Originally posted July 19th, 2008
I just spent a very pleasant and productive week in New York City presenting my work to the MTNA-CFMTA symposium on Empowering Musicians: Mind, Body & Spirit. An exciting week full of surprises, one of the nicest of which was my meeting with Kathleen Riley who has been doing important work in developing biofeedback techniques for pianists. I just wrote an article about it for pianotechnique.net, which I submit for your enjoyment here…
“When Kathleen Riley invited me down to her studio to hook myself up to her electrodes and measure my muscle contractions as I play, I must admit I was a bit sceptical. I myself tend to focus too much on the physical, and here was someone going even further into that strange land where one risks being so distracted from musical concerns that one’s playing loses any life and creativity it might have once had. But I was curious, so off I went down to her office at NYU in lower Manhattan.
She put two electrodes on the extensor muscles on the upper outside of my forearm just below my elbow, and another two on my trapezius – if you reach up and over your right shoulder with your left hand to touch the soft spot between the shoulder blade and your spine, that’s about the place. She put a laptop on the piano where the music desk usually is, showing two thick lines moving on a graph, one blue (trapezius) and one brown (extensors in the forearm). These lines jumped every time I used those muscles. If I didn’t do anything, the lines trundled along at a steady 3-5 microvolts, indicating that a small amount of tonus remains in the muscle even at rest – it remains ready for work. However, Kathleen told me that many students come in with an “at rest” level of over 100 microvolts! The effort they invest in playing becomes residual tension, continuing long after the playing has stopped – it becomes a chronic contraction.
I started fooling around to see what I could do with those lines. First Katherine took me through a short calibration process where I figured out how to keep the blue shoulder line low and smooth. She also pointed out how when my hand’s arch became too flat, the tension in both muscle groups rose and the lines moved higher. This was interesting to me, because as far as I had understood it, I am the expert on the hand’s arch! But the sensors were showing me right off the bat that I could do better at practicing what I preach!
Minimizing extensor activity
Then I tried seeing the difference between playing with curved or flat fingers. Everybody agrees that using curved fingers causes less stress than either curling or flattening, but I often use the flat finger to get the biggest, boldest, juiciest sound possible – the brilliant scales near the end of Liszt’s B minor Ballade for instance. I knew that my extensors would probably work a bit more with flat fingers, but I was amazed at just how much higher my flat fingers made the graph peak. I could play a curved finger scale and keep the brown line down around 40 microvolts, but flat fingered scales pushed the line up above 80 and even 100 microvolts or more. I believe this happened because the flat fingered scale invoked the work of my lumbricals whereas in the curved-finger scale I was more likely transferring my effort over to the more subtle action of the interossei.
“Hmm,” I thought, “is this difference just because of the change in technique, or could I be doing ‘flat fingers’ incorrectly somehow, introducing a misalignment of structure that contributes to the higher levels of stress?” I played around with it and found that by being more attentive to exact alignments (something I am always bugging my students about), I could significantly lower the graph – even more for the curved finger scale than for the flat fingered scale! And when I did this, my curved finger scale started sounding almost as brilliant and full as I had wanted the flat fingered scale to sound!
It was an uncanny process: with the help of these sensors, I, the “guru” of skeletal playing, was learning better how to play skeletally! I found I was moving my hands into new, unusual positions that accentuated their capacity for 90-degree angle skeletal alignment. When I did what I usually do, the graph lines didn’t really bottom out the way I wanted them to – there was still too much tension, and so I naturally sought a new solution.
There was a really big improvement here, not something marginal. The graph showed me that I hadn’t been doing exactly what I thought I was. It helped me to do a lot better what I had initially intended to do.
Neutral shoulders
Next I played a bit of Brahms, the Intermezzo in E flat major from Op. 117. Why was that blue shoulder line peaking? Once again I had thought I was maintaining an arch in my hand that was not fixed but structurally powerful, using it to get big, warm tone in the chords and melodic line of the Brahms, but often I would see that blue line bulge up. I noticed it rise whenever I was even slightly unsure about a note (a very revealing observation in itself), but that wasn’t the whole story. Eventually I pinned it down: the blue line shot up whenever I inadvertently allowed my arch to just sightly empty out, so slightly that I failed to notice it. I had thought I was just relaxing, but the graph instantly showed me whenever this verged into an over-relaxation that caused a misalignment of my one structure. This in turn led to a rise in tension somewhere else in my body. This was aggravating! I thought I knew what I was doing, but the machine is telling me a different story! Finally I told myself, “OK, I’m going to play that Brahms again, and this time that blue line is going to bottom out and stay there!” I was determined to beat the machine!
Finally I succeeded in this, and lo and behold, I found myself in a mental state where my attention was 100% focused on what I am doing, where my arch didn’t even hint at over-relaxation or self-emasculation, and where my shoulders remained so free that any contraction there was neutralized long before it became a reality. I was now in that state of heightened attention I always strive for in performance. It was a palpable, recognizable mental calm that served my artistic purposes ideally.
Kathleen’s machine showed me that I hadn’t been doing this consistently in my practice but I thought I had. It was disturbing to discover the degree to which I was not even close to that mental state in my everyday work. But finding a way to finally achieve it was wonderfully encouraging!
Breathing spaces
One of the nice things Kathleen saw in my graphs was the frequent dipping of the lines, indicating that my muscles were capable of returning to neutral very quickly in between spurts of effort. “You should see some of the graphs for students doing something like Chopin Op. 10 #1 – it hits 160 microvolts and just stays there.”
“But there’s nowhere to breathe in that piece,” I said.
“Yes there is, give it a try.” I played a few bars of that fiendishly difficult etude and yes, you could see a significant trough in the brown line during the 16th rest at the beginning of each bar – even when I didn’t think about it and overdo it. And if I paid a little more attention to keeping that blue line well-behaved, the etude started humming and blistering really nicely!
It was fascinating to take mental control over aspects of my playing that I had never really brought into my awareness. Such a strange, empowering experience to look at the graph lines and consciously change the state of muscles in my shoulder or the shape of my hand on the keyboard to lower the height of the lines. This was my first experience of classical biofeedback and I must say, I am a convert!
Most interesting, if I now manifest a clear intention to “make that blue line bottom out,” I experience the resulting positive changes in my shoulder even when the electrodes are not attached. I can also adjust my hand position the way I would have done to keep the brown line to a minimum, and this improves my facility, sense of comfort, and most of all my sound. My hand is more skeletal than ever before!
Throughout the piano playing community there is a widespread failure to maintain a healthy arch in the hand. But the potent arch is a central tenet of Kathleen’s technique: her work with the sensors and graphs had confirmed that without that fundamental structure working well, tension levels go sky high, and when the arch becomes potent it helps the rest of the system calibrate to much lower levels of tension. Interestingly enough, she says she knew about the potent arch even before she began this work, but it is certainly nice to see such a resounding confirmation of this technical fact.
For more on Kathleen Riley’s work, please visit www.pianoperceptions.com.
