just stabilises the reaction movements. If the wrist were to move down hard and suddenly stop, you would face far more physical impact. The arm instead contributes a forward pressure, but it doesn't itself proceed downward. The continuation is slightly up and out of the point of collision, not straight down into a dead stop point. My wrist ascends a little (but slows before getting higher than the knuckles themselves) and excess energy is absorbed. Gravity is not the accelerator here but a natural braking force to absorb the remaining energy. The slight movement isn't the dangerous part but rather the reason the energy dissipates slowly. The ends of my fingers are literally the only thing going down in space, while everything else is pushed safely back the opposite way. This is the polar opposite of a gravity action. Learn to do this and you'll be able to apply abundant power with very little effort.

Now, here's the rather surprising bit. When I add in the swing of the arm, the hand and arm have to land in what is exactly the same basic manner as playing from direct contact. In the final group, watch for all the same key features I defined in the first film. Almost all the important stuff happens just as you arrive at the key and this is what you need to watch most closely.

The first movements sag down pretty uselessly again. Lots of flailing there, but not much energy is making it into the sound. Practise it again to develop freedom in the wrist, but not as a primary technique to use directly. The second style is only even worse now! Maybe try this once (and only once) to experience why this is not the way anyone should be trying to employ gravity technique. But preferably move on and then never look back. Incidentally the "tension to release" description is popular for arm drops, but it's simply a terrible and deeply misleading explanation. Relaxing after an impact already happened would be bad enough without the big run up. On this occasion, giving significant value to relaxing after such a brutal impact would be like imagining it's fine to slit your wrists, as long as you're sure there's a stock of plasters in the bathroom cupboard. If you use this kind of braced landing as a standard part of technique, it's only a matter of time before you should expect to hurt yourself, no matter whether you relax afterwards.

Anyway, watch closely when the landings occur in the third group. The wrist descends in space solely during the run up. At the landing it starts on the slightly low side, but rebounds while the keys move. We used gravity to help build the speed of hand movement, but that doesn't mean you need to actually land heavily. Yes, the secret to "arm weight" technique is to basically take virtually all the sense of arm weight away, in the split seconds before landing- allowing the hand to push the bridge of the knuckles more upwards and away. You actually need to pull back with the upper arm a fraction before you get to the keys and then let the hand swing free out of a slightly cocked wrist. This throws the hand and fingers outwards (again sending the peak acceleration to the business end), just like the crack of a whip or the casting of a fishing line. It's when you pull back slightly, that the far end really flies out into its main movement. You will see exactly the same when you watch the videos I posted, plus those of Volodos and Rubinstein etc doing similarly massive arm swings. They don't truly fall all the way into the landing itself. The arm lightens in advance and the fingers fly out of the hand. Nowadays you can use slow motion on Youtube, if you doubt that they're actually landing softly, rather than with heavy arm collisions. There are different degrees of this whipping action, but you always need a certain degree of it if you are to land softly.

Merely relaxing all the way into the landing would take the edge off compared to the previous braced collision but it wouldn't either make all that extra arm energy vanish away, nor would it give you control over the sound. Relaxing just buys a slightly softer impact, rather than an effortless redirection of energy. Would you rather relax everything and fall to the floor mid-stride while running, or push off the landing into your next stride? Actively pushing out is safer than just collapsing into the floor (in spite of the fact that landing onto a stiffly braced leg would be worse still). At the keys the exact same upward redirection as before is taking place. The wrist rebounds a little upwards and therefore the arm energy doesn't crash into a stop at once. The slight throwing out of the fingers creates the springiness that rebounds remaining arm energy effortlessly into continuation upward, rather than into an abrupt collision downwards. Although the fingertips themselves will keep the key pinned down, everything else is free to bounce subtly around that stable point, until the remaining energy has been absorbed. I was fairly modest in the size of my movement here, but the basic technique makes it equally possible to generate a lot of sound from a minimal run up and to generate even a huge sound from a far larger one (without landing hard in either case).

Here's a film of similar movements in play in a Schumann example. The first time is deliberately exaggerated far beyond what I'd do for real. It's just to show that by thinking this way, I can comfortably land even the most over the top motions. Yes, this isn't just hypothetical talk, but something that really makes this approach possible. In the past I had been shown a lot of methods that make it chiefly about the arm (based on various notions of bracing or relaxing the hand, while chiefly working from the idea of supposedly just needing to be brave enough to drop the arm upon it like a sack of potatoes). None of this had ever allowed me to approach the keys like this without notable impact on landing- so small wonder it was hard to do it without both mental and physical restraint. It was only by concentrating on the basic hand action and on achieving lightness of the arm during landing, that this technique became a safe and meaningful option for me to use. The main reason I wouldn't want to go so far as this for much normal playing is that the size of movements makes it hard to give any real dynamic variety. The second time is more in line with how I'd really play the passage. Incidentally, although gravity is free to assist in both cases, it's not quick enough to account for arm movements of either size without active whipping action, even at this fairly modest speed.

Most people would need to work chiefly on the basic action of growth out of contact, before they will be able to safely handle landings from a run up. If you do try the bigger and more flamboyant gestures, you should film yourself practising and reference it against my checklist (particularly in terms of whether the arm or knuckles crash downward during the landing). However, with the right awareness of active acceleration, you can start to master those light whipping actions of the arm, as opposed to genuinely arm-heavy collisions. I actually practise this a great deal on a tabletop before taking it to the real keyboard, so I can see just how light and springy the landings are. If you're getting any of this right, a table should start to feel more like landing into a trampoline, rather than like missing it and hitting a stone floor!

I recently tried teaching a lesson through Skype and was pleasantly surprised by how much it was possible to help adjust a student's technique via a video lesson. If this has piqued anyone's interest (and you'd like to know more about how get this technique right) feel free to contact me on cziffra@yahoo.co.uk for more details.

Reevaluating the foundations of sightreading skill- how to use quickstudy to improve both sightreading AND study of repertoire

2019-05-08T14:36:00.007-07:00

If you look online for advice on piano sight-reading skills, you will find plenty of resources. In the vast majority of methods, the primary focus is based around keeping the rhythm going at any cost, even if it involves a great deal of educated guesswork regarding some notes (or even omitting things altogether). This is for very good reason. If someone asks you to accompany them with an unfamiliar score, you're not going to be of any use if you regularly stop in response to any kind of doubt. You have to keep going ahead to stay with them. For that reason "never stop" has become a golden rule for practising sight reading.

It's truly unquestionable that any good sight-reader will have to learn to "fake" their way around some tight corners, rather than freeze in a self-defeating hope for perfection. So why am I writing a post to challenge the almost universal notion that this is the definitive mantra for all practise of sight-reading skills? Quite simply, it's because there's also a minimum level of accuracy required.

How much accuracy counts as enough?

Let's suppose that two pianists both manage to stay in time, while sight-reading a modestly difficult accompaniment for a singer. One fakes around 5 percent of the written notes- slightly rearranging the distribution of chords and skipping a few inner notes, while keeping a clear harmonic skeleton. Not a problem. It sounds fine. The other one manages around 70 percent accuracy, with failures including a missed change of key signature and a whole phrase where one hand is played in the wrong clef. Is it still fine as long as they remember not to stop?

Okay, I've plucked those theoretical percentages out of thin air. However, as a very rough working estimate I'd say that anything short of 90 percent accuracy is usually going to be enough to cause at least some awkwardness. That's open to debate, but let's say we were to fall back to as little as 70 percent accuracy. Could that sound fine? I don't want to try to define an exact boundary, so much as encourage you to ask your own serious questions about what would be feasible. However, if we get to a 50/50 success rate and you still think it might sound okay then you must be kidding. Not even Les Dawson fell to that.

https://youtu.be/DtK7Hg7PnnQ?t=407

In another field, 70 percent wouldn't actually be a notably poor success rate. In a maths exam you'd get a strong pass for that, if not necessarily the absolute top grade. However, let's say I offer 70 percent accuracy to a musician for whom I have been paid to accompany a diploma exam. After the exam, not only do I remind them that I did I not stop, but I also "boast" about how proud I was to have played roughly twice as many right notes as wrong ones. Will they book me again? I doubt it.

(Actually, as a brief aside, I'll just mention modern atonal music as the exception to this. I have actually fallen well below 50 percent accuracy while accompanying the ludicrously difficult final section of Hindemith's tuba sonata. In that case, I heard afterwards that the examiners felt it was the best they'd heard anyone manage with it before, so it's far from an ordinary case. I also recall agreeing to accompany a modern piece for a friend at very short notice, in which I probably managed to play around half the notes correctly in one hand, while playing literally anything in the other hand. While I doubt that the composer of either work would have been terribly appreciative of what I managed to muster up, you *can* sometimes get away with murder in atonal music. Apply a similarly poor level of accuracy to classical or baroque repertoire, however, and it's a very different story).

My own sight-reading captured- warts and all

Let's link those hypothetical figures more to reality, via a couple of examples of myself sight-reading. I can assure you that the first two are genuine first attempts, which I hope will be evidenced by the handful of errors in the Bach, plus the rather more numerous ones in the Rachmaninoff. I also deliberately avoided any mental reading through (save for a very brief glimpse, solely to choose each excerpt), in order to go in as unprepared as possible. The third film illustrates the same Rachmaninoff excerpt as the second, but after around four or five minutes of quick study practise (in which all rhythmic pressure was removed, in order to feel around the notes, before a return to performance style playing).

I don't think it would be unreasonable to label myself as a pretty good sight-reader, but these neither represent elite level sight-reading nor even some of my own most focused reading. I made a couple of silly lapses in the Bach, although I think it only strengthens my arguments- if I connect them to an airing of "dirty laundry", rather than select some of my best work. Now, there are two notable lapses of accuracy- particularly at around 48 seconds, where I should have planned ahead. Instead I had to skip a couple of right hand notes, while the left carried the rhythm. In the last line I assumed an F sharp would resolve to up a G, in spite of the fact it doesn't- providing an excellent reminder of how hugely overrated prediction is. There's a really good way to avoid being fooled by the fact that composers don't always do the most obvious thing- which is to actually read the notes they wrote down, rather than assume what might be likely! I also rushed the last couple of notes. While careless, this was a smaller issue, given that they are just a slight addition after the main cadence.

Anyway, my point is that, even with these issues, the accuracy level was far above 90%. The rule of never stopping for uncertainty/mistakes did not directly produce any of the things that were genuinely good about my read-through. They merely saved those things which were not so good, from turning into outright disaster.

For the second film I deliberately chose something where I expected to have a notably lower hit rate, for illustration purposes. At an estimate, I'd say I'm probably above 80% accuracy there, but perhaps not too much more. If you compare to the version I did after some brief practise, you'll realise that while it's not a terrible approximation, the number of splashed/guessed chords is more than enough to show up to someone who knows how they should really sound. The fact it sort of works is not a bad argument for that "golden rule" of just keeping the rhythm going at any cost. Had I not kept going onward, it would only have been far worse still. However, let's think just how much accurate processing was necessary for even this dodgy version. Had I only read the lower chords at all and played random notes above (which admittedly happened fairly literally on a couple of occasions) I'd still be having to process a large amount of information correctly. Dwelling narrowly on the need to play past errors does nothing to shed any light on the majority of notes which I was able to both read and execute correctly (not to mention how a truly elite sight-reader still could certainly do a far more accurate job again).

Why top sight-readers often give the least helpful advice to amateurs

The problem with the advice given by most good sight-readers is that an evolution-like process of natural selection has taken place. If they hadn't got the right things down you wouldn't get to hear their advice. Instead, they'd be out looking for a new job. As part of that, if you don't learn not to stop at the first sign of uncertainty, you will be weeded out fast. Worthy accompanists know that once you're in performance conditions, you must continue at any cost. Their livelihood literally depends on sticking to this rule every day. The problem is that they first had to spend years developing the background skills for a minimum threshold of accuracy. This is more of a long and complex slow grind, that couldn't even begin to be summarised via a catchy soundbite. Perhaps this is why we hear phrases like "never stop" so much, yet scarcely anything about how to cement deeper foundations? Anyway, if the "cost" of pressing on literally proved to be as severe as ignoring the key signature for a whole section, they would not get paid work. Easy as it is to talk about the importance of playing past mistakes, it's a lot harder to explain how to be in a position to keep errors down to an acceptable level.

Moving away from a professional standard, now- when an amateur does not have the same core skills, there's a point where no amount of willingness to press on via guesswork can compensate for that missing backbone. Good sight-readers might be very good at creatively coping with potential emergencies, but they are also very good at having as few emergencies as possible. We need to think far more about the origins of how they became able to process notes with sufficient accuracy.

It's based on this that I have come to feel very strongly that a lot of weaker sight-readers are being given completely the wrong advice for building the foundations they are most urgently in need of. If we say you can only train sight-reading under performance conditions (where the rhythm must go onward at all times and you are never allowed to go back over anything), it may do more harm than good- simply perpetuating the feeling of being a terrible reader who cannot cope under pressure.

The problem with using pressured testing as a basis for learning

I'd suggest that it's irrational to assume that test conditions are either the only way to learn, or even the most important part of overall learning, in just about any field. Would someone expect to learn to drive by simply taking driving tests over and over? Or to learn trigonometry by sitting maths exams over and over without any training?

Testing skills under pressure is certainly important, some of the time, but it's not where first foundations are built. I remember hearing the conductor/pianist Andre Previn speak of learning his sight-reading skills by spending a lot of time doing pressured sight-reading of duets, with a teacher (who would carry on if he was floundering and expect him to catch up). I believe this can easily mislead though. Such stories are appealing, as they present a romanticised notion of a "hero" being resilient enough to endure challenge and come out stronger for it. However, I strongly believe that he already had excellent reading skills. It's a make or break scenario, in which you don't automatically become better unless the main foundation has largely been laid. The situation would chiefly test how his existing reading skills fared under greater pressure. But it was doubtless contrasted against plenty of less pressured reading, in which accuracy was the main goal. This is where the core foundations are consolidated, before being pushed to the limit under performance conditions.

Quick-study as the gauge of true reading skill

Stepping back from that pressured type of sight-reading, I believe the most important foundations are best developed through what I call "quick-study"- the missing link between performance style sight-reading and slower long term projects. This involves working under more moderate pressure rather than under literal performance conditions. It comes with expectation that errors and uncertainties should be fully corrected at source, rather than done badly once (in strict time) and then left behind forever. In short, you look to understand exactly what the score means and then expect to translate it into practical reality- *not* by imprinting it slowly into habitual muscle memory, but by playing to a clear and precise intention. This is the same fundamental skill as that for your baseline of accuracy in sight-reading- to read well enough to get a clear mental image of what you want (and to have the physical skill to realise that intention immediately).

When learning repertoire over months, it should actually be very little different. You shouldn't start by playing long sections badly over and over and assume they'll eventually become right. However, neither should learning be based on reading details one at a time and spending days before understanding how they fit together. Efficient use of practise is based on having a clear picture of a group of notes (be it one bar or a whole phrase) and then trying to turn that thought into reality as directly as possible. If you cannot command a clear result when given a little planning time, you cannot realistically expect to sight-read well under pressure either.

What can you accomplish in half an hour?

As a thought experiment, let's say that a pianist is given a fairly easy score and told to learn to play it well within a month. If they can, it tells us nothing much either way about how likely they are to be a good sight-reader. Alternatively, if they couldn't do it well by then, it's just plain obvious they'd have done even worse at first sight. But what if we gave them just half an hour? This is far more interesting, because it neither imposes the sheer pressure of performance sight-reading, nor allows the luxury of building things slowly into habit. This makes for a very good indicator of general reading skill. It's just a simple way to check you can both read something correctly and act upon it.

For those who could meet the challenge of playing well after half an hour, it doesn't necessarily mean that they will also be good at first sight. Even if they can figure things out this efficiently, it's still possible to be insufficiently used to either to processing literally immediately, or playing on through uncertainty. The classic advice would likely be appropriate for them. It might well be time to start to focus more on letting go of the need for one hundred percent accuracy and loosen up into some educated guesses.

However, what about those players who could not build a convincing performance of an easy piece, with half an hour to throw at it? Clearly the results would again be substantially worse still at first sight- no matter how willing they are to fudge details in favour of trying to keep time! If you're not a good sight-reader (and want to know how to improve), the very first thing you should look at is whether you have this crucial foundation. If half an hour isn't enough to master some easier repertoire, it shows there is simply not enough fluency with translating written instructions in general, never mind under pressure. Although quick-study skills don't fully guarantee good sight-reading skills, it would be fair to say that a lack of quick-study skills will always be complemented by even worse sight-reading skill.

The background ability to translate a score into correct execution is not something that should be developed solely under intense pressure, but neither is it something where you should need days or even weeks to figure something out. We seem to have become lost in a false dichotomy- where either you learn pieces very slowly over an extended period of time, or you have a single make or break shot at sight-reading and then have to move on. It is highly artificial to have such extremes without middle ground, and it does not serve development of the best reading skills. To say that you should never go back and make corrections (because "it's no longer sight-reading" second time around) is simply missing how learning works.

Getting things correct RIGHT NOW- the truest testament to good reading

Although I'm generally a good sight-reader, I used to struggle with composers like Bach and Mozart- where everything is highly exposed. I went through a period where I deliberately took a much more careful approach to reading their music. These can be some of the hardest to sightread well, because everything is so exposed that details really do matter. Rather than plough on ahead through errors, I'd now start to slow down a little for the most dense passages, to find a pace where I could process everything in advance rather than have to guess. I wouldn't just stop dead in the middle of ideas, but I'd happily stretch the tempo out- thus making more time, without ever destroying the rhythmic flow. If something went badly I might stop and think about that bar before correcting it and only then go on after resolving uncertainty. I wasn't exactly "practising" these pieces in the full way I would if learning them, but neither was I settling for any old rubbish- just because it's "only" sight-reading and "everyone knows" that you're not meant to stop.

In spite of breaking almost all the rules, this approach made me far more accomplished back in pressured situations. I got used to allowing fewer holes in the basic processing. I wasn't allowed to just skim over problems in my reading, but had to face them and solve them. In the end, I found myself needing fewer guesses in general. When I have to accompany another musician, I can still snap into performance style sight-reading at any time I need to. However, by having tilted the balance towards accuracy rather than always time pressure, I built a far stronger foundation in general.

In quick-study you should not keep ploughing on past uncertainty until you reach the end. You're looking to build a foundation of accuracy (both for the piece being studied and, by extension, for more general reading skill). You should imagine exactly what you intend to do for a small segment, with ample thinking time, and then check for the accuracy after execution. This could be as little as a bar or so (although it is usually best to add the first note of the bar after, in order to avoid dividing bars into separate entities) and then you try to execute the plan. If it goes wrong, you plan once again and then you try again. If it still doesn't work, you must now stop and have a big rethink. It's probably necessary to reduce it to something smaller until you have found a manageable sized unit that you can produce confidently on command. You're looking for the things you can get right with minimal fuss. You should never just "have a go" and hope for a fluke. Guessing is not part of this approach. Done well, most things should be right first time and nothing should ever take more than three attempts. If it's not working, you should find a smaller musical unit or even go back to easier repertoire, if need be. As you get better, the mental preparation becomes ever more efficient. You won't always need to start from smaller units. Actually, I often begin as normal sight-reading, but then stop shortly after anything I wasn't happy with. The idea of working with small units can then be used as something to fall back on for correcting things- in order to get to the heart of the issue. You can also practise trying to take just brief glimpses of a unit, before immediately looking away and trying to execute it perfectly from that mere glimpse. As you become sharper at this, the same processing skill feeds very directly into your pressured sight-reading.

Going back to get things right on a second execution will do far more for your core sight-reading skills than just doing it incorrectly once alone and moving on. Finishing with a correct version means we are meaningfully connecting every detail of the score to its execution, rather than to wild guesses which were fuelled by panic. There are lots of ways to go wrong (including guessing, incorrect reading, moving the hands without adequate control etc) but very few ways to get everything right. What kind of delusional optimism would lead us to imagine that the ability to work accurately is best developed with an exclusive routine of guessing things under pressure and then never looking back? This trains willingness not to stop, but nothing else at all. To further the ability to read correctly and then instantly do things correctly, we should at least expect to get things right on a second (less pressured) attempt.

When I went back to practise the Rachmaninoff, I just played the chords slowly and in free time, confirming every single note. Rhythm is essential to a lot of practise but, particularly in chords, there can be great value in simply making room to stay with each chord. No, rhythm shouldn't always come first (as is often claimed). Merely sometimes. At times you're better off stopping to clarify notes, before immediately bringing it back in. I already understood the rhythms but I didn't want to leave a single chord on a misunderstanding or on a guess. Admittedly, the 2nd execution is far from electrifying musically and could have been sped up plenty. My intent was not to show an ideal final performance however, but to show I could take command over the basic reading issues at once, rather than continue to approximate. Had I pressured myself into spirited guesses a second time over, I could have scrambled my perceptions. People sometimes say "Practise like you would wish to perform". Sometimes you should indeed, but I was much better off "practising like I would wish to practise". I just calmly built a link between reading each chord and then feeling/confirming the match between reading and result. Sometimes, I will even linger on the surface of a chord before playing, to confirm every last note before playing it. Then I linger once again after playing, to confirm a second time. This allows me to keep checking both that the reading is flawless and that the activity always matches what I see. After all, if I couldn't first take command of accuracy in freer time, how could I expect to be ready to process similar chords in future pressure situations?

Foundations before instincts

Think again about how we develop ability to work under time pressure in other fields. When a child first begins arithmetic, we don't encourage them to take wild guesses, under the assumption that this will later make them perform best at speed. No, it will fill their head with confusion. We get them to count on their fingers until they reliably know the sums on a more instinctive level.

This is not remotely unusual in human endeavour. If you want to learn to do something well under time pressure, first you must actually be able to do it well at all. We routinely apply this to learning a specific piece (eg starting slow for accuracy before speeding up) but we should also appreciate how this relates to the broader skill of reading something new and knowing exactly what it means.

The main skill behind sight-reading is not truly "different" to that involved in quick study, except in terms of having less thinking time. If I look at a small enough segment of music and imagine it in full detail, I should then be ready to execute it straight away. The core of sight-reading comes from the very same place. You understand it and then you do it. Yes, we also need an emergency plan B, to scrape through those situations where there is a more than we can fully be sure of. Willingness to keep going when uncertain is largely just something you can either do or you can't, however. Yes, you must practise it often enough to be sure you can indeed do it. The problem is that there's no further summit to be reached here. Once you have that tool, further progress is almost chiefly about building on the deeper core.

Effective sight-reading skill is built by by training two opposite personalities side by side- one that demands absolute precision/excellence and another that is happy to occasionally scrape by on any old crap that stays in rhythm. It's only a balanced amalgam of the two that defines a truly great sight-reader. Think of the approximation aspect of sight-reading as being a bit like keeping a cupboard stocked up with ancient cans of cheap tinned spaghetti. It's always good to know the option is there, for a time when you have nowhere else to turn. But I'd far sooner take something fresh from the fridge.

The pianist and injury, part i- do common precautions do more harm than good?

2019-04-23T17:46:00.000-07:00

(This first part will focus mostly on general pianists' attitudes to physical activity with the hands- exposing how a distorted myth regarding Robert Schumann has created completely unjustified paranoia that urgently needs to be countered. In a second part I'll also go on to explore why I believe the relaxation school may have actively contributed to making injuries increasingly common place- with proof of how the extensor muscles are generally worked considerably harder when trying to channel arm energy through a passive hand)

Introduction

Firstly, I'll provide a couple of scenarios outside of piano playing, to set the scene.

Picture a tennis player who does no physical exercise apart from playing tennis. He aims to play to a high level and thus must often push his physical capability close to its limits, when holding a racquet in hand. However, don't fear. He won't be at risk of injuring himself. After all, he never goes to the gym, he consciously avoids all forms of stretching and flexibility based work, and he never warms up physically other than by actually playing games of tennis.

WHAT???!!! Let's rewind for a moment, for that's clearly the most deranged logic conceivable. This is not why he would be safe, rather it's why he is going to be actively prone to injury! To play top tennis, you must clearly CONDITION your body for the demands of the real life game, not exclude it from doing everything other than tennis. You don't get to have an incredible serve through avoiding all else!

If you're already complaining that music is an art and not a sport, I'm afraid I saw you coming.

In my second analogy, we have a ballet dancer. She never does any form of physical activity other than rehearsing the ballet routines that she is working at. After all, she must protect her physical apparatus from injury. She never works at flexibility prior to dancing nor does any form of non-artistic exercise to get started. Better to avoid such risks. This is exactly why it's safe for her launch into the splits at a moment's notice (as long as it has artistic context in a genuine routine), without any physical warm up.

WHAT???!!! Let's rewind again. This time you don't get to frown on a sport for being "different" to art, yet it's still abundantly clear that the whole premise is absurd to the very core. Anything that helps the body develop comfortable flexibility is clearly part of performing effectively and with safety. Alongside ballet practise itself, it's common for top dancers to do all manner of body conditioning- including flexibility and possibly even some degree of strength based work (especially for male dancers who may have to carry a partner's full weight). They don't serve their art by turning their noses up at anything that doesn't have artistic context. They work to keep their bodies limber and flexible specifically because it prepares them for the physical demands that they must meet during their art.

Finally, we have a pianist who is building up towards music college auditions. He never does any technique exercises beyond the odd scale, because he is too pure an artist to dirty himself with such matters (and he once heard a famous teacher say all drills are dangerous and should thus be avoided). He deliberately avoids all forms of "unnatural" hand exercise away from the keyboard. After all, everyone knows that Schumann damaged his hand beyond repair with some weird contraption. Other than practising his programme of difficult music, he keeps his hands fresh by resting them and avoiding activity. He has minimal risk of injury, because his hands do little other than musically artistic piano playing.

Now, this is the one where a great many pianists would nod in agreement, rather than shout "WHAT???!!!!". If so, why? If you do go on to continue thinking that's a good attitude, after having read this post, then very well. However, I have to insist that you at least stop to ask some serious questions. Now, there are also radically opposite stances- including pianists who obsess over an idea of extreme finger "strength" and genuinely overdo work on forceful exercises towards that end. I have no wish to promote that branch of extremism. However, the stance outlined above seems to have become widely accepted as if it were basic common sense, rather than the opposite pole of equally extremist madness. Did you notice how consistent it was with the previous examples? Somehow, something I'll call "pianist's logic" seems to have allowed this to be taken seriously within our field. Oh, and in the end, ironically enough that pianist does get injured by a "contraption"- an especially hazardous one, that subjects his poor hands to outlandish demands found nowhere in the natural world. It's called a "piano".

The Schumann myth

Before proceeding, yes I was indeed being facetious for the sake of a cheap gag. It was, however, also for the sake of making an incredibly serious point. This is where "pianist's logic" has come to differ from the default stance of virtually any ordinary human on this planet. Show us a little rubber band and suggest stretching it back and forth for thirty seconds (for the sake of building flexibility) and most of us will run for the hills, while screaming something incomprehensible about Robert Schumann's injury.

"Contemplate the possibility of facing such a wild risk as moving our fingers against incredibly mild resistance? No, thank you. Do you realise that I'm a pianist?".

But what if you ask us to engage them against the larger mechanical resistance of piano keys, for the continuous 30 mins+ it takes to play a Rachmaninoff concerto (featuring incredibly rapid runs, as well as vast physical stretches that must be taken with commanding ease while the hand bears the mass of the moving arm)?

"Sure, no worries mate."

Contrast against any "ordinary" person and they're usually of sound enough mind to stretch that elastic band without fear, while quite probably expressing far more doubt about playing the piano like the clappers.

Who is right here? Well, how many people have you heard of whose career ended due to an injury associated with using an "unnatural" device (other than the piano itself)? If this were the gameshow "Pointless" and you knew of any tale other than that of Robert Schumann, you'd certainly be on to a winner. Compare to cases of pianists who were injured merely by playing their instrument and we have undeniable reams of evidence. Leon Fleisher and Gary Graffman are two famous examples among a huge number of piano based injuries. Glenn Gould too had a period of being severely afflicted. It's time to seriously reevaluate why the piano gets the "get out of jail free" card, while we are quick to call danger on all external exercises- which no ordinary person nor qualified physiotherapist would be faintly concerned by. Of course, I'm not saying we should ban piano playing based on the possibility of injury. The point is that it's completely irrational for us to issue blanket bans on almost anything else that involves significant hand activity and then happily spend hours at the "unnatural contraption" which has definitively been at the heart of many injuries.

Anyway, here's evidence of the fact that the old Schumann tale is almost certainly nothing more than a wildly distorted myth:

http://www.pianisttopianist.com/?p=10

http://focaldystonia.co.uk/#/robert-schumann/4563923100

Schumann may not have been wise to use the machine exactly as he did, but the severity of his problems already existed. Don't misunderstand, I'm not specifically saying we should all run to get a device like Schumann's, and then pull the crap out of our fingers, with expectation of becoming virtuosi. However, we should stop to ask questions before tarring all hand exercises in general! Where is the meaningful evidence for the crippling long-term injuries that can supposedly afflict those who dare to exercise their hands away from a piano? If there is any substance, I extend an invitation to anyone to point me to it. As far as I can see, it seems that we've been duped en masse, by scaremongering. Evidence suggests that the true worry is injury from playing wrongly, not from any complementary exercises. The pianist's paranoia about everything under the sun (except for pianism itself) does not seem to have any footing in reason at all. It lives in a legend, that somehow evolved into being taken as gospel.

Back in reality, it's widely accepted in science that engagement of muscles against comfortable levels of resistance is actively conducive to flexibility and general health- far more so than abstinence from activity. The only meaningful questions should be about what is a reasonable range to work within. In cases of significant existing injury, complete rest may sometimes be wise. However, even then a physiotherapist may well prescribe gentle work against low resistance- thus encouraging blood flow to assist healing. It's a remarkable situation, really. The very same exercises which are safe enough to be given by medical professionals to the significantly injured (to help restore function via gentle rehabilitation) are being denounced by a horde of medically unqualified pianists as too "dangerous"for the healthy. The idea that hands which perform extreme gymnastic activities at a piano must be protected from such simple exercises exists in the world of "pianist's logic" and nowhere else. Look around and you'll certainly see plenty of evidence of injury through repetitive activities like piano playing, typing and the like. But the Schumann legend seem to be both the beginning and end of the "evidence" behind this overblown hysteria about any kind of alternative hand exercises.

The evil of Stretching?

For some reason, Chopin has been pretty universally portrayed as the antithesis to Schumann- a pianist who respected the hand in its natural form and would never have considered trying to alter its natural state. Well, I'm going to have to shatter this myth too. Did you know that Chopin developed flexibility between his fingers by sleeping at night with wine corks wedged in between them? So much for the poster boy for leaving physical development to piano playing and nature alone...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122670581542929769.html

Now, it may be that Chopin changed his mind on this type of thing, but it's impossible to say with certainty that it had no effect on him. I'm not going to recommend going to such extreme lengths, but I'm certainly not going to rule out more gentle stretching exercises. When it comes to small handed pianists, people regularly cite Alicia de Larrocha as proof that they can flourish like any other. While this is spot on, what seems to be forgotten is the fact that she was obsessive about stretching her hands and actually managed to develop enough flexibility to strike a tenth. Weirdly enough, I've literally heard the same people who put her forward as an example to those with small hands, going on to argue that you should never stretch at all. Sometimes they even argue against basic legato. If someone wanted to construct a conspiracy by which to prevent those with small hands from ever transcending their slight disadvantage, they could scarcely do much better. Yes, there will be things which just aren't possible and which cannot be usefully forced. A whole lot of stuff can be coaxed, however. It's incredibly unlikely that de Larrocha would have reached the level she did, had she just decided that there was nothing she could do to improve on what nature gave her. People who treat their small hands as innately incapable (and a thing to be carefully protected from all challenges) are not going to come close to what she achieved. Also, even large hands need training. A large hand is not automatically flexible or limber, in much the same way that a tall person isn't automatically a professional level basketball player. There are good ways to train and bad ways. But it's a gross oversimplification to decide that piano playing counts as good, while everything else must be assumed bad.

Skepticism vs cynicism/"Hmm"vs "NO!"

The origins of this article were triggered by a post in a Facebook group for piano teachers- regarding *brace yourself* finger weights. Given the extreme nature of the responses that post received (displaying "pianist's logic" in full force), I will clarify at the outset that the only thing I wish to promote is the value of an open mind- that neither fully excludes nor fully accepts anything without reasonable cause. Skepticism is healthy. That's where we ask questions and seek further information, rather than accept any claim at face value. Uncertainty is healthy- where we recognise that we have inadequate information to give a final judgement. Cynicism, however, is not healthy. That's where we make a snap dismissal of anything that differs from the limits of our experience/assumptions- thus shutting ourselves in a cage and removing all possibility of someday being pleasantly surprised by a new discovery.

Anyhow, these finger weights were met with a torrent of casual dismissals (some arguably libellous in nature). I won't name or quote anyone, but I will summarise the prevailing nature of the responses. Other than myself, nobody had even cared to enquire about the size of the weight involved, before being ready to pass judgement. Needless to say, the Schumann references came thick and fast- only a couple of which tried to debunk the myth rather than spread it. Yes, one man got injured almost two centuries ago (in a tale of very dubious details) so from there onwards every conceivable mechanical device (except the piano) is to be assumed cripplingly unsafe for a human hand. Among a very large number of responses, I saw very few people who were raising questions or seeking to understand more deeply. Anyway, in the end one of few curious posters looked up the actual weight. It starts at...

10 GRAMS!!!!

As a skeptic rather than a cynic, I find it astonishing that the default assumption would be that putting 10g (!) on a finger will probably cause injury. Pop a pound coin (you'll have to Google your own closest equivalent if you're not in the UK) on the back of a finger and that's the corresponding level of mass and indeed danger that would be involved. I won't even tell you to do so "at your own risk". If you want to take me to court under the grounds that you injured yourself with that coin, all I can say is that you're welcome to try (although you'll need a bloody good lawyer). Remarkable claims demand remarkable evidence. The idea that a finger cannot handle 10g (one hundredth of a kilogramme!!!!) without probable injury is a truly remarkable belief indeed. Particularly given that the very same people who call danger are typically happy to preach the joys of setting the whole arm's weight upon the hand!

Most remarkable of all, the discovery that that merely 10g of mass are involved changed nothing in the tide of opinions! I was assured that the difference is that the arm's more substantial weight is "natural" and thus can't cause injury- in spite of applying radically greater forces. Conversely, I'm led to believe that as 10g is "unnatural", it will therefore become injurious. If you're happy with that as an explanation, then we certainly do live in a world in which facts no longer matter. In my second part of this post I'll go into detail as to how arm weight schools really can cause significant strain, when excess weight bears down on an underperforming hand. I can assure that 10g won't, however.

Anyway, it's not that I even recommend these weights. Rather, I was struck by what the response says about attitudes in general. As one poster mentioned, Liberace's rings were probably heavier than 10g. You don't become an accomplished pianist by having the biggest and most rock solid finger muscles, but neither do you become one by wrapping yourself in cotton wool and
living in fear of anything untried. Here's Tzimon Barto:

As a devoted bodybuilder, it's said that after a concert he could easily bench-press the piano for an encore. I think that's only a joke but, regardless, do you imagine that if you asked him to bear the weight of a coin on his finger, he'd back off in case his hands were crippled beyond repair? Or that he'd accept, only to be forced to cancel all concerts for the rest of the season (as a payback for such naïvely reckless bravado)? Other concert level pianists who are also into olympic style weight lifting include Leon Bates and Gen Hirano. I must stress, my point is not that you should lift colossal weights. But this gives some perspective on how utterly pathetic it is for a grown pianist to fear either a rubber band or the mass of a coin upon a finger.

Come back to our ballerina, or gymnast now. Sure, they might not be looking to benchpress double their body weight. However, why would they be scared to lift even small dumbells, when they have to execute chains of backflips? Likewise, why should a hand that is getting around virtuoso octaves be troubled by supporting 10g? I might not expect miracles, but injury via 10g is the very last thing that would be on my mind. No hand is going to shatter into a thousand pieces. The fact that fear of 10g reads like more like comedic parody, than observed reality, speaks volumes of how warped our culture has become. Pianists are being encouraged to cower in response to nothing- despite constantly facing serious gymnastic demands at a piano. And then they wonder why those precious little hands end up injured? You don't necessarily need to have remarkably strong hands, but if you want to tackle serious repertoire then you sure as hell need to have them agile and conditioned for activity!

Weights and Hanon exercises

One of the most useful exercises I've done is to practise occasionally with a 1kg wrist weight. I came upon the idea in a book by the pianist Seymour Bernstein. I'm not going to specifically recommend to anyone else, on an unsupervised basis. However, I will describe some of the details.When I play with a small weight on my wrist, it makes any flawed alignments extremely obvious. Holding the wrist either notably high or low would get tiring very quickly, if sustained. Without the wrist weight it can be like boiling a frog. If you don't know the expression, it refers to the fact that frogs can only detect abrupt changes of temperature- which means that you could theoretically boil one alive without them knowing they are in trouble. In much the same fashion, if I were to play a Chopin study with a slightly crooked wrist position, I'd probably both get away with it for a while and not realise that anything is amiss. Lots of slight imprecision of movement (none of which stands out on its own) slowly adds up though. All of a sudden, I'd eventually realise that I'm starting to miss plenty of notes and feeling everything seizing up.

I just about got away with much that kind of thing, in this rather old video of the black key Etude by Chopin.

The dressing gown slightly hides my long-term habit of holding the right wrist upwards, although you will visibly see a few rather jerky "hopping" movements of the arm, where the legato is poor and the arm is not properly supported by clear connection of the fingers. As I remember, although the accuracy didn't go horribly wrong, my forearm was rather tight by the end.
If I had tried the same with the wrist weights on, I'd know about the slight problems almost immediately, through a somewhat amplified sense of instability. I don't actually do it to make my hand work harder during a whole run-through though. Rather than struggle on while tiredness builds, I use the feedback to stop and adjust into easier coordination- where my wrist is properly suspended at length between a stable finger and the shoulder. The idea is to suspend that extra kilogramme without bearing the whole force down directly on the finger. I literally do it to AVOID weighing down hard on the hand, not to encourage it! When you get things wrong, there is indeed a significant sense of the hand being burdened by extra mass- which is why I don't try to plough through whole performances at speed. Instead, I explore sections (both at very slow tempos and fast burst of small units), looking for comfort and stability at all times. As soon as I detect any moment of awkwardness, I stop and fix it. Nowadays I play the same Etude with far less downward arm pressure and far greater ease of movement.

Also, this brings me back to technical exercises. I've heard many of people say that playing Hanon causes injury. If it can possibly do so, it's because your technique is wrong. Anyone with truly good technique should have no problem playing any of them safely. Avoiding Hanon because its dangerous is simply fleeing from your problems without actually solving them. It's far better to intentionally expose the problems (via only brief bursts) and then make corrections. There are few better places to both uncover and fix fundamental movement problems quickly. When I do the occasional Hanon exercise (with weights on or off) what I again almost never do is is run from start to finish. I'm not looking to build strength with endless repetition, but looking from immediate refinements of coordination. Instead I tend to do small bursts quickly (usually a bar plus one note) and then stop to assess how precise and easy the movement was. If I wasn't happy I'll then do it very slowly, checking for smooth sideways arm movement, while the fingers keep a clear legato connection (to stop the weight collapsing downward). If that works I'll probably do a little bit fast again. Eventually I may play through the whole exercise fast, but never to "feel the burn". If it's not effortless and precise I stop and build precision and clarity again. With this kind of focused approach (based on finding and solving slight problems in the movement, rather than drilling mindlessly) you can find the issues which get in the way of free and easy movement and then change things at once. If I find and correct any points of heaviness, with the wrist weights on, I know that I'll still be significantly clearer and lighter in my movements when I take them off again.

I'd have been far worse off had I simply shouted "Schumann!" (like some mindless parrot) when I first read about wrist weights.

A pianist's innate tone quality- an embarrassing myth of the past, or the innocent victim of bad science? Part i

2019-01-29T08:57:00.000-08:00

Before going any further, I'm going to lay my position on the table. Whether a pianist can vary tone (independently of volume) is a subject that generates such extremist fervour that if some people get any sense that I won't be stating exactly what they want to hear, they'll be off at once. If you're the sort of person who is only interested in hearing validations for your existing belief system, then by all means go elsewhere to cherry pick whatever you can find to agree with you. However, I'm actually here to disagree with any definitive position about a still uncertain issue. When someone is overly certain (either for or against absolute tone) then you should probably be suspicious. There's simply not enough evidence either way for a truly informed final stance yet.

What the science does show is that innate tone is definitely not as big an issue as some might believe (with the majority best explained by illusions of contrast). However, it also shows that it may be audible in particular conditions. It's certainly not a proven impossibility (either in theory or practice) and not enough conditions have been properly tested. After all, the fact that no search operation succeeded in finding flight MH 370 didn't prove that the plane doesn't exist. It showed that they didn't look in the right place yet. Experiments have been adequate to say that if tone exists it's not anywhere near as substantial or prevalent a factor as some have imagined. What they haven't done is provide a basis to dismiss it. In a future post I'll likely go into more detail about why the common theory (of only a single hammer speed being relevant) is unfit as a model for analysis. Recorded data has definitively proven that there's more going on. Accurate theory involves issues of flexion and vibration (which are variable based on how smoothly the hammer gets accelerated). For now, however, I'm going to concentrate on some of the problems with previous investigations and also show where I believe any future research should be directed, for the best chance of getting more meaningful data.

Relative effects proven

Firstly, lets start with what relationships can offer us. There are three main variables here- timing of key depression/release, intensity of each note and pedalling. I doubt whether anyone would wish to dispute that these are an issue. Many deny absolute tone outright, but I've never seen anyone who denies the fact that you could generate plenty via those elements alone. Today, proof of how much is possible without absolute tone is simple enough. Record yourself on a decent digital piano (which merely monitors the energy in the key strikes) and listen back. You can do a pretty good job of a great many things. If I try to play with what I consider "coarse" movements, to some degree I will hear that reflected in the sound of a digital. Styles of movement can still have corresponding effects on perceived tone, through intensities alone. However, I don't consider that quite everything is there. I feel both that awkward movements are punished far less than on a real piano, and that the most expressive playing comes to life far less than on an acoustic. See the following video:

https://youtu.be/Hway_tTFOzc?t=58

Hearing a pianist of Katsaris' calibre has a somewhat perverse effect. In a sense he is able to show off how much is possible from the instrument. In another sense, however, such a fine artist emphasises all the more how much is missing, compared to his sound on an acoustic. That film is now rather old, but I still find even the latest digitals suffer from a constant degree of neutrality. Absolute tone could indeed be the missing factor here, but that belief is not adequate to draw a scientifically worthy conclusion. Technology is advancing, but there are still plenty of other issues that could explain what is missing from the current level of simulation. We can only use it as clear evidence that a good deal of illusion is possible without innate tone quality.

The search for absolute effects

In this previous example, it was incredibly easy to isolate those variables from a possibility for absolute tone. Here, we have much a bigger problem- to isolate potential changes in tone quality from all other variables. The moment anything else is included, you risk making illusions via relationships, therefore no definitive conclusions can be drawn. In testing for tone, scientists have always reduced to a single note at a time (looking to pair notes at similar volume and see if people can h ear any other differences). The problem here is that some things will register clearly only via a build up, rather than in small quantities Imagine a situation where someone shows you a single piano key. Let's say that key has a single mm shaved off its width. On its own you may have no idea at all that anything is amiss. However, build a whole keyboard out of the similar keys and now you have a piano keyboard that is missing 5.2 cm of width (if you're wondering- it's not 8.8 cm as I first thought, because only the number of white keys affects the total width). Still too small to notice? You could say the same about ingesting a trace quantity of poison, vs a number of trace quantities in close succession. 200 or so apple pips contain enough cyanide to kill a person (check it out, it's honestly not a myth!). A single pip wouldn't even cause a headache, however. It's another situation where effects can only be readily distinguished through accumulation.

In cases like this, the result does not even need to be more than the sum of its parts. The sum of its parts alone may register clearly where a single part does not. Just because scientific protocol can only draw conclusions from isolated notes, it does not automatically follow that isolated notes will therefore be adequate to judge an effect from. This is especially true when testing whether humans can hear a difference. Even when analysing sound waves with computers, no two strikes will ever be literally identical to start with. There's no definitive way to determine what traces of difference are meaningful on paper and which are not. If a scientist looks at a number of sound waves and says they show no evidence of tone, that does not mean they are the same waves, but merely ones that have been deemed close enough. This is an especially big concern when it comes to older research, such as Otto Ortmann's from the 1930s. With the extraordinarily primitive audio technology of the day, how could they possibly determine with any confidence what constitutes "close enough" for such narrow conclusions?

When many notes are played loudly into an open pedal, there is every reason to suspect that (should absolute tone quality be possible) the cumulative effect would be many times more distinct. That fact that we cannot segregate variables in any alternative way does not mean that failure to detect major differences provides a conclusive dismissal of tone in general. By extension, neither can we reasonably assume that when many notes are being struck, the relationships between those notes fully accounts for perceived tone quality. All we can say is that both variables could be in play and we have no meaningful way to isolate them (during a genuine musical performance) in order to assess whether there is a cumulative effect. This is not on a par with some "psychic" claiming that their powers would be stifled by testing under laboratory conditions, because the spirits of the ether would not approve. There's a vast and genuinely problematic discrepancy between those circumstances that are convenient to test and those circumstances that occur during real life music making.

Noise effects and the pedal as amplifier

In spite of this problem, I believe that current testing trends have missed a trick that could easily be added without compromising the standard of scientific controls. I have a proposal that I would encourage anyone involved in future empirical testing to pursue. Basically, I believe that the primary issue in perception of bad tone is the thud of the key into the keybed. I have heard for myself how loud this can be, after breaking a bass string on a few different pianos. Play the key with blunt force and you'll hear both the noise of the piano action (sending the hammer into space left by the missing string) and the noise of the key thudding into the keybed. The action noise was relatively superficial, creating more of a clattery sound. However, the key bed thud was deep and far from minor. In fact, on digital pianos there will tend to be a whole lot of noise. The pianist Frederic Chiu told me that when he was practising with headphones, not only could his wife hear the thuds from another room but she could feel the floor shaking in response. I've heard a lot of similar stories about people in apartment blocks unwittingly sending these substantial thuds into neighbouring properties during late night "silent" practise.

On a digital, the thud can occur simultaneously with the sound of the playing and thus compete against it. However, it cannot directly alter the musical sound at source. Back on the acoustic, there is a notable difference. However, it's specific to when having the sustain pedal depressed. When I did so, not only did the key itself thud but it also passed notable overtones into the other undamped strings. Play multiple notes in succession and you will cause a series of similar noises to start building up. To get some idea of this effect for yourself, try pressing very quickly and suddenly on the sustain pedal. It tends to cause something relatively similar. Alternatively, hold the pedal down and "knock" on the piano or even shout into it (open the lid first). You'll get an idea of how freely the undamped strings can be excited- not merely by other musical sounds but also by general noise effects.

Now, at this point I will add that I've seen many scientific papers that both referenced noise effects within sound waves and also tried to casually dismiss them on the grounds that they are not part of tone anyway. Even if we were to assume that outside noises could not interact directly with the sound coming from the piano's strings (in spite of having now proven that they both can and do), this would still be a completely inappropriate technicality upon which to exclude the relevance of this data. What human ear can knowingly distinguish between musical sounds and noises and then segregate them out into isolated components, in order to judge the music independently from the noises? Remember that it's specifically because the human ear cannot be trusted to separate out variables, that scientific protocol will only accept data based on the artificial limitation of an isolated note at a time. Yet we are going to casually assume it can make such impossible distinctions here?!!! Let's be blunt- that double standard is simply terrible scientific practise.

If you were to hear a recording of a pianist in which the start of every note triggered the corresponding sound of somebody breaking wind (with real vigour), do you imagine that you'd be able to easily separate out their musical performance in order to get a good measure of their perceived quality of sound? Yes, it's a ludicrous piece of hyperbole, but it shows that we can't simply decide that something is functionally irrelevant for the sake of convenience alone. It's for good reason that concert-goers are not encouraged to have a chat throughout a piano recital. Try telling security that it won't affect anybody's impression of the pianist's tone anyway... However, the things that we can't even consciously pick out might be more meaningful to perception than those which we know aren't part of the musical performance- and especially when those noise effects are also causing sympathetic reverberations directly within the piano itself. That cannot be considered "separate" from tone on any objectively valid level.

Searching in the right place

So, building on that premise, the most meaningful place to look for tonal variation (both via analysis of the sound waves and blind testing on humans ears) is when the pedal remains open and when notes are played loudly. While I can't say with certainty that nobody has ever tried to test under these conditions, I've never seen the pedal directly mentioned in any scientific paper. Why not? I'm scratching my head here, because nothing would make the role of that thud clearer or more detectable. Now, I already described pedal as a variable, but it can also be used as a tightly controlled constant. If you were to play two successive notes into the same open pedal, they would merge together and ruin the control. But there's no need to do that. Every time the pedal needs to start by being depressed. There then needs to be some delay, to allow any potential noise caused by the dampers to fully decay. If each note is played into these same conditions (always with a full reset to silence, before each recorded note) no controls are compromised whatsoever. All it means is that you have the ripest possible conditions in which to try to determine whether the effect of the keybed thud can be varied independently of the level of volume produced by the musical sound. To exclude the pedal from all testing is irrational. It's the most probable means of literally amplifying a variable which both creates its own sound and has the ability to exert at least some effect on the musical sound.

Theory certainly suggests that you should be able to vary the volume with some degree of independence from the thud. In this post I have given explanations for how you can affect how you can pass acceleration to the key in ways that either increase or decrease the levels of mass and momentum which is sent into the keybed collision. Look at the diagrams early on, which show a finger either lengthening or being squashed while moving a key. When it's crushed inward, the arm will land with more energy. When it lengthens there will be a sense of instead bouncing the mass up and out of the point of contact (with the greatest acceleration focused into the finger tip and key). A pianist also has different contact options, from a very pointed finger to a very flat finger (with larger surface area) that should logically affect the noise effect to at least some degree. One study even claimed hitting the key with an umbrella makes no difference. It makes the methods look extraordinarily dubious, if their recordings were unable to capture any difference between the noise effect of a skilled hand and that of an umbrella. A literal absence of difference does not even seem plausible within appropriately sensitive methods for capture of data.

Let's say two pianists are both playing at a similarly extreme volume, but one manages to reduce the severity of keybed noise by some 10% or so, compared to the other player. While I'd expect the difference to be most audible in thick chords, it's feasible that such a relatively moderate difference could affect the sense of sound even on an isolated note, when the pedal is used to boost overtone relationships. Experiments have traditionally either checked notes struck from above/direct contact, or compared strikes made with a "stiff" or "relaxed" arm. Technique is a whole lot broader though. Most relevant to the severity of thud would be whether the hand and arm stop abruptly into impact (thus dissipating the bulk of the energy directly into the instant of collision), or continue out from the point of contact to send momentum away. The difference is basically similar to that between stamping into the ground with a stop, vs pushing out of the ground while walking/running. Identical sounds would certainly not be expected from the different styles of contact.

Those who rule out tone generally say that "ugly" sound is just the result of playing louder than an instrument's limit. I don't find that credible. I once heard a concert where a rather slender pianist seemed to hit the piano with all her might (sending a lot of arm energy into hard impacts) without getting a notably large volume of sound out. However, the noise effect of the keys was so strong that I believe I could literally distinguish it from the direct musical sounds. The next pianist to play the piano had what seemed to be a much "purer" loud sound, without that same percussive thud. For the reasons mentioned earlier, I cannot prove that my hearing was accurate. However, alongside all of the additional variables, it's still perfectly logical to ask whether the superior sounding pianist might genuinely have achieved a better ratio of direct sound to noise effect. Have a listen to Cziffra here.

https://youtu.be/3zGx98fuR4I?t=33

Most of this is owed to contrasts within the most widely accepted variables, but I do not believe that it's an adequate explanation for that something extra which distinguishes his spiky sound from other players. If you listen carefully, there's a particularly audible thud at 36 seconds in. I suspect this may be caused by a slight stamp on the pedal. However, with all the variation in Cziffra's sound, I believe he also exploited noise effects when moving the keys. Much of the effect is down to wild dynamic contrasts, as well as variety between longer sounds and explosively short ones. But I think it's a hell of a stretch to argue that noise effects are not actively contributing to the perceived sound. I believe he contrasts technique that results in "purer" sound with less noise effect, against deliberately sharper attacks, that excite more chaotic frequencies responses into the open pedal. "Ugly" tone is applied to selective moments, but to great effect. When I listen to other performers play the same arrangement, they do not get that same "bite" to their sound. I can't say for sure whether the sound is more about key bed thuds or attacking the key from a height. Coming from above has been proven here to have an audible effect, that actually precedes the musical tone (note that this study didn't try to downplay the noise as irrelevant to perception of tone, like many other had). However, I'm convinced that the most probable explanation is some kind of noise effect that is both heard directly and through sympathetic vibrations within open strings (nb. even his short explosive sounds often involve a very brief pedal during the attack, which is instantly released after the explosion of overtones).

Coming back to an optimal experiment, notes must also be tested in many different registers of the piano and at many different levels and articulations. While I think it's probable that loud playing produces the most audible thuds, it could also be possible that loud playing might serve to conceal them more beneath the intensity of string vibrations. All angles must be pursued. It's also feasible that different registers of the piano would vary in how likely it is for the thudding sound to show up clearly. Very high notes would both carry a lower energy of their own (due to the lighter hammer and shorter strings) and also be expected to offer less direct competition between their high frequencies and the lower pitched thud of the key. There is every reason to think this would be a good place to test, but there's also plenty of reason to look at extreme bass registers. The point is that even when working on an individual note, we need to look at extremes of dynamic, extremes of register and also (above all for me) use the pedal for the purpose it was actually designed for. It's also logical to try a range of different pianos in case some offer more scope for exaggeration/reduction of thuds than others. I tend to feel that older pianos offer more scope for the kinds of edgy sounds we heard from Cziffra, so they would be a good place to test various attacks into the pedal.

Any test which failed to detect differences in tone (without having checked these kinds of options) has not only failed to disprove tone. It has also failed to contribute anything worthwhile to the pursuit of either science or music. Narrow testing no more "disproves" the possibility of tone than the timing of a school sport's day 100 m parents' race "disproves" Usain Bolt's official world record time. Not having observed a given result is not sufficient to declare it impossible. If you get a negative in narrow conditions, you need to ask what alternative conditions might show a clear result- not go out and tell the world you just proved tone to be scientifically "impossible" under all circumstances.

Evidence for tone in existing research and why belief in at least some possibility matters

I already linked the paper which showed that a preliminary noise effect was sufficient to allow many listeners to distinguish struck vs pressed notes by ear. This study has also given an indication that some listeners could distinguish differences on some notes and also shown differences in the resulting tonal balance, even without pedal. It's not a body of evidence that is adequate to start proclaiming that absolute tone is now proven to be a huge issue. They state in the study itself that it wasn't as much as the pianist expected.

However, there is a world of difference between recognising some possibility (with more research required) and asserting a conclusive possibility of absolute zero. Moving away from the scientific stance and towards an artistic one now- even if it were truly impossible to exert any influence over absolute tone whatsoever under any circumstances, it would still be a bad idea to work based on cold pragmatism first and artistic ideals last. At face value, the piano should be most deadpan and least expressive instrument imaginable. However, when it really does sound that way then nobody is to blame other than the pianist- for playing it so poorly. Deciding that you should think merely of pressing keys faster or slower, in order to make notes merely louder or quieter, is no way to succeed in producing sophisticated illusions of something greater. In the earlier days of the study of tone, people had grown up in a culture founded upon phrasing and musical ideals. The idea that notes can only be louder or quieter was nothing but an intellectual novelty for those artists who were swayed by the research. They might have believed it away from the instrument, but you don't literally see them treating piano playing as founded upon nothing more than attempting to find the right speed to move each key at. The playing was not defined by a strict belief in tonal limitations but by artistic goals.

Today there are some pianists who are so obsessed with working from (what they believe is) pragmatism, that they have neither learned to control absolute tone nor even to produce any worthy level of illusion. They are so caught up in a premise that is probably not even entirely true, that they have forgotten to be an artist first and a thinker second. If you want to make even an illusion, you're going to need to do a lot more than think of pecking at piano keys at different speeds, in the hope of getting a worthy phrase. I recently saw a post by a pianist who was trying to ridicule his teachers for telling him to think about his tone quality. The joke was on him, however. Whatever else you might believe, tone quality does exist. We can debate whether it can exist independently from volume, but it certainly varies in proportion with volume. If you punch into every note needlessly loud then you will indeed have an uglier sound than a pianist who shapes phrases according to musical principles. Sure enough, this pianist's sound was noisy and brutal- filled with percussion and lacking in close control. Ruling out the very important advice of a teacher (based on dubious science) had done him no favours. He was too busy calling tone impossible to realise how poorly he was controlling even relative dynamics. If you want to make a musical phrase, then you can forget ramming the arm on to every note (and then validating a bad approach by saying science has proved that the piano doesn't care how you move the keys). A musician needs to learn how to move the arm smoothly from side to side- helping to organise the movement of the fingers in better relationships, while also helping to avoid the volume of excessive downward pressures. I don't think anyone has ever been worse off for striving for tone quality at the piano. However, at least some of those who insist that tone is impossible will be putting themselves at a genuine artistic disadvantage.

There's something incredibly absurd about the fact that many people are willing to believe that basic musical techniques for expression are on a par with occultism, while basing their view on a religious style faith in what is very low quality and poorly tested science. At the science end, it's about time that archaic assertions were tested with better quality methods- to help prevent this movement of elevating flawed science ahead of artistic goals. Most importantly though, is how to look at things from an artistic point of view. You must at least believe that musical illusions exist- and that you can't hit the piano keys any old way if you want to make them. Especially not with an umbrella.

Effortless balance within piano technique- Poise in chords and octaves- connecting your whole arm to the keyboard, without burdening the hand

2016-12-23T14:59:00.002-08:00

This is technically the second part of my core group of posts on the subject of balance. However, if you haven't already worked through the first then please carry on regardless and begin here. I'm certainly not discarding the prior post- which contains extra exercises for healthy balance. If you've been through it, you didn't waste your time. However, you'll notice a notable difference in the tone here. The first post was perhaps rather abstracted from actual playing. In this one, I'm going to show you some tricks that have instant and direct bearing on ability to play passages featuring chords and octaves (especially those that demand a powerful sound) with ease and finesse.

Since the previous post I've developed new approaches, that give a much quicker way of feeling the connection to the keys during musical works- with not only comfort, but also a sense of poise. Following the main exercises, I'll show you how to recognise when typical problems have their underlying roots in a poorly poised hand/arm combination, and I'll give a simple corrective method. Video demonstrations (of myself using the same methods to develop poise in musical examples) should help clarify how crazy quick-fire passages and simpler melodies alike depend on knowing a sustainable quality of connection to each musical step. But, first, there would be little point in reading on if I couldn't prove some reasonable degree of first hand experience.

While I'd hope that most people might agree that signs of poise are on display there, the real question is what IS that? Some people might note than I'm not as "relaxed" as some pianists. While consistent ease was a goal, going floppy in the instant after each sound was certainly not. In fact, I'll prove to you that there are situations where going into a flaccid hand will CAUSE greater tension, compared to a more steady hand posture! While I'd hate to sound like I'm trying to put myself in the same category, watch Vladimir Horowitz or Sviatoslav Richter on Youtube and what you'll get is a sense of sustainable physical focus. Now, this post won't be one of my shortest, but I offer a firm guarantee to any pianist (from beginner to concert pro) that if you're willing to risk half an hour or so of your life, you'll come out with a clearer understanding of what exactly is going on beneath the surface of both players. I'll show you how and why they can engage quite so positively (while staying well within a range of comfort)- and I'll give you a very simple trick to get closer to them. If you try all the exercises and don't feel I've brought something radically new to your understanding of active poise within high-calibre pianism, you have my open invitation to leave an expletive-riddled tirade of abuse in the comments section!

Before getting fully started, I'll just define the term in a very simple way that clarifies why it matters so much. In short, poise is an alert state of readiness for anything. By using exercises that are designed to check for this, we can get feedback on comfort AND function. Here's a preview of the main exercise, to show how simple it is to apply (although please do work through the rest of the post before trying it, in order to avoid any possible misunderstandings). There are a couple of short excerpts from Liszt and Chopin. For each, I play it first with what is frankly a really crappy dysfunctional hand position (deliberately, although this honestly isn't much different from how I used to play). I then do the basic exercise to change the coordination and repeat with a productively engaged approach.

If a hand is clenched tightly to force a conventional position or drooped down due to aimless misuse of relaxation, both will depend on points of stiffness in the overall balance (especially in the wrist)! Obviously a clenched hand is tense, but the wrong type of relaxation too will cause tension elsewhere. Former problems were caused by intent to relax, that needed abrupt stiffness to stop my knuckles falling. Checking freedom of movement in the middle fingers quickly exposes unnoticed points of tightness and helps to free them. Picture a snake preparing to strike/a gymnast poised to vault. There is stability, but also complete readiness for movement. Balance doesn't veer between something akin to biting down on a plank of wood (in anticipation of having a limb amputated, without anaesthetic) and the equivalent of a drunkard fainting into a flowerbed. It typically remains in a range near the middle, that can be maintained safely and easily, without a hint of discomfort. This kind of active poise also stands up well to nervousness. Both tense and floppy positions can get very unstable during nerves- inviting a battle against trembling that will tend to be fought by clenching harder, in a bid to resist. Real poise connects in a way that will help stabilise even a shaky arm via improved security (providing an even stronger foundation for beating nerves, than mental strategies alone).

What can weight really do?

For the first section, I have to establish two facts about gravity (which are not the ones you typically hear of) ready for the exercises. Now, a great many of my ideas are closely in line with the teachings of Alan Fraser (who is notably opposed to weight traditions), but this won't be an anti-armweight approach, as such. There's a huge amount of common ground with weight ideals here, but I'll have to ask gravity devotees to keep an open mind towards a few game-changing adjustments.

Anyhow, firstly I must demonstrate exactly why an oversimplified idea of connecting weight into the fingers can be quite so problematic. So, what does weight really do?

Hold your hand over the keys and simply flop your relaxed hand and arm, like that of a corpse (example 1). Your fingertips can either start touching the keys or above. Before we put any actions in, let's get an objective awareness of what happens during a relaxed state, through release of weight. Where does the weight go and exactly what movements does it cause? There will be subtle variations, but it should be relatively universal that weight does NOT pile easily upon the fingertips and into the keys. In fact, in the truest release, the wrist is where the weight of the arm should naturally manifest itself. If you can't feel this, try the same release in two extreme locations- firstly so the fingers are only just upon the very edges of the keys and then towards the backboard (both in example 1).

(nb. example numbers will show directly on the video if you're on a desktop, although Youtube unfortunately omits them on mobile devices)

In the former, the wrist should go freely down into the empty space. In the latter, the weight of a released arm should primarily be felt to plop the heel of the hand down against the keys. The downward pressure caused by gravity scarcely passes through the fingertips to the keys- unless we make active muscular interventions, to redirect it there. True use of dead weight will go primarily into a wrist "flop". Your wrist is a hinge by nature, after all, and not a rigid link to the hand. To illustrate further, close the piano lid and practise the same (example 2). When relaxed, the fingers should land fairly gently with the real thud of energy going through the heel of the hand. Even when the fingers land first, the main sound should be when the wrist lands. If you sent it to the fingers without the wrist plopping like that, you actually pushed the arm forwards and up on contact- which is hardly a hallmark of free-falling weight! Don't worry about trying this one right now (I'll give a detailed explanation in a future post), but witness example 3 for illustrations of this action on the lid and then octaves. Note the upward quality to the landing. I do a very obvious continuation staccato and then a more subtle version without releasing the keys. The arm does not land like a tonne of bricks in either.

Anyway, let's come back to the genuine effect of releasing dead weight. The action of gravity upon the upper arm also causes a chain reaction that should pull your forearm and hand horizontally back towards you. A genuinely released arm (that is not held forward by muscular action) will not only droop through the wrist, but it will tug the hand back along the keys until it falls off. As a secondary aspect, if your elbow wasn't held tightly to your side, the upper arm will fall inwards towards the torso. Gravity might be a downward force, but the overall effect on an arm occurs in all three dimensions.

Gravity Facts:

1. Upon literal release of the arm into the keys, the most significant manifestation of gravity DOES NOT naturally weigh notably upon the fingertips. Without a host of muscular interventions, genuinely free falling arm weight will primarily channel speed and momentum into the collapse of the WRIST. The heel of hand is the primary point on which weight will land.

2 The resultant effect of released arm weight tugs the forearm and hand BACKWARDS from the piano (and draws the upper arm INWARDS towards your torso). It doesn't just rest conveniently down into the keys from on top- unless your muscles are holding the arm forwards.

The problems with getting weight wrong

At this point, if you're more interested in a simple route to what does work, feel free to scroll down to the exercises, starting with the section headed "forwards and under". However, if you want the very deepest understanding of pianistic problems, I'm first going to show why those two facts make armweight ideals so tough to apply. I'll give a quick run down of four basic problems and then show a film of myself (from some ten years back before I began reworking my technique) where you'll see how they get in the way. Now, before anyone should accuse me of burning a strawman, let me be clear that I'm not suggesting that all armweight methods ask you to literally play merely by letting go of dead weight. This is not the whole story. However, I do think it's fair to say that the adaptations (which are required to successfully direct weight into the fingers) are rarely made clear.

Although it IS possible to find a functional manner, two types of radically disconnected and highly overworked arm can easily arise. In example 4, there's an illustration of a hand that collapses and strains really badly while I try to send weight on top, by holding it forwards. I'm exaggerating it at first (beginning with a relaxed droop into a cluster) but even the far smaller collapse shown after can be a problem. If the knuckle sinks even a little during loud chords, it typically means that you must pull back/stiffen severely. Do you see my fingers working really hard to pull back from disaster? This is an "emergency save" that stops the knuckles from hitting a cluster, but through way too much effort. Excess relaxation merely created the demand for tension.

In example 5, my hand works better- engaging to open the arch with movement, to allow for total confidence without risk of falling down. However, in a bid to get weight over the fingers my wrist ends up very high (to the point where it creates a slight "pinching" during landing, rather than full ease). Although a sense of weight can now pass meaningfully through the fingers, holding the weight forwards radically contradicts the points about how a relaxed arm behaves under gravity. Obviously we can use a high wrist some of the time, but once you're there it's not a sustainable place to stick around. Spending too much time in such a position means working harder against gravity, thanks to a mindset of getting weight into the keys! This is a valid tool in a balanced whole, but it's not good as the most standard option.

At this point, if we go back to the most literal release of weight (rather than try to move it over the fingers) there are new problems. The arm's weight can drag the wrist back and let it down, but allow it to continue and we'll end up with the new discomfort of a drooping wrist (example 6). It is important to be familiar with such a genuinely released arm, but letting the wrist go so far doesn't create an easy connection to the instrument. It's no better poised than when holding weight forwards. Still, one final possibility- we can add various rules about hand position and keeping the wrist straight etc. On the surface, that might seem to avoid all those problems. It may indeed be helpful to some. However, it easily creates an extremely self-conscious state in which everything is tight and restricted (example 7). What we see obeys many common rules and unquestionably prevents the knuckle droop. It probably matches perfectly to what many would regard as a "professional" look. However it is not so much a "balance" as a rigid position that is forced by severe mental and physical effort. Horrifyingly, some methods even directly advise the pianist to "lock" their wrist while playing a chord- hardly something that matches to an idea of using weight to take the effort out of playing! The appearance of this position is only the tip of the iceberg. As I'll show later, it's a process that determines whether it works. Do you sense a difference in example 8? Superficially it looks fairly similar, but this time it's real poise. If you think the actively extended fingers look more "tense" than in example 7, I hope that the coming exercises (plus a film of Argerich using her fingers exactly this way in her notoriously wild octaves) will at least give you cause to think.

Anyway, if you look at this rather old film of myself (in the days prior to taking my taking any serious interest in analysis of technique), you'll see a hotch-potch that veers between all of these problems. Don't be too alarmed by the severed head.

I'm frequently trying to direct weight to the fingers, but my knuckles droop badly under that pressure. I thus have to seize up to avoid going into palm clusters. Sometimes the knuckles stand up to it better, but I still get trapped into working hard to hold weight forwards and over. Sometimes I'm simply clenching unnecessarily tightly to stay in a more conventional position. And sometimes I'm drooping my wrist sharply downwards with gravity to free it from too much time in various high effort positions. These particular moments are often fit to trick a casual eye into assuming I seem "relaxed" throughout the performance. After all, the "tension/release" school says an instant of tension is fine as long as you release it as soon as possible, right? Well, if the floppy parts made you assume I was generally freer than in the first film, I'm afraid your eyes have fooled you. This is relaxation as a mere prelude to the most severe kinds of tensions. I directly recall the sense of burning that had built up in my forearms by the end of the video. The floppy bits are pure misdirection. Overall it didn't even fulfil a basic standard of comfort.

Forwards and UNDER

Anyway, enough moaning about problems. From now on, this is all about the exercises for feeling the simplest adaptations from literal relaxed weight, into an effective quality of balance. The main one quickly brings all these concepts together- with a simple trick to feeling a state which is every bit as comfortable as it is functional. However, you'll first need to run through one slightly more abstract one, to get used to a key ingredient of the balance state.

Firstly, please find a way to set up a mirror beside the piano so you can fully observe yourself. Before anything, we're going to check how free and responsive your hand is when in a neutral state. It's a simple case of taking your hand (in the most literal relaxed state possible) and moving it forwards towards the backboard of the piano. When you run out of movement for the fingers, continue to move your arm regardless (example 9). This is no cause for panic, as you need merely stay loose so the fingers can fold in, thus pushing the knuckles upward.

With a lot of students, this will be very revealing. If you have that tendency to try to send your weight OVER the fingers, the wrist may rise sharply, which would likely squash the knuckles as unpleasantly as in example 10. This kind of thing happens with the majority of students I give this to, upon first attempts. If the wrist gets higher than the knuckles it is simply a whole other action that pushes your knuckles downwards. For what we need here, the knuckles must be free to drift up above the wrist, as a response. If this isn't happening, take special care to think only of slowly moving the wrist directly forwards, with no other expectation. You may be going up as a result of pressing down on your fingertips, without even realising- particularly if you normally aim to get weight there when playing. If the wrist does go above the knuckles, flop it and pause (to notice where the weight naturally wants to rest) and then lighten up enough to try again. Only active pressing can burden the knuckles, not genuine dead weight. Another common problem is if you are used to bracing your hand, to resist movements. If you can't get it loose enough to respond, first wiggle the fingers using your other hand to release any stiffness (see example 11- but apply it to all individual fingers). Then put your hands up, as if to surrender to a masked gunman, only without lengthening out the fingers (example 12). Loose fingers will automatically fold towards the palm- in the same way they should be free to fold in response to the backboard. I did one with a floppy rather than aligned wrist. Although theoretically more relaxed, it's interesting to compare this. Do you feel a slight pinching compared to when the wrist is more actively aligned?

Once your hand has learned to be free enough to do this, gently let the heel of the hand down and rest into a cluster. You should now notice that slight tug beginning to pull at your wrist. Don't let it start sliding you backwards for now, but any sense of the arm going in forwards is now completely over with. Let the upper arm begin to ease back (causing a slight tug at the wrist) and roll very slowly from side to side (shown already in example 9). Notice again how this does very little to bear down upon the fingers. Even if tapping the knuckles with your other hand, they should stay puffed up with ease. When weight is allowed to sink passively, it should be observed to rest into the heel of the hand. Gentle rolling helps you to check that you are merely letting go, mind, rather than exerting any active pressure. Don't try to set the weight onto the wrist, but simply notice it while you roll- like you're having a gentle massage against the keys.

Finally, float the wrist up by mere millimetres- releasing the keys back up so you're left with your fingertips nail-down on the surface of the keys. At the same time, feel the elbow coming backwards from the keys by millimetres, to create a sense of length through the wrist, that joins hand and forearm in a long line. You should find that the sense of comfort has only grown. This tiny "correction" to the natural sunk wrist is extremely important. A lot of people claim a low wrist is dangerous during playing- but this is not true unless you weigh down really hard or actively press down on it. From a released wrist, even the first few millimetres of drifting up can relieve virtually all pressure and make it both safe and comfortable to sustain. Ease a little further still and the fingers can gently uncurl into a near effortless playing position- where the knuckles are high but the wrist is still a little lower.

Do you see similar characteristics to what I showed in the first film? Can you feel a sense of the arm being connected to the keys, in spite of how little weight is resting down on the tips (ie too little to even depress the keys)? Hopefully you already will but, if not, repeat a few times and get used to both letting the wrist down and then floating those few mm into a very light, yet connected state of the arm.

Forwards and over with the wrist is an extremely popular part of most teaching methods and it is a useful part of any good pianist's overall arsenal of options for chord playing. But this exercise teaches you an extra option. You learn to make room to get the wrist forwards and UNDER the knuckles- without any association to piling force upon your knuckles! Forwards and over movements of the wrist are limited because they will force your knuckles downwards, unless the hand can resist. Resisting this force as your norm can be very hard work and potentially dangerous (particularly if you cope by stiffening). You can't be truly at ease until you have an alternative, where the hand can expand with guaranteed comfort. This version doesn't pile on force, but instead encourages the knuckles to raise up and away from compression! The wrist may still ascend slightly (so it's not a case of "forwards and down") but it never gets high enough to shove down upon the knuckles. It doesn't just look easier- it really IS easier!!! A traditional "strong" position is not strenuous to either find or sustain, unless you are creating the work by piling on downforce to resist. However, the right coordination is completely alien to many pianists, even to some at a rather high level. It wasn't in my repertoire of actions, at the time of the old film. I recently discovered that I have a bone cyst- which limits freedom of movement in my right wrist (thus making it hard to entirely fix habits of a high wrist in that hand). However, using this particular exercise has already gone a long way towards easing the restrictions.

FEELING the balance point from inside

Anyway, let's look at how to achieve a similarly easy quality in real life chords. With your thumb and fifth, depress an interval of a sixth from E to C (nb. I will show how to use similar methods on almost any chord, at the end of this post). However you did this, I want to show the journey into a quality of the utmost poise. Rather than try to analyse that quality directly, what you need is a task that will expose any tension that restricts freedom to move. So, take your three non playing fingers, lengthen them out slowly a few times, feeling how the arm should want to follow. Start to wiggle them gently from the knuckle, within a comfortable range of motion- where the finger never fights to reach higher than the knuckle (I can comfortably go beyond this and you may notice that I accidentally did a couple of times, but the important thing is to stay well within your easy range!). Pat the surface of the three black keys, to feel their resistance (example 13). Try with curved fingers and lengthened fingers, to see which is easier and freer.

If you concentrated really hard on the previous exercise, that may already be virtually all you need to get the idea here. However, let's make sure you don't misunderstand. If you're getting it right, it will feel as effortless as breathing (and I don't mean for a lifelong hundred-a-day smoker). If it feels like anything in your hand or arm is working hard or resisting the movement, you have certainly NOT found poise! To try to be sure that you can discover it, I'll address a few typical problems. Firstly, if you have that habit of holding your weight forwards and over the playing fingers (example 14), you won't have an easy time. You must be able to let the wrist down while the knuckles are encouraged to bulge- just like the prior exercise. If the wrist gets stuck high, flop down and back- either letting the heel of the hand into a cluster, or letting it swing into the open space off the keys. From here, if you have a habit of literally relaxing your hand, you will doubtless be more comfortable at first- but I'm afraid you may still get into a mess as soon as you begin to waggle the fingers again. In the prior exercise, the hand was shown how to open without any internal activity at all. This time, your hand is going to have to get off its backside and be more proactive (albeit relatively gently). A relaxed state is pretty damned easy to get into, when your only other concern is to succeed in keeping two keys down. It's not necessarily so easy now, however. A "relaxed" state that turns out to be a tense one (as soon as you have this extra task, to expose all the hidden tension) is pretty useless in the majority of situations.

After your wrist has been allowed to gently sink, try again from this lower point. Some people will just get it now. If not, the specific problem is that without properly opening out your hand, nothing but serious tensions can stop the knuckles from falling that bit further into a cluster chord (I show this literally happening as part of example 15). That same tension will also stop other fingers waggling freely- making this an excellent test. If relaxing down into an unsupportive thumb and 5th, you're only creating a need for greater tension, to avoid falling the rest of the way. See how my fingertips struggle to lift up but fail to have any effect on the squashed knuckle bridge. This is a common emergency movement, that narrowly avoids falling down to the cluster- via supreme effort. Avoid this like the plague. Rather than struggle to sustain such a disadvantaged position, you need to make extra sure the wrist can sink, while the knuckles stop receiving any of that downforce. Fifth finger and thumb must become twin pillars which support the knuckles and also the wrist, thus buying freedom. With the right movement in the middle fingers, you can help encourage this. Once you have it, those fingers can instead dangle freely, from a stable knuckle. Can you yet find the position that is open enough to simply let them hang- without any risk of dropping into extra notes?

If you can't get open, practise drawing thumb and fifth together (avoid bending- to clarify that the important movements come right from the base of the thumb). Imagine if a very low resistance elastic band were gently pulling these in together at the keys (example 16). The effort is very small, but you need a little of this action to grow the most meaningful structure. Create length and slightly draw them together on the keys. To check for full openness, use your other hand to physically open the space between your thumb and second finger. If there's any sense of physical resistance to the rising of the knuckles, you URGENTLY need to release that. Either your arm is weighing down hard in the worst place (and probably even pushing with far more force than mere gravity) or your hand is locking into a rigid position, rather than trying to grow itself. A good variant for those who experience this would be to practise it from light contact on a table top, so you don't have to worry about keeping keys down.

Either way, the hand must move to open itself out, and the arm must lighten up enough to make this easy. You don't need big forces to keep the keys down. When fingers first extend, you should sense a slight "pull" upon the forearm- which ought to be free to follow along with the movement. If the arm stays put, you are locking it in place or slumping its weight too heavily downward. To be clear, however, the lengthening of the fingers is not expected to physically drag your arm's dead weight! Rather, the gentle lifting should merely encourage the arm to lighten up- so the fingers can connect to a freely moving arm with minimal work. A good comparison is yawning- where the obvious bit takes place at the mouth, yet the whole chest "floats" up during the activity. Imagine if your fingers were gently yawning. The arm should connect with them as naturally as the chest does to an actual yawn. Let the elbow drift out by a few mm too, so it's not slumped into your torso. If you've got it right, your arm will be subtly wobbling when the fingers start to waggle.

Ultimately a suitably free arm and wrist should feel suspended between shoulder and fingertips, with no sense of "holding" anywhere in between. Think how a plucked guitar string vibrates from end to end. Press part of the string against a fret however, and the vibrations pass no further. Here, you must let vibrations go freely back up the whole arm, like an open string. This isn't some hippy "positive energy" type vibe, but actual literal vibration. It should at least pass through the wrist and reach the elbow, but it ought to go all the way to the shoulder, even. My upper arm will quite visibly wobble in response. Most people only talk of sending energy from the arm down through the hand, but you must be equally capable of letting more subtle energy flow BACK from the hand and up the arm. Arguably, this is the most important of the two. Anyone can shove arm energy upon their hand. However, to transfer it, the hand must connect to the keys effectively. Feeling responses coming back in the opposite direction points to a much more sensitive coordination and links things up on a whole different level. By waggling and looking for the distant "echoes" of the movement, you have radically more feedback on the freedom of your whole arm, than you could get merely by holding the two notes in a static position. Allowing these waves to travel back requires length in the wrist. If the wrist is either caught up high, or pressed down, it's like pressing the string into a fret. In fact, even when straight a tense wrist will block the flow. Only when suspended freely via length (from knuckles to elbow) instead of fixation, can vibrations flow.

Do you also feel the subtle responses in your thumb and fifth finger? To appreciate why this teaches them so much about coordination, try standing on one leg and waving the other about in the air. Find a sensible place though. If you do happen to topple over on to the mantelpiece and smash all of your best Princess Diana commemorative plates, I accept no legal culpability. Anyhow, there's no magic position that you can lock the standing leg into. Rather, it must continually adapt to feedback in highly instinctive ways, to keep you in balance. Wiggling the other leg sends reactions back through your body that challenge your standing leg to keep refining and correcting its organisation. By practising fluidity of balance in response to ongoing movement, you're triggering the unconscious- in a completely different fashion to what happens when you simply hope to find a position and set it in stone. Oh, and while we're on this, try relaxing the standing leg into a notably bent position and then have another go. As I said, the closer you get to collapsing all the way, the harder you work to resist the last bit that would take everything down. How do you usually stand for comfort?

Sunk?

or actively elevated OUT of the point of contact?

Once you've learned to "stand" your hand, concentrate particularly on moving slowly up and down with the wrist while continuing to move the middle fingers (already shown in example 13). There should be a reasonably wide comfortable range. To illustrate it, here are three photos of slightly different qualities, all of which I passed through in my demonstration. Towards the lower end of the range, we have a classic Horowitz style position (seen below in his left hand).

If anything, he often goes lower still with his wrist. As long as you're moving gently back and forth in both directions the fingers should move freely- proving that the wrist is still loose (any tension would restrict movement of tendons that pass through the wrist). In fact, it's far more dangerous to be incapable of letting your wrist gently down- which points to severe tension somewhere. However, notice how the weight associated with letting the wrist sink may require slightly more engagement to keep the hand open. Find your comfortable range of options- by continuing to waggle the spare fingers, while remembering the imaginary elastic band between thumb and fifth. If you have even slight discomfort you don't need to force things lower. Just notice that point and go back the other way. But bring in the other hand to check for collapse and try again. When letting the wrist down, you need to be especially certain that the knuckles cannot droop towards the thumb, to discover your true range of easy motion.

Towards the upper end we have a classic Rubinstein position.

Although his wrist is rather high, the important thing is that he doesn't let his knuckles get crushed. Different as they look on the surface, the positions at both ends function due to near identical qualities of openness. One way to envision the common link is to imagine if you were to trap a ping pong ball into the palm without bending the fingers. A little of that action is present in both. However, it does get tricky if the wrist is higher than the knuckles- and can easily stray into all the potential problems I linked to holding weight forwards and over. Although more "conventional", I honestly think the Rubinstein position is by far the harder of the two to get right. My fingers definitely waggle a little less freely when my wrist is the highest point, so I wouldn't personally advise using this as your most normal part of the range. Something akin to Richter's typical style of poise lies in a nice middle ground, within the overall range.

In his right hand, the knuckles are just slightly higher than a relatively level wrist. For myself, I find it far easier to move the middle fingers freely when they are in the supposedly more "extreme" Horowitz style position. However, once poise has been earned, the middle fingers can relax and dangle to create this more conventional hand position. It can still feel pleasantly stable- as long as you have achieved the important support in your thumb and fifth!

Anyhow, far greater ease should by now have been earned, compared to if we either held forwards and over, or plopped all the weight down and hoped to stay relaxed for free. However, this is about so much more than comfort! This state is also alive, ready for any of the fingers to perform at a moment's notice! If you simply tried to mimic any of the above positions by sight alone you'd probably be very tense in the wrist. A good position is but a snapshot during an activity, rather than a rigid state to copy and fix into. Take a look at Argerich's middle fingers here, most specifically in the revealing camera angle at 1:20!

A tense or braced hand shape? No, there's no fixation there when her hand lands. The middle fingers are reaching out and show clear evidence of slight movements, just like in the exercise I gave you. It's not a clenched hand, but one loaded with springy action out of the keys. It's a process, not a mere position. Relaxation? No. Relaxed middle fingers don't behave like that. And a relaxed thumb and fifth could never stand open in such a radically exaggerated arch shape, while being propelled into the keys with such velocity. This is poise at the virtuoso level- caused by neither generic stiffness nor relaxation. It comes through excellent discrimination between useful movements and counterproductive ones. Far from being some eccentric "quirk" of a great pianist (that she manages in spite of) the movement I got you to perform is an integral part of making her octave technique free of impacts! Don't try to launch straight into such extreme bursts of octaves right now, but DO start training yourself to stand easily out of held octaves with elevated knuckles- by checking in on the non-playing fingers, rather than simply hoping to relax into freedom.

Traditionally, a lot of people talk of finger independence, but here it was the relationship between both playing and non-playing fingers that we used to find poise. Ironically, referencing back to the connected quality of all the fingers helps to better activate those which are playing- giving them an even greater sense of individuation from the rest of the hand. Rather than giving all the work to the thumb and fifth, it's actually being shared out. The middle fingers are completely involved. Try playing octaves from a drooping arch (due to lack of clarity in the role of both playing and non playing fingers) and it's impossible to have the same level of confidence. It's too easy for the knuckles to fall down, which makes it impossible to go at it with true confidence. Argerich doesn't merely fix the arch of her hand against collapsing down, she actively grows it when moving the keys- with an action that moves both playing fingers and non-playing fingers in opposite directions. This automatically ends every octave in a state of easy openness (leaving no generic stiffness to be relaxed!). The continuation of movement springs her knuckles safely up and away from the landing, rather than down into an increasingly stressed position.

Anyway, this is veering more towards analysis of the technique during the actual instant of sound. I'll save the rest of that aspect for the appropriate section. To conclude, I'll show you a few specific examples of how to directly apply this concept in your everyday playing.

Exercises to apply to everyday practise of chords and octaves

No mindless mechanical drills here. This is a method to apply during thoughtful practice of musical repertoire. Firstly, I'd hope it will be self-evident that you can take the exercise and use it for any octave. See a demonstration below

I deliberately play each "badly" at first, before using the process to regain poise. As it goes on, I stop collapsing in the first place and use the focus to sustain the shape more. If you have a smaller hand, note that it's all the more important both to slightly grow (rather than squash) the knuckles and to confirm that no tension gets in the way of moving those other fingers. If you can't lengthen and slightly wiggle them, you have serious tensions getting in the way. I have a large hand, so to prove that this isn't just idle talk I also demonstrated this on a chord of an 11th (from a work by Cesar Franck). I even show the same on a 12th, to create radically greater difficulty than most adult hands would have with an octave. Many pianists get into their very worst collapse when near their physical limit. These are actually the places where it's most important to avoid it, to prevent strain! In some cases, it even turns out that an extra note can be reached, after reorganising the posture. As I show, I can't even strike a clean eleventh if I collapse my hand and raise the wrist in a bid to reach out. Practise collapsing and regrowing the shape of the knuckles (through those middle fingers), to find the most comfortable open position available to you. Most people concentrate so much on stretching outwards, they only enter the weak position and then stiffen. As I show last, away from the keys, from such a position you need to feel the thumb and fifth drawing slightly back INWARDS. Even on the 12th (which is so extreme for me that I frankly shouldn't even really be holding it at all) you can see that there's room for me to gently squeeze inwards enough to raise the knuckles just a little. Even if you can barely reach an octave, there is no excuse for poor form, sorry! Weighing down on the knuckles (rather than being free to grow them) is the very worst mistake that can be made- both in terms of safety and function.

You can apply variants to improve your poise in fuller chords too- as long as they use both thumb and fifth finger. Basically, first play the chords in whatever fashion you normally would. Whether you are stiff, collapsed or whatever, the means to improve is the same. Release the middle notes and perform the same exercise. Merely ensuring that your knuckles are open enough to support the other fingers will give a massive head start. However, there are also a couple of adaptations which can be made. Firstly, you could release all notes apart from the outer two, but then tap against the inner notes of the chord with only the appropriate fingers. The workings are scarcely different. It still checks for freedom from tension, but in a way that also primes your hand for the whole chord. I already showed this in the video seen earlier:

An interesting example of the approach to octaves can also be applied later in the same Liszt Etude ("Wild Jagd")- where he writes a passage that is quite impossible without alert middle fingers. In this case, it works on two levels. We are not just using those middle fingers to encourage the hand to connect better on the octave. This time, we're also involving them for the specific reason that they literally have to be ready to move their own keys right after! Even if you're nowhere near the level to tackle this kind of repertoire at full speed, if you can reach a comfortable octave then you could still have a go at this type of figuration. Just go slowly, with a pause between the octave and the rest of the triplet- so you can clearly feel the readiness. You must be very free in those fingers to properly distinguish between a healthy melodic sound and far lighter accompaniment.

I show the more open version first and then a drooped version, which compromises the free movement. Try deliberately letting the knuckles droop into relaxation and then notice quite how much more strenuous it is to move the inner notes. Do you also feel how much easier it is to get a big sound on the octave- when the middle fingers are already playing their part by preparing for their coming movement? When I show the practise version I'm initially merely recovering from droop. However, after a few this is no longer happening at all. Finally, I don't even need to lengthen or wiggle the inner fingers to prepare them. They start to go straight into readiness. When you've learned the right feeling, the poise can come instantly with each octave. After your hand has been prompted enough times, you should come to remember the important feelings without requiring the trigger movement.

The final variant demands slight caution, but you could also move only the fingers which are not playing, while keeping the whole chord depressed. Just gently lengthen out, like "yawning", and the knuckles should grow while the arm follows. Then you can keep the open hand, while allowing the fingers which had reached out to dangle. However, particularly if finger 3 plays but finger 4 does not, you may wish to avoid this. The theme behind these is never to work hard, but but to find an EASY way to trigger poise. Now, it's not impossible to move the 4th alone safely. See various demonstrations here.

Firstly I show it on the lid. Notice how the 4th finger is the least visible movement. All you're really looking for is to cue the rest of hand to grow and open up as before. Note how my arm and wrist "breathe", while I use only a very small and gentle motion of the 4th. You can reference it against the gentle grasping movement, which expands the knuckles out in a similar way (against no resistance from weight whatsoever). It's actually far more dangerous if the hand collapses badly while playing. I showed a collapsing hand a couple of times- with the 4th having to strain to lift up, to prevent falling down to a cluster. What we want is not that, but only an incredibly mild lengthening out. Done right, this will actively protect you against any need for those really strenuous lifting movements, that barely avert disaster during a severe collapse.

However, without direct supervision it could still be possible to get this one wrong- especially if you struggle to lighten the load from your arm. If unsure, consider that the other exercises will achieve much the same, so concentrate on those. However, if you're thinking of the stories of Schumann's famous hand injury, please note that I didn't lift upwards at all and I definitely didn't force anything! I simply lengthened my 4th out forwards while still aiming slightly down and I then allowed it to hang freely from the support of the rest of the hand. While my approach couldn't be further from the blind-optimism of extreme relaxation oriented schools, it certainly isn't to be confused with a "no pain, no gain" attitude. If in any doubt at all, use one of the two easier alternatives already described. Even there, always remember that this NEVER has anything in common with the old-fashioned idea of finger lifting to challenge and develop muscles. It is purely about making very low-effort movements, to trigger changes in coordination that should only improve comfort. If they don't, STOP right away!

Postlude

Anyway, that's more than enough for now. I hope this may give readers cause for a rethink about the commonly held notion that constantly willing yourself to relax is the road to getting the most comfort. In a sense, I'm sure that you will go on to be more "relaxed" after mastering these exercises. However, given that this will have been earned by searching for the useful ACTION, I greatly prefer the word "comfort". The popular idea that we can fix tension merely by generic desire to be more relaxed (without checking in on positive actions) is horribly flawed. In the complex activities of pianism, comfort is primarily something that we EARN by ensuring that the important ingredients have been put in place. From there, we have a foundation upon which to free up all else. When we aim to release anything and everything, we may easily release all the useful actions- leaving no choice but to balance things with far greater efforts elsewhere.

Anyway, knowing poise over the outer fingers really is the foundation of pianistic balance in general. With the foundations set, my next post will be extremely direct about showing how to apply the "forward and under" principle to finding poise in virtually all other pianistic situations (from basic single notes to double thirds etc).

Listening vs. visualisation- exploring the link (or lack of) between musical intention and real-life results

2016-06-01T21:03:00.004-07:00

(Nb. I wrote the vast majority of this post some two years back. Although I've not yet completed the associated practical exercises, I thought it was probably about time I did something with it. I'll look to publish a part ii in the future)

This will be in a very different vein to most of my posts. This has zero to do with making objective analysis of how movements translate into control over sound. Rather, it's specifically about how the inner musical conception and listening relates to the sound that a pianist conveys to the audience. Here, I'm simply going to illustrate issues that may play an enormous role in how accurately we are able to listen to ourselves. This first part details a rather remarkable aural phenomenon, whereas an upcoming follow-up post will demonstrate a few related exercises (both in listening to yourself objectively and understanding how to better project qualities of sound, not merely into your own private thoughts, but also into the ears of a listener).

Firstly, I want to set the scene with a little story about an experience I once had. A few years ago, I recall hearing a pianist tell me that, in his opinion, the secrets to technique and sound production lie primarily in the ear and in the depth of musical conception. This is not an uncommon stance by any means and it's a view that is shared by such virtuosi as Arcadi Volodos and many others. He spoke with such confidence and assurance that I naturally imagined that he must be among those lucky "talented" pianists- for whom difficulty doesn't seem to exist and for whom the limits of what they can do really are the same as the limits of their imagination. At least, that's what I imagined until I heard him play a simple lyrical piece! Rarely had I heard a pianist pound out melody and accompaniment notes alike with such incessantly brutal percussive force! With every note of the melody came an individual thrust of the arm- that produced lump after lump, without a trace of binding logic or musical fluidity. Even the accompaniment notes were scarcely less aggressively forced out. How can a serious musician hold such a belief system, yet hammer out a simple melody on a note-by-note basis- as if he is quite deaf to his own sound?

On a less extreme note, a phenomenon I have sometimes noticed in the past is performing artists who give fantastic masterclasses, yet comparatively ordinary and uninspiring concerts. In the masterclass, scarcely a bar goes past where they do not have some kind of interesting insight to offer. It becomes evident how deeply their musical thought processes run- with attention to all kinds of musical details. However, when the very same musician plays in concert, all too often they sound like a totally different pianist- producing relatively ordinary effects, that show few signs of those profound musical thought processes that they had been describing to the students. They have all manner of ideas about how to sculpt the music, when teaching. However, come concert time the very same players sometimes fail to transmit more than the merest outline of the ideas that they had expressed verbally, within their actual realised sounds.

So, why? What is it that causes this disconnect between the understanding and the audible results- to the point where they can be so far from the internal conception? Well, this post is entirely about those issues. However, before progressing onto this directly, I want to start by directing you to a practical demonstration of some very interesting scientific background about the nature of listening- and the sheer difference between what the ear collects and what we actually "hear".

The demonstration in this film shows how deeply what we "hear" will necessarily be distorted, if we have a sense of expectation.

https://youtu.be/NJ-IfVHJH58?t=23m51s

The full demonstration lasts for around 5 minutes from the point I've linked to (you'll need to skip manually to 23:50 if opening on a mobile), but it really is quite astonishing and thus well worth the time. Listen to the song being played backwards without looking at any words, and your brain will hear gibberish. Then listen again whilst looking at the words, and your brain hears them rather clearly. Put them away again and you're straight back to hearing gibberish (provided that you have now forgotten the lines- although in the event that any words were consigned to memory, that too would be enough to trigger the distorted listening).

I first read Mlodinov's excellent book "Subliminal" on these issues a good few years ago, but I only recently came to experience the actual startling effect via this demonstration. Expectation literally transforms how the brain processes the information received by the ears- and it's quite impossible for the conscious mind to override that expectation. If you're reading the words, your brain will "correct" the sounds received to match to expectations- provided that they approximate reasonably closely (ie. presumably it doesn't automatically work for literally anything that the brain is told to expect). I don't know whether Adam Buxton had any conscious awareness of this phenomenon, when he made the following comedy video:

https://youtu.be/7-ZnPE3G_YY?si=oT0MbmSK4Y8TzonY

Either way, the humour stems from how easily the brain is fooled- leaving the listener both surprised and amused at quite how genuinely (the majority of) what we hear there seems to match precisely to written words, that are clearly altogether inappropriate to a church hymn. Again, listen without looking at the subtitles and you simply won't be likely to mishear in the same way. You'll just hear very muffled singing, scarcely any of which either suggests the made up words or even gives much hope of deciphering the real ones. Expectation is what specifically determines how severely we mishear in this way. The unconscious part of the brain literally distorts what the ears perceive- producing a sound that has been altered in order to align itself to expectation. But the hearing itself SEEMS objective- we don't in any way perceive the fact that the aural information is effectively being "doctored", in order to create our impression. We experience the dubiously interpreted version as if it were nothing more than the original raw data that comes via the ear.

So, let's bring this back to the musical issues that I started out on. It should be pretty clear by now how significantly this objectively proven phenomenon might be expected to influence how we "hear" music. Consider those performers who hear something wonderful in their head- for example, a beautiful full-bodied singing tone that rings out all the way to the back of a hall. It's not hard to put such an image in your head, particularly if you've spent much time listening to such phenomenal artists as Emil Gilels or Alfred Cortot. All the better still if you're also acquainted with the real deal, through such great singers as Callas or Caruso. But does that internal image of how you want to sound necessarily translate into execution of that sound? Or does it translate into an example of the same phenomenon? What if the internal intention for the sound is truly wonderful, but a level of expectation distorts the accuracy of listening? The brain could quite feasibly succeed in turning something relatively dull and ordinary into the experience of hearing something rich and colourful. Could it allow even a pianist who thumps the piano like he's trying to tenderise a steak to "hear" a beautifully rich vocal cantabile? I honestly think that the level of delusion created by a strong internal expectation could potentially go so far as that.

At this point, I want to make it absolutely clear what I am definitely NOT arguing, before anyone might severely misinterpret where this is going. Doubtless, some readers will already be absolutely irate that I've dared to utter such blasphemy as the notion that a strong internal conception for how you want the music to sound could prove to be a negative thing. Well, that's not actually my point. A pianist's sound is most certainly limited by the scope of his musical imagination. If no musical conception is present, the pianist could not produce any musical results. We certainly should strive to develop an internal image of how we wish to sound. However, the fact remains that strength of internal conviction does not automatically translate your conception into an actual sound. If you are too lost within your inner intention to be experiencing the ACTUAL sound that comes out of the piano, you will be limited in terms of what you can achieve. To truly listen with accuracy, live and in the moment, what if we must also counter that with time spent simply listening, driven by relatively few expectations?

Now, I did already state that you can't consciously decide to try not to hear those written words out of the gibberish, once they are there inside your head. Here, however, I feel the situation differs. If you step back momentarily from the strength of the inner conception and try to listen to yourself without expectations, I am confident that you really can grow to hear the results a little more objectively and in a manner that is less clouded by whatever you are hoping to hear. In many circles, we are given a simplistic and definitive assertion that we must ALWAYS intend a specific musical result. Is it actually such an unforgivable thing to sometimes play a passage with a slow and exploratory feel, listening in on an interval by interval basis- without cast iron expectations? Wouldn't we become more accurate listeners if we regularly tipped the balance towards OBSERVING what results during such an approach, rather than always be trying to force a completely predefined idea to arise in that precise form?

Stephen Hough once made an excellent analogy about how automated player pianos might never truly convey the "sound" of a pianist, when played back upon a different instrument at a different time. He says it's like recording all the details of a car journey between two cities and then expecting to program a fully identical drive on a different day, in a different car. Even for someone for whom such a journey may have begun to feel habitual, there are all kinds of adjustments which have to be made as live responses. Sometimes something unexpected happens and you simply can't press on according to a rigid plan. You have to observe it by being as present as possible and then make whatever adaptation is necessary. Player pianos are utterly incapable of making ANY adaptations to that record of a particular "journey", which is why they rarely give more than a hint of a player's personal sound. They are a pure preordained auto-pilot that comes with no corrective intelligence- either to adapt the details in order to stay in line with an originally intended vision, or to adapt in more experimental ways that would create something spontaneous and fresh.

Coming back to real life performances, it was said of Horowitz that not only did he make such adaptations around what he heard coming out of the piano, but that he even took it so far as to adapt his ideas according to what he "sensed" of the audience's mood in a given moment. Elsewhere he described his approach as planning the basic colour scheme in advance, yet picking all of the particular shades in the moment. It's a nice way of putting it- to clarify that while not every single detail has been rigidly planned out, it's not a matter of completely random ideas either. It's a balance between planning and living/listening in the moment- in order to sense what best matches the specific sound that is being heard in the present. Whether a pianist wishes their concert performances to accurately correspond to a strict plan, or involve spontaneity, I believe that practise sessions have to involve some degree of experimentation and flexibility.

Particularly when a rather rigid conception is bound into strictness of metre, I believe it's incredibly hard to actually hear yourself with any accuracy. The inner rhythmic conception can become quite so driven, that there's never an opportunity to linger momentarily- in order to listen for that little bit longer to anything that grabs your interest. One of the problems with the backwards words is that they're gone before you know it. You can't stop and linger on a single syllable, in order to confirm what you really heard. Well, in music you can, as long as you make it possible for yourself. I feel confident that this is how we can correct the delusion of expectation- by spending a little longer to notice what you're truly hearing from a note or chord. For me, the best listening practise frequently incorporates "stolen" split seconds, in which you can be truly engrossed in the actual moment of sound that exists there and then, before going on to both "feel" and hear the characteristic of the particular musical interval that leads to the following tone. In a follow-up post, I'll give a far more detailed description of how you can use such practise techniques as extreme rhythmic flexibility- in a way that will both expand on your repertoire of tonal colours and improve upon your ability to listen in to your true sound. While sticking primarily to the musical theme I'll also tie in a few aspects of physical technique, in order to show how closely the tonal continuity between notes is linked not only to the ear, but also to an appropriate feeling of physical continuity.

Piano Technique, Weight in Motion, Boxing, Taichichuan and The Cherry Tomato- an objective analysis

2015-11-03T16:57:00.000-08:00

Although I hope to get some of my more specifically themed core posts completed in the near future, for the moment here's a collection of musings on a whole range of issues that was inspired by this article, by jazz pianist Mark Polishook.

http://pianodao.com/2015/10/31/piano-technique-weight-in-motion-boxing-taichichuan-and-the-cherry-tomato/

The primary theme here is of weight (and the limitations of what it can accurately account for in objective reality), although the relationships between pianism and martial arts/tennis may well be of interest to some. In short, I can agree with very little asserted within the article and thus wish to debunk numerous claims within, via simple practical illustrations. I certainly hope that this post won't end up as a tirade of negative vitriol. However, I'm publishing it specifically because of how interesting I consider some of the off-shoots of my disagreement to be, with regard to my own alternative conclusions about how the analogies can best be related to pianism (in a manner that is both simple to understand and consistent with credible science). Also, I have no personal beef with the author and would like to start by making it clear that my intense disagreement with the validity of what he draws from these analogies should not be interpreted as any direct slight upon his capabilities as either a teacher or as a pianist. I've often witnessed teachers (whose verbal or written explanations of technique I would dispute) using practical approaches that are so effective that the direct plausibility (or lack of) in the explanation itself doesn't in any way interfere with what they draw out of students. My disagreement is in no way intended to read as any kind of professional condemnation. Indeed, if he wishes to provide any follow up comments to what I have to say here, in the spirit of two-way dialogue, it would be most warmly welcomed.

However, the following arguments were triggered for two primary reasons. Firstly, there are numerous issues being portrayed as if having some kind of real life grounding in science- most notably the outrageous pseudoscience (nb I don't use such a word lightly, and will substantiate that assertion fully) that is quoted from boxer Jack Dempsey. I have a big problem with ultra-subjective imagery portrayed directly as a reality for two reasons. Firstly, a subjective method does not become any more effective on a practical level, due to having flawed analytical logic tacked on. It if does offer something useful on a practical level (which it may very well, to those who come at it from the right starting point), there will be ways to trigger the same practical effects, without also creating confusion. But above all, if it is not a real truth, even on a practical level it's not only very unlikely to work for everyone, but may well be least effective of all for those who pay the closest attention. Advice should not punish those who follow it the most correctly. A great many of the ideas dealt with here are extremely prevalent beliefs in modern pianism, yet represent just about everything which I consider to have severely held my technique back over a period of many years. Indeed, while I'll go on to give theories as to why scientifically implausible ideas about (supposed) use of weight might well help a boxer or tennis player, I'll also show quite how easily they could hinder some of the most important fundamentals of pianism (unless the pianist has already been lucky enough to have developed them).

Anyway, the first assertion which I take overwhelming issue with is as such:

"Third, body weight rather than finger strength gives a much greater sense of control at the piano – weight-based technique returns more feedback to the body than finger technique alone."

Firstly, we have a false dichotomy. It's not a simplistic choice between one option or the other. As I illustrate in my post on balance, intending to use weight through the finger often leaves it with no choice but to work considerably harder, compared to when the finger itself is proactive about connecting out of free will. As for the claim about sensitivity, I'm simply baffled. Let's introduce an excellent analogy that I heard pianist and teacher David Kuijken use. If you want to scratch your nose, do you do so by moving the whole arm back and forth from your shoulder, or do you move the finger itself? Well obviously the arm carries the finger to your nose. But I certainly don't get as much feedback or sensitivity when I try to scratch by moving the whole arm, while the finger only seeks to maintain "structure" (rather than get on with performing the scratch for itself). By extrapolating further on this idea, it also gives an excellent representation of how narrow it is to offer but two polarised options of "finger technique alone" or weight. If I lie on my back and involve arm weight in the scratching, it's the last thing that could add to either control or sensitivity of feedback about the movement. So, I certainly don't use any weight and neither does it help in either respect. But do I scratch my nose with the finger "alone"?

Well, it depends what you mean. The arm always plays a role of some kind, whether here or at the piano. Just not one of having to either generate the basic movement or apply notable weight. My arm is entirely responsive to the finger movement, but it just doesn't need to take an active role in performing the movement. It merely aligns and supports. Likewise at the piano. If "finger alone" means locking the arm stiffly, it's a bad idea whether you're scratching your nose or playing the piano. But a responsive arm is something else altogether than a weighted one. To imply just two options doesn't bring us even close to the reality. I get the most feedback when my finger strokes the key and the arm is made light enough to respond freely to resulting reactions. It's not finger technique alone. But neither is it anything to do with weight-based technique. If I weigh down notably on every finger, my arm stifles my freedom to perform that finger movement, and is not free to "breathe" with the reactions. With notable weight, things tighten up in the forearm when you try to move the finger with anything resembling a deliberate quality- because the application of weight starts to create a blockage against the reaction, thus working muscles harder. It's not unmanageable for a single note, but it's not half as sensitive as what I experience by stroking the finger and keeping the arm light enough to respond freely.

See the difference in practise at the piano here:

Which looks more sensitive to you? In the first execution, my specific goal is to use "weight-in-motion" to move the keys. So my arm thus sinks down while moving each individual key, before having to lift back up to repeat. Otherwise weight is not "in motion" And as Polishook also claims "Again, no need to use strength – arm weight alone is sufficient". Sufficient to move a piano key, yes. Sufficient to give the finest control over every sound, or to sculpt a longer phrase though? No. Perhaps the author will say I have followed his instructions wrongly in some way. However, I would welcome him to clarify precisely which points I am disobeying, if so. The reason this style of playing doesn't work well for a phrase is specifically because I followed the explicit reference to "weight alone"- and thus ended up producing sound by plopping the weight of my arm down on each key, without moving the finger. Not only was there no word from the author on the need for to do so, but we were also directly told that that the weight would be sufficient. I'm not trying to play Devil's advocate here. This is the genuine mistake I made in the past, as a result of trusting such one-sided descriptions as an accurate description of the process. I'd be glad if he were to clarify whether I have done as he intended, or whether he feels I've gone against something he states. But seeing as we're being told that weight is supposed to be in motion, that's exactly what I am indeed doing in the first example (while I instead keep it balanced in the second, and produce the tone with the most wilful motion of my fingers). It seems clear that the description itself is wrong, rather than my application.

Also, which looks closer to the fluid energy of tai-chi, visually? Bobbing around to set weight into motion, or stroking the finger through the key until it gradually evolves into a "standing" position that is still brimming with life and vitality? Which looks more like smooth walking? Dropping down through individual notes is a good exercise for a very tense student to loosen their arms up, but to literally produce sounds one by one with a series of individual arm motions is but an occasional tool in wider technique. This is absolutely not the fundamental building block of normal playing. Today, there are occasions when I use that type of motion, deliberately. But I generally find far more sensitivity and control when my standard intention is to stroke the keys via generous finger motions, while the arm follows the phrase horizontally and without any intention to weigh down on each key. The arm responds freely to every finger action- meaning that I am neither using "finger technique alone" (the arm is abundantly involved through the phrase) nor employing either gravitational weight nor arm momentum to provide the basic motion of the key.

Anyway, to see whether it is fair to assert that there is more sensitivity through a weight-based technique, try the exercises within this video, away from the piano. Start with the hand in something resembling a playing position and either rest down on it, or drop down from a small height. Then start again with the hand resting down only very gently, fairly flat, and lighten the arm all the further still while the fingers and thumb gently draw in together, to open the arch. Do you experience more sensation in the contact of your fingertips when resting weight down into the hand (or to put it another way- when the fingers are having to resist the weight that you are applying to them)? Or when gently stroking the fingers inwards while the arm is light enough to drift up and away with the reaction? I definitely favour the latter. If I should switch to wishing to rest weight down, after having finished stroking the fingers in, the loss of sensitivity that occurs can be absolutely phenomenal! Just the most gentle connection is enough, when the hand finds a living balance through a gradual path of unrestricted movement. When feeling the soft fur of a cat, would consciously striving to rest the weight of your arm upon the cat offer more quality of sensation than a lighter and more gentle contact?

It's worth noting that if you also should attempt the exercise while starting from significant weight (I mean the prior one to that- leave the poor cat alone please), you'll experience just how stifling weight can be upon the hand's ability to expand safely. Can you spot on which occasions I was moving freely and easily and when I was having to apply a little strength, to perform the movement against the resistance of extra weight? Find out for yourself both what gives you the most feedback and what feels the most effortless, when you play around with the options. Finally, try experimenting with a similar style of recitative passage at the piano, as I demonstrated earlier (I used a passage from Tchaikovsky's Romance op 5, if you want to try the same one).

"So finger strength isn’t the issue at all. Using the resources of the body efficiently – the weight of the whole mechanism all connected together as it is – that’s the issue. Athletes use whole-body weight-based technique all the time. Which is why tennis players talk about getting body weight behind the racquet. Same in baseball with bats or really in any sport where a stick or a bat hits a ball. Weight-based technique is why balls get “hit out of the park” so to speak.(...)

The advantages of weight-based technique are why boxers put their body into a punch."

I barely know where to get started here, as it's not only remarkably one sided but gives us no significant clue as to what the word "weight" is even supposed to mean to the reader. To illustrate this, let's think what weight can add to a punch in the only situation where it's notably literal, firstly. Sit on a bed or soft chair and put your hand in the air. Then relax your arm and allow your hand to fall freely down. Okay, you probably wouldn't want your youngest daughter to have been lying right underneath that, but would you say that you could have knocked out Mike Tyson, had you managed to channel that into a punch? After all, we all remember that scene in Rocky II in which he raised his fist in the air, let it fall on top of Apollo Creed's head and knocked him out cold (or am I misremembering?). Gravity is really not all that quick to generate speed. Drop a ball from a height and see if you can then outrun it with your hand to catch it again. Not exactly an astounding feat, because the earth's g-force is nothing terribly fancy as far as rates of acceleration go. It's especially lame compared to the levels of muscle generated acceleration that boxers put into a genuinely powerful punch. And that's to say nothing of the fact that it's impossible to even send any notable weight into generating the vast hand speed associated with a horizontal punch.

Jack Dempsey's diagram of a sled shows how we can redirect acceleration via weight to work in a different direction, supposedly illustrating that it can also be directed to a punch. Well, Jack, I'm afraid you're no heavy-weight when it comes to intellect. Now, I suppose you could grease up a slide and rest your fist on it. At least I have no alternative idea how else we might redirect energy of a descending fist into a horizontal path- and he doesn't seem to have even tried to conjure up any theory of his own. You could let your relaxed fist slip down it and then see how much speed it generates before contacting a stack of bricks at the bottom, although I'm less than convinced that you'd impress sufficiently within the local dojo to trigger an emergency black belt award ceremony there and then. While I probably wouldn't fancy my chances against Dempsey in a back alley, in a one-on-one bout of bare-knuckle science he'd probably have been lucky to see the end of the first round against an average high schooler, if he thought a punch might in any way be linked to either falling babies or speeding sleds. The fist can neither fall for long enough to gather the kind of speed that either a baby or sled builds up (not even if dropping vertically) nor is there anything to redirect the utterly unimpressive speed into a horizontal path. In fact, to put these issues squarely into perspective, the fastest recorded punch is 44 miles per hour- which would require a fall of some 130 or so feet, for such a speed to be reached via falling weight!!! So what is all this talk of "weight" supposed to mean- given that gravity was so bad at the task of generating a serious punch, even in the ridiculously contrived situations where it could make a true contribution?

Well, some serious clarification is due, if anyone is to make sense of such a colossal discrepancy between the myth and scientific reality of "weight". Here, I'd like to expand on a style of analysis I've previously used at the piano regarding relative speeds- although I'll illustrate it through a practical exercise. Firstly hold your elbow slightly bent and swing your hips to the side, while keeping the arm in a held position. Here we used a turn of the whole body to accelerate the fist. A formidable blow? Hardly. The fist speed was limited to the speed generated by the body, which was very small. Turning the whole body through the strike is almost certainly what people mean when using "weight" in this particular context. The word tends to be used in a colloquial fashion, as a substitute for the more accurate term "momentum". Polishook may have intended this colloquial meaning in much of his article- although it's very confusing if so, as the passages he quotes from Dempsey are about literal weight in relation to gravity. That is an altogether different issue. Literal weight can create acceleration instead of muscles (although we've seen how dubious this was). Colloquial weight, (technically momentum) in boxing, tennis or baseball is generated almost exclusively by muscular acceleration of the body and thus has zero in common with his pianistic idea of using weight "instead of" muscle, for energy. As far as I can gather, he appears to be switching freely between the two different interpretations of the word "weight", as if they were just a single concept, rather than entirely different ones (if not, I'd warmly invite him to clarify what he does actually mean, as it's not at all clear to me).

Anyway, as we've seen, using the body "weight" (or rather, momentum) to generate the fist movement achieves next to nothing on its own. We accelerated the fist to a small speed, but divorced from more important movements it doesn't even register as a real punch. So, this time turn your hips and also throw your shoulder forward around your torso. On top of the speed achieved by the hips, we have added some speed to the fist. The fist is now separating out from the body in what I call "positive movement" and thus reaching a greater speed than that of the body itself. Although we didn't really add much yet. So this time, add the extension of the arm via the elbow. Finally, we have a REAL punch. The arm adds a truly notable level of acceleration to the fist, away from the shoulder. This speed is now being added to speed generated by the body. The most important ingredient in accelerating the fist was by far the arm motion. Clearly it makes more sense to build up a good jab first (a punch that all boxers learn). The body can then be added, to supplement momentum behind what is already a good fist speed. But if the fist itself is not accelerating out and away from the moving body (with plenty of speed of its own) the body has been conclusively demonstrated as incapable of doing the arm's work.

Try applying the same concepts to a tennis forehand. Once again the body produces pitiful results, when merely coupled with a static arm. If the arm itself is swinging freely and easily, you can turn the body through, to achieve some extra racquet head speed, plus considerable extra momentum that supports through the contact. But you cannot possibly accomplish results by pretending that the arm is only there to make a structure that will pass on the power from the hips. No, it's there to perform the stroke and it must do so without fail. The turn of the torso can again add extra power, but the arm must always individuate out from the body to generate the bulk of the racquet head speed. It's not about unifying the body into one piece that merely transmits motion from the start of the mechanism to the very end. It is a matter of parts both receiving speed from the prior link in the chain AND individuating out to generate independent movement. Successive parts need to make their own meaningful contributions to motion, or the whole thing fails badly.

Now, in either of these scenarios, I see no problem from thinking about weight (whether in the colloquial or literal sense). It's abundantly obvious that you won't achieve results from locking up your arm and then turning the hips. It's equally obvious that drooping limp body parts towards the floor is not going to generate a whole lot of horizontal motion. The imagery of gravity doing work can loosen up muscles in readiness for unrestricted freedom of movement, without creating a genuine distraction from key elements. In no way would pretending that gravity is responsible discourage those individuations of body parts, while generating acceleration.

But let's return to pianism for a while here, in an entirely comparable fashion. When a pianist who hasn't first learned to move his fingers properly thinks of using arm weight to set the keys in motion, it's like telling a tennis player who turns his body (without swinging the arm a jot) that he needs to forget his arm and use his torso more. Okay, the tennis situation is ludicrous and unlikely to ever occur, but the pianistic equivalent to such a situation is exceedingly common. Instead of necessarily freeing the mechanism in readiness for essential hand movements (which is what I believe happens under the surface, within success stories), weight ideals at least risk causing huge distraction from them. At worst they may even gradually program an impressionable mind to actively intend to avoid finger movements (after all, remember how strenuous it was to perform notable finger movement against armweight, in the earlier exercise!). I suffered badly from this and I've encountered numerous students who can sink weight, yet have rigid/collapsing hands that have never learned to apply the necessary baseline of movement to a key. Under arm weight, a hand that has inadequate capacity for movement will buckle under the weight into what I call negative movement.

Think back to a decent punch. The aspect that people almost always stress is the role of the body. However, the fist is carrying the greatest speed found anywhere in the mechanism, when it individuates out and away from that turning body. It could not correctly be seen as something that merely transmits the lower speed of the body. It must not only add extra movement on top of that from the body- but a truly significant amount. Likewise in tennis, the fastest speed generated must be passed specifically to the racquet head, when the arm individuates out from the turning motion of the body. None of these examples are about fusing parts into a structure, but about separating them out from each other during the action. In the diagram above, the knuckle ends up travelling faster than the fingertip (due to the finger being compressed from both ends, between the force of arm-weight and the key's resistance). Thus the fastest speed peaks at the knuckle. Not only does the fingertip fail to individuate out with a higher speed, but it doesn't even manage to move as fast as the knuckle (which is gaining on the tip and thus certain to be moving faster than it). The extra energy carried in this speeding knuckle joint merely crashes into the keybed as an aftershock, without reaching either fingertip or key.

This time, the finger is generating at least some motion of its own (just as the arm had to be in the punch/tennis stroke), meaning that the fastest speed is unquestionably channelled specifically into the key itself. The fingertip is now gaining further away from the knuckle- just as the fist was gaining away from the body in a suitable punch. Even if we are intent on playing via individual arm movements, the full potential won't ever see the business end of events unless the hand can make at least some small positive contribution to slice through the key resistance. Oh, and in case you're wondering why this matters (given that pianism isn't all about generating the fastest possible key speed) this post explains why directing your greatest acceleration towards the point of contact has as much to do with precise control over the very softest sounds, as it does to with producing the loudest ones efficiently. Although, for a more a concise example, picture aiming a ball at a near target. It's every bit as important that your hand is accelerating out from your body for a gentle but precise throw, as it is when aiming for raw distance.

Moving on, if we still insisted on using the weight to generate the key motion, how fast could weight generate repetition? Firstly, lets look again at how effective gravity really is as an accelerator. Throw a ball in the air to around eye level and watch as it changes direction. Do you notice how it seemingly "hangs" in the air for a while?

Okay, it's not quite as extreme as Wile E Coyote, in the seconds before he looks down and finally plunges into the gorge, but using weight to produce movement is not any basis for fast reversals of motion. Consider also that a piano key moves but a cm or so. How much speed was generated in the first cm of the drop? Very little at all, even in free fall (and remember that a piano key will also be putting up notable resistance that lowers the rate of acceleration). The falling baby of Dempsey's diagram could scarcely be less relevant, because in even moderately fast pianism we don't have time for long falls, over which to gather acceleration. In slower and particularly in chordal pianism it's indeed possible to gather speed over a bigger drop, as Rubinstein famously took to matters of extreme. But it's objectively inaccurate to attribute the possibility of achieving more than around three (probably a very generous estimate) or so key movements per second to free-falling weight. Even if you pull back very sharply after each drop, we're looking at six individual reversals of direction per second. Take a small object and drop it from a cm or so then pick it up and repeat, as fast as you can. Even if you should choose a bouncy object, it won't be very fast. This should give you a pretty good idea of how relatively slowly weight creates speed, in the early moments of a fall- and of how utterly implausible it is to attribute key movements to weight, during even a moderately brisk scale.

"So, again, no need to use strength – arm weight alone is sufficient. Which doesn’t mean muscles aren’t necessary. Because they are. The role of the muscles is to help the body maintain an efficient structure – so we can use and apply body-weight-in-motion."

To say that the above is a case of the most extraordinarily one-sided wording would be generous. I'm afraid it's not technically even correct, unless we're talking about an extraordinarily narrow style of limited piano technique, that would rule out all manner of possibilities. As we saw in boxing, weight in motion cannot possibly explain the world record punch speed. Given that it wasn't generated by a boxer having plunged from the necessary 130 ft in the air, the likelihood that his muscles created the acceleration is a safe enough bet. Far from being about "maintaining" a static structure, it's all about separating out the parts of the structure into motion. Neither can weight come close to explaining many of the most routine ingredients of pianism. Aside from "structure", muscles have an unequivocally important role of generating the movement that causes keys to go down. I've already illustrated how few repetitions are possible per second, by setting weight in motion. If the author didn't intend the literal interpretation of the term that he himself chose to employ, I could only invite him to consider alternative wording- as I don't know how myself or any other reader might be able to deduce what he really is alluding to. But the statement, in the form he asserts, it is incorrect beyond any reasonable doubt.

It's interesting that the video selection is of Errol Garner- who certainly does depend on plenty of literal use of falling weight to move keys. Now, I take no issue with Garner's phenomenal musical talent, but does his fondness for bouncing the arm represent everything you need in pianism? In case you're second guessing, this is certainly not a jazz v classical issue, mind. I've posted it before, but I'll post it again here:

These kinds of runs likely approach some 12 or more notes per second. The arm is neither falling 12 times per second, nor being picked up ready to fall again on an additional 12 occasions within the very same second. As I said, 6 reversals per second is probably a rather generous estimate for what is possible from weight in motion. 24 per second would be plain ludicrous. Muscles generate motion in his fingers, beyond question (regardless of whether it is the ones in the forearm, or the intrinsic muscles in the palm) while the arm moves at a perfectly leisurely rate. Yes, there are places where he does use dropping gestures- but exclusively in places where he has the time to do so, and where it's conducive to the type of sound he wants. For smoothness and for speed, it's abundantly visible that results are produced by moving the arm laterally, while the fingers produce the motion of the keys (without letting the arm's weight collapse down, other than as the exception). This very simple style of motion is the foundation of piano technique. It works every bit as well for Tatum style licks, legato melodies in Chopin, or passagework in Mozart concertos.

What Tatum exemplifies is how truly simple means can produce the most extraordinary results. The only thing we should regard as "remarkable" about his finger technique is the sheer speed and control. But far from involving any kind of radical motions, he simply mastered elements that any pianist can already be learning in their earliest lessons. Weight in motion can be simple too, in the right context, but there are places where it precludes results, if it's your basic foundation. Arms don't move that fast and Tatum is clear evidence that they have no need to do so. The extraordinary things in Tatum couldn't arise by using falling weight to replace the role of muscle motions. Garner achieves some of his most outstanding results via a baseline of dropping weight and I'll certainly not argue otherwise. I doubt if his sense of timing could easily have been achieved in any other way. However, while his runs may not have been quite as super smooth and light as Tatum's notorious virtuosity, there are plenty of moments in the video where he too uses the slower gliding horizontal arm motion, while the fingers individuate to produce the key motions. No matter how many moments of authentic weight in motion are indeed on display, he certainly wasn't some one trick pony who only knew how to drop weight.

I'll stress again that I sincerely have no ill will towards the author. However, I've "pulled no punches" in these honest responses to his assertions, because I write as one of the many pianists who has previously been duped into assuming that such phrases as "arm weight alone is sufficient" exist in reality, rather than purely in some pianists' extremely vivid imaginations. Such ideas seem so enticing, that's it's hard not to be swayed by a picture of having to use very little effort. However, owing to my deficient ability to apply finger movement, attempting to use weight to achieve the impossible ultimately made me work harder and more strenuously. For all I know, the author may teach far more about cultivation of finger movements, when teaching in person. However, by writing an article without a single word to acknowledge that that fingers and muscles must generate not only "structure" but also movement of keys (just as the arms must generate the majority of the fist/racquet head speed in punches or tennis strokes) he paints a severely flawed picture. Not only is it objectively flawed on an analytical level, but it is potentially misleading to anyone who should take the ideas at face value, without having first learned extremely advanced finger agility.

I'll finish by giving a brief taster of a concept that will likely be fleshed out more in an upcoming core post on the basics of generating sound. Alan Fraser uses Tai-Chi walking as an excellent analogy for the action of fingers in pianistic legato. However, I wonder if a step machine is an even better one still- given that it introduces something analogous to the actual depression of the piano keys? If you've ever used one, consider the style of motion on a medium to higher setting (so the pedals don't put up a huge resistance to being moved). Do we simply stand on them and allow weight to push the pedals down while the leg keeps structure? No. Do we try to lock the torso into a fixed position and shove down with the legs, as if they were a whole separate entity from a rigidly fixed body? No. Like the title of the machine suggests, we are supposed to imagine that we are trying to walk UP some stairs. By trying to push the body up and away over each step, we actually tend to balance the torso into a pretty steady equilibrium. It doesn't collapse notably down on top of each foot and neither is it weight that drives the pedals. The legs move the mechanism via muscular engagement and there's no question that they could be seen as a mere "structure" to pass on weight in motion. Although a conscious effort to weigh the upper body down through the legs only provides greater burden (just the same as such a mindset only burdens when climbing real stairs) there should be a clear feeling of responses in the torso, to the action of the legs. What if we take a similar image of leading with motions of the fingers, that try to push up at responsive knuckles and arms (which end up nicely balanced like the body), when seated at the piano?

EDIT- I initially neglected to deal with most remarkable analogy of all, namely the tomato. Firstly, after all the talk of body weight in motion, it's a curious turnaround, if he suddenly wants us to hold back and keep the weight extremely subtle. However, according to his follow-up comment, it turns out that the intended point was to show how gently weight can be applied. But it's beyond me why we're even told to apply any- regardless of how gently. It take quite some religious devotion to armweight, to spy the problem of pushing through a fragile tomato without bursting it- and then start with the assumption that we should look to rest armweight upon it. Hell, why not go back to his original ideas and rest the body weight in too, if we're going down such a remarkable path? Gentle or not, I really don't recommend that you start from such an irrational approach to the problem as to reach straight for the big guns, in the expectation that they will offer the greatest precision.

The mechanics of chaos vs the mechanics of predictability- what quality of movement offers the best tonal control over ppppp, FFFFF and every possible shade in between?

2014-09-28T16:48:00.000-07:00

Nb. This post is all about the consistent factors behind control over sound. After outlining some very basic issues about what defines control/the lack of, I'm also going to talk a little of the great artist Shura Cherkassky's methods- and illustrate quite how neatly his approach to the keyboard corresponds with what mechanics suggests to be necessary for close control of sound. Whether we're talking about getting the softest sounds possible or the fullest ones, the essential basis for control is scarcely different. Likewise, staccato and legato have a lot more in common than most people realise. Much the same basic issue dictates whether the precise sound produced is primarily defined by artistic choices, or by mere chance factors that pollute the result. This was originally the end of my previous post on the concept of "positive movement" vs "negative movement". However, as that post was rather long (and as the issue of tonal control is quite so important) I decided to expand that segment into a separate standalone post. Please start by reading the definitions in that post- so you can appreciate what I am actually referring to via these original terms. However, in order to understand why these issues are at the very core of what defines the possibility of controlling your sound, it's not necessary to read the full post right now, but only the definitions. Also, please note that additional illustrative videos will shortly be added to each of these posts.

Why is "negative movement" (a squashing of the distance between knuckle and fingertip during the key depression, as per the diagrams) the single biggest enemy to a pianists control over sound?

Well it's very simple to prove. Basically if two bodies are in contact and one is accelerating the other from behind, as soon as the one at the back starts to slow down a little, the other will start to escape on existing steam. At this point it is coasting and you have given up your means to manipulate it any further. Even if you should catch up again, merely by bobbling in and out of contact, you have already lost the simplicity and directness associated with staying in touch continuously. When a hand collapses as shown, during key depression, it can be said with objective certainty that the knuckle is travelling faster than the fingertip- (which is why the distance between them is becoming progressively smaller). This suggests (with near certainty) that the fingertip is losing available speed while moving the key, rather than accelerating continuously through- which renders it impossible for that fingertip to be passing on speed both smoothly and continuously, in the most predictable fashion. The transfer of energy is necessarily "chaotic"- which means that a very small change in one variable can result in a very significant change to the final result in sound.

If that's not making sense yet, there's a more specific situation that's very easy to imagine, that should readily demonstrate both the truth and significance of this broader principle. Imagine standing still behind a line and pushing a supermarket trolley into motion (without being allowed to take any steps forward, beyond the line). Let's say there's a target a certain number of metres away and you hope to roll it into stopping there, or at least come as close as possible. It's not a miniscule distance but it's not especially far either- say 5m. Is it easier to give a short sharp jab or is it easier to connect clearly with the trolley and then gradually push through until you can stay with it no further? Well, the greater the distance of travel during which you can stay in steady contact, the more margin of error you have (I won't bore you by detailing the proof through physics or associated graphs, but any physicist worth their salt will affirm to you that this is an absolute objective truth, with reference to "impulse"). So, for control, you should push continuously over a longer duration, rather than apply an identical level energy through a brief prod. Incidentally, for direct equivalence to the concept of negative movement within a finger, imagine if the distance between your hands and shoulders were to become squashed, rather than grow out through the push. Think quite how hopeless this would make your control of the trolley!!!

Another example I used before is golf- where all good golfers aim slowly but surely through the ball for short putts- and never hold back or start to slow the club as it reaches the ball! The simple reason is that slowing down during the movement, rather than accelerating, means there is collossal margin for error. A tiny difference in timing means a huge difference in the result, as per chaos theory. There is more inherent predictability when a small but increasing level of force is applied steadily over a longer distance of contact. To put that more simply in layman's terms- you need to putt by aiming steadily THROUGH the ball, rather than move sharply but with intent to stop the club upon contact. Nobody could succeed with a technique that is objectively unfit for the purpose of achieving a high level of accuracy. This isn't a matter of subjective preference- as evidenced by the fact that a golfer who jerks at his putts by slowing down the club is literally unheard of at professional levels. If you care to do well, you need to use a technique that gives you decent odds of getting as close as possible to intensity of kinetic energy that you had actually aimed for.

Going back to the trolley, if we only wanted to move it by a mere 2cm then a shorter prod might be more accurate- but only for the reason that a longer contact would necessarily apply too much energy and would thus mean overshooting the target. However, remember that even the softest pianissimo playing must swing the hammer all the way to the strings. No note that sounds involves the barest minimum. Silent key depressions are the bare minimum- and those are really not something we want when we're supposed to be producing tone! By analogy we're not in a situation where prolonging contact will automatically mean overdoing it. Moving the key too fast is the only way to overshoot your intended volume, so there is no associated benefit to trying to keep the contact short (at least, not when striving for a very soft tone- I wouldn't rule out sharper attacks for specific tonal effects at higher intensities). Making a lasting contact adds scope for control of tone, but does not in any way mean sacrificing the possibility of softness. The classic mistake is to become less positive when trying to play soft. However, moving steadily but with a positive quality is the very thing that makes it possible to play truly quietly- without either risking missed notes, or compromising the level of softness for the sake of avoiding them.

At the piano, try either pecking at a note and then pulling the finger right back (rather than aiming through a longer contact) or allowing a finger to buckle into negative movement. This will tend to allow the hammer to escape from your influence sooner, just the same as if you prod abruptly at a trolley. When you stay in contact over a longer distance (by starting gradually and accelerating right through to release) you have more scope to judge exactly how much energy and therefore tone you will pass on. It's important to note that the piano has a point called "escapement", after which the hammer always gets released from your direct manipulation. However, while you can't change anything after that point, what you could very well do is lose consistent contact with the hammer before that point is reached- should your fingertip start slowing down rather than accelerating. It's very easy to overlook this, but it is quite possible to lose influence prematurely.

This is why you should NEVER think of making the fingers more passive or floppy for soft playing! Fingers with give mean you cannot accurately predict either how long you are manipulating the hammer for or precisely how much speed it will receive during that time- before it escapes you. But don't stiffen the fingers either! You can achieve all the "firmness" you need by preventing negative movement in the same way that you always should. Reliable control of soft tones comes when you bond with a hammer by starting very slowly against the key's resistance but then use "positive movement"- so you are always accelerating the fingertip through subtle resistance until the hammer is set free. The acceleration will be more slight of course, when speaking of soft playing, but you have to stick with it until the hammer is already gone, if you want fine control. This is equally true of any dynamic- which is why the most polished performers move so effortlessly between levels. They're not switching between radically different concepts but doing much the same basic actions, with simply more or less intensity to correspond with the dynamic. In soft sounds, the trick is not to be pulling back with any repression but using a positive and deliberate movement throughout. It's always easier to judge the result if you slowly increase a gentle force, over a longer time, than it is to judge a larger force for an ultra-short duration. The great pianist Josef Llhevine spoke of the need to ground every key even in soft playing. Although this advice doesn't quite convey all the deeper nuances that I'm looking to reveal here, I have no doubt that it was his way of encouraging this same positive quality of prolonged contact. If you don't ground the keys, it's a very likely indicator that you are repressing and thus failing to maximise contact with the hammer. Once you appreciate the basic concept, looking to finish grounding every key is a very simple way of checking that you're staying suitably positive, without having to retain any more complex thoughts during performance.

This is why so many great pianists are known to have liked practising soft passages loudly, even. What they were achieving is a consistently positive quality of motion, that was not infected by any trace of repression or give in the fingers. Listen to what the great Shura Cherkassky (an artist renowned for the most astonishingly soft yet defined pianissimos) had to say about how he practised, and watch the few seconds of him doing so, that follow.

http://youtu.be/zgEwSoA9Dvs?t=50s

A pianist who already thinks like a musician simply cannot lose that, by spending some of his time searching for a simple positive quality of movement from each and every finger. He may not have directly analysed the concept that I have labelled "positive movement" but his manner of practise was quite visibly certainly geared towards achieving a simple positivity of motion. When done with sensitivity, this kind of preparation may be rather musically dry, but it trains the reflexes to work consistently in the most effective manner. Such practise isn't where Cherkassky developed his profound musicianship, but it is where he kept up his ability to control the precise sound of every single key. When he put musical intentions in, this is what he could do:

Note just how vigorously and deliberately he GRABS the keys with his fingers, even in the softest accompaniment notes! The secret here is to remember this:

The finest control over soft playing comes when the finger moves every bit as positively as in louder playing, but simply at a far slower speed.

What we see in Cherkassky is a deliberate movement done very slowly- not a short fast movement that is tempered by repression!!! His dry practise may have sounded like a "piano tuner", as he put it, but it trained the deliberate quality that allowed him to reach such extremes without losing control of his sound. At this point, the less specific concept of "positive thinking" is actually closely intertwined with the more specific notion of positive movement. Mental confidence is much more inclined to generate positive movement than mental uncertainty. With a sense of being even a little mentally tentative or restrained, negative movement is almost certain to be huge a problem. I always like to think of fingers moving gradually but with extreme power (as if they could slowly but effortlessly cut through a brick wall, if need be) for soft playing- so nothing in the mindset implies anything less than a long movement with intent. I may not be on the level of Cherkassky's astonishing pianism, but in recent months I've made a huge amount of progress in terms of how softly I can play without giving up control, by being aware of these defining issues. In the long run, feeling generically mentally positive can start to look after the physical side- provided that you've already ingrained the more specific quality of the physical habits, of course. But if even Cherkassky saw fit to do his practise that way, there's every reason why lesser mortals should give serious consideration to devoting some of their practise time to achieving a similar straightfoward positive quality- rather than kid themselves that they're too artistic to dirty their hands with such mundane practicalities.

Incidentally, the issue of staying in touch with the key's resistance is another reason why I greatly dislike the idea of moving wishing to move a key "fast" for even loud playing. Any golfer, cricketer, tennis player (or other sportsman who uses their body to transmit movement to another object) will not achieve the biggest distance by merely trying to swing as "fast" as they can. To transfer energy effectively, you still have to pace things so the acceleration increases through contact with the resistance- just the same as for quiet playing. If you don't achieve acceleration right there, a reaction force starts to slow you down, so you lose contact too soon to apply serious impulse to your target. Any good sportsman knows this (in instinct, at least, if not necessarily always in analysis) but, sadly, a lot of pianists really don't have either knowledge or "feel" for this. Some misguided methods even encourage things which are likely to obstruct the process of acquiring that feel, if taken at face value. Rather than be slowed down upon connecting with your target, you need to be able to accelerate the fingertip right through the full distance- so the hammer doesn't escape from your manipulation prematurely.

Even in staccato I've recently discovered this to be important. In fact, perhaps especially in staccato- where it's overwhelmingly common for pianists to lose exact control over the intensity, by backing out prematurely. An excellent comparison is the screw shot in snooker or pool. Although your average pub pool player stabs at the ball to achieve backspin, top snooker players will aim low but cue straight through the ball- in line with the same principle of prolonging contact rather than shortening it. Just because you want to allow the damper back to the string, it doesn't mean you should be thinking about trying to back out before you've even finished manipulating the hammer. Finish the job properly with one simple and unpolluted positive intention (the reaction to which should automatically bounce the finger straight back up anyway) and you'll have vastly more control over the tone than when you "peck" at the keys with needless anticipation of pulling back out.

Anyway, back to the very loudest playing. If we return to the trolley example and picture trying to get the biggest distance- would you rather swing a baseball bat at the trolley as fast as possible (and see it bounce straight off a short and unpleasant contact) or use the same technique of connecting to the resistance, before smoothly accelerating your hands through the trolley in a prolonged contact? I know what I'd do. Although I used reference to relative speeds as a basis to prove that negative movements waste energy on impact, I simply don't think of high absolute speeds as being the way to play loud. I think of feeling the key's resistance clearly and then staying in touch with it as far as possible- by continuously accelerating into the escapement (the level at which the hammer necessarily leaves your control, even when accelerating smoothly). I then smoothly continue the same action, so my hand evolves further into a place of openess and comfort. When I'm playing at my best, I know that the process will feeling surprisingly long, slow and effortless during the biggest sounds- not like a short but violent stab. With suitable use of positive movement, there's nothing to relax from- because your movements are taking your hand towards increased freedom from the very outset, rather than headed for the type of compressed impact from which retreat might be desirable. When you have learned the type of action which actively builds upon comfort, through ongoing continuation, even the very loudest FFFFF can be done without fear of impact or stress. In fact, the more positively the hand performs, the safer it actually starts to become.

Tonal control, efficiency and health (lifting the lid on the most fundamental and indispensable ingredient of simple, controlled pianism- minus strain, tensions or impact)

2014-08-24T17:35:00.001-07:00

n.b. Although the diagrams illustrate virtually everything necessary, I will add some videos of the exercises within a couple of days.

I've already written a post on this subject, but I wanted to come back to the same issues afresh. Although it's not intended as an outright replacement for the previous article (which features some additional thoughts that are worthy of consideration) it is more a case of wiping the slate clean and going back to the beginning, than of continuing onwards from the last post. At the time I was still getting to grips with major issues that (to the best of my knowledge) no existing piano methods have attempted to directly define. I was certain that I'd observed something important (namely, issues that seemed to suggest that what lies at the core of fine technique has very little to do with the tension/release model that almost all modern methods are founded on) and was taking the first steps at trying to categorise a clearer alternative way of seeing things. Having since spent additional time on these matters, however (both in theory and in terms of practical experiments) I can now give a more complete and definitive explanation of that premise, but in a much more concise and direct form. I've also found a perspective that enables a rigorous proof (all via simple logic, which does not demand notable understanding of physics). For anyone who was baffled by my previous post on the issue, I hope that this version will be extremely easy to digest and that the new diagrams (kindly contributed by Azim Akberali) will assist.

Before getting started, I want to briefly clarify why these issues are quite so important. Perhaps most importantly of all, your level of control over the sound of every key that you depress is governed by details in the foundation of how you pass movement on to the key. When looking at the surface there are many different ways to get excellent control and there are many ways to get lumped with erratic and unpredictable results. This post is not about scratching at the mere exterior and it doesn't matter whether you prefer to sit high/low, say, or if you subscribe to armweight/finger schools or whatever else. It's about the underlying similarities between the qualities of movements that objectively CANNOT offer reliable results but, above all, about the consistent factor at the root of all styles that CAN give scope for the most precise level of musical control- so your fingers have the best chance to pass on the exact tonal intensity that you intend to each note. Anyway, before giving any more background, I'll stop to detail how spectacularly simple this concept actually is, right now, via an ultra-concise "idiot's version" of the entire premise, plus illustrative diagrams.

i) If a finger operates as a single lever from a lengthened position, the effectiveness with which movement passes to the key is determined by whether the knuckle is getting higher or lower, relative to the point of contact between fingertip and key. Letting the knuckle drop down is a "negative movement", whereas drawing the knuckle upwards is a "positive movement".

before and after negative movement

before and after positive movement

ii) If a finger starts with any curvature, any compression of the distance between fingertip and knuckle during key depression counts as a "negative movement". Any expansion of the distance is a "positive movement".

before and after negative movement

before and after positive movement

Note that the diagrams are intended to illustrate whether the distance between knuckle and tip is shrinking or growing . This is the primary issue while moving the key- and not whether the hand directly emulates these exact positions.

Negative movement reduces the control over the energy transfer and the amount of speed that reaches the key. This typically sends excess energy into increased levels of impact at the keybed and unconsciously prompts straining in anticipation of such impacts. Positive movement allows for extreme efficiency and precision of energy transfer. This means a wider range of musical options and more control over tone. Positive movement doesn't always need to be significantly exaggerated. But slipping into a mere trace of negative movement can be enough to have a significantly detrimental effect- which is why it's easier to develop a healthy technique by exaggeration of the positive, rather than by aiming to scrape together a bare minimum. The tension/release model is a very poor model for technique- as the premise does nothing to encourage positive movement. Should positive movement be absent, muscles have to work significantly harder. However, even the most severe fixation can only reduce the intensity of negative movement. Positive movement eradicates the problems of negative movement outright with vastly less physical effort.

Following up from those basic ideas, the most concise summary of the basic methodology for curing physical problems in pianists is thus:

As most tensions are the result of straining to reduce negative movements in the hand (nb. I appreciate that this is as yet unproven, although the rest of the post will offer evidence), the first step is to learn not to fight. For a time you should embrace negative movements, by gently letting them occur to a very notable degree. This needs to be done sensitively and without intent to control, but rather to put physical release first, so as to observe the results. This breaks the habit of using tension (that can run back through the whole arm and further) as a standard means of trying to restrict the possibility of movement. After this has been achieved, you merely have a cleaner slate- but no alternative means by which to prevent negative movement from taking the control out of your sound! At this point, you need to wipe out the harmful effects of negative movements altogether, by using a directly opposite positive movement. Achieving a state of empty relaxation achieves nothing, if positive movement is not ultimately added to this mere starter point. Although radically inferior as a solution, tensions are the only possible alternative by which to combat the ill effects. Without instating positive movement, it is a certainty that numerous muscles will once again tense and overwork in a bid to retain some semblance of control over the sounds being produced.

At its core, it really is that straightforward. In fact, come to think of it, you could simplify the practical consequences even further by saying:

Once you've figured out in which direction it is counterproductive to allow movement, don't ever try to use generic fixation to fight that. Learn, instead, to generate movement in the opposite direction.

The rest of this is primarily clarification of those statements plus proofs. Also, in this companion post, I have gone very directly into the concrete proof of why what I call "positive movement" offers more control over tone than what I call "negative movement". Note that this post is largely aimed at setting a background foundation, so future (and more heavily practically oriented posts) can follow up from directly from that short and simple premise. However, I will introduce exercises that illustrate how to start both seeing and feeling the sheer significance (of an issue that is relevant to every note you will ever play) at the keyboard. Even a tiny amount of negative movement can wreak havoc in your playing. Think of it as being a little like a dog turd in your bowl of ice-cream. It's significantly better if you have very little, than if it's piling up all over. But you're not exactly winning unless you've made sure that you know how to serve ice-cream that contains none.

If the reduction to just two categories of finger movement sounds too simple to explain such wide issues as musical control and physical ease, then please just keep an open mind. I don't expect many people to read something quite so simple and just accept it at the drop of a hat, without seeing some half-decent evidence. Quite frankly, if you really are willing to accept the truth of that analysis without demanding concrete reasoning, then you shouldn't be willing to trust on such a casual basis (especially given how much misinformation is out there about technique). Anyway, have you ever had that feeling where you thought you moved quite intensely (and perhaps felt a fair old whack into the keybed) but for some strange reason hardly any sound came out? I suspect that virtually all pianists have experienced this baffling sensation to at least some degree, at some point. Or have you tried to play a note extremely softly- only to find that the key didn't sound at all? Both of those are classic symptoms of the destructive effects of negative movement.

In order to definitively prove why this deceptively simple premise plays such a key role, we need merely look at speeds. A great many pianists have spoken of how volume is defined by the key speed. Personally, I have always hated the simplistic idea of trying to play louder by striving to move "quicker". If it were actually that straightforward, the people who strive to move quickest should logically make the loudest sound with the most ease. This is simply not so and merely reminds us that superficial applications of "obvious" logic can be overwhelmingly prone to failure (even when seemingly air-tight) unless properly scrutinised. To use the analogy of my previous post on this matter, the problem with merely aiming for more speed is that it's like telling a person with a large hole in their bucket that they should "obviously" put more water in next time- rather than show them how to stop wasting so much through the leak. Tell someone who struggles to make a big sound to try to move keys quicker and you'll likely see them spasming and straining like crazy but achieving an aggressive yet often shallow tone. Yet a great artist may move seemingly slowly (and may very well advise against trying to move "fast" into the keys for loud playing) while getting a huge resonant sound with an effortless quality.

As I said in a previous post, this is not necessarily an illusion. There's a very simple rational explanation. The person who tries to move quickly may visibly jerk parts of their body into very fast speeds- but there is no guarantee that they will transmit that same level of speed into the key itself! Remember that the only speed that affects tonal volume is that which is passed to the key. This speed is defined by the speed of the fingertip. This is a matter of indisputable objective fact, regardless of whether that is generated solely in the finger itself (or if the finger merely passes on movement that originated from an arm-weight based drop). It's still the fingertip that administers the key speed. The pianist who moves their arm quite slowly may actually be generating a notably faster motion in the key, despite the lack of outwardly visible speed or effort. When other parts of the body move visibly fast, the speed of motion that catches the eye does not necessarily make it into the key. As I'll prove later, what it may well do, however, is contribute to increasing impact and strain when the key lands.

Although I used to dislike the viewpoint of "speed" for those reasons, I've since realised that looking just slightly below the surface can turn it into something of huge practical benefit. If we look not merely at a single speed but instead at relationships of speeds between different areas, it actually becomes very easy to understand how to generate more tone with less effort. The ultimate result is that you no longer need to attempt something that feels especially fast. Instead, you will learn to pass on your existing speeds with so little wastage, that it neither looks nor feels "quick".

Anyway, that's enough of the more general background. From here on, I'll be extremely specific and straight to the point about the two categories of positive and negative motion and get on with proving the role they play in what is possible. The principle is not restricted to pianism alone, but also relates to any situation where movement passes from one body to another. Firstly, imagine hammering in a nail. Now, clearly, I don't want anyone imagining piano playing is similar to brutal or insensitive motions. Just consider how speed is passed on in the situation, for now, and you'll soon discover the relevance to how effectively a finger can pass speed on to a key (in a far more sensitive and precise fashion).

Try hammering a nail as seen in this diagram, with a loose grip.

and you'll get a very poor result- something like this.

That's because speed is focussed into the wrong end. The hammer is only moving quickly at the point where you hold it. Upon arrival, the head is moving the nail very slowly (if at all) at the point of contact marked x. How about if we just hold the hammer more tightly, to stop the end falling down like in the second diagram? Okay, now we're passing on some speed, if we can be both stiff and forceful enough. The hammer head is repelled less severely by the nail, thanks to the stiff grip. But we're working absurdly hard and that nail certainly isn't going to pop in without amazing strength of effort. This is a spectacularly inappropriate way to hope to solve what was a "negative movement", of the first category. Pianistically, the sad truth is that a huge number of pianists are trapped in a dichotomy between allowing a similarly destructive movement or overworking to fight it, in precisely this fashion. They too, try to stop the movement that interferes with their task by stiffening unhealthily against it. Would attempting to work that way be alright if you were tomake a point of remembering to relax straight after? Of course not!!! It would be absurd to assume that might do the first thing to prevent injury. To get a better result, we must forget searching for any magic compromise between clenching and relaxation and instead think how to generate MORE movement- but not in the problematic direction. We must generate more movement in the opposite direction to the problematic type of movement.

This time we will swing in a circle around the elbow:

However, on contact we will then let the end of the hammer begin to RISE instead of fall- ie, a "positive movement" of the first category.

With a loose grip, a reaction force will now cause this to happen just as contact occurs. The speed can now be passed on effectively all the way through to the business end- without any need to grip tightly or brace the arm. Furthermore, allowing the point that is being held to rise a little (in response to the natural reaction) also takes the impact out of the landing- by allowing a run-off for remaining energy, rather than an abrupt stop upon collision. If you pause to consider what impact actually is, it can best be defined as an excessively sudden stop (nb. strictly speaking, it's actually a sudden "change of momentum", which is why you can be killed when standing still and getting hit by a speeding car, but in pianism we will only suffer from abrupt deceleration). Jump off a skyscraper on to a concrete pavement and you will die for the simple reason that your momentum is stopped so violently when you hit the ground. Land into a thick foam mat that has plenty of give, however, and the deceleration is gradual enough to keep you safe. Swinging the hammer in a circular path without allowing that little bit of upward movement would work, from the nail's point of view. But from your body's point of view, it would make for totally senseless impact (which is made especially damaging by the stiffness of the muscles, during the sudden stop). It's simply unnecessary to fight the roll forward and up, as energy can still flow where it is required with efficiency. It's not a movement that requires retreat or restraint during landing, but a movement that it is perfectly safe to continue through, assuming you do so in this fashion. Note how the central pivot is marked in the diagrams by "x". The initial approach involves a circular motion around the elbow. But in the instant of contact, we allow further circular movement to occur around the point where the hammer contacts the nail. Allowing this sudden "change of ends" for the pivot is vital to the possibility of a soft landing!

Apply this to the piano and we have almost comprehensive equivalence. This is a very direct analogy regarding the nature of energy transmission, not some flowery metaphor. If we start with a run up, we have the equivalent arc around the elbow.

When moving the key, positive movement must again occur around the new pivot, ie. around the point where finger connects with key. Regardless of whether we descended from a height or started from contact, positive movement occurs in this path:

Just like with the hammer, the change of the centre of movement is vital. The vast majority will try to fight the new arc of movement with needless tension, rather than embrace it. It's senseless to restrict this motion, as it's exactly what allows the comfortable landing. The arm should be free enough to allow positive movement to start to occur around x- with no stiffening or shoving straight down! Although the word "hammering" is typically used to refer to the most stiff and insensitive pounding of a piano, consideration of how to take the impact out of hammer blows into a nail actually tells us a good deal about how to play the piano more safely. Ironically, I suspect that many who habitually charge into horrific impacts by "hammering" at the piano might be rather better at softening landings if they first practised with an actual hammer- given quite how much it hurts if you don't allow it to rebound freely. That level of pain can be quite a fine deterrent to fighting against positive movement with stiff muscles. Bringing in this safe rebound from good hammer technique would actually teach them to stop digging in so coarsely and instead land more comfortably at the piano, too.

Anyway, at the piano start with an extended and flattened finger, that acts as a single lever by staying at constant length (nb remember that positions involving curvature or movements in the mid joints work quite differently and will be separately covered by the second category). If the knuckle is falling, it is moving substantially faster than the fingertip and the key will thus be moved weakly. Try this, without actively intending to even move the key. Just swing the knuckle down and observe the pathetic, flaccid connection to the key and the weak tone it achieves. A key is a lot more willing to move than a nail, but it's almost as inept as the result was when letting your end of the hammer down. Try at different speeds and see just how little scope there is to control the sound. Now start aiming for a range of specific tonal intensities, while always keeping the finger at length and simply letting the knuckle down passively. Even if you try to start pulling from the knuckle at the same time, you'll realise that it's simply not in a position to have much more meaningful control over the result than when you merely flop. If the knuckle is rising a little as the finger pulls, however, it can be generating significant key speed from a substantially slower movement. As long as the finger stays at length and the knuckle is going in the right direction, speed can be passed on just fine. Whether we look at hammer and nail or finger and key, if the end of the lever through which energy is flowing through should be falling even slightly (within this type of circular movement around a point of contact) then you simply will not be able to pass on speed effectively. As I said, I call this "negative movement". If this point is allowed to rise slightly through the duration of contact, however, speed can flows into the place where it counts. We have illustrated here, in practise, exactly what I stated earlier:

Achieving some movement in the positive direction eliminates any need to try to fight against the ill effects of negative direction of movement, via tension. The hard work associated with fixation no longer serves a (superficially) useful purpose and only serves to limit the freedom for useful movement.

Of course, there are still many ways to get it wrong when seeking positive movement and there are all kinds of issues regarding the rest of the body which should also be brought into a big picture. However, this particular issue is not so much the "tip of the iceberg", but rather the most fundamental core issue. When you understand what is needed at the business end of events, you can link the rest of the arm and body, as part of a coherently unified mechanism. With many methods that speak little of the role of finger and hand, you risk looking at all manner of minutia, without even glancing at the gaping hole in the bottom of the bucket. Tensions that are carried by a person about their daily life can be a slightly different issue that can require alternative approaches. But the kinds of tensions that arise specifically during the act of piano playing usually exist due to the need to combat negative movement at this end. Shoulder and arm fixations may have little to no possibility of being solved in a lasting way, until a foundation in positive movement connects the hand and arm meaningfully. I'm a firm believer in thinking from shoulder down to fingertip some of the time (so the finger may even feel like a mere "extension of the arm at times")- but the opposite perspective is also vital. Positive movement starts at the fingertip and runs backwards. Nothing else in the body can make up for missing out, at the end which actually determines what the key receives.

Anyway, the principle of positive movement applies the same whether you started with a "run up" or not. If you start from the key, the knuckle should be given room to rise a little as you pull on the key. If you start by dropping the arm from a height, by the time you are moving the key you must have SWITCHED from a falling knuckle to one that is allowed to be rising, in order to pass on speed effectively. Carry on dropping it like a stone and you get a poor speed transfer. Try this on the piano and see. It's just like the hammer example. No matter how you got there, at the time when the key is moving the knuckle should almost definitely not be going down (or stiffening to fight that)- but moving slightly in the opposite direction. Again, the tension/release model offers no basis for a worthy solution. However, if we look at good quality hammer technique (in which, rather than drop the arm like a stone, we lighten slightly to make room to run into positive movement), we have an ideal model for taking the impact out of piano technique. Note also that, in both cases, if you approach from a circular path, rather than drop straight down, you're less likely to progress into negative movement. As long as you allow the centre of the circle (as marked by the X in the diagrams) to switch from the elbow across to the fingertip or hammer head, positive movement is almost guaranteed. (n.b. only "almost" though- I won't go into notable detail right now, but letting the thumb reach up as you land could still allow the knuckles to droop down into negative movement. In a future post I'll address this more directly).

Negative movement is almost always detrimental, but I'll just show one exceptional type of situation where I use the first category of negative movement deliberately, for a musical effect. When playing chords, swinging the knuckle down gives a very uniformly neutral and empty sound. Extremes of voicing are out of the question. If that's typical of your technique in general, don't expect many people to be interested in hearing such monotonous and limited sound production. However, in this example from Schubert, I actually like to make an unusually "dead" sound for the surprise harmony. It's possible to make the unexpected chord sound special via more conventional means of voicing (example 1). However, executing this particular harmony by swinging both the wrist and knuckles down (example 2) brings out an unnervingly chilling quality. When moving positively in the fingers, it can actually become hard NOT to play with some kind of differentiation and musical warmth. In this case, negative movement actually becomes an effective tool for an effect.

(videos to be added, shortly)

For the second scenario, we don't need to limit the finger to acting as a singular lever, so this covers a much broader range of possibilities. It can start in any curve desired and it can move as you please. There is a very simple dynamic which governs how speed is passed on. As I already stated, if the distance between knuckle and fingertip is getting squashed we have a problem of negative movement. If that distance is shortening due to a descending knuckle, then the knuckle is travelling faster than the fingertip. Thus it is again certain that the fastest speed is not passing into the key. (Strictly speaking, the distance could also shorten due to closing up the joint at the very tip of the finger. This would not fall under the same classification, although I don't personally recommend it as a standard action for separate reasons, that are both mechanical and anatomical)

To feel negative movement in practise, start with relaxed curved fingers and keep them as loose as can be. Then gently prod them against the other hand and watch the speeds. The tips are quickly slowed by the collision but the knuckle continues travelling towards them at a faster speed. Now stiffen a little and do the same- purely to see how ineffective this is. Note that you could strain like a mad man (not that I advise doing so) but they ALWAYS collapse at least a little, regardless, when contacting resistance (even that of a piano key, which gives way) . Even skycrapers sway very notably in a strong breeze. Not only is it unhealthy to clench but all it does is reduce the wastage of speed- as the knuckle still gains a little on the fingertip. Either relaxed or stiff, negative movement of this kind will fail to pass on speed with maximum efficiency and will send the wasted energy into impact.

Again, getting trapped into a quest to find the right balance between tension and the even grosser unsuitability of literal relaxation is a dead end strategy that misses the necessary premise for solution outright. The end of this post on the fingers gives similar demonstrations of the futility of trying to immobilise the fingers in lieu of some positive movement. The only meaningful answer is to at least try to move a little. Many have tried to claim that pianism requires a fixed fulcrum at the knuckle (notably including Otto Ortmann- who blackened the reputation of approaching technique scientifically by making such outrageous errors as to render many of his conclusions grossly misleading). They are plain wrong, I'm afraid and there's not a single positive about operating under such a terrible misapprehension. Letting the knuckle down is a big problem, but encouraging a strategy of muscular fixation to fight that is a horribly misguided attempt at a solution, that hasn't properly referenced theory against the practical nature of reality. Just as with the hammer example, the only effective answer is to be willing to go up, if that's where the reaction is taking you- not to stiffen the muscles in a futile bid to stop all movement from being possible in any direction.

Think how swimmers are told go with a rip tide in the sea- rather than try in vain to swim right against it. Some things are too powerful to be worth an unnecessary fight. Note that in many instances, the knuckle may stay in the same place (satisfying the definition of positive movement due to the tip moving away from it, rather than by the knuckle moving up in space)- but that's not to say it's "fixed". If you were in a squatting position and someone were about to press down on your shoulders, would you want to just stiffen up for stability? It wouldn't be the best answer. In order not to be crumpled up further, you couldn't either fixate or relax. You'd need to try to move upwards slightly before they start pushing down on you. In such a situation, you may actually end up balanced in one spot- but you best achieve that by trying to move in the positive direction- and not by trying to find a way become as rigid as a block of steel! Ortmann tried to be scientific, but he made a truly shocking practical blunder- by failing to be aware of the significant objective difference fixing something into a position in space, compared to sensitively tuned BALANCE. It's almost like suggesting that we'd have to "fix" joints in our legs whilst walking in order not to fall over. We don't. The reason our knees don't buckle is because we're lengthening the legs out while walking over them- not because we're "fixing" the joint. Balance is fluid in a way that constantly changes and adjusts in subtle ways. Even when the outward appearance is of relative stillness it doesn't logically follow that anything has been "fixed", or that such an intention will yield good results. This is why positive movement should always be aimed for, in at least some quantity, and why simply striving to "preserve" a static hand position is generally a pretty hopeless premise for technique.

As the phrase goes: "Attack is the best form of defence".

So, now be increasing the distance between knuckles and fingertip (ie lengthening out the finger) very gently, just a split second before contacting the other hand. Also roll just a little forwards and in as you do so. Colliding directly could still give a tiny bit of impact (compared to the cushioned keybed of a piano) but you can reduce that by having a tiny run off to the motion. Collapse is now off the radar entirely even with a very low effort movement- but you must start slightly in advance with the fingers and not wait until they are already facing resistance that would compress them. Allowing negative movement to come first would wipe out the chance to enter positive movement- just as surely as starting in the act of positive movement tends to wipe out the possibility of slipping into negative movement. Again, the productive manner of movement entirely eradicates the problematic type of movement in a way that clenching or relaxation cannot offer- and with far less effort than when we stiffen hard, yet still make a loss. Not only can we now pass on the full speed of a moving knuckle to the key, but the expansion means that the fingertip is travelling faster than the knuckle. Rather than losing anything in transmission, this style of movement passes the full speed of the knuckle on to the key, plus a little more still!

If you're still not clear why this is such a vital issue to health, take a truly relaxed finger and put it vertically over a key and allow the knuckle to droop until the finger crumples entirely. Again, don't intend to move the key or to produce a specific sound, but just try to notice what the key receives when this occurs. Do you feel the bump AFTER the sound occurs? It's hard to turn off your instinct about piano playing but don't do anything but flop down. If you are passive enough, your whole arm will plop into impact after the finger made a flimsy sound. It's the same way a train would concertina together in a head on crash. The energy doesn't hit all at once, even with a hard train. With a collapsing finger, a rather pathetic amount of energy passes within the period in which you are determining the sound and then the best part of the energy merely provides a useless aftershock into the keybed. This is a very extreme example, but this concept perhaps explains why some pianists have a very ugly tone quality. Movements with ANY collapse have some level of wastage and an aftershock that compresses down after sound (and remember that tightened muscles provide terrible shock absorbers, compared to loose muscles). Positive movements do not only keep muscles supple while sending speed through the key, but they also push any extra energy safely up and away rather than down into a compressed impact. At the highest volumes in the thickest chords, you get a much purer tone from positive movement, with far less additional noise effect. I assure you that when you play loud into an open pedal, the big thuds associated with negative movement can be notably audible (nb. I'll write a post in future about the idea that science ever "proved" tone to be impossible- which is a complete myth that has been evidenced as such by credible experiments). When you are trapped in trying to find a balance between fixation and collapse, you must hit the piano a lot more forcefully and stiffly to get a big sound. Positive movement enables a much purer loud sound, not only thanks to the mechanism for absorbing excess energy, but also thanks to the fact that less energy needs to be employed, in the first place, to achieve volume.

Postlude

Now, I did earlier state that it doesn't matter whether you come from an armweight school or a finger school. I stand by that statement- as these are universal truths and not something that can be side-stepped by any "other" issues. So be aware that if you do come from a school that is weighted chiefly towards the arm, these proofs of the importance of the hand's constant role have major significance. There are ways to use the arm that can encourage the fingers to open into positive movement, which I'll detail more in future posts. However, these are VERY specific (as a preliminary clue, picture casting a fishing rod or cracking a whip- you actually have to slow down your arm, just before the whip/line can be passively thrown out into serious motion). For the vast majority of situations, using notable arm weight creates a situation that actively contributes to squashing the hand and makes the need for positive movement all the greater. Arm weight was exactly what caused all the negative movement in the prior exercise. Arm weight does not pass speed effectively through a passive hand.. If you are negligent about generating some positive movement in the hand, looking to the arm for all the energy can easily inspire impact and all the other associated problems- ironically placing more stress on the underperforming hand, rather than relieving it of work. Arm weight methods are only truly effective where they involve some positive movement in the hand- not where they try to replace it. The same is true with rotation practise- as per Taubman method. If there is no positive movement in the finger, you can only either land stiffly or collapse significantly. Frankly, on their demonstrations it indeed looks rather stiff and often loaded with impact. The sound also tends to be punched out unmusically. I didn't find any lasting benefit from the method until I learned how to use rotation to complement slow but positive movements in the finger- which finally turned it into a source of freedom, ease and musical control (nb. I would usually expect tonal control when doing this type of rotation practise, in order to gain from the experience). In other words, the adaptations I like to incorporate could scarcely make it much more different, compared to the forceful hard-toned crash landings seen in this at around 7:00 in:

In fairness, if your arms are typically locked solid, the method can greatly reduce the problems of an extremely faulty technique and completely liberate the forearm. In line with what I said near the start, for a little while you could rotate and observe negative movements in a very limp and passive hand- purely for the sake of taking out any tensions that have become a habit. But what I see there looks tight, stiff and jerky! I'd either intentionally let the fingers sag floppily and do it purely to inspire a foundation of relaxation, or I'd already be involving slow but deliberate finger movement to remove the need for tensions. What I see there is moments of stiffening in the hand, followed by stopping into a position that is still slightly stressed into compression. It's just like the hammer action that ends in a dead stop, without that all important continuation into freedom. I don't see fluid and supple movements that are fit for sophisticated pianism. Due to the neglect of the finger's key role of movement, it's really not a model for real world technique unless we complement the basic idea with awareness of the significance of positive movement. How curious that after digging into the rotational movements with inactive fingers, she then lightens up and uses a simple positive quality of genuine finger movement to breeze across the scales in the last minute of the film. She really didn't learn the final quality from the coarse way that she punched at keys in the slower tempo (without moving the fingers either positively or sensitively). The only thing from the rotation work that remains is the freedom and good alignment of the arm. The rest only works via an evolved quality of finger movement- which is not guaranteed to reach any such standard, unless you find a way to actually involve this element during the slower rotational work.

Anyway, I'll talk more directly about the secrets to doing rotation and arm-based strategies effectively (ie with comfortable fluidity in both sound and movement) in future. However, it's often said that a chain is only as strong as its strongest link. In pianism, if the transfer of movement between finger and key is anything less than your finest link, no other strong links can truly compensate. It's true that moving the fingers without linking to the whole arm makes for a lot of problems, but no amount of attention to the arm can replace the hand's consistent duty to generate at least a trace of positive movement, while that is going on. With any arm method which preaches that the arm passes energy through fingers that merely "support", the only way to truly succeed is to "support" it by introducing positive movement- not by an instant of tension followed by an instant of release (don't forget how hopeless it is to merely relax afterwards, if hammering a nail with a stiff arm!). Likewise, the idea of using "relaxed" fingers to pass on arm weight is simply not grounded in physical reality, in any respect. That's what we did for real the exercise where you let your finger collapse into a cluster, not a means of actually playing.

In the real world, relaxation in a finger (that is trying to play) is just tension by proxy, as the relaxed finger can't perform the job. Any premise of either passivity or fixation in the hand can only ever mean impact and stress (no matter how vociferously the advocate might claim that the weight of the arm might supposedly work on the hand's behalf), That is, UNLESS the pianist in question is lucky enough to unconsciously discover the superiority of some subtle levels of positive movement- with which to phase-out losing battles against negative movement. If they don't luck on this aspect, they'll have to depend on tension. My big problem with the Taubman school and many other modern arm centered methods is that they scarcely address the important link in the chain. They neither define nor give any real clues as to the issues that I had to discover for myself, before finding success. If anything, they arguably throw a lot of red herrings- by portraying extremely subjective ideas as if they were universal "rules". Many of these purported rules actively discourage the development of positive movement. Rotation can be extremely valuable, but I don't believe in leaving the association to the finger down to chance. I didn't profit from it at all until positive movement in the finger became the primary goal, with rotation being a secondary enabler- that helps maintain freedoms and a whole body connection, when moving the finger. For some baffling reason, Taubman puts rotation first (even though it is reduced to the point where it cannot account for moving keys) and does very little at all to explain the finger's role.

Collapsing fingers- a simple illustration of why they occur, why they are harmful and how anyone can quickly learn to prevent them (via the action of extension)

2013-06-13T18:44:00.001-07:00

(Nb. I wanted to get this issue dealt with in order to avoid the need for any digressions about how to avoid the problems of collapsing joints, within my next post in the series about core piano technique. For anyone who sometimes suffers collapsed joints, this is an essential precursor to the upcoming post. However, I am deliberately ensuring that it can equally be understood as a standalone post about this important issue, without any need for external context)

Collapsing fingers are a classic pianist's problem. Particularly with the second finger, it's extremely common to see the joint nearest the fingertip abruptly give way and double back on itself, to form this type of shape:

(many thanks to Azim Akberali for kindly producing all diagrams)

All too commonly, this is put down as being an issue of strength (particularly in young children)- a defeatist attitude that suggests that the answer is simply to ignore it and merely hope that matters will change of their own accord, given time. However, following some recent experiments with a number of students, I've become quite certain that the real issue lies in the coordination of muscular activity and that it's almost entirely about the basic manner in which movement is conceived. Before I go into any further detail about hows or whys, try this potentially very revealing exercise (please read the descriptions before following the video examples):

Firstly, ground a key gently with a lengthened thumb, in order to help the arm gain a touch of support (without either feeling in any way clamped or forced down against the point of contact). Just once or twice, draw the fingertip lightly back towards your palm in mid air (these are the most sensitive joints of all so I have to stress the importance of being gentle- rather than truly "gripping" against perceived resistance). Here, your joints are closing inward. Then attempt to do the same, when sliding the fingertip lightly and easily across the surface of a depressed key, in towards yourself. Do this with absolutely no sense of digging down through the finger with arm pressure. If you feel the key starts blocking your path, lighten up your arm and make room to continue more gently, without getting squashed down!. Note that the knuckles are given room to drift up and become the highest point- which is important for avoiding any sense of burden. Definitely don't do this with the knuckles squashed down!

So, did the tip double back on itself or did it successfully curl in on itself as it did in thin air? Ideally, line up a mirror beside the piano so you can observe yourself properly. Recently, I saw no less than four students who found this task almost impossible, even when being extremely gentle indeed. Instead of curling inward, on each occasion that final joint would abruptly give way and fold considerably back on itself. Logically, this might seem to suggest muscular weakness- given that they were actively attempting to close the finger tip, yet were incapable of doing so? Well, it might seem that way, but now try example two.

Here, the finger starts curled and the same two joints perform the opposite action of opening out forwards. Again do it in thin air just the once or twice and then experiment with how it feels to gently slide along the surface of a depressed key- initially starting nail down (but again with a sense of a high knuckle), in order to feel the whole range of movement. Of all these four students (who doubled back severely when they tried to grip their finger tips inwards), not a single one experienced that same sudden collapse! They could easily go from a curled position all the way to a very open one (where just a slight curve of the fingertip was still present) without any sudden jerks or any loss of stability. Within a very wide range of angles, there was simply no danger of collapse at all, any more- as long as the student was allowing the finger to lengthen out freely and easily, without the arm jamming it down hard against the point of contact with the key. Now, I don't want to say this will definitely apply to EVERY case of collapse. However, I'd stress that each one of the students who I speak of here had highly flexible joints that had formerly been so "weak" as to instantly double back into positions so extreme that I'd literally have to break my own bones to even begin to recreate the shape. As soon as they replaced the concept of gripping with that of lengthening, their hands started to find positions that looked as effortlessly "strong" as any hand.

This could easily seem plain bizarre- and (in spite of having previously thought about these issues in depth) I was actually rather surprised to see these formerly "weak" fingers consistently becoming so capable at once. Why on earth would it be that trying to perform an action that usually closes each individual joint of the finger would uncontrollably collapse the tip in the very opposite direction? Why would the action that lengthens the finger (ie which moves the fingertip away from a rounded position and in the direction of the position seen in collapse) be readily possible without risk of triggering that extra step into collapse itself? The whole thing seems to be completely the opposite of what common sense might dictate, but actually there's a very simple mechanical explanation (simple enough that it can be given purely in common sense terms and without any need for mechanical jargon).

Obviously, when we perform the curling action in thin air, the finger closes. The problem is that it's not so simple when we're interacting with a piano key (and the more the arm is pressing down through the finger, the less simple it becomes). Consider, firstly, that the joint which acts to close in the finger tip cannot typically be moved separately from the action that causes closure at the finger's middle joint (except by a tiny percentage of people).

The impossible movement of the tip seen there could only be effective at preventing collapse IF it were possible to execute it without the finger's middle joint also getting involved. As you'll almost certainly see if you attempt what is seen in the diagram, however, the middle joint of your finger will begin to curl up too. Consider now what happens if the arm presses down while this is going on. The fingertip is now effectively fixed against a certain point on the key. That means that if the mid joint starts closing up, it is dragging the final joint backwards and towards collapse. If we depict the finger tip and its middle segment as isolated levers it should be completely clear, from these before and after pictures, that any pull from the upper lever is dragging the joint towards our classic collapsed finger position.

Let's translate that back to the fingers themselves in these diagrams:

and it should now be abundantly clear why the action that might usually close up the finger (away from the piano) will instead be trying to drag the fingertip into collapse. The middle joint and fingertip joints will function just the same as those two levers had. Once the middle joint has started pulling you towards collapse, the more you try to grip from the weak joint that controls the fingertip (in a bid to keep it rounded) the more you ALSO engage the stronger middle joint that is destabilising it. This creates a vicious circle where the harder you should to seek to oppose the collapse, the more actively you contribute to causing it- by working directly against yourself.

Consider now the lengthening action, seen here in a before and after:

(Note that this action still involves the act of closure or 'grip' at the knuckle joint. The difference in what I am speaking about exists exclusively in whether the middle and fingertip joints complement that by opening or by closing. In standard human grip, all joints close in. In this action, the two lesser finger joints instead open out, while the knuckle alone goes into a more closed position. If that sounds complex to you, simply imagine the finger lengthening to match the blue line, or see this post on the finger actions for more information on how to develop a "feel" for this.)

When you are familiar not merely with the hand's most standard gripping action, but also with this complementary lengthening action, it quickly becomes possible to learn to balance on a depressed key without fighting against yourself. By alternating between the action that slips towards you and that which slips forwards, you start to discover a direction of action that exists somewhere between the two. The line of force is actually a touch forward (rather than perfectly straight down), yet not so much as to make you slip or to cause any feeling of instability. Sometimes it's as simple as getting the student to experience both forwards and backwards slides first and then simply allowing them to discover what feels right, without too much rationalising. However, if a student's habits are strongly based around desire to move keys by pulling the fingertips backwards, it may take some time before this rather different conception of movement becomes fully habitual. If so, I advise spending some trying to consciously perceive the slight sense of aiming finger activity forwards, even whilst keeping a key depressed. The feeling is not that you're not actually going to slip, but that you're ALMOST doing enough to cause the finger to start to sliding slowly but steadily forwards. Given time, this slight forward action will start to feel normal and instinctive and the student will stop accidentally retracting the tip in a way that causes collapse. In the end it may still feel like the finger is acting forwards or it may simply feel come to feel "right", in a more abstract and non-analytical sense. Whatever the case, it's worth coming back to explore both directions of the exercise, from time to time (and for each finger- not just the 2nd, that I used to illustrate). Willingness to slide smoothly but freely in either direction gives a wide sphere of experience to your senses and allows various muscles to let go and stop trying to force stability. When you go back to a regular balance point, it often turns out that you can be more than stable enough without actually bringing back those efforts.

Addendum

What I've written so far will hopefully have both given a rather comprehensive summary of the objective background to collapse and provided a means of conquering it that is both simple and direct. However, I'd also like to follow up with a few additional points regarding some of the issues that have arisen here. One part of this is extremely significant for pianists with small hands. But, firstly, even if you don't have any collapse issues, consider this- are you certain that your middle joint isn't placing a burden on your last joint, by needlessly pulling back at it while you play? Just because a finger doesn't collapse, it doesn't mean that an inner battle isn't going on between conflicting actions of the two joints- if you happen to employ the type of gripping action described.

With that in mind, the exercise is equally worthwhile for those who never experience collapse but who may be hooking themselves too forcefully into the key. If the finger is typically gripping back in towards you during regular playing, the arm tends to have to press down for the sake of stability. This can really burden the tendons and I strongly suspect that a conception of movement that is exclusively based on trying to grip inwards at the tip can contribute directly towards tendinitis.When you add a capacity to lengthen these weaker joints to the more common desire to grip from them, there's vastly less physical effort. Many people speak of curled fingers as being a cause of tendinitis, but I think this is a very misleading simplification. Curled fingers that are acting to curl up further will become burdened. HOWEVER, curled fingers that are gently lengthening in the last two joints (ie uncurling outwards) need experience no such burden. You have to consider both the position and the type of activity that is in progress, to get to the bottom of these issues. Neither gives the whole picture, without consideration of the other.

Consider what happens if you reach this type of open position (as is commonly seen by the likes of Rubinstein, Richter, Gilels and many other great artists- none of whom ever experienced any physical problems that I ever heard about)

Any use of inward grip from those two secondary joints will cause the fingertip to be dragged virtually horizontally, as shown by the red arrow. Unless the arm is forcefully digging down to create friction, that will cause phenomenal instability when the finger moves and compensatory tensions. From such a position, it is far healthier to appreciate the action that lengthens out the very same joints. This completely eliminates any need to hook in via strong arm pressure. Remember that both actions involve the stronger closing action of the knuckle itself. It's just that one also involves a significant burden on the weaker joints, whereas the one that involves lengthening them out makes for a vastly lighter workload (plus a more productive line of motion).

One point of interest to consider is that many pianists and teachers still actively preach the value of drawing the fingertip in towards the palm. While I'm on this topic, I'd like to illustrate how I'm personally 100% convinced that the efficacy of such advice actually depends on the student taking this as a springboard to something altogether different. This paper speaks about fingertip grip in relation to a pianist's health.

http://www.legacyweb.rcm.ac.uk/cache/fl0026842.pdf

Also, there is an Irish pianist called Roy Holmes who used to have various Youtube videos that claimed that all finger technique should involve aiming to draw the fingertips back towards the palm (I don't know if the fact that they have been withdrawn might suggest that he's since had a rethink). Firstly, if taken precisely as detailed, this approach would be quite functionally impossible for anyone whose fingers collapse easily. Rather than being healthy, it would frequently encourage the joints to slip out into their extremes of motion, via jolting collapses. Some hands just will not suit the approach, due to their individual characteristics. Even for someone whose joints do not collapse, it could still be hard work, for the reasons already detailed. So how could such a thing be promoted in the name of "health"?

Consider this- if you pull back into a position that is still curved, what happens next? Do you really keep gripping from the fingertip while keeping that key down? If you did, you'd have to hook in for stability against slippage, as illustrated by the last diagram (and the line of attack would also tend to drag the wrist forward and trap it into an uncomfortably bunched up position). I don't believe this could possibly be wise as a baseline for technique. BUT- consider this: what is the most natural thing to do once you've found a curled position? It's to switch to the lengthening activity, for ease of balance. Perverse as it may sound, I believe that approaches which are founded on preaching the importance of gripping from the fingertips work specifically because they create a position where you may start to feel that it's unnatural to grip any longer (ie. the advice actually describes an action that is potentially dubious, yet which prompts you to move into a position from which you may instinctively begin to a get a feel for the totally different action that suits the situation!).

If you can do it without collapse, try sliding your fingers along the keys like in exercise 1 again. After having had the experience of working at both drawing the tips backward and lengthening out forwards, can you feel an instinct that makes you want switch over to the lengthening activity, for balance- in the instant that you decide to stop sliding? If not, try it even more gently against a table top. If you don't perceive it on the piano, it should at least be possible to detect this change on the table top. At this point, either you could hook in by pressing the arm and work pointlessly hard or you can stop gripping from those joints and instead keep the balance via a much more subtle lengthening action (that keeps the key down and preserves the shape of the finger). This is perhaps what some people mean by "and then relax"- which might be more accurately translated to- "and then switch to a different style of finger activity, in order to find easy balance" That may sound wordy by comparison, but not every one will get this on instinct, merely as a result of indirect (or arguably even "contradictory") instructions. I believe that any deeper benefit of the "carezzando" idea is dependent on whether fingertip stroking triggers a position in which literally the opposite activity has to kick in, as part of a major muscular reorganisation. If you're equally used to finger lengthening actions and willing to go on instinct, you may well find a simple and easy balance without thought. However, if you get lost in an artificial premise that your fingertips are "supposed to" grip and devote all attention to doing so, you may very well place an unpleasant and unhealthy burden on your fingers- especially if you attempt to execute rapid-fire semiquavers with these highly indirect scraping actions. The more successfully you should literally adhere to the advice, the more uncomfortable you would likely find yourself- unless you should begin to perceive a change-over, by which the activity switches to the alternative manner of finger activity.

Although I am totally convinced that actions that involve extension are literally essential to the possibility of advanced pianism (and suspect that you could theoretically flourish with virtually no deployment of active fingertip grip), by looking at it from both angles you can learn a great deal. As I said, allowing slides teaches you how to let go of some unwanted efforts. In that respect, the "carrezando" idea can likely have benefits- (as long as you genuinely do it lightly and without "scraping" hard across the keys or "hooking" forcefully into them). What I am not particularly keen on, however, is the danger of implanting a person's mind with the misapprehension that fingertip grip might be one of THE standard ingredients behind pianistic actions, without drawing any equal attention to the important alternative. Unless a person is lucky enough to stumble on a "feel" for the fact that balance is vastly easier via an opposite activity, they may get themselves into all of the problems that are often associated with "curled" fingers- by using both a curled position and further curling activity. Grip is second nature to most humans already- which is probably one of the reasons why children so frequently collapse their fingers by gripping from the fingertip. In most of life, that's our default hand-action. What we are less inclined to have any immediate feel for is the vital role which lengthening actions can play.

On the subject of health, I want to illustrate one further issue, that demonstrates a powerful reason to appreciate why the lengthening action is extraordinarily important for small hands (and which further illustrates why it's a very bad idea to approach pianism solely in terms of the gripping actions, without reference to opening of joints). Lengthen your fingers out as shown before and then practise gripping lightly inward in all joints. Watch your knuckles this time. Do you see the fingers closing in towards their neighbouring fingers when you grip inward in all joints? Do you see how the space opens when you combine the slight lengthening of joints with a knuckle grasp? Here's a demonstration of both (followed by a demonstration of the fingers purely being drawn inwards and outwards, independently of other motions. This is a great exercise for freeing up any long term tensions that may be lurking there).

If you fancy trying to keep that space between adjacent fingers open while gripping, do you feel the sheer level of conflict inside your hand? Muscles are fighting to contradict the action of your very own muscles. All it takes it to add some degree of lengthening in the lesser joints, and you can eradicate this senseless fight (which is exactly what is going on when most pianists strain to reach big chords).

Ask yourself, even if you have a big hand, do you really want to be limited to actions in which you are actively making your hand smaller with every movement you make? Could that honestly be healthy, if taken as a regular pianistic action to default to? Or does it make overwhelmingly more sense to depend chiefly on an action that actively opens your hand out and frees you while you use it? I don't think it's any coincidence that my reach between 2 and 5 has increased from an awkward 7th to an easy octave since I willfully introduced lengthening actions to my technique. I'm certainly not looking to try to ban actions involving fingertip grip from pianism outright. However, given the compelling evidence in favour of actions that instead utilise extension (which stacks up way beyond the particular collapse issue that this post started out on), this alternative strikes me as the single most worthy action of any studying pianist's conscious attention. I feel certain that those pianists with smaller hands who flourish (unlike the unfortunate many whose fight to reach chords is all too easy to detect in their sound) do so specifically because their technique regularly involves the lengthening action. In my opinion, pianists whose attention is drawn exclusively to the actions of closure are more likely to be hampered by that advice than to stumble on the alternative- and overwhelmingly more likely to suffer injury via the internal battles. When pianism is approached in terms of both qualities of movement, students are vastly more likely to find their own feel for what works.

Achieving effortless balance within piano technique- connecting your whole arm to the keyboard, without burdening the hand (part i)

2013-01-23T18:39:00.002-08:00

(Since first publishing, videos have now been added, plus a couple of additional steps for achieving freedom in the arm)

In what will now be a two-part second section to my core posts (I recommend reading this first section on the fingers first), I'll be dealing with various issues- including how to feel the internal workings that determine whether a particular hand position will be effective (involving reference to the different positives of both "firm" and "relaxed" fingers). In particular, I'll be looking at how to achieve simple and low effort balance (of both finger and arm) after sound has occurred- while a key remains depressed at the keybed. However, in part two I'll also be spending a little time on a means of feeling how to ready a finger for easy key movement- setting the scene for the final core section on actually sounding the keys efficiently and with predictable results in sound. As with my last post, I'm going to keep the scientific background to a bare minimum and make this almost entirely practically oriented. However, this first half will end with optional "behind the scenes" information that further illustrates why I am asking you to perform these exercises and shows what they can objectively help you to achieve. If you have a naturally enquiring or skeptical mind, the addendum should make sense of various questions/potential objections that might arise for you along the way (in fact, if you're mid-way through and find yourself thinking "Why the hell do you want me to put my hand in that ridiculous position? That's not how I was taught to play the piano!", you may want to START with the addendum- where I'll both show why this is the easiest introduction to judging quality of balance in ANY position, but also prove via videos that great artists regularly used exactly this style of position in a literal fashion!). The proof is in the pudding and I hope the exercise alone is adequate to get a feel for what efficient balance is like- but I would still strongly urge you to consider reading the background issues in the addendum, for the fullest awareness of what is going on. It will explain many specific reasons for instructions that might otherwise seem a little counterintuitive- and I assure you the background reasoning is not at all complex or advanced!

Anyway, I'll start with some brief practical background issues right now- about why this particular issue is so important to piano technique (and why even highly advanced pianists can benefit from going back to these simple foundations). It will doubtless seem odd to start putting things into practice with reference to what goes on AFTER a key has been depressed. "Shouldn't you start with moving the key?" you might ask. However, the state of your hand (and indeed of your whole arm) before you start depressing a key is of paramount importance. You may not be able to influence the sound of an ongoing note after you have struck it, but what you definitely can do is to ensure that you are optimally poised to control the note that is to follow. This is extremely important if you want to develop the ability to precisely control the intensity of notes that come in rapid succession. The quality of balance that ensues after a note has been played should be regarded as the FIRST element that contributes to an ability to exercise control over the sound of the NEXT note- not as a mere footnote to a sound that has already occurred!!! Tensions are frequently a matter of fighting to remain stable due to not having found clear balance on the last key. Before you can expect to evolve into good poise merely as an automatic result of depressing a key, you first have to be intimately acquainted with that poised state.

Would an athlete be happy starting a 100m sprint having slumped casually against the floor- in the vain hope that they might spring to life in the instant that they hear the starter's gun? No. If they are not properly prepared, they cannot suddenly recover from a disadvantaged position. Even Usain Bolt couldn't win if he began from a posture where he was teetering on one leg whilst swirling his arms around (like a cartoon character trying not to fall off a cliff). It would be no better if he only avoided toppling like a drunkard by tensing up every muscle in his body. He needs to be primed for action against the starter blocks, in a quality of balance that cannot be effectively summarised by such overly simplistic terms as "tense" or "relaxed". A good pianistic hand typically needs to be priming itself in much the same way. To exploit your pianistic "starter blocks" properly, you need to be looking both forwards AND backwards- not waiting for the exact moment where sound is due, before acting. In most standard playing, we have a situation where the quality of poise against whichever notes were struck last is an inseparable part of the readiness for the notes which are to be sounded next (which will be demonstrated with specifics, in future). In that respect, I'm actually working in the natural order of events by covering basic balance issues first (in reference to one of the basic finger actions that has been detailed in the first core post).

Anyway, in this first half, I primarily want to tie together the concept of the "floating arm" (ie. where weight is supported at the shoulder end of the chain) with "arm weight" ideals (where the weight rests down on the keyboard via the hand). Those who advocate the floating arm (notably Alan Fraser) are trying to ensure that the fingers are free to move without being burdened by a heavy load from above. Those who advocate resting the weight of the arm on the fingers are trying to ensure that the arm can feel a sense of being supported- rather than become trapped into a position where it is being stiffly held up against gravity.

The thing is, you don't have to choose between the two positives, or get locked into a one-sided view. With the following exercises, I want to show how easily you can reap the fullest benefits from both models at once. After playing a key, the arm should be able to feel as much comfort as when you rest it casually on a tabletop. HOWEVER- what this doesn't mean is that the hand should therefore feel as if it's bearing the full weight of your arm, against the keybed! As far as the hand is concerned, it can still feel as effortless as if the arm is just floating behind it, without any sense of the hand being forced to prop a significant load up against gravity. If you think that sounds like a deranged paradox (rather than anything that is at all realistic) let's get into the exercises, for a rapid illustration. I strongly advise lining up a mirror by your piano for observation purposes.

Exercises

(Note that many of these involve arm movement, whereas others are primarily about settling into a more stationary position. Be careful not to overdo the stationary positions. There's a way of involving miniscule traces of ongoing arm movements (that are virtually invisible to the eye) even when "still", that helps safeguard against tightening. It's good to gradually reduce the movements of the arm and then still imagine you are almost doing them still, as you settle into balance. I'll detail more about these issues in the next post but, for now, notice which exercises bring most freedom to you, while keeping the hand and arm actively connected up. If you feel something tightening rather than loosening at any time, switch to whichever exercise loosens you most, via arm motion. If that doesn't work, switch to the other arm or just have a break and come back later. If you fight on through any tiredness, you're literally achieving the very opposite of what is intended from these!).

Start by extending out a thumb and finger as shown (there's no need to squeeze or grip inwards- just lengthen out!) and hover a cm or so above the keys (example 1)

Try to stay like that for 10 seconds or so (nb. I gave a shorter illustration, as there's not much of a spectacle on display when it comes to viewing this one). Before long, you will almost certainly start to feel tired in many areas of your arm. As explained in this post, one-ended balance requires an assortment of supporting muscular efforts around EVERY joint- or gravity would create imbalance and therefore movement. Your shoulder has to bear the arm's whole weight, without action from any other joint being able to reduce the load. Further joints simply have their own additional workloads to perform. Unless you experience severe discomfort, try it for another 20 seconds or so- but, this time, can you distinguish between the muscular activities that are genuinely 100% necessary for balance and those that serve no function at all? Try to relax anything that is not needed- so just a fraction more release would be enough to allow gravity to cause motion. Try to acquire real awareness of the activities that are truly essential- especially in the shoulder, elbow and wrist.

Now (after shaking your arm loose, perhaps) rest your thumb and second finger together on a single depressed key and compare (example 2). Don't push down, but try resting a released arm passively and limply on top of the extended thumb and finger (in the unlikely even that this causes any pain then please don't force anything!). Hang back though- so anything that might be bunched forward gets lengthened out by release of efforts. Can you feel the specific differences in effort? The benefits of the arm weight approach should already be clear. Because you now are in good contact against the keyboard, the burden has been taken off various muscles in the arm that previously had no choice but to engage. There is now support from two ends. While this does not guarantee that any superfluous efforts will all be released, it is at least possible to remove the overwhelming majority of prior activities. Previously they had been required, not to drop. Now it is possible to strip down to a low level of muscular activity without falling down. This mere possibility tends to inspire plenty of muscles to start letting go- but you should take a little time to look for any other needless efforts that your instincts might have missed.

Okay, that's the obvious plus side of arm weight ideals. So the arm weight folks are obviously correct and those who want to bear the arm's weight at the shoulder are obviously in the wrong, yes? Well, if I wanted to produce propaganda for extremist arm weight ideals I could stop here and leave a powerful one-sided impression (I hope that traditional arm weight advocates will not get their hands on this example and abuse it out of context!). There could hardly be a more persuasive argument for the benefits of resting arm-weight on the keys and not bearing it at the other end, right? Well, in a way. However, this is absolutely not the whole story! It's very easy for what might seem to be airtight logic to be founded upon incomplete data- rendering the "obvious" conclusion invalid. What happens if we reduce the amount of weight that rests on the thumb and finger now? Since when was arm weight limited to a simple on or off switch? Does anyone seriously think the body is that coarse and simplistic in how it functions? As long as you were only resting and not pressing down, you should have felt your hand was far from in danger of injuring itself from the experience. However, what if you could find a way of using even less effort and a greater sense of freedom still?

So, this time aim for a rather smaller pressure against the key bed, while still keeping clear contact with it- ie don't release enough to allow the key to start rising or even wobbling). Firstly, rock your arm lightly from side to side, sometimes fairly quick and sometimes slowly (example 3).

Look for a sense of release- but don't release that mild lengthening activity in the fingers or let them droop! Now try going out to the side (and mildly forwards) with the elbow in a big circular path. Then let it slowly come in all the way back to your body. Note the sense of length in the wrist (example 4). Keep changing direction, but slowly reduce the size of the movement- until you feel you have found the place where your arm feels just right. It should neither be slumped in against the side, nor significantly "held" up (with the elbow still poking massively out) via large efforts in the shoulder. You have to find the position that is right for you, but it should be more open in the armpit, compared to when you truly relax the arm all the way back in to your side (can you feel how you end up working harder if when you let it slump against your side as dead weight?). When you get it right, the arm hangs itself between the shoulder and finger. Everything in between should feel as if it's supported automatically- without even a trace of tightening to stop gravity collapsing it. It's important to do this very slowly- rather than in a hurry. I just demonstrated roughly what it might look like to give you the idea- but you need to try to perceive yourself with acute awareness, in order to strip away pointless efforts without losing the useful activities (which will need to remain present in both hand and upper arm). Spend plenty of time searching, but if you start to get tired then switch arm or take a break. This post features a very similar exercise (given in more detail, away from the keyboard). It's not compulsory, necessarily, but it offers a good preparation for sensitivity to the weight-regulation mechanism. However, if you find your upper arm getting tired or feeling stiff, you should probably take the more detailed version of the exercise as a compulsory preparatory exercise, to improve the basic action.

Anyway, how much lighter are you now? Can you feel the springs of the key pushing back up and trying to collapse your finger and thumb? Can you feel that the action of extending them out does just enough to balance a small but clear pressure that is trying to return the key? If not, there's way more force than you need and you're probably just plain tense at the moment, even. This is the worst kind of "firmness"- which is probably more accurately viewed as general "stiffness" that exists in balance with nothing in particular. Aim to feel the key pushing back at you with total clarity of awareness. Balance is what happens when the load on one side of a see-saw is sensitively matched to that which can be observed acting on the other side. If you encase the pivot in concrete (immobilising the seesaw outright) that is not an act of creating "balance"! Neither is "firmness" against a force that you cannot even perceive. Ironically, when people don't realise that the fingers need to maintain activity in keeping a key depressed, it's usually because muscles work so coarsely and excessively that they have lost awareness of these big efforts- not because the level of activity being performed is insignificantly small! Tightness readily interferes with the brains ability to register what the muscles are actually doing (especially if you've done it so much that a long-term habit has started to evolve).

As a teacher, I can tell you that it's amazing how stiff a student can sometimes be while believing that their hand or arm is "relaxed". That's not their fault though- everyone has different blind spots in their self-perception. The problem with an impression of comfort is that it is relative to what you typically experience and not necessarily a reliable gauge of what you are really doing. However, the better you can perceive what purpose the action of fingers should be serving (ie precisely cancelling out the force that is trying to send the key back up/collapse the knuckles) the easier it is to strip the muscular activities down to those which are actually useful to the task- rather than counterproductive. If you can feel what you need to match your actions to, you will get a lot better at saving effort. Sometimes let yourself get collapsed back a little by the key (in order to get an internal measure how strong the force really is) and then see exactly how much activity you really need to regain quality of contact and ground the key again (example 5).

Don't hurry this (as if you're simply ticking off boxes and then casually pressing on to the next instruction). Keep looking to perceive the details more and more clearly (but be very careful not to clench the arm on this one- can you feel it going from something like that initial state in example 1, back to the renewed looseness that can be found after regained contact?). Other times, rest down a touch extra and then gently allow the knuckle to droop down, before lengthening back up and away (example 6). Depending on how weighted or light your arm is, relaxing the fingers could either allow the key to go up or it could allow the knuckle to drop down. Which is most normal when you relax? Deliberately try the other one too, regardless of which side you are on now- so you're not getting lost in a single extreme. If you're sensitive to how you balance your arm, you should be able to experience either. Anyway, can you yet perceive the sheer extent of the role that the extension action must play in keeping the key down, when the level of weight reduces? By seeking to perceive this with sensitivity, rather than employing aimless strength of muscle contraction, you are learning precise coordination that keeps the arm at ease (rather than held up as in the first example). In a sense the fingers are quite "relaxed" (in the sense that that they are very comfortable indeed), but in another respect they contact clearly enough to be "firm"- just not as severely as when more weight was bearing down.

(Ultimately, descriptive words are a poor summary, anyway- compared to what you can learn by starting to perceive the FEELING of the exact interaction between the force that a depressed key sends up at your finger and the particular intensity of lengthening that most readily balances this out. You cannot convey that abstract feeling through vague subjective language in a particularly meaningful way- as it will typically mean something totally different to another person. However, what words can do is show a person how to zone in on balances of simple activities and find their own internal feelings of what it is like to explore them with a sense of purpose.)

Also, don't be tempted to pinch inwards! This can destroy your sensitivity, by forcing muscles to work in direct opposition to each other. Focus the activity into the twin goals of keeping the key comfortably down (without excess force) and helping your arm to be at ease. There's no need to fight against yourself! Rest the thumb and finger lightly together but always strive to perceive that the lengthening action is your specific means of sensitively balancing the key. The fingers should be mildly firmed by the interaction with the piano (and definitely not full of slack) but they should be in no way stiffened or clenched together- and certainly not compressed by the arm. If you catch yourself pinching together, can you feel how mere lengthening out can replace that need to actively grip inwards? A good test is to sometimes start together but then to open out slightly (example 7) between finger and thumb

(nb. if you are prone to collapsing joints then hopefully keeping it to literally a millimetre or two of space should safeguard against that. If not, just keep the 2nd very gently propped up by the thumb without tightness, to make collapse impossible. I'll deal properly with reversible joint issues in part ii).

Are they still as stable as they were when touching? If you are doing the extending action well, you should feel as secure either way. Although squeezing in can make it very easy to experience extreme stability, learning to exploit extension effectively will ultimately offer all the same benefits for less physical effort. Try comparing a deliberate bunching together with the lengthening. Can you perceive the slight tightening in the wrist with pinching, compared to the true freedom that can be found by matching the lengthening activity to the force that the key sends up at your finger?

Can you feel a clear connection between your fingers and the piano now, but with drastically less stress on the hand? Does your arm still hang loosely back from that contact, though? If not, can you find a way to make it do so? Did you relax the fingers a little too much now and lose the quality of contact? Be sure that they are actively lengthening, to push the knuckle right up. If it droops even a little, the contact may not be good enough to hang freely back from. Pushing gently on the knuckle with the other hand will confirm whether you are actively opening it by lengthening out (example 8). Remember though, this is to test that the knuckle is being pushed UP and away! It is not to encourage extra downward pressure from the hand that is on the keys, but rather the very opposite! If you pass the test (by not collapsing) that's good in one respect, but maybe you are actually too firm still? Can you now make the pressure against the knuckle from your other hand smaller still- yet feel as if you're only just lengthening enough to continue to support it? Sometimes almost be on the verge of giving way- so you pass the test, but only keep the knuckle up with the very least effort possible. There's no single "correct" balance. There's actually a good argument for sometimes very marginally doing a little extra activation of the fingers on purpose, but be aware that there's usually much more sensitivity if you're still rather close to the exact balance point, rather than making yourself totally solid. Even the test described here is better viewed as a test of coordination and sensitivity- rather than as a challenge as to whether you can grit your teeth and survive an onslaught of brute force. When done insensitively, pressing down on your hand can make you stiffer and less perceptive. If you've gone about it the right way, you should go onto feel an improved quality of connection to the keyboard with LESS effort- not more! As a counterpart to this exercise, sometimes place a finger underneath the knuckle and check if there's room to raise it up further without losing contact with the keys (example 9). If there is, you were drooping and were not extending properly! In this case, you definitely underdid the lengthening action. Fix the position with your "teacher" hand. But did you lose quality of contact between the fingers and the keys now? Did you lighten too much and leave your arm "held" rather than hanging? Don't worry if you do slightly miss the right balance at first. Over time, alternating between these two exercises is a powerful way of converging on a level of activity that is neither too little nor too much, but matched to requirement.

Is the arm yet feeling truly lengthened or is anything bunched forward that need not be? Try slowly going forwards- so the wrist goes up and above. Here you have to be especially careful to maintain length in the thumb and finger! Any of these added arm movements can either be coupled with a mild pressure against the knuckle from the other hand, or the slight upward assistance (as in examples 8 and 9) The latter is a very good idea here, as it's very easy indeed to droop and lose connection! Go slowly and try to perceive the adaptations required to keep the sense of length in the fingers as you enter different positions with the arm. Once forward, the whole arm eases back (starting from the shoulder end) to pull the wrist straight within a longer line- but it should always stay free and movable (example 10).

Also don't pull back so hard that you'd need to try to "hook" down into the piano key, to stop the point of contact sliding back. Any pull is merely to create length in the arm. To make sure you are not digging in, sometimes deliberately slide the contact against the key forwards and backwards (example 11). There should be clear contact but minimal sense of friction- definitely no bumping or grinding as you travel, but steady and simple motion. Again, watch that the knuckles don't start to droop but feel you do just enough to be lengthened in the thumb and finger. The more you go slowly back and forth, the easier it should be to get the arm to hang loosely between the key and the shoulder- without any areas bunched up (except the knuckle) or held in place by tensions around joints.

So, after all these variants, do you actually have to rest notable weight on the piano to get a good level of all round comfort? Hopefully, you should already be starting to see that the effort involved in a "floating" arm is a world apart from the major efforts associated with the arm that had been literally supported in space from the shoulder end alone. It should be far closer to the ease of our "resting" arm, even though we're not going out of the way to rest weight down any more. That is- as long as we have found a top quality connection to the keys (that can keep the knuckles elevated) and a sense of length and freedom in the arm. Miss either of these and you will struggle to achieve even a fraction of the comfort that is potentially available to you. Get it spot on, and you'll come to find that far more ease is afforded to the forearm and wrist, in particular, when you are not actively trying to rest down upon the hand. See the major difference between these two diagrams (the first showing an arm that is held up in a forward position and the second showing a well aligned arm- after the bunched up wrist has been pulled back into length):

(All diagrams generously provided by Azim Akberali)

Check these issues regularly in the mirror to be sure. Try getting it wrong now by holding the wrist a little higher and forwards and staying there for a while. Can you feel how the arm no longer balances with the same ease? Slowly release and feel how the upper arm will drag it back (in the general path shown by the arrow on the diagrams). Is it now even clearer how much effort you are saving when the wrist is lengthened out, compared to when it is a little bunched up? If you're stuck forward and over then no matter how well the fingers connect, the arm will be working harder to keep you up- until you actually let gravity drag it back into alignment (after which you can strive to lighten without falling into the trap of holding anything forwards, this time). It's no use connecting the hand to the keys if the arm is not taking the opportunity to lengthen back from the contact that you create.

Sometimes let the fingers relax as much as possible so they droop down into collapse. Can you feel how the arm has to work harder to stop its weight from squashing the whole palm down into a cluster (example 12)? I didn't illustrate it on the videos, but try a high wrist and drooping knuckles all at the same time. Can you perceive quite how much extra effort is required in general if you fail to focus enough intent into employing a simpler yet more productive connection? Now look to return to the low effort state- where the lengthening actions of finger prop the knuckles up, and where the arm hangs back without bearing down heavily on the hand. Are you getting a clear feel for the radically different possibilities involved in different styles of setup?

Via a combination of these exercises (especially those that involve starting out with movements in the arm), can you keep reducing the pressure until your thumb and finger feel as if there is zero arm weight bearing down though it at all (so it's purely that feel of lengthening the thumb and finger that makes for enough pressure to keep the key safely down without risk of wobbles)? Can you somehow have your arm feel as easy as when you had been resting down, even now? You're probably not 100% there on this extreme version quite yet, but getting gradually closer towards this seeming paradox is one of the big secrets to low effort technique in general. Compare again now to when you had been contacting nothing but thin air. Just rather light connection between the actively extending digits and a depressed key can make all the difference to the effort required, even if you're not trying to rest weight on them at all! In fact, try now with so little weight acting that the key doesn't even begin to go down (example 13)!

Can you feel how even resting on the mere surface of the keys (but still trying to push your knuckle up and away- to firm the fingers slightly and get a sense of connection) can offer significantly more ease and support than resting on nothing? This is VERY tricky so don't overdo it if you feel the arm starting to get tired, as it would in example 1. Come back to this part regularly as a test of your progress, but don't do more than a little with it in each session! The difference in effort between this minimal support for the arm (to get an idea of how little weight rests here, note that the pressure from a mere 50g mass would send an average key down!) and no support at all may be startlingly vivid to you or it may as yet be relatively subtle or even an elusive mystery for now. If you work on the previous exercises, over time you should build up to the point of being able to feel a truly significant difference in the arm's comfort, depending on whether you are supporting yourself in mid air or resting on the mere surface of a key that is not depressed (nb on this one, above all, I cannot overstate the necessity of the arm hanging back- or you literally cannot even begin to capitalise on that which is possible!). Can you even start squashed down, and be sensitive enough to feel the fingers push you away from the key to raise the knuckle WITHOUT moving it (example 14). Sometimes let the key move a touch, to be sure you are feeling how much resting on it is possible. However, the lighting in my video perhaps makes it look like the key was perhaps moving a good deal more than it had been. If any key movement occurs, find a way to keep it slight and definitely don't ground the key. If you can start to feel firmed against the keys (which is absolutely not the same as firming against nothing in mid-air!!!!), this is the good kind of "firm". There's so little force involved that it would be impossible to extend out too much- without the key going down, to tell you about it. In that respect, there's no way of overdoing it without instant indication of the excess. At this point, when you are back on a depressed key, you'll barely have to feel any weight resting on the note at all, to get extreme comfort (and the feel for the springs trying to raise the key up ought to be spectacularly vivid to you). This stage could take a week or even a month of sensitive work so, for now, just continue to observe the differences in various states and see how much improvement begins to occur. Try coming back to these exercises for just a few minutes everyday.

If this exercise still seems abstract to you, I should stress that it relates to just about EVERYTHING in piano playing! Even the shortest staccato demands sensitivity as to how the springs throw the finger back up. Once you can perceive both the resistance and an interaction with it that is based on finger lengthening, you simply need to figure out how to integrate this basic state into regular playing- and start to get it ingrained as a kind of automatic reflex, that you can choose either to perceive or leave to instinct. If you can learn to reliably achieve this quality of whole-arm balance after any note or chord, the level of control (not to mention comfort) afforded to you will improve beyond recognition.

If anyone struggled to perceive the differences in effort clearly, I'll reiterate once more that the basic key to comfort in the arm is to feel an adequate act of extending out the thumb and finger into clear contact and to hang or even lightly pull the arm horizontally back from there, in order to settle into a sense of being lengthened. The secret is not to go out of your way to try to rest considerable weight straight down through the thumb, or to feel the arm sagging down! In a finished product it's the lengthening activity in the fingers that secures a quality point of support and makes functional release possible. If that occurs properly, any pressure from the arm is merely an optional extra. There's an argument for resting down more in the earlier stages, but once you've definitely made contact, the rest is all about freeing yourself by raising the knuckles up and away- not continuing to squash down. The arm only needs to hang back from a well connected hand without getting held up forwards. To find comfort it does not need to be so inconsiderate towards the hand as to place significant levels of weight through it!

Resting down as a rule with full relaxed weight (as some arm-weight extremists preach) imposes nothing but limits, if taken literally. It's an option, not a permanent requirement (nor even the "normal" way to be). It's not necessary to rob your fingers of the scope to move as freely and easily as Art Tatum's are seen to be doing here.

Addendum

It took me a long time before I came to truly understood why Alan Fraser's books are regularly based upon getting into such positions as those seen here- and it was only when I discovered the lengthening action of fingers that I started to get a deeper insight. If you're looking at the examples and thinking that the position looks absurd, firstly consider that this is primarily a chance to experience the LEAST effort possible to connect the hand effectively. I'm confident that this is an objective truth and will try to give a practical demonstration of why. After experiencing this particular low-effort balance, you have something to compare other positions to- and can decide for yourself if you still prefer an alternative. However, regardless of what traditional advice says, I assure you that such positions are not unusual at all, among the greatest pianists. Thanks to Youtube, this is available for all to see. Here are just a handful of examples.

(this first one of Clifford Curzon cannot be embedded)
https://youtu.be/uzljkzRdrLA?t=3m30s

But what of the curved fingers that most traditional methods preach? Where does a near-vertical and fully lengthened out 5th finger (something that is actually VERY common among great artists) come into that? Well, let's clarify this in reference to Alan Fraser's "standing up" analogy (which essentially implies the same lengthening activity that all of this post has been grounded upon). I want to go a little deeper into the reasons why this type of near vertical balance is objectively the lowest effort position that can be experienced. Consider what happens when you are literally standing up out of a squat. Quite simply, you are lengthening your legs away from the point of contact with the floor. If you relax your knees once standing, your legs will give way and you will fall back down. There is a necessary level of muscle activity to keep balance once stood up- but the smaller the bend in the knee becomes, the smaller that ongoing activity needs to be. Try slowly squatting down. Can you feel how much harder the muscles work if you stop here? Push yourself back up. Here is an illustration of before and after:

Obviously the first position requires more effort to keep balance. Once the leg is close to vertical (nb. leave a slight remaining bend, to avoid straining the limits of the knee joint), the muscular effort involved in balance has become drastically smaller.Of course, the more you push your body up, by lengthening your legs, the more work you are doing against gravity- to lift your body up. HOWEVER, getting that work done creates a position in which your efforts are virtually done and dusted (because the joints are now almost perfectly in the line of force, rather than at a big angle to it). In effect you "earn" an easier balance for yourself, from having done the preliminary work of opening out at the knee (ie. standing up).

It's much the same with upper body posture too. Relax your posture too much and your neck will slump forward and down with gravity. Many muscles now have to work hard to stop gravity pulling your head all the way down. Lazy posture creates more need for larger intensity of muscle contraction. However, lengthen your spine out and you end up needing less effort to keep in balance. In all of these cases doing USEFUL work by moving up against gravity leaves it easier to continue to balance, from that moment onwards.. The finger works in very much the same way. In this exercise, the initial work of creating an extended finger and thumb will permit the least physical effort possible from the hand, in order to both ground a key and help out with the arm's balance. As long as you are not either pressing from the arm or resting down too heavily, this is the objectively optimal way of keeping the effort down without compromising stability. People usually tend to assume that such a position would involve working harder (and that allowing the knuckle to relax down would reduce the overall effort, once the key is depressed) but it's not so. Keeping it elevated is what makes for optimal efficiency. Once you've done the small level of work to get the knuckle up, you have a very easy balance to maintain- just the same as when staying standing up rather than squatting down and then trying to stay like that. It's possible to balance well without being fully extended, but it's harder to get it perfect and be sure there's no general stiffness. The easiest thing both in a squat and at a piano is to finish the job and get close to upright. The finger need not be altogether vertical, as with a standing human, but it does help to be between an angle of 45 degrees and vertical, if you want to feel a low effort balance.When standing up out a squat, you create ease by going from initially bent legs to straightened legs via the action of straightening- not via an action of bending your legs further! The bend was only there as a starting point. What happens if we compare this issue to the equivalent issue in a finger?

I believe that the irony is that "curve your fingers" advice is most useful when the pianist feels that the activity is the very opposite ie.UNcurling the fingers. Pianists who start naturally curved and get an instinctive feel for going from there to a less curved position can learn the ease of going from a slightly closed position to a more open one. However, pianists who start curved and stay locked into that (or, even worse, who try to close up further still) while producing sound, end up working extremely hard. Even if you don't go to the extreme of fully lengthened fingers, consider that getting straighter will still progressively improve ease of balance (just as the positions get progressively easier when you go slowly from a very deep squat to an upright standing position). Even pianists who don't go to full length with their fingers can be quite thoroughly dependent on this "standing up" action of lengthening out. I am not dictating the exact hand position that would be considered "correct", but rather being sure to provide the easiest way of feeling the type of action that reduces the workload involved in balance. By experiencing the whole range of the "standing up" movement you can come to decide for yourself which part of it you prefer to balance in (regardless of whether it's necessarily the one I demonstrate here)- and be sure you're making an informed choice rather than sticking to the limits of your experience.

Anyway, once you have options, the pianistic equivalent of the slightly bent squat position is far from off limits- even though it involves slightly greater effort to maintain balance. Not everything is about saving effort- when you have a musical image to attempt to execute. However, remember that the greater the bend in your balanced position, the more work it takes to maintain your balance. If you rarely play with significantly lengthened fingers, it's worth asking yourself whether you're actually subjecting your hand to the pianistic equivalent of this type of workload?

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Solid foundation reading skills- lifting the lid on the simple secrets to reliable and fluent score reading skills

2012-08-30T20:57:00.002-07:00

Although this blog is primarily about piano technique, I've mentioned before that I also intend to deal with other areas in which I have a notably different perspective to offer, compared to the norm. In my opinion (in spite of what so many people believe) reading music is not inherently difficult at all. Anyone can learn to do it well and without major mental effort- that is, IF you approach it with the right mindset. One problem is that standard methods don't tend to do much other than offer raw information- without typically doing much to aid the internal processes which need to fall into place, in order for reading to become second nature. In essence, it's a little like teaching Spanish by handing someone an English to Spanish dictionary and telling them to learn it. Having access to a dispassionate list of information is not enough for everybody to succeed. This means that while "talented" students may flourish, others are stuck in a continual struggle to get off the ground. My belief is that fluent reading is possible for any sighted person of moderate intelligence. It's simply that some people need a little prodding towards the simplest foundations for optimal development. If you get the right start then everything else tends to evolve of its own accord, whereas if you miss certain things it can seem like a constant uphill struggle. In this post, I hope to lift the lid on some of the things that must objectively be going on under the surface, when success ensues. I'll also show how to give these basics a solid kick-start, if you're not among the lucky ones who "get it" very easily.

If you're literally completely new to notation, these two pages give you a pretty comprehensive rundown of the basics about how pitch works (nb. I won't go into rhythm in this particular post).

http://www.piano-lessons-info.com/read-piano-notes.html
http://www.piano-lessons-info.com/piano-notes-diagram.html

It's not that there's anything "wrong" with those pages but, as I say, it's primarily just a collection of raw information. I'm going to talk about the tricks for rapidly getting to the point where you can see any single note and identify it at once- which is the first step of building up to the ability to instantly process every note in even a dense chord.

Firstly, I want to look at a common approach to learning all the lines and spaces. Many people use "mnemonics" such as:

Good Boys Deserve Football Always- which gives GBDFA as the lines for the bass clef (in ascending order)

and

All Cows Eat Grass- which gives ACEG as the spaces for the bass clef (in ascending order)

I'm going to have to go against the grain here and strongly advise that you stay away from these, if you want to make life easy! I'm not saying that they can never be helpful to anyone (after all, every mind works slightly differently) but I do believe that many of those who struggle do so precisely because they are lost in an elaborate and very indirect system of slowly decoding each note- rather than just KNOWING a small number of reference notes with certainty, and then logically deriving the others from those reference notes.

Before I explain the reasoning any further, if you want to read music easily this is all you should learn for now:

Yes, that's all! Well, actually, I'd be sure to know middle C in each clef too- but the main point is not to confuse yourself by also trying to memorise the five lines within each clef! Stick to the spaces, but learn all of those spaces properly- right now! You must get to the point where you know the letter for any space with 100 percent certainty without a moment's thought. Also, play them on the piano and look back and forth between the shape on the page and the shape on the keyboard. In the long-run, the association to the relevant piano keys becomes even more important than the letter. However, the letters are actually very important in the early stages- so don't lose sight of this aspect. Anyway- "what about the lines?", you're probably thinking? Well, if you truly know your spaces, every line is merely one above or one below something you know. How hard is it going to be to calculate a line, if it only requires going up or down one from something you know well? Really, it's not hard at all.

Compare to using a mnemonic, now though. First you have to be sure that you're using the right one- with four to choose from. It's not actually that simple. Time after time, students tend to confuse which one is for which clef. By sticking to just two groups of four letters to remember (rather than two of four, as well as two more groups of five) there are less things that you can get wrong- because there's less to memorise in the first place. Also, FACE applies to the upper clef, just as the face is at the top of the body- making it very easy to recall which spaces apply to which clef. Secondly, with a mnemonic you may have to count as many as five lines up to read just one note! I believe that it's this kind of long-winded process that makes reading music seem such an effort to some. Those who struggle need to learn to break out of this slow and tedious process and replace it with a totally different method. Good readers do not have to count their way up lines or spaces to decode anything! They memorise notes, so they can identify them at first sight. Mnemonics are useful for storing information- for recovery in situations where you have time to stop and think for a moment. When reading difficult sheet music, no such time is available. Quite honestly, I think a mnemonic is just about the worst thing you could possibly be reliant on. It's too much time and effort to get from the mnemonic, to the note that you are looking for. Ultimately, it's more of a barrier between you and the notes you're trying to find, than an aid.

Now, knowing the notes by a direct means is not easy straight off- but if you start by getting certainty on a few notes, it's way better than getting lost in four confusing mnemonics to count your way along. Far better to know a small number of notes well, than to have a hazy memory (or worse still, an inaccurate memory) of many notes. At the very worst, if you have only learned your spaces, remember that you still never have to count more than one note away to get any line. This is quicker and, very importantly, begins the internal process of putting notes into association with each other. Notes are always being viewed in comparison to their neighbours. Everything gets placed in the context of a bigger picture- it's not a case of deriving one isolated letter by reciting meaningless strings of irrelevant words. Next thing you know, you'll discover that you also know every line at first sight- without even having to work from a space any more.

Let's also compare the idea of counting your way along a mnemonic to mathematics. Today, there seems to be an obsession with counting up objects- to make maths relate to the "real world". A kid might take 5 sweets and add 4 sweets and then count them up to get 9. However, what anyone who is good at maths has acquired is the MEMORY that 4+5=9. If using objects should help that memory to develop, that's great. However, if the kid is lost in the process of counting those sweets out one by one (rather than paying attention to the results, for future use) he is just getting stuck in the slow, cumbersome work that maths was meant to replace! Often the child is getting little more than relentless counting practice (arguably due to having been directly encouraged to focus too much on the "real world" element) rather than getting on with learning the results. Ironically, the whole benefit of maths is that it eliminates the need to waste time putting objects side by side and counting them. You just remember your basic sums in a completely abstract context (without the slightest need to associate calculations to the real world) and then relate the answer back to reality- only AFTER you've skipped what would have been the slow counting part. Rapid arithmetic does not hinge at all on whether associations have been made to the real world, but merely upon the speed and accuracy of memory recall.

That might seem distant from musical notation- but there are actually extremely close parallels to reading music. Suppose that you see the top space in the bass clef. At first, you may say "All Cows Eat Grass" while pointing at each space in turn. Now you know that note is a G, from the word "Grass". Here's where the big issue really begins though. Are you going to be able to recall what letter and piano key that space represents (WITHOUT counting your way up) when you next see it? Or are you going to perform the same slow process of counting spaces, time after time- without necessarily learning anything from the experience? Okay, I'm not saying that you should only ever need to count your way up once and only once. However, you have to ask yourself whether you're actually building up memories for the future (that might soon eliminate the need to perform that process entirely) or whether you are simply counting up mindlessly- without necessarily developing any more direct associations from the process. Some people can just memorise which note is which organically- without really trying. If you're not one of those lucky ones, you must consider whether you're doing anything that might allow you to start recognising notes straight off- or if you're just repeating a slow decoding process over and over without learning from it. To be fully clear, I'm not saying that counting up is a bad thing in itself. You just have to be sure that you're only using it to progress towards a point where you no longer need to do so (just as a kid must progress to the point where he just knows that 4+5=9, without being dependent on real world counting)

Of course, this is only the very beginning of reading musical notation fluently- but it's a very important beginning to get out of the way. All good readers can recognise any single note on the stave in an instant. Without getting this under your belt, you can never hope to become an advanced reader. One thing I also have to stress is that you should NEVER guess, until you read notes with total consistency. Educated guesswork under pressure is a useful thing in an advanced sight reader- but you need to keep guesswork well away when you're developing the fundamental skill set. If you feel any less than 100% sure, go back to counting your way up FACE or ACEG. What you must not allow is the chance for inaccurate associations to form, due to casual guesswork. When you look at a note, you should either know that you do know it or know that you don't yet know it for sure (and if you don't know whether you know it, you probably don't!). Even if you have a fairly strong feeling, come back to the basic idea of counting up the spaces (whether the note is on a space or an adjacent line to one). It's better to know only one note per clef with true certainty than to pretend that you "know" more- while allowing errors. By stopping to be extra sure about the results, you'll get to the point where you genuinely know every note at the first glance with minimal thought. However, if you're inclined to have a wild stab in the dark when in doubt, the associations cannot form with any certainty- because the brain will be receiving conflicting information. Consistency is everything.

So, in summary, these are the key steps to this approach:

1. Work at learning the spaces inside out! Stare at them for a minute, a few times per day.

2. Get to the point where you recognise any space by letter at the first glance- but never guess, if in doubt! You cannot hope to force this step, if you're not yet there. If even 1% doubt lingers, count up ACEG or FACE to be certain, but keep practising until you do know with total certainty right away.

3. Find notes on lines by thinking one up or one down from a space that you are certain of (eg. the top line in the treble clef is one note above the top space E, so it is F). Again, if there is doubt, always double-check.

4. Start discovering that you will often know lines straight off- without consciously having to count up or down from spaces any more (but as usual- if in doubt, double check!).

5. Evolve to the point where you are totally certain about any line or space at the very first glance. Again, remember that you cannot force this! You must allow it a chance to evolve by following the previous procedures with care.

I'll probably write more posts on reading issues in future, both developing on this core foundation and going into notably more advanced issues. Consider though- if you learn the basics this way, you have already sewn the seeds for more advanced skills. This approach teaches a solid absolute reference point- but uses comparative logic. It's not mere rote learning, but a combination of rote learning and relativity to fill in the gaps. Any good reader should recognise any isolated note at first glance- but it's perhaps relative comparisons between notes that become most important in advanced reading. A four note chord is not just four separate notes to recognise- but also a series of distances between notes (that directly relate to physical distances between the fingers). All good readers master absolute reading AND comparative reading. The more you learn to work both ways, the better.

The fingers- the core of piano technique, part i

2012-07-10T15:08:00.001-07:00

In this post, I'm going to illustrate a very simple way of understanding the basic core of piano technique- getting the fingers to perform effective activities without wasting energy or straining. Afterwards, I'm also going to illustrate the fact that the fingers still have an essential job to keep performing after a key has been depressed. Finally, I'm also going to give exercises that will illustrate how ineffective it is to try to achieve things by bracing the fingers, and then demonstrate how much less effort suitably directed intent at movement is- even in arm weight approaches (actually, especially in arm weight approaches!).

Anyway, first up let's just do a quick preliminary exercise to loosen up any initial tension that might exist in the fingers. There are many ways to do this, but the one I'm going to outline here is based on using one hand to move the other. Firstly flick the fingers quite sharply (but not forcefully!) in both directions. Try to do nothing other than keep the fingers loose and responsive. Note how they automatically jump right back to pretty much where they started, almost immediately after being displaced. The natural muscle tonus draws the fingers back into a slightly curved position. Now try slowly pushing and pulling at individual fingers (within a comfortable range of motion)- trying to notice if any efforts are restricting the ability of the other hand to move the finger smoothly. Try to be 100% passive in the finger and look for signs of resistance- especially at the knuckle. Obviously resistance will be found nearer the edges of the range of motion, but can you feel habitual efforts causing resistance in the middle? Try to release whatever causes it. Sometimes wiggle a finger more quickly, to check for completely unimpeded movability- but always be gentle! By the time you're finished, the fingers should be felt to hang very loosely and effortlessly. This video only gives a very short demonstration for general illustration purposes- but spend a while really exploring the sensations of each finger in depth (for at least thirty seconds or so per finger, say) before moving on. Don't just wiggle the fingers without paying attention but really try to notice what is going on!

Now I'm going to work through the two basic styles of foundation finger movements. With my post on the thumb, I gave exercises that fit into three categories. Firstly, there are those where you feel how to perform the movement in thin air. Secondly, there are those where you interact with another surface. Finally, there are those where you use it to sound a piano key. This particular post will involve preparatory exercises from the first two categories- to fully clarify these two styles of movement (in preparation for a post about applying them to playing).

To be clear, I'm not suggesting anything as simplistic as the idea that there are only two possible movements from each finger. However, the vast majority of useful actions basically fit into one of these two groups. Even then, there's a rather significant overlap between the two categories. Both depend on the most powerful actions of all- those that originate at the knuckle. The first exercise is to perceive a pure knuckle pull. Before getting started, I'll just add that none of the following exercises should be performed with a clenched arm or wrist. Notice the feelings in your arms too, in order to ensure that you're not stiffening up. In order for the fingers to move truly freely, you need to keep the wrist loose, so the tendons which pass through are not restricted. You don't need to use deliberate arm movements here, but keep checking that it is free to respond slightly to your hand motions.

Point the thumb down and extend it lightly away from the palm. Use the fingers of your other hand to push the knuckles lightly up from beneath (especially on the 5th finger side, which is especially inclined to want to droop down. I won't go into the explanation right now, but keep it raised up!). Then extend your fingers out and slowly move them from the knuckles. Try to notice how far you can move them while maintaining a slight sense of reaching out at the fingertips- but aim for maximum freedom. Try to let go of anything that does not directly contribute to simplicity and ease of movement from the knuckle. Also, try to notice exactly where the movement occurs from (note that if you look at the palm side of your hand, the knuckle joint is roughly a centimetre or two down into your palm, from where the finger appears to begin! Misunderstanding where your finger is joined can make the movement a lot stiffer!). Although this movement can later offer tremendous power, try not to act against any imaginary resistance or to think about "strength"- either in this exercise or any other of those done in thin air. The more freedom and ease of movement you acquire here, the more potential you'll have to employ serious power when there is something of substance for it to actually act upon. Note that this movement is similar to the type of leverage shown with a pencil in earlier posts. The finger acts like a single lever.

Once you're used to what the knuckle can do, you can also try going on to curl up the fingers- meaning all of the three joints in every finger will act inwards (seen in the second half of the prior video). This action needs to be done with even more lightness still. Don't clench- just feel the path of movement, back and forth! When overused in piano playing, the action of curling up the end of the finger is especially inclined to cause injury. It also makes for an extremely indirect line- naturally scraping across the surface of the key rather than aiming the energy directly into it. Although fingertip pulls were used as a basis for old fashioned harpsichord technique, it is not a good default movement with which to control the heavier action and more sensitive dynamic response of a modern piano (I'll go into more details regarding the problems with curling up from those joints in future posts). While awareness of this motion is useful, it's the action from the knuckle that we want to cultivate as the primary source of key movement. Once you've observed what it's like for every joint to be closing inwards, go back to the knuckle action and compare. This purer knuckle pull is the first of the two basic finger actions.

The next quality of movement is based on adding a movement of extension in the weaker joints. That is, you do not start having already extended the finger (as in the first exercise)- but perform a simultaneous act of extension DURING the same knuckle pull. There's only one direction of movement from the knuckles that can possibly get a piano key moving- that which closes the fingers in towards the hand. Reverse the direction of the previous exercise and you'll see that there's no way that opening at the knuckle could ever contribute to moving a key (unless you want to play with upward-facing palms). However when it come to the two joints in the middle of the finger, it's possible for EITHER opening actions or closing actions to contribute to moving the key. This is an important thing to realise, if you hope to capitalise on a wide range of options.

Try keeping the knuckles reasonably still (but not forced into rigidity- note that mine still move a little) and go slowly back and forth with the next two joints (again be careful not to overwork with these more sensitive movements). Notice what happens when you are UNCURLING, this time.

Can you imagine moving a key with that movement? Almost certainly not. This opening movement is not remotely meaningful on its own- until it is used to complement the pulling action from the knuckle. Only do that one once or twice, purely for observation purposes. However, once the two are combined, there are countless benefits that will rapidly become clear. If it sounds like it might be rather complex, to try to involve these two contrasting actions at once, it really isn't. Perhaps have a go though now and see how it feels to attempt both? I presume that it will have felt very difficult indeed- but fortunately there's a simple mental strategy, that gets both elements involved very easily. If you start with a relaxed finger (in a slight natural curve), all you need to do is imagine a straight line- that passes right through both the knuckle and the fingertip. Simply imagine the finger unravelling, until it extends directly along that imaginary line. Here are before and after diagrams (to illustrate the line) kindly contributed by graphical artist Azim Akberali.

And here's a video:

Picturing the movement as an act of moving the finger out into this line should automatically combine the different activities into what the brain perceives as if it were merely one rather easy act. As if by magic, you'll soon find that the knuckle performs the same closing action as before, but that the finger as a whole lengthens out into that line- with the other two joints opening out. Please note that this is simply a guide line (if you'll excuse the pun), however. The idea of settling into this imaginary line is only a means to acquire the general feel. Although I do find this extremely effective as a rather literal premise, don't feel strictly bound to this! If it's between slightly missing that path with a smooth and comfortable movement or hitting it precisely due to stiffness, the former is vastly better. Feel free to explore around the general concept. In particular, don't try to force the finger beyond your comfort level. If it's not fully extended, that's fine. Over time, you will likely increase the range of comfortable movement, but don't try to push it into happening immediately by straining. All of these exercises are about comfortable, low effort exploration- not forcing things!

For the above exercises, start by moving all of the fingers together as one single unit. Once you have become used to the basic feel (and got it almost entirely effortless), go on to try them for individual fingers. This requires even more care not to force anything, due to the impossibility of comprehensively isolating movement of a single finger from the rest of the hand. There are physical connections (notably between the 3rd and 4th fingers) which dictate that totally independent movement can never occur. The danger of trying to 'isolate' a finger exists only when you try to FORCE other fingers to remain still by clenching other muscles (in other words, it's not so much "isolation" of muscles but the clenching up far too many additional ones that is the true problem).

Note how the other fingers follow plenty, in this demonstration of the two actions in each individual finger.

There's nothing wrong with trying to improve upon independence of movement- as long as it is not achieved by active muscular repression of other movements. The ability to cause movement in a specific finger is obviously a basic requirement of playing. Just don't fight against the lesser movements that fall outside of your intention. Focus your direct intentions on the specific action you wish to perform, but also be aware of the other fingers. If instead of fighting them, you merely go a little slower and with less effort, the additional movements will gradually become smaller. Also, consider that the resistance of a piano key enables it to withstand the equivalent pressure to approximately 50 grammes of mass, before it can even start to move. Slight sympathetic finger movements that occur in the air will be often be absorbed altogether by contact with the surface of the keys, unless severely forceful. For this reason, you do not need to actively repress other movements! It is only by noticing and accepting them that you can acquire the greater 'independence' of each finger

Anyway, now I've introduced the two movements, I want to give a practical demonstration of a few significant issues. Firstly, keeping the fingers relaxed, LIGHTLY push at them in the two ways shown here (note that they move the fingers in directly opposite paths to the two basic finger actions):

If they are truly relaxed, they will be moved. Consider now that a depressed key will necessarily be pushing back at the finger just the same as your other hand was there- due to the springs that are trying to return it. A truly "relaxed" finger on a depressed key is simply impossible. Arm weight cannot help either. A genuinely relaxed finger also buckles under pressure from above. The only issue is how efficiently the efforts to keep it depressed are being deployed in the finger. I'll explore this further (in direct relation to depressed keys) in my next post- although the following exercises also relate directly to this issue.

Next up, I want to demonstrate a few objective facts about the idea of supposedly taking the workload off the fingers by using arm pressure. Many people claim it is desirable for a "firm" hand to channel energy from the arm and then relax. Supposedly, this is less strenuous than having to move the fingers. Although there are some who succeed with this subjective illusion, I want to show how objectively flawed the idea of "fixing" the hand is if you fall into the trap of taking it literally. Try stiffening your hand quite firmly and then trying to "surprise" yourself with a slight push from the other hand (be very careful not to strain! If in doubt under-do the push and stop if you feel anything getting tired. If you have any history of injury, just watch my video and skip this altogether). The push from your other hand is equivalent to the reaction force that any arm pressure will cause the keys to send back through the fingers.

Could you stay still? Not a chance! I deliberately kept the force of the push rather low (as I wouldn't want to encourage anyone to hurt themself) but even in the second you can see the fingers giving way a little.You could stiffen as much as physically possible, but you will always give way at least slightly- UNLESS you respond with an attempt to move in the opposite direction to the force that acted on your fingers. General stiffening only reduces the amount which you give way (compared to the extreme give that occurs during relaxation). It never cancels it out altogether- no matter how severe the tensions that you might end up subjecting yourself to. Give in the finger is an example of a negative movement, that reduces efficiency of energy transfer (as surely as a battering ram made of collapsing foam). We cannot ever succeed in eliminating it with general stiffness, but only with an intent at positive movement in the opposite direction (see here for more background to these issues). Now start stiff again, but intend to move when the hand pushes- with our two basic finger movements. Start the fingers moving slightly before the other hand pushes- so you're not having to fight to change the direction of movement after a finger has already begun giving way. Can you feel how intending to move produces vastly more stability against the oncoming force? Can you feel how little effort it takes, to eliminate any possibility of giving way?

Now start completely relaxed and go on to do everything else in the same way. Were the results in any way inferior to when you started with a state of stiffness? If you timed the movement right (to start slightly before the other hand pushed) it should be every bit as effective as when you started out stiff. If anything the added sensitivity that comes with having started at ease should make it even more effective than starting stiff. Intent at useful movement is inherently superior to generic attempts to stiffen something up. Being stiff adds absolutely nothing to the quality of the results at any stage. You don't need to start stiff, you don't need to stiffen during contact and you don't need to be stiff after. You just need to intend to move the finger in an effective path. If you don't try to send the fingertip right back through the force that is sent at your finger, you can never succeed in balancing it out- no matter how tightly you clench! This is why arm weight approaches can be truly damaging to students who do not have an instinct for finger movement. If the fingers do not create movement as a matter of routine, the hand's only choice (other than collapsing into a cluster) is to stiffen up- achieving significantly less, despite far more physical effort. It's not about a moment of "tension" followed by "release", but about employing enough simple movement to balance out the force that would cause everything to give way.

In short- if you don't want a finger to give way, forget stiffening it against anything and instead think about moving it directly in the opposite direction to that in which it would give way. This is the foundation not only of single finger technique but of chords and octaves etc. In styles of playing like that of Rubinstein (where the arm drops the hand down into the keys from a great height) these movements only become more important, not less so. A generically braced hand just isn't anywhere near as effective as one that moves through the force that will try to collapse it.

Postlude
Please note, that I am NOT wishing to encourage anyone to think that the key to technique is based around arm pressure. If anything, quite the contrary. The latter half of this post is intended to illustrate that IF you choose to use arm pressures, they can never "replace" the role of hand movement within an effective technique. They can only add to the sheer necessity of properly involving it. If you truly throw out hand movements, you are going to be forced into stiff hand fixations (no matter how much you hope to "relax") that achieve greatly less. I want to stress that the finger actions outlined here are best developed without the arm pressing down through the hand- which only forces the fingers to be worked harder. Hopefully the follow up posts about putting these activities into practise will come soon but, in the meantime, please be clear that I am not advocating the heavy workload that comes by adding pressures from the arm (at least, not in the majority of playing).

An introduction to three core posts on the fundamentals of piano technique- plus a digression on why technique lies primarily in the right positive additions of activity (illustrated by a demonstration of two essential factors for achieving a loose wrist in octaves)

2012-05-15T15:21:00.003-07:00

I'd like to start by describing a phenomenon in piano playing that is widely assumed to be mere illusion. However, anyone who has ever had lessons with an extremely accomplished concert artist will be likely to relate to this. Basically, the most advanced pianists can often produce a very deep and resonant tone with minimal movement or effort involved. The individual motions for sounding each key don't even look very fast, yet there seems to be an abundance of time available between notes. Typically, a student's hand will get drastically less in return (despite visibly working far harder) - where a true master just drifts over the keys and produces a big tone, as if it were nothing. You can get some sense of this via videos of great pianists, but it's when witnessing this at close quarters that the effect is so startling- especially when you yourself have been getting so much less out of the very same instrument. Even in something as simple as a slowly executed scale, the piano just seems to respond totally differently to them.

At this point, I want to assure you that this is NOT merely a subjective illusion!!!

At the heart of this is a truly basic issue of mechanical efficiency, during an act of energy transfer. Sorry if such pragmatic language seems to kill the romantically arcane mystique of piano playing, but if you're not already startling others with the effect described above, this is your ticket to start discovering what makes it possible to do so. Aided by an understanding of what lies under the surface, the ability to produce sound so effortlessly (and with such overwhelming control) is something that can very much be acquired- or at least substantially improved upon. If I compare my current playing (since I started working with these considerations in mind) to older films of myself, my movements now look slower and easier- yet I can produce a more resonant and defined sound. I'm nowhere near mastery of these issues, but the ongoing improvement has been unmistakable. These next few posts are going to get to the heart of how to understand (but above all how to FEEL) the most fundamental issue behind piano technique- ie. how to channel energy into the hammer with efficiency (rather than waste the best part of it on banging against the keybed, once it's already too late to contribute to the musical sound).

Having delayed getting right into these key issues for some time (partially due to wanting to develop the clearest possible sense of focus first, but partially due to mere laziness), I am now going to start explaining how to produce reliably controlled sound via efficient finger actions (that cause neither strain nor impact) while also retaining a suitably balanced yet comfortably relaxed arm. After a lot of thought, I've decided to attempt to make these next few posts primarily practical- but also to tie in to some of the scientific background that I have covered in earlier posts. To achieve the fullest possible understanding, it will certainly help to cross-reference these posts with the more detailed background in preceding posts (that I shall link where relevant). However, my aim is that these posts can be understood in their own right- which will be aided by far briefer summaries of previous points.

The current plan is to split these core posts into three sections. This first one will detail a simple approach to conceiving the specifics of effective hand movements (starting with very slow actions in thin air). The second will put these fully into the context of the arm (illustrating a manner of thinking that I believe synthesises the positives behind both the 'floating' arm approach and the seemingly contradictory 'arm-weight' approach). Although it might seem to be putting the cart before the horse, this post will deal largely with finding the lowest effort with which balance can be effectively sustained AFTER key depression. In the third part, I'll be dealing with actually moving the keys (in a manner that seamlessly evolves back into that state of balance from the second post).

Anyway, you'll notice in these posts that I will talk primarily about ADDING activities- with less attention to things to be avoided. This runs in stark contrast to many of the prevailing methods around today, so I'm just going to give a brief demonstration to show that technique is most easily developed when the primary focus is on acquiring the activities that you do want- and why it's virtually useless to approach it exclusively in terms of trying to strip unwanted efforts away. To illustrate that, I'll show the two most important components that contribute to the possibility of achieving a truly loose wrist in octaves- both of which are about intent to add seemingly unrelated activities, rather than about the wrist itself.

Anyway, if the above sounded rather harsh, let me stress that I'm not dismissing relaxation exercises- but rather arguing for the necessity of also looking at the productive activities that must occur for particular releases to have any realistic chance of being maintained. I recently received a pre-publication copy of Alan Fraser's latest book on piano technique: "All thumbs". He, too, looks primarily at positive activities. However, it also contains some of the finest exercises I've encountered for neutralising unwanted efforts in the hand- to effectively wipe the slate clean prior to getting started on the positive actions.

Such things are great and I am certainly not arguing against them. The problem with so many other approaches is that they are too heavily focused on subtraction of efforts- WITHOUT covering the corresponding positive actions that you do need to be sure to put in. Alan Fraser goes on to cover such additions in great depth, but in other methods you're frequently left to either figure out some of the most important things of all for yourself, or to go nowhere fast. There's no better example than the classic case of pianists who resort to a stiff wrist, in loud chords and octaves. I want to illustrate here how directly focusing upon the wrist itself is possibly the single most futile means of dealing with the issue.

The thing is, it's simply not hard to loosen the wrist. Yes, a pianist with years of bad technique behind them may have stiffness and poor range of motion, even away from the piano. However, this is still easy to sort out. Just get them to take a few days off playing and engage in daily cardiovascular exercise, such as jogging or swimming. Get them to do some yoga and flexibility exercises, get them to relax in a sauna and spa etc and (unless they had acquired really serious physical problems) their wrists will at least be loose enough to work with in no time. However, no matter how hard they try to remember to keep the wrist relaxed, as soon as they return to the instrument to play octaves or chords, some activities are going to need to be employed again. Unless they chance upon two POSITIVE intentions for activity (that must be in place elsewhere in the mechanism, even if you're straight out of the jacuzzi) the wrist will almost certainly start being forced to stiffen again, to compensate for their absence- no matter how strong their intent to remember to retain the looseness. When a wrist stiffens in spite of willful intentions to the contrary, it usually does so for a reason.

Let's just think what happens when a wrist is loose. Well, considering that it's essentially a hinge, if you simply press the arm downwards it shouldn't take any profound genius to realise that, upon contacting the piano, it would begin to give way and keep travelling down- unless you immobilise it. When people try to thrust down, there is not much choice but to lock the wrist, or to be willing to let it keep going. Carrying on going is exactly what Grindea's "flop" encourages you to do, in order to loosen up. The problem is that, although flopping reminds you to release the wrist and helps provide the feel for loosening it, you cannot possibly allow it to happen while playing loud chords or octaves at a notable speed! It also tends to give a very flabby connection to the key that provides little scope for controlled musical voicing, or depth of tone.

(EDIT- I've since discovered a way to achieve effective results when the wrist drops during sound-production. This requires a very particular quality of movement from the individual fingers, if you are to achieve fine control over voicing, but I should stress that a literal "flop" is not always a bad thing- at least for an individual chord. However, if you have to play fast chords in succession, it remains an objective fact that you cannot possibly afford to waste time on allowing the wrist to keep collapsing and falling down during key depression- and that immobilising it with tightness is a counterproductive and dangerous way to avoid that. Even if the flop can sometimes be used in a practical context, a pianist MUST also have the option of avoiding it in a healthy way, in order to excel).

See the first and third examples here, for an illustration of a "flop" due to a loose wrist (coupled with an inactive hand and upper arm), first from contact and then from a height.

These are actually great exercises for reminding yourself what it's like to experience a truly relaxed wrist- but they play no direct role in setting up a functional situation in which the wrist can afford to relax- without causing the ultimately unwanted consequence of actually collapsing. Instead of allowing such a flop, in regular playing you must be capable of adding an activity that will roll the wrist very slightly over the top- ie. an activity that specifically prevents this very flop from occurring! You will see this in the second and fourth examples of that previous film. The key is that you do not prevent the flop by tightening muscles to immobilise the wrist, but instead via a tiny sense of forward motion from the upper arm. If you've read my previous post, this is a classic example of countering a "negative movement", not by stiffening, but by including enough of a "positive movement"- directly in the opposite path. When you add this fundamentally essential component, gravity provides a smooth deceleration (rather than either a dead stop, or something so dysfunctional as a drooping wrist). Over time, you can refine it to a miniscule follow-through, while keeping just enough movement to ensure that the wrist is able to remain loose, yet without any chance to be flopping down. I overdid the roll over the top somewhat in the second strike of example 4, but the first shows something rather more functional. However, I would stress that it is possible to refine it to something notably smaller still (as can often be seen in the playing of Rubinstein, after he drops from a great height).

Anyway, develop movability of the upper arm with the following exercise- for rolling the wrist over the top, via upper arm movement:

Note that there should be no active pressure- other than a slight sense of allowing the hand to rest. Move slowly back and forth- without either causing any sense of strain in the wrist or forcing anything. Move from the upper arm and simply let the wrist follow passively and comfortably. If you feel the slightest twinge of discomfort, try resting more lightly against the tabletop or reduce the range of movement to whatever is manageable without any perception of effort or "pinching" anywhere. Don't go into this with the mentality of stretching or forcing!!!!

That covers the upper arm's requirements. However if the hand itself is merely braced to transfer arm pressure, it can still be hard not to stiffen the wrist when moving the keys. Instead, practise bringing in movement within the hand to push yourself AWAY from the keys, as the wrist rolls over. I actually involved this already in examples 2 and 4, if you look closely. I didn't just fuse my hand into a fixed position (as many explanations claim is desirable), but actively opened it out while moving through the keys. Such movement is especially important if you want to be able to drop from a height without experiencing a heavy landing. However, here's a clearer view of the action of opening out the hand upwards and away, done on a table:

Note how easily the hand expands. That is due to a complete absence of downward pressure from the arm. The only pressure that occurs is the result of the thumb and fifth finger extending and pushing the hand open. The less resistance to this the better. That can still be relatively advanced for an octave, so less experienced pianists might want to practise and play with the thumb alone to get the feel for how it contributes to looseness of the wrist- or perhaps try a smaller interval such as a fifth. The hand, too, now starts to contribute towards moving any remaining momentum forward and over the top (for gravity to naturally absorb), meaning that the wrist no longer has any need to stiffen against the possibility of slumping down into a collapsed state. The more the hand can contribute to this, the less the upper arm needs to press forwards (which becomes especially important at high speeds).

This barely scratches the surface of such a huge issue as chord and octave technique, to put it mildly. I'll certainly come back to this in more depth, after I've gone down into the absolute basics of movement. However, I hope this not only provides some initial insights into the objective background behind the specific issue of how a tight wrist can be cured, but particularly into the wider fact that ability to release an unwanted stiffness can be massively dependent on whether POSITIVE activities are being adequately deployed somewhere else in the mechanism. A list of things not to do is generally of little use unless you have a grasp of the things that you do need to do. Would you go about passing on a recipe for a meal, by handing someone a list detailing only those ingredients that are not to be included (without bothering to mention that they're specifically going to need a few strands of saffron, some grated truffles, half a pomegranate and a couple of kilogrammes of tripe)? Sadly, many schools that focus heavily on relaxation are so stuck in a one-sided picture, that they can ironically end up perpetuating tensions (by either failing to outline the useful activities or, worse still, directly advising against them). In many cases, looking at the location of a dysfunctional tension does not necessarily contribute anything much to the possibility of stripping it away- until a necessary ACTIVITY starts to be put into place.

Addendum

If you're in any doubt about what I outline above, this scientific study is most revealing.

http://sites.google.com/site/auditorymotor/Furuya_EBR_2008_final.pdf

It's not an easy read, so I'll summarise it by saying that they took a number of accomplished pianists and amateurs and asked them to play a single octave from a height. All of the accomplished pianists rolled slightly forwards and over the top- whereas all the novices moved down and back. Rather than take my second hand version, see page 6 for a very clear diagram of this (illustrating the differing paths of arms viewed from the side). This is very much in line with not only the details in this post, but also the concept of negative/positive movement in my last post (as well as my prior explanations of how to healthily redirect momentum away from impact, in the two posts on "keybedding"). It was no particular surprise to read that the accomplished pianists all used this specific quality of movement, or that the novices veered towards the same classic error (likely caused by thinking that because the key moves downwards, the trick is to thrust everything else downwards too). I cannot think of any better illustration of the fact that, while accomplished pianists will differ in many ways, there are also some very specific mechanical issues that consistently determine whether the most effective results can be achieved. The defining difference that distinguished between the movement of pros and novices was not an act of relaxation during key movement. The novices were slumping everything down anyway. What they missed was a positive ACTION- that was present in all of the experienced players. Without bringing in those key activities (to contribute towards efficiency), there's just no possibility to recreate the motion of the pros- or to reduce the overall effort to comparable levels. In many cases, before you can start stripping efforts away in any productive fashion, you must first introduce that which has been missing.

There's a hole in my bucket- issues of efficiency, why tension/relaxation thinking typically confuses and distracts from a vastly greater issue and why the arm can never genuinely replace the role of the hand's actions

2011-11-12T17:41:00.001-08:00

I had written this post some time ago, but decided to hold it back until I'd been through some very direct applications to playing. Now that I've posted about the thumb, I decided that I might as well publish this- before continuing with the actions of the hand. Please note that, while the description should make the practical exercise pretty clear, I will come back and add some videos in the near future.

Picture this situation: a man with a massive bucket is required to transport a volume of water between two points. However, there is a hole in his bucket. He puts in exactly the volume of water that is required- yet upon arrival he finds that there is scarcely any left. Seeing insufficient water, he comes to the conclusion that he obviously did not put enough in. After many failed attempts he finally decides to fill his huge bucket to the very brim, meaning that he is absolutely exhausted upon arrival- although even now he only just manages to retains the required volume of water. Shortly afterwards, another man arrives with exactly the same amount of water, yet without having even broken a sweat. His tiny bucket did not require any excess water to start out and he knew how exactly much he would be arriving with. Not difficult really- seeing as it just didn't have any leak.

By now, you might be wondering where exactly this is headed? No, don't worry- I am not an Evangelical preacher and neither is this the beginning of a convoluted Sunday sermon. I am not about to claim that this somehow "proves" that, while other things fade away, Jesus' love for each and every one of us is both infinite and eternal. Rather, I'm going to show just how relevant this analogy is to some of the most significant flaws that exist in most techniques. Rather than nitpick at mere surface details, this post features an extremely wide-ranging foundation issue (of which I have never personally encountered any objective categorisation or analysis) that relates to every sound that is produced. I want to illustrate how much energy is typically wasted due to technical "holes"- even in some very accomplished professionals! I will give a couple of exercises to show exactly what most typically compromises efficiency of transmission- and introduce issues that determine the means of improvement. Way too many pianists fall into the same trap ie. when they don't get enough sound, their instinctive default response is to press harder with the strong muscles of the arm. However, this is about as productive as the 'add more water' approach. A far more effective solution (but sadly one that few pianists find by instinct) is to start by patching up the metaphorical hole in the bucket.

Pressing harder means there's more energy flying around, but how much of it actually goes into sound and how much is wasted? Without efficiency, not only does much of the energy expended miss out on the chance to affect the hammer, but it goes into creating greater scope for impact at the keybed- ie. the "keybedding" that I spoke of in previous posts. Whatever anyone tells you about the supposed "scientific impossibility" of absolute tone quality, there is actually plenty of very credible evidence to suggest that thudding against the keybeds can affect sound (I'll likely devote a post to this issue, in future). If you start with less energy but direct it more efficiently, you can still get plenty of motion into the hammer- but with very little potential for a following impact. The collapse-free thumb extension in my last post is a particularly good example of a high efficiency movement, that sends little energy into the keybed. However, in this post I'd also like to expose some of the least efficient qualities of movements possible- so they can be more easily identified and improved upon. Odd as it may sound, a little first hand experience of a poor movement can give an extremely clear insight into what you DO need to look for.

Let's go back to the idea of using a pencil as a lever (see here for details). Remember how well you can get into the key when you lever your end of a pencil up, while moving the key. Well, let's deliberately try the reverse for a while. See how much sound you can get by sending the lever in the other direction. Try as you might, you're going to find that hardly anything can go into the key. There's little sense of acting properly against the key's resistance, or of being able to adequately accelerate though it. There's a lot of movement going on but the connection with the key is loose and unproductive. Quite simply, to bring your end of the lever down affects things negatively, whereas to lever it up had a positive effect. Even for a soft sound, you will likely perceive less feeling of control when employing the down motion. Efficiency is not exclusively relevant to making big sounds. Levering upwards will also tend to give a greater margin of error in soft dynamics.

From now on, I'm going to refer to the concept of 'positive movement' and 'negative movement'. The latter is synonymous with the 'collapse' that Alan Fraser frequently refers to. I have to admit that I was rather skeptical about his references to this concept, for a long time. It's easy to think "Okay, so the hand collapsed. What's that got to do with the musical results? Why should that affect the sound?". That is why I want to expand upon his concept and give a cast-iron illustration of exactly why these things not only matter, but to an extraordinarily significant degree. In short, negative movement (or collapse) vastly reduces the proportion of available energy that goes into actual sound- often causing an inaccurate perception of physical weakness and the mistaken belief that it is necessary to possess extreme strength or to press extremely hard with the biggest muscles. The real problem is the sheer WASTE that negative movements cause during transmission of energy. Energy leaks away as surely as water will disappear through a gaping hole in a bucket.

Also, imagine trying to play golf, if a hinge allowed a putter to bend back upon contacting the ball- rather than accelerate through it. Negative movement reduces efficiency of energy transmission, but perhaps even more importantly still, it frequently reduces CONTROL over the hammer and restricts the ability to accurately predict how it will be affected by your actions. It goes without saying that this prevents control over tone-production. I also have a strong suspicion that it can impact on rhythmic steadiness and the ability to play fast. When a finger gives way, there is a bigger gap in time between when the finger begins to to move and the moment when sound occurs. If you eliminate collapse altogether, you are going to be able to predict the instant in which a note will sound, with some reliability. If you have variable levels of collapse, you can never know exactly how great the time-lag is going to be. We may be talking split-seconds here, but if you consider what goes into a rapid Chopin Etude, there's every reason to believe that these could be enough to cause sluggishness and imprecision.

At this point, I want to expose a major fallacy that has been repeated in many explanations- that looseness and relaxation necessarily aid energy transmission. Please bear with me, though- for 'tension' (ie. stiffening joints to withstand force) is NOT what I about to suggest! I am not arguing for the "bracing" approach but rather a whole new avenue of understanding. The reality just isn't simple enough to be adequately summed up by the notion that it's all about whether you are "tense" or "relaxed". Even the realisation that most muscular states actually lie somewhere between the extremes of "tension" or "relaxation" sheds very little specific light on what is required. Tension vs. relaxation simply isn't the best viewpoint to approach it from. When you approach it by distinguishing between "positive movement" and "negative movement", instead, it transpires that the reality is not terribly complex after all.

Particularly with actions that source energy in the upper arm, there are a wealth of joints where relaxation will cause negative movements, that reduce the amount of energy that can be transferred to sound and which compromise control over the movement in general. It's not at all hard to see why people often seize up. They do not do so for the hell of it, or because they are too "stupid" to understand superficial instructions that they are meant to be aiming for a more generally relaxed state. Their subconscious likely realises that allowing negative movements would drain both energy and control. It then leaps in and tries to deal with that problem as best as it can- by using tensions to fight against these unwanted movements. The problem is that braced joints are not a very effective alternative to sagging ones and neither are they a healthy thing to employ. The brain is left in a constant battle between tension and release- each of which has its own pluses and minuses, but neither of which is remotely effective.

So, if you're neither going to brace a joint nor relax it, what's left? Quite simply, the alternative approach is to be in the midst of a positive movement in the opposite direction to that which would be causing a negative movement. Yes, it really is that simple! Forget the idea that it's all about some mysterious and fantastically complex compromise between tension vs relaxation or that it's about tensing for the correct number of milliseconds and then relaxing again. These ideas are completely irrational and there is no reason to believe that such staggering acts of coordination are either required, or even beneficial. All you have to do is notice where relaxation causes negative movement- for example if the wrist collapses downwards while playing an extremely loud chord. Instead of bracing to stop that, seek to move it slightly in the opposite direction as the key goes down. That way, there is neither the need for fixation- nor do you get the energy wastage and poor control that would ensue from pure, corpse-like relaxation.

If that doesn't yet make sense, we'll use the pencil (and later the finger itself) for an irrefutable practical illustration of how genuine (and indeed inescapable) the reality of this concept is. Suppose that I want to use my arm to provide a small "run up". If I simply descend with a light grip on a horizontal pencil, it will be greatly repelled by the reaction force, upon contacting the key. The amount of energy transferred is simply pathetic- even with a big arm drop. It's like what would happen if I moved into the key with a finger made of foam or plasticine. There's so much negative movement, that scarcely any energy is applied at all. The give caused by a relaxed grip is a hindrance, not an aid. But now let's try to render it immovable- ie. the bracing approach. Be careful doing this one- because it's not going to feel pleasant. Also, notice that however hard you might grip, you'll likely find that there's still some negative moment. Trying to fix something rigidly rarely actually achieves a situation of anything close to zero give. Remember that even massive sky-scrapers made of brick and steel sway in the wind!

Now let's abandon this horrible feeling of hoping to fix the pencil and replace it with simple movement. This time, as the pencil reaches the key, you're going to be doing the levering action described earlier. Instead of being left to collapse down, the end you hold will be pulled up. Negative movement cannot occur- quite simply because movement is actively going on in the positive direction. Once you've mastered this, it's possible to get to the point where the pencil barely moves at all. Now, this is on an absolute knife-edge when it come to coordination- so it's not something to aim for immediately. However, when mastered, you can try using only just enough positive movement to cancel out and prevent negative movement. To an observer there is a very still pencil that acts as a mere extension of the arm. To you, there was a very significant intent at movement that balanced everything. It should FEEL a whole world apart from the effort that occurs with intent to brace it still- regardless of how it looks. When using arm pressure, a hand needs to operate under much the same principles that pencil did- if you are to avoid wasted effort. If you want to merely be still enough in the hand to transmit energy from the arm, you first need to get a feeling of what it's like to safely eradicate negative movement- ie. by moving positively, not by stiffening! Only from this starting point can you be sure that you are neither tensing needlessly, nor wasting energy on impact at the keybed. Note that this is why watching what a pianist seems to be doing can be so misleading. A master pianist can match up positive and negative movements, sometimes with the result of minimal movement in the hand, while the arm moves visibly. However, the sheer stillness can easily trick viewers into thinking that the pianist is generically bracing- when they are actually matching sensitive balancing actions.

Think about the consequences of this experiment- with regard to schools that claim fingers only "support" weight or arm pressure! I'm not going to beat about the bush here. Even with regard to slower individual chords, the idea of using the arm pressures as a replacement for the necessity of hand activity is simply an impossibility. If the hand does not seem to take part then that is an illusion- not a reality. For those who succeed under this illusion, it matters little whether what they really do is what they describe. However, the problem is that countless others will find themselves unable to find anything workable, by striving for the same subjective experience. You cannot succeed with this unless you also learn to employ suitable positive movement in the hand. The only issue whether the individual is aware of doing so. When people make it all about the arm, there are some whose hands have adequate experience to bring in the balancing role of positive movement, by instinct alone. But there are many who will simply brace their hands against contact- especially when the explanation specifically says that they are meant to do so! The braced hand approach can be truly ruinous for such people and telling them to 'relax' AFTER is futile. Unless their senses overrule the explanation and tell the hand to employ adequate positive movement, they will be needlessly stiff and uncomfortable.

Countless great pianists have described "firm fingers" and others have described "relaxed" fingers, but either description is potentially equally misleading. Those who succeed with the firmness approach create "firmness" by sensitively balancing out negative movements in the hand with positive ones- not by fixating with the crippling muscular tensions that less accomplished pianists often employ. The fact that this balance is so physically comfortable is what allows others to experience the very same process as featuring a "relaxed" hand. Neither adequately conveys the reality of the situation.

Let's summarise here. Even when using the arm for sound we have three options, regarding the hand's major role:

1. We can brace against collapse, in line with the 'and then relax approach'- but how comfortable did bracing the pencil and then relaxing feel? And did it even succeed in eliminating collapse altogether, or providing any notable efficiency?

2. We can use a relaxed hand, that would waste energy by collapsing on contact- and indeed collapse into a palm cluster, if taken 100% literally. Considering how rarely this happens, most supposedly "relaxed" hands would more accurately be described as fitting into either the first category or the third. The problem is that, if you pretend your hand is relaxed when it isn't, there's no way of knowing which. When you strive to do nothing at all, it's left to your subconscious to fill in the gaps (assuming that you wish to play the right chords, rather than random notes). Sadly, without the right experience, the subconscious typically does a pretty useless job of that. Aiming for a relaxed hand (rather than a moving one) can often make for the stiffest fixations of all!

3. Observe where negative movements will take place, via experimentation with extreme relaxation (of the kind that would be totally dysfunctional, during regular playing). Then start to employ enough positive movements in the hand, for these negative movements to be cancelled out. There are all kinds of different variations that fall into this category- including those where the hand might appear to be perfectly inert and still. But remember- when a hand seems to be doing nothing it's a pure illusion. A hand that ACTUALLY does nothing moves keys with low efficiency- before collapsing into a cluster of notes.

So, do you still think (as most pianists do) that the secrets to power lies in tension/relaxation issues or that the main secret to power lies in generating enough pressure from the bigger arm muscles? Neither is accurate- which is why you sometimes hear even young prodigies making a big tone with little visible effort from larger muscles. The secret to power is to patch up the "hole in your bucket" by replacing negative movements with positive ones- starting at the connection to the key itself (ie the finger) and working backwards along the chain. Positive movement within the hand alone can produce fair power. If you start bringing in positive movement from there AND a little arm pressure the piano can really start to explode- still with minimal impact or exertion! In a future post, I will expand on this concept, with an illustration of how much the hand itself needs to move for truly big (yet low impact) octaves and chords. Neither flaccid relaxation nor bracing contributed to how a pianist like Artur Rubinstein could lift his hand above his head before dropping the weight of his arm into the keys!

I should add that I don't wish to be dogmatic and suggest that negative movements should be eliminated entirely, in the end product. However, I believe that the only way to be sure that they might serve a purpose, is to come from a place of being able to eliminate them altogether- without bracing to do so. From there, you can do whatever works best in a given situation- safe in the knowledge that your way of moving is not the product of having a lack of options. In future posts I will give a number of relaxation exercises, through which to both loosen up joints and observe the effects of negative movement- before illustrating how to cancel them with simple positive movements- not with stiffness!

Action and reaction in practice part i- achieving a big resonant thumb sound without impact and how to activate the thumb for effortless scales

2011-11-08T18:54:00.000-08:00

Okay, I've given a lot of background now, so with no further ado I want to get straight into a couple of entirely direct practical applications- starting with use of the thumb. This post will reveal some important aspects of what goes into an effortless but resonant tone, as well as a means of improving stability and ease in scales. While I wouldn't want to be so foolish as to give a "100% guarantee" of instantaneous magical improvement, I do honestly believe that virtually anyone will perceive some degree of instant difference from the exercises- including many advanced players. Even if you haven't read a single one of my previous posts (with their illustrations of scientific background to technical issues), I hope this will give an immediate feel for just how beneficial the consequences of these concepts can be, and hopefully draw you into deeper exploration. In particular here, I want to show that while the premises are largely based on seemingly abstract movement issues, they can have a rapid impact upon how effectively existing musical intentions can be brought into fruition. However, I'll also be looking at a means of improving raw speed within scales!

(For legal reasons, I should briefly stress that all exercises are undertaken at your own risk. Please note that while the videos provide a valuable illustration aid, it's the thinking that runs behind the movements that matters the most. It's very important to follow the instructions of each exercise- rather than only the videos. If you do so with due care and pay attention to the feedback from your perception, there should be nothing to fear. However, take special care if you have prior injuries or medical issues. Above all, anyone should stop immediately in the unlikely event of discomfort or pain. None of the movements involved should feel anything less than comfortable and even pleasurable to execute. )

Anyway, let's go straight to the piano. Try to make a massively sonorous melody line, using only the thumb of the right hand (plus pedal for legato) for long, broad notes. While you can use whatever piece you like, something like the opening melody from Chopin's op. 25 no. 12 would be extremely suitable. However, I have no desire to exclude anyone. Do a slow thumb-only version of "Mary Had a Little Lamb" if you wish- as this exercise is suitable for all levels!. The performance below gives an excellent idea of the type of sound you're looking to make (with a bell-like quality to the line)- but forget the flurries of notes! Only play a melody line (plus bass, if desired)!

Don't think too much about the movements the first time around- think of the intended sound and just do it! Once you're finished, think a little about how you found yourself moving when striving for that type of sound. Maybe even repeat it and pay more conscious attention this time. Also, how happy were you with the musical sounds you produced? It might be worth recording yourself to see how it sounds upon playback. If you're honest with yourself, did you manage to come anywhere near producing the type of "golden age" sound that (the surprisingly little-known) David Smith produces? Maybe you succeeded in creating a pleasant enough musical line- but only by sticking within a very "polite" and gentle dynamic range? Or maybe you knocked seven shades of shinola out of the piano, but failed to achieve the seamless quality of tone required for a genuinely vocal melodic line? Without thinking too much about anything but the sound and the musical goals, spend a little time trying to improve upon the results and see how you fare.

We'll come back to that shortly. However, firstly, rest your right hand very lightly on a solid table top, palm down. Start to exert a moderate pressure against the table through your thumb. Now imagine the table is a piano key and do the same once again. Was the action the same or different?

Okay, now let's look at what you actually did there. Firstly, I'd be willing to bet that at least 90% of people will have performed every one of these actions (at both piano and table) by pressing their arm through either a stiffly braced thumb, or a floppy and inactive one that collapses. Before I go any further, if you hold the typical belief that big sounds should come from actions of the upper arm, I'd ask you simply to keep enough of an open mind to stay with me for just a few minutes- rather than exit this page in disgust. I hope I'll be able to illustrate just how much more versatile your thumb is than you probably realise, and show quite how much LESS impact and exertion is likely to result when your arm stops sending needlessly high levels of momentum into collision at the keybed. Yes- involving a notably pronounced movement from the thumb itself should actually be vastly more comfortable than trying to press the arm through a thumb that merely "supports" and I hope I can show you how to perceive this for yourself.

When you pressed into the table, what happened to the rest of your hand? Did it raise up over your thumb? If not, I'm afraid to say that this is a sure sign that you scarcely engaged the most useful activities AT ALL!!! Don't worry though- the details on how to introduce them are coming right up. If you did cause the rest of your hand to lift away, that's a promising sign- but how far did it go? Try going back to your starting point and simply lift up the fingers, as shown in example 1:

Don't press with your arm as you do so and don't even make any willful attempt to create pressure through your thumb! Start with it touching lightly and just think of lifting your fingers up and away. Did you feel your thumb starting to lightly engage- simply by lifting the fingers up? Try flicking the fingers up fairly quickly now (see example 2)- but remember to think up! Think of the downward pressure as being like a side-effect of lifting up- not as any kind of a goal. If the thumb feels "squashed" at all (either during the movement or once the fingers have stopped) make sure you start with a lightened arm and think of the hand's actions as being upward all the more. Sometimes try "waving" (keeping the knuckles high but moving the fingers back and forth) as in example 3. Particularly during this wave, be careful not to brace your arm. If it wants to wobble slightly in response, that's exactly what you need to be letting it get on with. Feel the sense of a loose "chain" that is free to sway slightly- extending from the thumb all the way to the shoulder.

Can you feel the slight adjustments that the thumb makes to remain balanced? While you should clearly perceive that downward pressures occur as an indirect result of your actions, they should never be especially large. With the right quality of movement at a piano, you don't actually need to exert a big pressure to achieve a full tone. I can honestly say that the very slight pressures that occur here (without so much as intent) are not drastically smaller than those required to make a healthy level of sound at the piano.

Anyway, if you're the impatient type you may already have jumped the gun and started applying this to the piano- and you may already be starting to get a better idea of the thumb's potential to produce tone. However, we've barely even started! All we've done is get the muscles to act in response to a flick of the fingers. The thumb is merely required to stabilise against a reaction in the opposite direction to the finger movement. It's possible that you'll have instinctively begun to involve the thumb's actions a little more directly than that, but we need to be sure. In the air now, try to differentiate between pulling the thumb down and away from the hand (example 4)- compared to the previous action of moving the fingers away from the thumb (example 5).

Alternate between the two relatively similar actions and try to notice what differences you can either see or feel in the results. However, be careful not to stiffen in a bid to immobilise anything. Retain maximum lightness and ease by going slowly and smoothly. If sympathetic movements still occur, that's fine- don't try to fight against them! Once you can clearly distinguish between the two, try flicking each movement out more quickly (examples 6 and 7)- but keep it very light again and don't fight the responses! If in doubt, it's better to keep it comfortable than to feel anything is being forced with needless vigour. Next up, try cocking the thumb back and extending it outwards (example 8). This will likely involve a slight rotation of the forearm (example 8).

Let's come back to the table. First remind yourself of the pure thumb "pull" by doing it in the air. Now let the table get in the way and feel how instead of moving the thumb itself, a reaction to that intention will instead raise the knuckles up (example 9).

The table "reflects" the movement in the opposite direction, like a mirror, in a manner of speaking. Make sure you still feel everything as an upwards action rather than downwards (with no jamming hard against the table) but try to feel how much more directly the thumb's action is now responsible for creating the upward motion compared to before. Try going back to lifting the fingers right up and reaching out (as in example 1), to see if the thumb gets more involved there too. Finally, try adding the act of extension. Think of much the same upward lift, but start with the thumb lightly bent and extend out forwards (example 10). Feel how when you lightly contact the table, everything is gently pushed back and away from that point- allowing everything to straighten itself out as the knuckles rise. Don't jam into the point of contact!

Finally, let's take this to the piano. Remember, you still need to think of lifting up though! It's very hard to retain this style of thinking, but you must not focus on moving the key down! For now, feel as if moving the key is a mere side effect of pushing AWAY, without anything resisting that motion away . Bizarre as it may sound, the slightest level of unconscious downward pressure with the arm is often what destroys the efficiency of energy transmission (this post gives a detailed explanation of why arm energy doesn't necessarily transfer to either the finger or the piano hammer, if you're curious). Depending too much on arm pressure also tends to crush everything together and create discomfort at the keybed. It's not impossible to add some in a useful way, but first you have to be sure that the thumb is playing its necessary role without jamming. The arm's role is to give your thumb an optional top-up- not to steal the show so frequently thumb never learns how to fend for itself.

Anyway, try playing that melody again. Is there much improvement in the quality of sound compared to before or in the physical ease of tone-production? Also, do you find habits wanting to come back? For now, you may have to make it extremely conscious, until your brain has a chance to develop an association between a big resonant sound and the activity that most easily achieves it- especially seeing as it feels like that activity is being aimed in what might logically seem to be the "wrong" direction! A great test here is to simply touch the underside of the thumb with the other hand while playing. Any remaining downward pressures will quickly be exposed by this. The underside of the thumb should only be touching (not pressing!) against your other hand. If you feel your playing arm is pushing even slightly, slow down and try to engage the thumb action from a passive arm that merely responds- not from an arm that presses. It's arm pressure that creates a big danger of impact and strain between the thumb and the keybed- not activity from the thumb itself. If you're still trying to lift the hand comfortably up and away when you reach the keybed, you simply cannot cause significant impact. It is only when the arm presses downwards or if the muscles are stiffly braced (or, worst of all, both!) that your thumb can be driven into a hard landing. (I shall upload another video rather shortly, to illustrate this action at the piano).

Next up, let's apply the same upward action to the differing context of a scale. For most students, the thumb is something to be feared in scales. It is often thought to be too "strong". However, this belief often causes an attempt to compensate that sees it go flaccid and unsupportive. When you see a bobbling arm in scales, it's almost guaranteed that this is because the student's arm sags down into every thumb note. The sheer inactivity of the thumb causes everything to slump down uncontrolled and jam against the piano. This typically results in an inconsistent sound that features as many heavy lumps as it does notes that barely sound at all. It's also harder to find the next position. Pressing down actively hinders the ability to realign. When the thumb works better, realignment becomes an automatic part of merely moving the key in the first place.

Here's a recently added video:

First I show a fairly lifeless thumb and the awkward wrist twist need to navigate deliberately between positions, without the proper thumb contribution. Then I show a slow sense of being opened around the thumb- not by moving straight to the side but in a larger curve. You can also wiggle the fingers, as earlier, or simply open them out. The feeling of realignment is an almost completely passive response to a very deliberate thumb motion, although the arm must be very light to react so freely and easily. It's not about having to work your thumb hard against weight. This is followed by a fast and almost functional version, with a quick throw of the fingers followed by instant alignment. Finally, the fingers no longer lift visibly, but the inner feeling is identical to the previous step- they still feel thrown up and over by the active thumb movement. It's like a gentle puff of wind "blowing" the arm over the top, into the new alignment. Similar as it might appear, it's nothing like the first one- where they are cranked sideways from a twist in the wrist. The arm is much more responsive to the thumb and nothing is being held into a fixed position.

Most people use overwhelmingly excessive downforce (without embracing the upward reactions) and thus struggle to open this freely. For this reason, take great care not to overdo the sharper actions and don't jam down for even a moment. However, once you have lightened up and learned to move the thumb freely, it becomes a real breeze. By the end, we should have the (seeming) paradox of extreme stability, coupled with a tremendous feeling of lightness and ease- that should carry as much into the other fingers as the thumbs themselves. Contrary to what many believe, the greatest ease of thumb movement comes when you give it a positive task to perform- not when you try to hold back. The problem with holding back a "heavy" thumb is that it removes all this assistance to easy realignment. We're left with the awkward feeling of having to consciously adjust from a wrist bend. With the right action, we simply open up naturally around the thumb, almost as if by magic. After work on these more exaggerated movements, normal scale playing should feel like the easiest thing in the world. The thumb should start to feel athletic and become one of the easiest fingers for controlling tone- not one to be used tentatively or with a sense of caution.

Anyway, I hope that at least one (and hopefully both) of the two different contexts of thumb usage will have become clearer and easier from this. If you've been surprised at how much powerful your thumb is than you realised, do be careful to build this into your playing gradually. Hopefully the thumb's action already feels natural (rather than a thing of great effort)- but it's still important to take care not to overwork muscles that are not used to doing so much (even if it already feels physically comfortable). However, if you didn't feel any great improvement (and are not already coming from a place of being able to execute lightning fast scales at the drop of a hat) I would consider reading some of my earlier posts regarding the arms and hanging on for future updates. The most likely hindrance to good thumb activity lies in arm tensions- which repress the natural responses and make the thumb work needlessly hard against resistance.

PS. I should acknowledge that the basic concept of bringing in a greatly active thumb is owed to what I have learned from Alan Fraser. While I think it's reasonable to refer to these as "my" thumb exercises, I should acknowledge that the ideas are very heavily rooted in the same principles as his "thumb-pushups"- which I strongly recommend.

Scale fingering made easy

2011-10-28T10:13:00.000-07:00

Just a brief departure from my regular posts here. Having written up a categorisation of the simplest way of conceiving the coordination for every unison major and minor scale for my students, I thought I might as well post this on my blog too. While I cover standard basics in my teaching, one thing I don't want to do here is to put together posts containing information that has been stated elsewhere in exactly the same way 1000x over. However, while this covers something as standard and routine as scale fingering, I've never personally seen scales categorised in this exact way before and feel it warrants posting for that reason. Considering that 22 out of 24 keys actually use one of just two possible physical coordinations (!), I find it rather surprising that these simple time-saving observations have not been widely made. All too often, pianists do not understand just how similar seemingly different coordinations actually are. For this reason, a lot of time can be wasted on trying to get a "feel" for just running the fingers without understanding the basic trends (typically by repeating over and over). However, the process goes a lot more quickly if you realise that the coordination for virtually every scale is identical to that which will already have been learned elsewhere. The key to consistently sound fingering is understanding specific signposts or anchor points, that hold everything together. When properly understood, instead of having two separate coordinations conficting with each other, the two hands should actually help to guide each other. However, I must stress that hands separate practise is extremely useful. This is to show how to combine two hands with understanding- not to replace high quality separate practise altogether.

When working with students, I use this basic material along with various demonstrations at the piano. I've filled in some additional details to the original summary, to clarify certain areas that might potentially cause confusion when viewed without that demonstration. However, I'll likely come back to this at some point in the future and perhaps illustrate certain points (that I typically accompany with a demonstration) with videos. Also- please note that this is specifically about understanding and organisation of fingering. This is not designed as a comprehensive "how to" for starting scales from scratch (although I may write an additional post sometime, about the quickest way to acquire a comprehensive mental grasp of the notes and key signatures for any possible key).

Also, one final point- this is written to summarise the most significant features of each fingering- in an ultra-concise form. Some people may find it valuable or even necessary to cross-reference this skeleton with a fully notated and fingered version of each scale. That's not something I'd discourage at all- but remember to start focussing on the significant features straight away! Don't just follow instruction after instruction over and over- like a mindless automaton! The sooner you can reduce your mapping out of a scale fingering to its most significant features, the sooner each scale will be truly learned- and will stay truly learned.

Scale Fingering

Firstly, all unison scales that start on the white keys involve one of two coordinations. Most involve 343 (ie. for two octaves this means that the thumb turns under 3 then 4 then 3 in one direction, whereas 3 then 4 then 3 is turned over the thumb in the other direction). The only exception is anything starting on either a B or an F! For all 343 scales, practise the exercise of playing both thumbs together on the keynote and going back and forth, with a note on either side.

eg. for C major

R.H. 4 1 2 1 4 1 2

B C D C B C D etc.

L.H. 2 1 4 1 2 1 4

(apologies if the alignment is not quite right in some browsers)

This gives you the location of every fourth finger in the whole scale (which will always sound at the same time as the second finger in the other hand). This is by far the most important point to focus on. Practise hands separate C major scales up and down passing exclusively under the third finger (and the third finger over the thumb), in order to develop a feel for this passing as being a "normal" default action to perform. Once this becomes habitual you are free to focus almost exclusively on the addition of fourth fingers (alongside the reference point of where the thumbs meet)- while everything else can be left to take care of itself. In this fingering, the worst possible sin is to fail to get the thumbs to meet- and especially to fail to even notice if it didn't happen! Even at the very fastest of speeds, there should always be conscious awareness of the thumbs meeting on the keynote. This is the anchor point that continues to hold everything together- even when other details start going on autopilot. Don't forget to keep looking out for that one moment of reference in each and every octave- even if the rest of the scenery is allowed to breeze by unnoticed! In the event that your fingers should start having their own ideas about which order they might wish to come in, a failure of the thumbs to meet here should send alarm bells ringing immediately! This sets up the chance to do immediate corrective work- before bad habits have a chance to set in.

Next up, we have B and F. Both the majors and minors use the next most standard fingering- which is that where thumbs ALWAYS land together, rather than only once per octave. This is very simple indeed as long as you plan for your thumbs and calculate the fingering accordingly. You should always be consciously aware of BOTH thumb notes before you even think of starting (which also applies when practicing any scale whatsoever hands separately)! Once the thumb notes are clear in the mind, practise firstly with a large pause on every thumb, both ascending and descending. When ascending, stop on the thumbs and think about the left hand. How far is the next thumb note for that hand? If it's a long way take 4 fingers. If it's nearer, take just 3. When descending, stop on every thumb note and apply the very same process to the right hand. Of course, this needs to lead to a "feel" for the movements, if the scale is to go quickly. However, by developing the "feel" in a way that is informed by a complete mental understanding of where the fingering comes from, it's far easier to train the reflexes to become reliable.

Additionally you can look at the black keys to help guide this (although you should never use this as a replacement for knowing both of the thumb notes!). When there are two black keys you use the third finger (fitting 2 and 3 to the group of 2 black keys). When there are three black keys, you use the fourth finger (fitting 2, 3 and 4 to the group of 3 black keys). Note that the fact that the left hand starts B major and B minor on finger 4 is a mere passing detail- that true understanding of the thumbs will sort out automatically. If you realise that the first thumb meeting is on E, there's no other finger that could logically end up on the first note, other than the fourth. When a student starts on 5, it is clear that they have not given any thought to forward-planning. If they deal with this merely by memorising "start on 4" that tells them nothing except to start on 4- offering no guarantee of a better plan for the scale as a whole. Understanding nothing more than how to think around two reference thumb notes tells you EVERYTHING you need to know to reliably finger every note in the scale- saving a hell of a lot of time and effort!

Next up, we have the scales that begin on black keys. Firstly, D flat major plus its relative minor B flat minor and F sharp (or G flat) major plus its relative minor E flat (or D sharp) minor. All of these function around an identical principle where thumbs meet twice per octave. In particular though, take care with B major, F sharp major and D flat major. Note that each of these contains every black key- but different white keys. This is why it’s essential to be 100% clear on the thumb notes, as trying to play these by “feel” alone inevitably results in confusion.

That leaves 6 more keys. Surprising as it may sound, 4 more of these are simply 343. C sharp minor and F sharp minor are most easily executed with an identical fingering to their relative majors (note the standard fingering for F sharp minor is different to what I suggest here, although I regard this approach as being far more practical and effective than having to learn the unique coordination required for the "traditional" fingering). Thumbs land on E for C sharp minor and on A for F sharp minor, with 4s on either side. A flat major and G sharp minor work much the same. Look where the thumbs meet and remember that the fours only occur immediately on either side. Be careful with G sharp minor here, however! Note that this time the fingering is different to the relative major of B (and that it does not correspond to the number of black keys!). Relate the fourth fingers to their location on either side of the B- but be careful not to think of B major (which does not operate on the 343 fingering we need here). All other black key minors involve an identical fingering to their relative majors and there is usually great benefit in directly associating their countless common features. It's very good to practise these relative majors and minors together. However, G sharp minor requires a different fingering- making it important to be careful not to associate too directly with B major.

That covers everything other than B flat and E flat majors. For B flat, notice that there are no convenient meeting points. Odd as it may sound at first, the conflict between the hands on the black notes is exactly what holds it together most easily. When ascending the right hand has 4 on B flats and 3 on E flats and the thumb always follows the black note. The flats are the reference point- but the left hand never meets up with the right. One hand always has a 3 and the other a 4. On the way back down the left hand always has 3 on B flats and 4 on E flats and the thumbs turns under every black note. This time it is the right hand that must match the seemingly 'wrong' fingers to the left hand.

E flat major is very similar but we have a natural meeting point to think around. 3s come together for a useful point of reference on E flat- but elsewhere 3 and 4 coincide with each other, as in B flat major.

In the specific case of scales with flats in the key signature, an additional point to notice is that the right hand thumb always falls on C (or eventually C flat, in the case of G flat major/E flat minor) and F. Also, the third finger always lands on the E flat (or E natural, if we include F major) and the fourth finger always lands on B flats. It is only in the left hand that significant fingering changes occur.

Fingering chart

343 scales: C, D, E, G, A (major and minor for each) A flat major, G sharp minor, F sharp minor (relative of A major), C sharp minor (relative of E major)

thumbs together scales: B major and minor, F major and minor, D flat, B flat minor (relative of D flat), F sharp/G flat, D sharp/E flat minor (relative of F sharp/G flat).

This leaves B flat and E flat as the two exceptions, with their own unique coordination.

Addendum regarding melodic minors, issues of turning onto black notes and why I advise A major fingering for the BOTH hands in F sharp minor

Almost everything above applies equally to harmonic and melodic minors. However, F sharp melodic minor and C sharp melodic minor are slightly different. Due to the raised 6^th on the way up, it is necessary to adapt the right hand fingering when ascending. Simply conceive the ascent as a thumbs together fingering (thumbs on A and E sharp for F sharp minor, and thumbs on E and B sharp for C sharp minor). To return to the “normal” fingering, care must then be taken to start the right hand descent with 321- rather than to take the 2 that would normally be used on the keynote. From this moment onwards, the scale becomes a simple 343 fingering- involving wholly identical notes and fingering to the relative major. Additionally, note that G sharp minor melodic reverts to the fingering of the relative major (ie. B) for the descent.

Also, one commonly stated principle is that the thumb turns under black notes and that fingers are typically turned onto black notes. Personally, I would say that it is potentially disastrous to use this extremely superficial (and highly inconsistent trend) as a major part of what guides scales. There are simply far too many exceptions. It's considerably easier to use the two basic coordinations detailed here as the foundation.

Some people use the premise that it is "easier to turn onto black notes" as the explanation for traditional F sharp minor fingering. Personally, I totally dispute that. Not only does the traditionally "correct" fingering make coordination of the hands vastly more complex, but I also believe it is marginally less comfortable. If it's somehow "hard" to turn the fourth finger over the thumb and onto a B, I cannot see why. If that movement is "hard", then A major contains the same difficulty anyway. Does anyone think something as routine as playing A major is "hard"? Personally, I actually feel far more cramped when turning my third finger onto C sharp. When turning onto the B, I feel I have plenty of time to get into position for the following notes. When going straight onto the C sharp, I feel slightly hurried. Having used the standard fingering for many years before switching to A major, I'm perfectly capable of using either. However, seeing as the left hand is marginally easier with a standard 343, I cannot see any justifiable reason to inflict a completely unique and confusing coordination upon anybody, as if it were somehow more "correct". In particular, I can't see why a clearly non-existant rule about turning under black keys (that is contradicted by the fingering for a wealth of other scales) should make it more "correct" to employ a fingering that is arguably less physically comfortable than the more obvious alternative.

Keybedding part ii- achieving a direct line of action without impact (plus an illustration of the REAL psychology behind prevention of muscle tensions)

2011-09-28T07:32:00.000-07:00

This will be a fairly short post, but I just wanted to add an explanation of the second way of directing energy well away from potential impact at the keybed. Think of this as a kind of "half-way" post. As well as clarifying the basic theory of how this approach stops impact, these are extremely important concepts with regard to learning how to put this quality of movement into practice. From here, my next post will get right into the specifics of moving the keys with the fingers- with full relation to the arm's role (apologies for stalling, but I've wanted to be sure to get this part just right. A post with fully practical explanation and illustrative videos will follow very shortly now). Along the way, I'm also going to shed some light on the psychology of what really causes the worst tensions. I'm not necessarily denying that there is some relaxation value in positive thinking, lighting a couple of joss-sticks or taking in the sound of whale-song accompanied by pan-pipes. However, I want to show how achieving a suitable conception of movement itself has a vastly greater role to play.

Anyway, I've already covered the circular path that accounts for pure pulls from the knuckle- but there's a second type of finger action that is based on a more direct line of motion. Although this shares the same powerful "pulling" action from the knuckle itself, the finger as a whole is felt to "extend". Arguably you can even look at it as being something of a "push". However, thinking of a push can easily cause the truly harmful type of keybedding that Matthay spoke of! I'd like to use the analogy of a "press-up" against the wall to illustrate some significant issues that are hidden beneath the surface (see this post regarding issues of actions and reactions for some relevant information, and some background about the exercise). I'm going to use it to show what kind of background mindset leads to the equivalent of healthy pushing, compared to the type of mindset that results in an equivalent to Matthay's keybedding. Please note that this is not a vague or poetic metaphor! The basic practical issues are extremely similar- providing a better level of self-perception and awareness that can then be directly transferred to guiding finger actions!

Anyway, compare doing a light press-up against the wall with how you might act if you began from the same starting position, but intended to actually push the wall over (just to be clear, the motion of the arms here represents the action of the finger on a key- not the action of the arms on a key!). Although you can try out the latter- go easy if you do! There's probably little danger of toppling a building, assuming that it was constructed by a qualified team of certified builders (rather than a team of mobile-home dwellers, who some guy in the pub called Dave got you in touch with). However, you don't want to risk straining yourself. If in doubt do a rather light version of only pretending to act as if you want to bring the wall down. Alternatively, just imagine how your body might behave, were you to attempt this. Once you've done that stop and think for moment. What is the actual difference between the two acts, in terms of how the body behaves? Try it again and see if you can perceive what exactly is really going on.

If we looked at every individual detail it would likely be pretty complex. However, if we look at the bigger picture, the key difference is very simple. It's just that in one case you think of pushing your body AWAY from the wall, whereas in the other you think of piling your whole body in TOWARDS the wall. Yes, it's that simple. This basic concept is something that can play an enormous role in playing- if we can understand how to apply it to moving a key. I'll come back to this shortly. However, while keeping it relatively simple, I'd just like to go slightly beneath the surface for a deeper insight.

The weird thing here is that in both cases physics illustrates that you actually act TOWARDS the wall. Try doing the same motion of the arms in open space, with no wall to contact. Your elbows start bent and your hands extend away from your body (which stays in the same place). Most likely you won't even think about what your elbow does. You just feel where you hands begin and aim to move them directly away from you. The fine details of what makes that happen are left to the unconscious. However, when contacting the wall your hands stay in the same place and it's now your body that moves away. Basically, the wall gets in the way of the arm extension and sends the movement back in the opposite direction. To put it in a subjective (rather than scientific) manner, it's almost as if the wall serves as a mirror that reflects the movement back in the opposite direction.

Anyway, while the press-up and the demolition press are spectacularly different acts, each is a type of "push". Even when you think of going away from the wall, your hands will necessarily act towards it to make that happen. However, one of these is directly comparable to a healthy finger "push" on a piano whereas the other corresponds to the specific type of "push" that would be deemed keybedding. But if both involve pushing towards the wall, what makes them different?

The simple answer lies within the action/reaction concept. When you do a press-up, if you think of moving away, you will instinctively allow the REACTION from the wall to move you in the opposite direction. The brain figures out which muscles need to be moveable enough for the reaction to be allowed to push you away. When we think too much about aiming towards the wall, we are inclined to fight against the reactions and press through them with extra efforts or try to lock joints into rigid immobility. Here we have the underlying cause of most heavy tensions and of ongoing excesses of pressure into the keybed. Basically, the brain devotes too much attention to piling everything into the direction in which the key moves. There's not enough freedom for the reaction to act in the opposite direction.

Incidentally, when you get to the top of the press-up, there may be room for fine tuning. You should be careful not to lock the elbows or to push so hard that they double back. But there's obviously no question that the arms can release their effort altogether. If they did you would fall back in again! In fact, if you've done the movement optimally, it should be truly seamless. At the top, there should be nothing that you could possibly let go of without losing balance and there should be nothing that you would feel even slightly uncomfortable with. If you're balanced just right, the smallest fraction of release would slowly start you on the way back in again. Negative tensions do not come from keeping yourself away from the wall with sensitivity. They come from excessive efforts that are intended to act towards the wall. This tiny difference in the conscious mind triggers a wealth of different responses- that can gradually become ingrained into habit.

To take it half-way to what happens on a piano, imagine now if that wall could move an inch or two (offering moderate resistance) before stopping dead. If you think towards the wall, the mass of your whole body will likely be thrown towards the stopping point. That means more momentum and energy is heading into impact- and it doesn't necessarily go into aiding movement of the wall (as I'll demonstrate in a future post on efficiency). Imagine now if you think away from the wall. Your mass still acts to support and balance the movement of the arms into the the wall. But as it's mostly going away from the wall, there's less impact on landing. Only a small amount of momentum from the arms goes into the moment of collision- with any other momentum being sent in the opposite direction. With just the right coordination, it may even be that the body doesn't end up moving in either direction, but simply hovers in balance (note that this balance is totally different to if you willfully fix it it into being immovable)

Interestingly, a "fall" into the wall would cause less impact than a full body press. HOWEVER, it will actually land vastly more momentum than when the muscles activate to press the body away. Falling through the wall certainly does not make for the least impact upon collision. Because the whole body is travelling, there is necessarily more momentum going into the stop. An inert collapse is superior to thrusting the whole body into a collision. However, a suitably controlled activation (that stops the body crashing in) is notably lower in impact still. This makes a lot of sense when related to "relaxation" technique. A flaccid arm that collapses makes for less impact than an arm that is pressed in hard against the keys. But compared to a hand that activates to push away from the piano in a suitable fashion, it's actually the dead arm drop that makes for the most impact. Later on things can start to get rather interesting when you learn how to "catch" an arm drop with hand activation (which does not mean a braced hand!)- like Artur Rubinstein:

Anyway, all of these issues translate into extremely direct equivalents, when moving a piano key. I suspect that this will have already given some major clues in itself, but I will show specifically how these concepts relate to putting finger actions into practice in my next post. In case you want to start experimenting now, I should stress that when you push away, it's very important not to let the arm be in a heavy corpse-like state! If you release too much weight, even an attitude of pushing away can be hard work. It needs to be very low effort when you start out. Don't even think of crashing your arms down like Rubinstein, but start by lightly extending the finger to ease your knuckles up and away, starting from direct contact. There should never be discomfort or a heavy sense of pressure!

Anyway, as you've probably guessed, the big issue here is that thinking away in piano playing requires you to think not down of pressing the key down but of causing yourself to go UP in the hand (and perhaps even in the wrist, in some instances)! This is something that Alan Fraser suggested to me, the first time I played to him. Although this provided plenty of benefit from the start, there are many issues that I've only recently been able to put into that context and fully make sense of in that light. I honestly don't believe it's any exaggeration to suggest that almost any action should be felt as to try to push back away from the key. Surprisingly, dropping onto the keys from a great height involves this too- I'd even say it's especially important in that scenario. Rubinstein doesn't get that big resonant sound from crashing into the keybed with an inert or braced hand. Redirection remains essential- and it's timed movement in the hand that best achieves that. Anyway, this post is effectively a fleshing out of the upward concept and an illustration of just some of the reasons why it is quite so significant. A future post on efficiency will go deeper into the reasons why this can also improve energy transfer and allow big sounds to come when expending relatively little energy.

Briefly, I should just add that the idea of thinking "up instead of down" may appear to be in contradiction to my post about two-sided thinking. To be clear, the difference here is that I am talking about acquiring a starting point in which you have first learned to allow the arm to respond freely to reactions. This is a missing link in the psychology of just about any technique that involves stiffness and fixation. Even some highly evolved techniques are held back slightly in this respect. Some of the exercises in future posts will give a clear illustration of how we'll still be building up towards a balanced understanding of both action and reaction as a single entity.

Keybedding- to follow through or to hold back? How does a pianist really avoid impact, strain and injury? (part i)

2011-07-06T10:15:00.000-07:00

(In this post I'm going to introduce various background issues that relate to what makes for healthy movement in general- before going on to give large numbers of related exercises- which I will illustrate with the aid of various videos. Although the specific practical exercises and applications will follow in a second post, I do urge having a good think about the more general issues presented here- in order to grasp the concepts that run behind that which will follow.)

"Keybedding" is a term that was coined by Tobias Matthay. In short, it refers to directing unnecessary pressure into the keybed. Personally, I'd actually go as far as to say that way a pianist deals with the moment where the key reaches the keybed is the single biggest issue, with regard to whether a style of movement is likely to be healthy or injurious (which is why I want to devote plenty of explanation to this). However- the term has caused overwhelming confusion and misunderstanding. In this post, I want to clarify what types of contact with the keybed can be harmful and why. I will also explain how the pianist can contact the keybed extremely confidently (and indeed reap the benefits of maintaining quality contact with it) in a way that does not involve any physical risk.

All too often we hear people claim that the fingers must finish their activity 100% in the very instant the note has sounded- or they are supposedly guilty of "keybedding" (implying that the key is supposed to be kept from rising by some form of arcane sorcery). Some people even go so far as to claim that you can (or even must!) prevent the key from landing against the bed outright, even in loud passages. I'm not going to beat around the bush here. This is simply IMPOSSIBLE- beyond any reasonable doubt!!! Please note that I fully acknowledge that some methods that involve this claim have worked for some people. Rather than be entirely dismissive of such approaches, I'd like to explore how they can sometimes help. However, I want to demonstrate a simple means of perceiving what really happens at the keybed in a healthy action. Once a person has grasped this simple, rationally feasible means of eradicating impact, I believe they have a far greater chance than when working with a premise of pure fiction (portrayed as if it were fact).

On every piano key, there's something called an escapement level. This is where the hammer leaves contact with the key. Press a key very slowly without making a sound and you will feel a point where the resistance changes (nb. this point is not felt on many digital pianos). From that moment on, you can no longer affect what happens to the motion of the hammer. Now, there are two schools of thought here. Some people insist that as nothing else affects the hammer, you should stop acting after escapement rather than direct unnecessary energy towards the keybed. Others insist you should play straight though that point of release. Contradictory as it may seem, at first glance, I want to illustrate how you can reap the fullest benefits from both schools of thought- without any compromise whatsoever!

Firstly, let's imagine a golfer making a drive. Try telling that golfer that he might as well stop the club a few centimetres after striking the ball- after all, the ball has left contact and he's no longer affecting it. That golfer will tell you where you can stick it, and he will be absolutely right to do so. Stopping after might seem to be "doing nothing", whereas continuing with a follow through might seem to be "doing something" unnecessarily. However, the reality is that a follow-though is far closer to "doing nothing", whereas stopping is "doing something" unnecessarily. That is because the club is carrying momentum.

A car that is in motion doesn't instantly stop if you cut the engine off. Even if you apply the brakes it takes time to stop. Stopping a golf club abruptly also takes some time- and a lot of extra muscular effort. Also, for reasons of psychology, even having to think of willfully slowing down the club long after contact could introduce problems. The anticipation of that action could affect the rest of the swing. The golfer stops adding extra efforts after that last burst of acceleration through the ball- but he will NEVER repress what follows when playing a standard drive. The club's momentum dissipates gradually of its own accord. Of course, a golf club doesn't have to contact anything else after the ball though- whereas the piano key reaches the keybed and stops quickly. That's the big problem with use of this (otherwise very sound) analogy, in isolation.

I'll come to the other element which needs to be used to complement this analogy shortly. But first, back to the idea that the pianist is supposed to "repress" the naturally ongoing motion before contact with the keybed- it's simply not feasible. Those who succeed by thinking this way actually end up doing something else. We're talking mere millimetres between escapement and keybed. Imagine that you're driving about in your classic car and you see your husband/wife standing by a wall at the end of an alley. Plough into him/her at a fast enough speed and you could collect on that life insurance policy. However, with your spouse just a couple of metres away from the wall, would there be any real chance to slam on the brakes in time to save your car from the scrap heap? Also, brake a little too soon and perhaps your speed will be the only thing that you succeed in killing? Maybe instead of collecting a fat cheque, you'd get to spend the rest of your life paying off hospital bills? Okay, that's a slightly bizarre analogy (and certainly not the most scientific one), but you get the idea. While I by no means wish to imply that arriving at the keybed would be akin to a four-wheeled murder weapon hitting a wall at full pelt, what I am saying is that there is generally no chance whatsoever of preventing that contact from occurring. The only real issue is how you can make that contact comfortable and safe.

Due to lower key speeds, in quiet playing it might sometimes be possible to stop before the keybed (although I believe it's more vastly more likely that the key reaches the keybed but then bounces back). However, even with a slow key descent this motion would be closely equivalent to a golfer who takes putts by prodding at the ball and then deliberately stops the club a centimetre after. No professional golfer putts this way- because it's inherently too erratic. If professionals did putt that way, they just wouldn't get to earn a living. You see many amateurs try this- typically overshooting a short putt by ten times the distance they intended. At other times the ball often moves just a few inches or sometimes they hold back so badly they don't arrive to contact the ball at all! For even the shortest of putts serious golfers will unfailingly play through the ball. Quiet playing too is vastly easier to control when viewed solely as one positive action- without adding a negative action. Although that could virtually be a sentence from a positive thinking manual, there's also a verifiable scientific reason why a single positive act is easier without an additional subtraction to make. Or to put it another way (that certainly wouldn't be found in positive thinking approaches):

Why attempt to juggle two variables that you could totally screw up when it's already difficult enough to control just one?

That is why I am very wary of anything that preaches the possibility of willfully trying to slow down after escapement. What really happens (for those who succeed with this belief system) is that the momentum is comfortably absorbed or redirected into an alternative path- DURING contact with the keybed. This feels so effortless, it's possible for them believe that they must have actually slowed down already, for so little impact to be perceived. However, there's no actual ducking out of the keybed. In truth, contact is not avoided but is simply done better. When the wrong person is given a physically impossible task to attempt, taking the instructions literally can sometimes be disastrous. Dwelling on such a description could easily cause many pianists to fall into the trap of actually trying to add muscular repression (likely causing stiffness that will only serve to increase the impact!). This is why I think factually creative explanations should always be designated as a metaphor that is worthy of consideration- but never portrayed as fact.

Imagine if a train in a very thin tunnel hit a brick wall head-on. All the carriages would come crashing into it from behind and the momentum would jam everything together in a concertina effect (note that a whole arm push will give you a very big and heavy "train" that carries some serious momentum!). Conversely, imagine a lorry doing a hand-break turn, in which the trailer skids around until it comes to a stop. In the latter, nothing is forced together into compression. Movement continues to occur in a circle around a point- it does not pile straight into any point.

Consider also the "tension and release" approach. If you bang your fist head on into a wall, will it help to release a split second after? Well, I suppose so, compared to if you continue to pile right through it- but it would be damage limitation, not prevention. How much use is trying to time "release" (to hundredths of a second) when a head-on impact will still occur- considering that momentum continues to travel anyway? "Keybedding" is when momentum comes crashing behind the finger and compresses everything against. It might seem to logical to follow up with the assumption that the only answer is to somehow "turn off" the momentum and pressure within a split second- but there's a far easier solution. Learning a path of movement that automatically results in redirection of any remaining energy can make an instant of compression impossible- without any need to attempt mastery of intricate split-second timing. Think back to the efficient path of levering with the pencil:

When movement is allowed to go unimpeded around a central point of contact on the key, no amount of continuation along this highly effective path can cause either strain or impact. It's not remotely like a train crash, but more like the trailer that gradually spins around the truck cab until it halts. The worst thing that can happen here is that you simply carry on travelling a little further than you intended- as continuation goes away from impact and compression not into causing it. Also, all the while gravity is providing a natural braking force- so it's extremely easy to for a small continuation to be absorbed. Seeing as overdoing results in nothing that you need be scared of, it's a very easy movement to do positively and confidently.

While I certainly don't want to dismiss tension/release actions outright 100% of the time, this alternative causes far less initial impact and does not require any special timing in order to avoid keybedding. That alone makes for a far better baseline of movement (before I even go into the efficiency with which it sets the hammer in motion).

In my next post I'm going to show how to put these principles directly into practice when using actions of the hand {EDIT: I didn't get to the practical side in my next post, in the end, but see the exercise at the end of this post for a practical illustration of how you can begin to use the redirection concept to safely play an octave- potentially with even a truly vigorous crack of the arm}. While it's important to build up gradually, I do not believe that there's anything inherently dangerous about activation of the hand itself- IF you know how to deal with the keybed. Take a look at the style of movement in this film:

There's not the slightest hint of the on/off approach. The arm is never pressing hard through the fingers against the keybeds but neither is there even the slightest sense that he is trying to avoid or hold back from contacting them. Continuation of movement CANNOT ever cause compression, because the movement is never directed in path that might cause it- hence the look of lightness and effortlessness in each and every movement. Continuation of the action takes him up and away- it doesn't force anything down into keybedding. There's never a large pressure against the keybed- but neither are there coarse on/off jerks or prods from the fingers to prevent it. There's NO NEED to turn the action off at the keybed. Rather, there is a very smooth and continuous transition that ends in a low effort, yet stable and sustainable balance- that the whole arm is involved with.

Compare to this film:

Now, I'm not typically in the habit of being scathing about amateur pianists who are less than professionally accomplished. However, this is from someone who frequents internet forums under the bizarre delusion of being an expert on piano technique- yet who visibly struggles even with this straightforward ABRSM Grade 3 work. As a performance, the most significant deficiency lies in the treatment of the left hand as a mere background accompaninent- rather than as one half of a two voice duet. However, that is a major failing in the musical intentions rather than an issue that relates to his technique. What I'd like to focus on specifically is the style of movement- and how it compromises both his physical comfort and his control over the sounds that he creates. Notably, this is a pianist who advises the instantaneous stop at the keybed- and who suffers the consequences of that mindset, for all to see.

Notice the totally locked up arm and wrist. This would typically be called "finger isolation", but the real problem is the stiff arm- not that he is dependent on finger actions (note that Prats' finger actions are actually vastly more extreme). He is just not dealing well with the keybeds, hence the strain and effort. We see a series of half-hearted on/off pokes, with no flow or continuity to the movement. The stiff arm does nothing to absorb the landings- and cannot be hung freely as a suspended chain, because the fingers provide no notable stabilisation that might permit it. Instead of keeping the arm released to absorb reaction forces (like Prats), he has to clench harder upon every depression, to stay balanced. Also, the tonal control is extremely erratic, with a number of l.h. 2nd finger and thumb notes scarcely even sounding at all. Even in the soft dynamics, he plays like he is scared of the keybeds (and frankly he has good reason to be- when moving with such a stiff wrist). It's a classic example of severe repression robbing a pianist of sensitive control- just like the golfer who aims to stop his putter dead, straight after contacting the ball. This is certainly not an example of somebody who succeeds under the pretence that he can slow down before landing at the keybed. It's a pianist who is crippled by the problems of trying (in vain) to actually do it- resulting in gaping holes in the the line. When the fingers repress too much too soon, the level of tone is completely compromised. As I said- it's easier to control a lone positive action than when you add a negative action to the mix. Here we see what happens when you add unnecessary repression to what should simply have been a direct and uncomplicated motion.

Note how clearly the pianist who plays with confident actions is the one who can land the keys healthily and with control in any dynamic. Not the armchair guru who plays with repressed little prods- as if he's terrified of having to encounter the keybeds at all (even in a middle of the road dynamic). What he would need to do in order to progress would be to release the stiffness of the arm and stop trying to hold the fingers back from the landing.. If you continue freely into a small amount of positive movement upon contact with the keybed (involving proper response from a loose arm), there's no moment of impact or compression to be feared. When there is a small natural continuation (rather than a willful stop) the arm rapidly ceases to clench in anticipation and instead becomes capable of offering effortless shock absorption to the hand's actions.

Hunched shoulders- why do they really occur and how can they be fixed (with an extended digression on issues of stool height)?- Alignment and the role of the arms, part ii

2011-04-17T07:35:00.000-07:00

In the last post I illustrated the extent to which a completely released arm can align itself into a playing position, as well as how suprisingly small the force required to balance the weight of the arm is- provided that balance is generated at the finger end. In this post I want to explain the key element of how the arm would more typically behave in practice, at the other end- ie. the shoulder. Note that weight regulation is vital for ALL pianists. Weight never goes away as if by magic. Unless the arm is in the process of falling, its weight has to be supported in some kind of distribution. Some teachers shout from the rooftops about extreme release of the arm (implying that the hand takes the bulk of the support) whereas others are intent on promoting extreme withholding of arm weight (implying that the shoulder works far harder). However, what both need is consistent control at the shoulder end- over how much of the weight is withheld and how much is released. In that sense, arguably it makes very little difference which perspective you favour. Both schools require a means to control the weight distribution in a predictable way- regardless of whether the focus would be placed more on withholding or releasing. Later on in this post, I will illustrate a singular means of regulating use of the arm's weight- that I believe can be used equally well to assist either approach (or preferably for a far more sophisticated approach in which the level of support/release at the shoulder fluctuates greatly, according to what is required at the time).

Although it is vital to be familiar with the fullest state of release, an arm will rarely (if ever) be hung from the shoulder as passively as that of a corpse while playing (conversely, to make it behave as if it were entirely weightless is quite literally impossible). However, when introducing activity at the shoulder, you have to be very careful. In particular, I'd like to bring in the frequently encountered problem of hunched shoulders. Along with stiffening around the wrist, this is one the most common problems in piano technique- that people have tried to explain with a number of bizarre and esoteric theories. Lifting up the shoulders is rarely a conscious part of the intentions in itself. It's often the case that pianists who are aware of this habit still find themselves absolutely incapable of stopping it- no matter how much they focus on the issue. However, if you look a layer beneath the immediate surface, I don't think the source of this habit is actually terribly mysterious at all. I'd like to offer a couple of very simple and (in my opinion) very likely theories for why this would occur:

Firstly (as detailed in previous posts) it's common for pianists to dwell too exclusively on the upward/downward axis of movement in piano playing rather than embrace the necessary horizontal elements. If your image of moving the key is based on having to push it in a directly downward path, it doesn't exactly take the deductive powers of Sherlock Holmes to see how that might cause the instincts to keep bringing the shoulders up and over the top. Indeed, it's also common to see the pianist leaning in and pushing the elbows forward- as if they want to align their whole arm and shoulder more directly over the top of the keys, ready to push them almost perfectly downwards. Sometimes, the pianist will even start bouncing up from the stool- leaving you wondering if they're even about to get up and carry out the rest of the performance standing up.

Okay, this is a very extreme version of such a habit. However, just a trace of that style of thinking can cause the shoulders to start creeping up. Even a tiny bit of raising can cause problems. It may also accumulate- until it turns out that the shoulder has been raised up entirely, completely unnoticed. If a pianist wants to use arm pressures to produce sound, a far more efficient way would be a forward press from the upper arm- in which the fingers stay in the same spot on the key while the wrist rolls over the top. A forward action is directed into a downward movement through the key, often finishing in an upward movement. This action is possible without the shoulder having to go up at all. That's a somewhat superficially brief explanation for now, but I will come back to this action in much more detail in a later post. Anyway, there's a clear example of this action at the very start of this clip:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmPwz6NpljY

(Although this is a great example of this particular movement, I should state that Daniel Barenboim is far from a favourite player and definitely not somebody I would use for a model of chord-playing technique in general. He often resorts to a totally different style of movement- where extremely forceful yet inefficient arm actions produces a hideously clangorous and percussive tone).

However, there's also a second likely explanation for why pianists would lift the shoulders- to support the weight of the arm more. This is extremely common among those who sit on low stools (where the forearm slopes notably downwards from the hand to the elbow). This is because the angle causes the weight of the arm to express itself more, compared to when sat on a relatively high stool (where the forearm slopes notably upwards from the hand to the elbow). For those who sit very high, hunched shoulders are generally much more likely to stem from excessive desire to get straight over the top of the keys ready to push (a mindset that may also explain why they have chosen to sit high in the first place). This can also be an issue when sitting low. However, a low stool also introduces a significant need to reduce the far greater weight that would bear upon the hand, were the arm totally released.

I should acknowledge here that this seems to run contrary to what many respected pianists have claimed about arm weight, regarding stool height. However, I can assure you that the lower you sit, the greater the force required to balance out gravity's action upon the arm. This is absolutely beyond question. Dig out that corpse once again and try experimenting with different heights in the exercise from my previous post, to see if you can perceive the difference in the balancing force.While I'd personally advise something pretty close to the standard horizontally aligned forearm, it's perfectly possible to play well when departing a little from there. In fact, Arcadi Volodos seems pretty much ambivalent about sitting a bit higher or lower. He actually favours whatever chair the hall has provided for the orchestra over a piano stool- seemingly caring relatively little about the exact height.

However, it's important to be aware of the potential problems from adopting great extremes. While Glenn Gould was a marvellous pianist, he sat so spectacularly low that he frequently resorted to hunching his shoulders up very heavily- presumably because it was the only way to lighten the sound, as well as to stop his fingers having to bear so much of the arm's weight. At other times, we also see him to trying to lift his arms into a position from which to push down into the piano for volume, as in the first example. Sure, he played supremely well despite these issues, but it is said that he often suffered severe pain in his upper body and it is widely known that he was addicted to various painkillers. His diaries also document an extended period when his technique fell apart and he struggled to play so much as a Bach Chorale evenly. I believe Peter Feuchtwanger once speculated that his low stool may even have been the cause of his early death. That's certainly a rather extreme theory! However, had he not sat quite so low, he would easily have been able to support a more relaxed arm via the hand- which would drastically have reduced the stress on his shoulders.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbJc6IPooDE

It's interesting that's he is in so much constant movement with his whole body. I suspect that rather than being exclusively about "feeling the music" he would have been so burdened with effort had he wanted to keep still, that it would have been far too strenuous. I don't think he had any choice but to keep shifting the balance- in a way that few other pianists could have done while retaining control of the sound. Compare the stillness of Horowitz:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPTe1xMB9Uk

Horowitz had a much more natural and healthy looking balance- where he was low enough to exploit plenty of the weight of his arms, without that weight becoming a burden to either his hands or his upper body. His hand does not generally support the full dead weight of his whole arm. His shoulders are certainly not slumped like those of a corpse- but neither is the arm being held up by major efforts. There's a much more natural interaction than with Gould- where both hand and shoulder achieve tremendous stability. Between them, they can support the weight of the arm without either side working very hard.

So, how do you succeed in lightening up the arm, without compromising the stable connection between the hand and the keys- and without hunching the shoulders up? Well, it's actually quite simple. Once more, we need to add an additional dimension to the thinking. I've previously mentioned how finger actions need to be conceived in the axis that extends forwards/backwards from your body, as well in terms of the more obvious up/down axis. In order to lighten up at the shoulder without hunching, you simply need to think more in terms of the sideways left/right axis. When you think of lightening the arm as a pure upward action, even a fraction of movement in the shoulder can instantly compromise the sense of the suspended chain. Just a couple of millimetres of movement can leave the whole arm feeling entirely "held"- totally removing any sense that the arm "hangs" between shoulder and finger. When conceived this way it's virtually a sense of the shoulder being simply "on" or "off" (ie. held or released)- rather than the smoothly sliding scale of infinite possibility that it should be. If you redirect the attention to include sideways motions, a wider range of possibility should become available pretty much instantly.

EXERCISE

(nb, while not absolutely essential, this post contains exercises and explanations that relate strongly to the general principles behind in the exercise)

Stand up straight (ideally facing a mirror) and start by shaking your arms around- until they feel released and free to hang down from the shoulder. Now feel the elbows drifting out and away from the body. Basically, I'm asking you to do an impression of a chicken clucking- but VERY SLOWLY. This movement comes from the shoulder, but judge it in the elbow for now. Although the elbows will naturally come up a little as part of this, don't pay attention to that for now. Just notice the feeling of going out to the side. If you concentrate on that, the elbow will also go up slightly of its own accord. Neither resist that nor make it part of the active intention. When you go away from the body, try to notice how gravity is trying to pull you back inwards. The slower you go and the more you perceive this, the better. You should feel as if the effort of the muscles is so small that, while it's enough to balance gravity and stop your arm being pulled back into your torso, it's only just enough to cause movement at all. The muscular effort should seem absolutely miniscule. If you get tired, have a rest and come back to it later.

When your elbows are a few inches away from your torso then stop. But don't think of stopping! Let gravity stop you. You don't have to slam any brakes on- because gravity is already providing a braking force! If you keep feeling how gravity is trying to pull you back in, you should get to the point where the feeling of the muscles trying to take you outwards is matched exactly by the inward pull via gravity. Your arm stops but the muscles didn't stop acting. They can't have done- or you'd have fallen back in! They are doing exactly what is required and no more. Try feeling as if the muscles are almost still moving your elbow out at this point, rather than fixing you in place. Literally speaking you "stop" in a position in space, but you should not feel any stop in the activity. Try thinking of deliberately stopping the movement sometimes and compare the difference. See if you can perceive the extra efforts and the greater sense of "holding" that results. Then try to notice where you can release these unnecessary efforts and look to return to the perfect equilibrium between the outward action of the muscles and the force that tries to pull you back in. The more you feel the force that have to balance out in order to remain still, the more likely you are to match it efficiently, with the lowest possible effort- rather than by generically stiffening.

Now come back in again, reversing the process. This time, you are only just letting go of the muscles enough for gravity to draw you back in a fraction at a time. Concentrate on the outward action of the muscles still, as you drift back in. Remember- the muscular effort should already be exceptionally low to start with- but try to feel that you are letting go of this slight effort ever so slowly. Little by little you allow gravity to bring the elbow back in towards the torso. Your muscles are still having to act against gravity- otherwise you would collapse straight back in. It's a very slow process of releasing the activity a fraction at a time.

If you've done this slowly and sensitively enough, there should already be a tremendously improved feeling of lightness in your shoulders. However, one thing to watch out for is whether the shoulders are still being raised up as you do this. Look at yourself in the mirror and try to notice whether you see any signs of the shoulders being lifted. A few times, slowly raise your shoulders straight up and allow them to descend, using a similar process to before (ie. as they go up, feel the muscles only just do enough to overcome gravity. As they come down, slowly release this very light effort enough for gravity to lower them). Now go back to the slow clucking movement, but continue to notice the shoulder. Take the attention away from the elbow now and this time perceive it as a sense of opening out the space in the armpit. Keep feeling how gravity is pulling the shoulder down for you and be very careful not to accidentally activate the muscles that lift it straight up. Sometimes even imagine that somebody is pressing down on your shoulders, for a time (or get someone to actually do this for you). You can also try this while holding a small weight (say a kilogramme in each hand) to increase the force that pulls the shoulder down towards a neutral position.

As you get used to this, you're going to start refining the movement to a level where it becomes so small that it's basically invisible. Try practising it to the point where the elbow moves just a few millimetres. Can you still feel the vivid sensations in the shoulder? Try resting your hand on a chord and experimenting with these tiny outward sensations. Can you feel just how much control you have over the regulation of pressure through the hand? Try all different levels- from a fully released arm to one where the fingers barely contact the keys enough for them to stay depressed. Note that this has nothing to do with the highly pronounced "elbow out" that some pianists do to the point of absurdity. In the end, the actual movement may literally be so small as to be entirely invisible to an observer. However, the pianist ought to perceive a very smooth transition through a massive range of sensations involving the whole arm- from fingertip to shoulder. You should feel as if you can make your arm as heavy or as light as you wish.

Virtually all playing needs at least some slight feel of this outward lightening action. This learning exercise is especially valuable if you sit low. I find it rather odd that this vital element of the arm's role does not seem to have been addressed in any specific way (at least not by any conventional teaching I am aware of). Logically, it is obvious that you cannot just collapse the elbow of a sagging arm into the torso. The means of balance is clearly vital. This action can take you from a corpse like arm through whole spectrum of functional states- without the risk of turning into a "held" or stiff arm. Not only does this action serve as an extremely sensitive way of regulating how much of the arm's weight is released/withheld at a particular moment, it is also a fundamental action of basic alignment- particularly when reaching towards extremes of the keyboard.