Posts Tagged ‘lumbricals in piano technique’

Tailor your approach to the student’s organization in piano technique

Sunday, December 20th, 2009

The other day one of my students who is by  now already VERY familiar with all my ideas about hand activation, structural function etc, brought me Chopin Op. 10 #5 (the Black Key etude) and yet again he had no real sound, the playing was uneven, his thumb chronically raised and tense. I obviously needed another strategy to help him get what he already knows.

I squatted down on my haunches and started trying to walk around the room – with some difficulty of course. I told him, “This is your fingers on the keyboard.” I then very slowly and dramatically straightened my legs to raise myself to full height. “This is what they need to do as they play. On each and every note your finger should feel this inside it.”

He instantly got it. His sound improved, the musical flow suddenly had a sparkling, vivacious regularity and verve,  and his hands suddenly looked capable.

I reinforced the visual image by standing near a wall, beginning to lean towards it until I was falling towards it, then catching myself by sticking my arm out against the wall and straightening it to push myself upright again. I was like a pendulum but with my feet attached to the floor and my upper body swinging, my arm pushing against the wall each time to swing me upright.

This image helps because it is more fluid – I’m not continuously attached to the object I’m pushing against, but refresh the feeling of ‘push’  each time I come into contact with it. Perhaps this is a little closer to the state of affairs in our fingers as we play…

I told him not to play fast for now but to only go as quickly as he could while maintaining this tangible inner ‘feel’ of standing up on each note, of pushing up from the key bottom on each attack. This was great because it stopped him feeling that his attacks were physically ‘down’ into each key; instead each attack became filled with a vital ‘up’ feeling. The ‘down’ generally contains an insidious hidden collapse; the ‘up’ effectively prevents any such thing happening.

I never said a word about his chronic raised thumb, which I have focused on previously. I picked that particular strategy because it seemed to resonate with his self-experience, how he experiences himself as he plays… We’ll see if it bears fruit!

AFF

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Piano Technique Workshop: improve your thumb in Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata

Saturday, October 24th, 2009

Some of the simplest tasks are the most effective. The 3rd movement opening of Moonlight sonata, a student plays each 4-note 16th group with the standard “arm out to the side” movement to shape the group. But this pulls her thumb off the board so it’s not ready to play the first note of the next group. Then the arm movement she does make to play the next thumb note is so big that her thumb feels no need to work on its own, and becomes inert.

I kill two birds with one stone by having her play the first five notes very quickly and overhold the last two. try that now: play G#-C#-E-G#-C# and hold on to your fifth finger G# while standing firmly on your thumb C#. The two outside digits of your hand make pylons that stand your hand right up like a bridge. The movement was so quick that your arm had no time to do its normal garbage but went straight to the goal. It moved your thumb in towards the backboard instead of pulling it away. And the arrival on the thumb’s C# was so sudden that it galvanizes your thumb into potent activity. The thumb really moves to save itself from collapsing!

One more thing: I noticed my student moving her thumb mostly from the middle joint. When I told her the joint from which the thumb should move is at the wrist, this helped it immediately become effective in its action.

Voila, problem solved – I wish they were all that easy!

AFF

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The high arch vs. flat fingers in piano technique: playing the Landowska Steinway

Saturday, August 29th, 2009

Originally posted December 6th, 2008

I really must be more regular with these blog posts… It’s been a month since Obama’s victory but much longer than that since I’ve written anything about piano technique – and this at a time when my own playing is going through a metamorphosis full of new insights…

Did I mention here that I recently had the extreme good fortune to acquire a 1942 New York Steinway B once owned by Wanda Landowska? This piano has changed my life. And largely due to its influence, the collision between two diametrically opposed piano techniques I have been describing here has begun to reach some sort of detente.

You recall how I have been raving about Kemal’s extremely flat fingered approach and describing how it has resolved many of my facility problems in a totally new and effective way. But when I took all that back to the Landowska Steinway, she wouldn’t let me play like that on her! That instrument is so responsive, so sensitive, so easily changeable in her colour, that I felt I was bashing it unmercifully when I tried all the flat fingered stuff that worked so wonderfully on a lesser instrument (by ‘lesser’ I include the very fine concert Steinway at FIU, Kemal’s university).

So I went back to the high arch, the meat of what I describe in my book and film, but now hovercrafting it even more extremely, going further and further into unstable equilibrium, not digging in and standing on the board but hovering above it and letting my long rope-fingers snake down and barely reach the keys. When I do this well, my hand actually gets bigger. Each joint, released from the compression of standing, opens up and enlarges the entire hand. Plus I get really exact control of the key, and the magic resonance and colour of that instrument begins to emerge.The adage, “compressions stifles the instrument’s voice” was never truer than on this “grand old dame.”

I can also cultivate this arch much better than I could earlier because of advances in my own Feldenkrais work. The benefits of Feldenkrais increase exponentially over long periods of time if you keep doing it – the initial revelation is great but it is nothing compared to the results of the same new stimuli being repeated over long periods, as each part of the brain integrates and begins to share the new kinesthetic information with the other parts. Thus it is much clearer now how each tiny anomaly in my hand instantly evokes a contraction elsewhere – in my shoulder, my back, and especially
1) in the “neck cords” that run from the side of my neck down into my arm and
2) in my hip joints.

The open 90 degree angle between thumb and second finger correlates directly with a sense of openness in the hip joint. One mirrors the other and influences the other. Thus not only does any anomaly in the hand evoke tension in one of these places, but also tension in any of these places evokes something going wrong in the hand.

When it really starts to work, my thumb is finally, truly individuated from the hand, and I feel new efforts in a couple of specific muscles that indicate this. One is in the first dorsal interosseous (see film for an explanation), which must really work to maintain the almost “opposed” feeling of thumb and hand (not “opposed” as in thumb opposition, bringing the thumb tip around towards the fingertip, but “opposed” as in struggling to stay away from each other instead of the almost inevitable falling towards each other). Another muscle that I really feel working much more tangibly than before is the big fat one on the inside of the thumb’s metacarpal, the one that works to sweep the thumb under the hand but not necessarily oppose it to the hand.

OK, so I am busy practicing like this, finding new exactitude in both body and hand posture that leads to increased virtuosity every day – a fascinating, compelling experience, a vindication of everything I’ve been teaching and a clarification, an intensification – perfecting it, refining it, creating it anew… Wonderful!

But when I go to my other piano, an old EHRBAR from Vienna, I find that Kemal’s flat fingers still give me more juice – I feel more secure, everything GOES better. My high arch is wonderful but finicky; living in unstable equilibrium is somehow living on the edge. I am more COMFORTABLE down there resting snugly on my squashed fingers “in” key more than “on” key… Bizarre! “In key” stifles the greater instrument but opens up the sound of the lesser one.

I write this from Miami where I am in residence at the Gekic’s, and tomorrow I go to Miami Steinway to try out Horowitz’s piano which is in residence there. In preparation I am practicing less, playing through more, and some sort of synthesis is finally starting to happen. I just play, I am in the sound, in the emotion, in the vast investment of psychic energy that this music demands of me, and I notice that I can’t tell any more whether I am doing high arch or flat fingers. It is just going… Whatever feels more convenient in the moment, that’s what’s happening…

What is important is the tremendous learning that became available to me when I subjected myself to these two wildly contradictory pianistic regimes!

More later…

AFF

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The various guises of skeletality in piano technique

Saturday, August 29th, 2009

Originally posted October 9th, 2008

After spending a week with Kemal Gekich in Miami it is time to update my take on skeletality. We played for each other quite a bit, and his sound just blew me away. Fecund, orchstrated, unbelievably rich singing lines combined with whispering accompaniments full of mystery and veiled clarity – it is kind of impossible to put into words the sonic effects coming out of the piano when he plays.

When it was my turn, his response was, “Hey, you don’t do anything you write in your book!” He then proceeded to show me what he meant, but to get me more skeletal he showed me that he was actually doing something a little bit different from what I wrote in my book. If you bunch your thumb and forefinger close together and then slide them forward on the desk surface, taking no care to keep your arch strong but on the contrary, letting it go and mash itself down, you begin to get an idea of how his hand feels on the keyboard when he plays. This seems sacrilege, heresy yes? To let the arch go so much? Well it turns out there’s a good reason…

One technique in a Feldenkrais Functional Integration lesson is, with the client lying on his back, to lift one leg gently by the foot, and push through the heel, up through the skeletal frame of the leg, into the pelvis and on up into the spine. A gentle rocking is set up where the pelvis, spine and neck all loosen and the head rocks as freely as the pelvis. To do this well, one must leave the leg absolutely straight. Instead of functioning like a 3-element differentiated skeletal structure (foot, shin, thigh), it now works as a unity, for all intents and purposes like a single bone. If any of the joints of the leg bent, the force of my pushing would not be transmitted cleanly through the leg into the body.

Now imagine that your forefinger is like that leg, but it’s the piano key that is pushing through your finger back into your body. If you slide the flat of your finger forward along the key and let the fingertip acually rise, scoop up like the front of a sled, and keep your wrist low and relaxed, you create this effect. Keep your finger not only completely flat, but hyper-extended! And feel the piano “pushing” you backwards. Compared to how we normally approach the piano, this is completely bizarre.

But this is how he tells me he gets all those amazing sounds out of the piano. How so?

The thing is, although your arch has now fallen, it has not emptied out. Your lumbrical muscle is still eminently potent and is working full strength. However, now its work is not divided between two goals. Instead of having to move the finger and generate the arch structure, now it only has to move the finger.

Another positive result: you discover that this rich connection of your finger to the key allows your arm, shoulder, back and pelvis all to relax without becoming lifeless. Then later when you go back to an arched finger, you begin to feel that it is inherently unstable and leads to more tension in your body. Whaaa? Doesn’t this completely contradict my whole approach??? It would appear so but actually not. Remember, my catchword is skeletality, and we are simply looking for its most effective manifestation.

A beautifully shaped arch is WAY more stable than an unaligned structure, and we have certainly not wasted our years cultivating that. But this single unit finger connects your skeleton even more easily, effectively and completely to the key, allowing you a greater control over your tone. At first it requires a really great muscular effort from parts of the hand and arm that aren’t used to working so hard. When I first tried it, even though I have a strong hand, I just felt I couldn’t. But with persistence it started to come with relative ease, and now, a couple of weeks later, I am flying!

I’ve waited some time before venturing to post this, because it is really radical and controversial, a provacative seeming about-face. But it works! Try it yourself!

AFF

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Nothing new in my approach to piano technique

Saturday, August 29th, 2009

Originally posted June 26th, 2008

Yesterday I had lunch with Uwe Balser, head of the piano department at the Musikschule in Heidleberg, Germany. We got to talking about our respective paths of development and he told me of a pianist named Andre Esterhazy who lives in London. A pauper living alone on social assistance with his 5 cats, Esterhazy was a former student of the great Henrich Neuhaus. He looked and played like Richter – “A complete Richter clone, in body type, hands on the keyboard, sound, musicianship, everything; it was uncanny,” Herr Balser tells me. He had very few students, generally only the occasional person who heard that he could help pianists with problems. That this situation could exist in one of the musical captitals of the world is in itself extraordinary. But his teaching was also extraordinary, pure gold, as Herr Balser put it. “One thing I remember him saying was about the key muscles of the hand for a pianist: the giant thumb muscle of course, then the big big of muscle around the fifth metacarpal, and the muscle in betweeen thumb and forefinger.”

This last is of course the first dorsal interosseous that I mention in my film – it was nice for me to hear it confirmed by such an impeccable source! The more I hear about the teaching of the past masters, the more I am sure that there is nothing new in my approach to piano technique, I just tried to systematize it in a new way.

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Resolving extreme inner hand tension in piano technique

Saturday, August 29th, 2009

Originally posted April 21st, 2008

I gave a lesson today to a woman who exemplifies the preparation I talk about in my book: stiffening the hand prior to playing even a single note. Even if it simply approaches the keyboard, the hand prepares itself for the onslaught and stress of playing by rigidly forming itself into what it thinks the right shape is, ahead of time. She knows a lot about my teaching, we’ve had many lessons, she’s seen the film and done the exercises – but somehow this inner pattern is so longstanding and integrated that she was still not fully aware of it, let alone being capable of letting it go.

Earlier on I had given her lessons on standing the hand up into its arch structure, learning to walk on her fingers, etc. I figured that when she learned how to use that structure well, the inner tension would begin to dissipate as the bones took over the work of her muscles. But this was not happening. It was an extreme case, so I tried something else.

Fingers as ropes

Step 1: I had her imagine that her finger was a loose rope – about as different from the standing, cathedral arch finger as you can get! I had her lay her hand gently on key, the heel of her hand mashing the white keys while her 2nd 3rd & 4th fingers rested on the three black keys. I pressed her 2nd finger into its key as gently, slowly and softly as possible. Still I could feel her finger almost convulse as its chronic inner tension was triggered by the knowledge that now it would play a note. But because she was so relaxed, my student could now feel that mini-convulsion. I told her, “this is what you are doing all the time, and we have to teach your muscles some other way.” (By the way, she has had serious forearm pain for some time now.)

I continued to repeat this gentle pressing until she could feel her finger stay soft as it depressed its key. Then I did the same for her 3rd & 4th fingers on their respective keys. Finally I went back and forth between her fingers, playing one then another, acclimatizing her reflexes to the new sensation of depressing the keys with no effort involved. It was kind of a hyper-gentle fingertapping.

Step 2: Next with her hand remaining in this nokia composer ringtones download free mosquito ringtones gold mp3 ringtones free polyphonic ringtones download free ringtones verizon make your own free ringtones free new ringtones download free ringtones samsung info motorola remember ringtones free motorola ringtones tracfone ericsson polyphonic ringtones sony free real tone ringtones alltel free ringtones nextel ringtones free make own ringtones download free ringtones to cellular phone virgin mobile phone ringtones free ringtones for cricket cell phone free nokia ringtones tracfone midi ringtones position I asked her to depress a key herself with the same “non-effort.” At first she returned to a sort of convulsion but because a new picture had been “painted” in her nervous system while she remained passive, she now had an internal reference point, an idea of what the sensation would be, and she finally discovered how to bring the key down with a movement that was totally “clean,” that is, completely lacking that quality of inner struggle and physical conflict.

Step 3: I began to gently lift her forearm so the heel of her hand rose slightly off the white keys, asking her to continue playing one note gently. I gave her the image of ropes again. “Your finger is a rope. A rope has no bones, no structure, no solidity. But this is a big, thick rope like the ones that tie a boat to the dock, so if you flop it into a key, it will be heavy enough to press the key down.” As she tried to get these weird rope-fingers down into their keys I continually buoyed her forearm, preventing it from depressing or squeezing itself downward effortfully. She began to love this feeling of a soft finger that depressed the key by simply flopping into it – she felt way more relaxed than she ever had in her life while at the piano. Occasionally she would tense her finger up to  play, but now this was such a different and unpleasant sensation that she quickly recognized it and returned to the new way.

Step 4: Now it was time to join two notes together, to begin to create melodic fragments. Again, it was important to do something different from the walking I describe in the book & film, which were based on a secure, clear, skeletal structure. She was so used to using muscular effort to create that structure that we had to find a way that was “clean” of all her chronic parasitic contractions.  I had her simply leave one rope finger lying heavily in its key while her arm moved in such a way that another rope finger became positioned over its note and by accident fell into it. I asked her to leave her finger totally neutral and to try to sense how the movement of her arm in space just dragged the finger to its key and made it fall in.

This was more difficult! I asked her to verify that she was doing it by listening for the melodic interval: could she hear the interval of a 3rd sounding indicating that she had succeeded in holding the 2 keys down together? Or a 2nd? Again she tended to spasm her finger, but I kept guiding with my hand firmly holding her forearm, preventing it from “digging in” as she was used to. The biggest tendency was for her to press her forearm down. This she had been doing constantly for years, and such an ingrained, longstanding pattern was not going to give up so easily. But we kept at it, using gentleness as our weapon, until that pattern literally melted away and she succeeded in making an absolutely exquisite melodic join with none of the contractions that had been her constant companion up until now. It was a great, extreme example of how force will get you nowhere, sensitivity everywhere.

At the end of the lesson she felt terrible. Her question was, “Will I ever be able to learn this? Will I ever be able to use this in my playing?” Obviously she had her doubts. I could have gotten angry and said, “What? I give you the lesson that finally frees you from the pattern that gave you grief for years and you’re depressed???” But I didn’t. Not just because I’m a nice guy but because I knew exactly what she was going through, having been there many times myself. The patterns that we use in daily life define our sense of self. When we inhibit an old pattern and learn a new one, it can be really alienating – I don’t feel like myself any more. And we had to go very slowly in the lesson – at the end of the hour we had succeeded only in playing a melodic fragment from her Chopin Nocturne that consisted of 7 or 8 notes, nothing more, and this was with one hand only, way under tempo. Of course she felt she was never going to get it!

It takes great courage to become a beginner again. She was literally learning to walk on the keyboard again, in a totally unfamiliar way. She had to leave everything she knew behind. All I could do was congratulate her on her bravery in daring to tread the unknown, to tell her it was normal that she was feeling discouraged, but that if she exercised patience and, as Moshe Feldenkrais said, continued to “go slow in order to go fast,” she would acquire this new skill in a surprisingly short space of time. It only looks impossible when you can’t do it.

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balance between the work of the lumbricals and the long & short flexors in piano technique

Saturday, March 28th, 2009

Originally posted January 5, 2008

In Aikido today, feeling totally loose and allowing that looseness to educate me – to show me how each hold leverages itself through certain parts of my skeleton. Strangely enough, transferring this to the piano involves reinstating a certain muscularity in my finger attacks, after a period of cultivating completely bony skeletality with an absolute minimum of muscular effort.

I notice that when I don’t do this well, there are certain muscles in my neck, more on the right than the left, that feel as if they were made to work in a way that is not entirely necessary. The sense of tension is not so much a hardness as an over-workedness. I find an interesting solution: the sense of my lumbricals working is mirrored by a sense of activity, real work, in the entire horseshoe of muscles around the ‘southern’ tip of each scapula. This gives the sense of my arm hanging, but not hanging dead. It can really let go and hang, free from those effortful contractions in my neck, because of this correct, tangible muscular effort in these two places so distant from one another and yet so intimately connected.

This brings up another point: the balance of work between the long & short flexors and the lumbricals. The long & short flexors move the distal and medial phalanges, the lumbricals the proximal phalanges. The generalization, “long & short flexors for fine tuning of articulations; lumbricals for power,” is true enough yet oversimplified. Pianists need absolute control over the degree to which each of these muscle groups work.

Often I find students able to move their medial-distal phalanges well, but the lumbricals woefully asleep. And when I ask them to work the lumbrical, they continue to involve the long & short flexors so much that the lumbrical’s basic flexion of the proximal phalange is overshadowed by a kind of spastic added movement, a curling of the medial-distal part of the finger. This screws everything up.

When the lumbricals work, the long & short flexors must reduce their work – either to nothing at all, where the fingertip actually splays, or to just enough effort to prevent the fingertip splaying, no more. The effort of these muscles is now supportive rather than aiming to actually move that part of the finger independently of the upper part. The muscular action prevents extension of the joint rather than actually flexing it.

Similarly, when the long & short flexors predominate, the lumbricals should never be totally inactive. This leads to collapse of the hand’s fundamental arch. A certain aliveness in the lumbricals even while curling ensures that your curling is effective and won’t get you into problems…

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legato vs. non-legato in piano technique

Saturday, March 28th, 2009

Originally posted September 26th, 2007

My last couple of entries touch on the problem of how most freely and effectively to manipulate the piano keys for beautiful and variegated sound. Another way of describing unstable equilibrium (see previous post) is “empowered neutral,” the neutral point being the point at which the greatest amount of potential energy is available. If the hand is standing freely on a finger, 1) it is free from parasitic contractions that limit its movement, and 2) it is as high as possible. These two characteristics lend it the greatest amount of potential energy it can possess.

A hand “stands freely” when its finger feels rooted in the key and yet it feels no downward pressure. It has “made peace with gravity.” Stand your third finger now on the desk, and don’t press into the desk. Simply move your hand forward until each finger bone is stacked up vertically on top of the one underneath it, and your hand is attached to the top finger knuckle horizontally.

Now rock your pelvis slightly forward and back, causing your hand to follow its lead – it mirrors the pelvis’s movement. Let your arm be floppy, to better feel how your pelvis and the cupola of your hand mirror each other in their movement, but don’t let your arm floppiness undermine the wonderful feeling of structure in your finger and hand!

Now as you continue to rock, switch the finger your hand is standing on. Walk from one finger to another, and try out different ways of coordinating it with the rocking – when is the most convenient moment to make the switch?

This exercise allows you to feel your hand standing on your finger with a minimum of “sheer factors” acting upon it. The actual sensation is markedly different from what we’re used to. Normally we tend to deform the finger by exerting pressure down through it into the key, or by having the arm pull it one way or another. Then we need to contract certain muscles to hold the finger in a certain shape. Here the finger acquires a strange feeling of strength, strange because it is not derived from muscular effort but from exact skeletal alignment – the shape holds itself.

This is what Kemal was trying to get me to feel when he had me abandon legato (see two posts ago). My legato had acquired a certain pressing that impinged upon the precise bone alignments of my hand, and hindered the free movement of my fingers. Cultivating the freely standing hand gives me the freedom that Kemal instilled in my fingers, but also allows me to reinstate a legato if needs be, a legato free from the negative qualities that can so easily creep in unbeknownst to one.

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stable and unstable equilibrium in piano technique

Saturday, March 28th, 2009

Originally posted September 18th, 2007

Here is something from a very early book of Moshe Feldenkrais, ABC of Judo (Paris, 1938). Feldenkrais was a student of Jigaro Kano, founder of Judo, and Kano said that Feldenkrais’s books on judo were the best in any language other than Japanese. I have translated this from the French.

I hope you will meditate on these few paragraphs and begin to sense why they could constitute the seminal idea from which a whole approach to piano technique could develop…

“In physics we distinguish between two sorts of equilibrium: stable and unstable. In stable equilibrium the body’s center of gravity is at the lowest point possible. A stick or a human lying on her back are typical examples.

‘In unstable equilibrium the center of gravity is elevated but the vertical passes through it and through the point at which the body presses the floor. This equilibrium is easily disturbed; then the body falls to lie on the floor. A vertical stick or a standing human are in unstable equilibrium. All other positions of the human or the stick lack equilibrium. The movement of the human body in walking is a series of losses of equilibrium, the loss re-established by the action of the legs and aided as well by appropriate movements of the torso, arms and head. Advancing the right foot to take a step, the body’s center of gravity is displaced forward and a little to the right: those who are not used to walking (the convalescent who has spent a long time in bed, for instance) have difficulty finding the exact point and the coordination of the muscles necessary to re-establish the equilibrium lost by the step forward.

‘Obviously this phenomenon is just as real for strong people as for others. I would even say that it is ‘more true’ for strong people than others because, in matters of equilibrium, the one who is quick and supple is much more gifted by nature than the colossus; in any case, we can assert without fear of contradiction that in matters of equilibrium, “force” in the current meaning of the word does not enter at all.

‘On this simple scientific fact rests the entire technique of Judo” (“and of piano technique as well,” adds this author). It is the perfect familiarity with equilibirum, how to upset it and regain it that allows the judoka to throw his adversary so easily without the ‘use of force’ in the common meaning of this expression.

‘To illustrate this truth, it suffices to imagine how easily one could topple the strongest man in the world – if he had his ankles tied together with rope. Unstable equilibrium has the tendency to revert to stable equilibrium once it is unbalanced. After a certain point, no force in the world will help he who falls to regain his balance.”

Earlier we used T’ai Chi walking to illustrate how our hand structure offers wonderful stability in legato playing. Here we see that normal human walking is a more complicated and sophisticated affair, as is manipulating our hands on the keyboard as well. Although Neuhaus used to press in on his students’ hands to make them find and use its arch right quick, if you exert pressure on your own arch as you play, you drastically inhibit its free moveability. If we cultivate the sense of unstable equilibrium, as Feldenkrais describes it, in our hand as it stands on each finger that depresses a key, we quickly arrive at something that has just as much structural integrity as T’ai Chi walking but a lot more moveability…

More later…

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