Posts Tagged ‘piano teaching’

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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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Accurate imitation a potent form of learning in piano technique

Thursday, November 12th, 2009

I recently asked a student to watch the Horowitz silent movie of Chopin’s Etude Op 10 #8 in F major

( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbq-laOlYbc&feature=PlayList&p=E92A23B073119C01&index=18 )

and then imitate his movements. This was a very revealing exercise. Horowitz ‘cocks’ his fourth finger and then has it vigorously strike into the key as his hand goes over the thumb in the descending passages. His wrist stays virtually even. It looks like there’s an undulation of hand, wrist and arm but this actually only occurs as a passive result of the vigorous finger activity.

My student however took the visible undulation to be the main element, and left his fingers, especially the all-important fourth, virtually inert. This was of course this student’s classic habit, the one of which I have been trying to cure him for years. I was struck by the degree to which his habitual pianistic self-image overrode the perception of what Horowitz was actually doing, and rendered this potentially rich learning situation barren.

When I pointed out what he had done, and guided him to eventually really do what the film shows – THAT was real learning. What a change in his sound and his sense of capability!

AFF

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The strange synergy of physical and musical in piano technique

Saturday, November 7th, 2009

This week I have had the unexpected pleasure of a few days in Montreal, my home town, and the even greater pleasure of meeting with my old mentor Phil Cohen. He gave me a lesson and it was an exciting refresher course in everything he planted in me all those years ago. Many things were clearer to me now than then.

Phil has unique ways of thinking about and experiencing music performance, and transmitting that way in his lessons. The lessons look like physical choreography lessons at the keyboard. They make you feel like a total beginner again (some don’t like this). It’s like learning to walk all over again. But if you examine these choreographies more closely, the hidden musical intention begins to come to light.

Phil is always honing in on a musical aspect of a phrase: a rhythmic impulse point, the direction of the phrase, its peak, its resolution – how do you reach that peak, through one long line building to it or through a series of lilts upward? But instead of speaking only in those terms, he goes on, with his vision, to show you a choreography that exactly produces the desired musical phenomenon.

Many now speak about choreography but in all my travels worldwide I have never come across someone who does it with this particular brand of sophistication, exactitude and elegance. It’s Phil’s own unique expression of a highly refined musical intelligence, and to me it’s gold.

A lot of what I do in my own teaching and writing grows out of my years of experience with Phil. You could say mine is a watered-down version of his work, or you could see my work as an attempt to de-mystify what he does. I think I lose something in the process, but I also might reach many people who may be put off by the esoteric, looking-for-a-needle-in-a-haystack aspects of his brilliance.

In any case, it’s a rare privilege for me to have a few precious hours with the master, a humbling and inspiring experience.

AFF

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New Horowitz Steinway clips now on YouTube

Monday, October 19th, 2009

Awhile back I wrote about my experiences on the Horowitz Steinway – I am happy to announce that a couple of clips are now up and running on YouTube. For instance there’s

Mozart sonata K. 283, 2nd movement Andante

… or this one,

Chopin’s slow, elegiac A minor Mazurka

It was interesting to watch myself, to see to what extent I ‘do what I say,’ and to what extent I do something else. One of the main reasons I developed my approach was to solve my own set of bad habits – on the Horowitz Steinway you can see me instinctively reducing those habits to a minimum. I overmove a lot less than usual – I HAD to reduce it to gain the finest control over the instrument. But there are still some moves that, if reduced further, internalized more, would open up the finesse of my phrasing even more.

As a work in progress, these clips fascinate me… I hope that musically they will please you.

AFF

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Knees and piano technique??

Saturday, August 29th, 2009

Originally posted September 27th, 2007

That’s right… As you sit and read this, move one knee slightly forward. You may notice that it is impossible to do it without a slight movement of the pelvis as well. Lately as I have returned to some thorny passages that over the years have obstinately refused to become easy to play, I notice that although I have cultivated a non-collapsed hand for years, somehow somewhere in there, there still exists some insidious form of micro-collapse. I also notice that as this collapse is happening, I cannot rock my pelvis. I have fallen into Arnold Schultz’s idea of stabilizing the hip joints to provide a fulcrum to the levers higher up the body.

If I overtly rock my pelvis the movement tends to be too big – it disturbs rather than enlightens. But if I attend to the moveability of my knee, it helps my pelvis stay free and moveable without my overtly moving it. So as your hand comes into the keyboard, let your knee ease forward a tiny amount, literally a millimeter or two… Does your hand sense its innate structural potency any more clearly when you do this? Does it better understand how to stand freely, floatingly?

Not only link a slight movement of your knees to the movements of your hand, but also sense that when your finger starts using a non-aligned, effortful action to move the key, the level of tension rises in your thigh, all along the underside of your leg from your pelvis to your knee, and also very often perceptibly in your calf muscle and foot. Release the tension anywhere in your leg by returning to sense your sitz bones and your pelvis’s capacity to ease gently forward or back or left or right on those two points of stability, and simultaneously sensing how your hand could return to its empowered neutral, the point where it freely stands and has its greatest capacity to move in any direction.

Many will dismiss this kind of work as a useless distraction – “Think of MUSIC! LISTEN! All this attention to physical sensation is pouring from emptiness into the void,” they say. I can understand the mindset very well, but I also know that physical sensation is the great teacher for body organization – we are not just losing ourselves in a morass of sensation here, we are attending to specific sensations that educate a certain function, one that will empower our musicianship and ultimately allow us even to listen better!

Even if you want to, you may find that you simply cannot tune in to the kinds of fine sensations I describe. I have years of Feldenkrais lessons behind me where I developed a heightened sensitivity to my own kinesthetic self-image. People new to the game may well become skeptical just because the sensations I describe are imperceptible to them. I guess that’s a risk that comes with the territory…

AFF

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Hips, neck, hands and heart… new insights into piano technique

Saturday, August 29th, 2009

I’ve finally restored all my old blog posts, sadly deleted many months ago when a distinctly unfriendly virus struck the blog. Since then, many new events in my own developing technique (What? My technique is still developing after a film and two books? Indeed so, it just keeps getting richer and richer…). Since last December my experiences on the Horowitz Steinway have slowly been integrating into a completely transformed sound, emotional expression and physical feel as I sit at the piano.

Hips: I am much more aware of tension within and around my hip joint. Keeping a clear sense of how my sitz bones press into the bench is the first step in catching the extra effort exerted through my upper leg, an effort always related to something not being right in my hand’s relation to the keyboard.

Sam Slutsky, my Tai Chi teacher in Montreal, keeps referring to “inversion” and I find this a useful term. It means that a bone that should be above its neighbour is below it; one that should be behind feels as though it is trying to be in front. Sensing “inversion” is a practical way of sensing when things aren’t right skeletally – the feeling of inversion is the result of bones being out of alignment.

Most of us stand with our pelvis too far forward on our hip joints. The thrust-back posterior of the African native is much closer to a functional skeletality than what you see in most modern, ‘civilized’ humans! Stand with your feet at a 45 degree angle, your weight on your back foot, and slowly begin to move your back hip even further back – feel what that does to the ball and socket joint where your femur joins your pelvis. There is a lot of room back there that we don’t use, but when we do avail ourselves of that “posterior space,” the pelvis socket can finally rest on the most ergonomically efficient part of the femur ball. If we don’t find that space, we constantly carry too much tension in those hip joints.

Hands: For pianists, a major and frequently seen inversion is right in the hand: the thumb not making an effort to stay under the second metacarpal. There is an actual effort needed here, of the thumb wanting to sweep itself under the hand (even if it can’t actually do it). This is corollary to the effort needed in the hip joint to stand on one leg – a considerable effort to say the least! We don’t realize just how much strength is needed to keep those bones well-aligned. This active effort of the thumb is diametrically opposed to the oft-seen, counterproductive effort to lift itself (a vain effort to help out the hand’s arch that I call pianistic co-dependence).

Stand on one leg, and then let the hip of your non-standing leg fall as far as possible towards the ground. It feels pretty awkward, right? Imagine trying to walk if you had to let your hip fall like that at every step. But many of us do just that pianistically – our thumb is chronically “above” our hand.

Now return your hip to its normal position. Do you feel how much strength is needed to keep it in place? Do you notice how good this feels compared to the collapsed hip? Resolving the thumb/hand inversion in your playing requires equivalent strength, and it should also give you similar pianistic satisfaction.

Neck: When my thumb does this inversion I instantly feel tension in my ‘neck cords.’  These are the scaleni muscles connecting the cervical spine to the shoulder girdle, and they are intimately involved with our hands. Tuning into scaleni tension is another way of alerting myself to pianistic inversion and doing something positive about it.

I become more able to reduce tension in my neck as well as in my hip, the more my hand’s  “hip joints” starts making a healthy effort to stand as it should…

All this leads to a more neutral overall relationship to the piano, which in turn gives me a much more dynamic relationship to the music. I have far greater dynamic range with far less effort. In fact, the reduction of effort is necessary to open up the dynamic range – and it will happen as long as I remain skeletal.

But this overall reduction in effort is facilitated by a vastly increased effort in certain key places. This is also a part of skeletality.

The other amazing thing is the increased intensity of emotional expression. An ‘empowered neutral’ body seems to be the ideal vehicle for deeply felt emotion, without the maudlin quality of so much ‘acted’ emotion we see and hear, that kind that just doesn’t satisfy…

more to come…

AFF

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The Horowitz Steinway – the ultimate challenge in piano technique

Saturday, August 29th, 2009

Originally posted December 15th, 2008

It just keeps getting better. Today we started at noon and finished when they closed the store up at 6. I played for four hours, then Misha played for an hour, and then when I had thought I was completely exhausted and couldn’t possibly do anything more, his playing inspired me, drew me back to the piano like a magnet, and then the most interesting part began.

I had watched his hands and listened to his sound closely, like a hawk. When I sat down again, I found myself drawn by some invisible impulse to play differently than before, to become even more liquidly skeletal and just melt into the piano to find an even juicier tone, a more stark difference in dynamic levels between melody and accompaniment. Let’s say I had been getting silvery sheen surrounding each note, but now, with a slightly fatter sense of the melodic finger in key (but not produced by anything like a heavier touch) that sheen started shifting in hue, becoming more golden. Imagine a painter painting in the style of Seurat with tiny dot brush strokes and then switching to a slightly fatter brush for wider daubs of colour, let’s say more like Van Gogh. The colour seems just as rich, perhaps richer, but there’s a slight loss of differentiation, of fine variegation.

Misha asked me, “What are you doing, the silver sheen of your sound went away.”

“But Misha, now I am doing what you did, look! It’s great!”

“Yes I see you are doing it more like me now, but the sound is worse.”

That surprised and puzzled me, but anyway I went back to a hand that stands up more rather than melting in to the keyboard, and my silveriness came back. It was another stunning demonstration that on this piano, less is more – less effort gives more riches of tone and expression. Then Misha sat and tried to imitate what I had been doing and lo and behold, his sound acquired that differentiated quality, it was even richer than before. “Hey, this is what I have been trying to find all week!”  says Misha… Each note was somehow more defined but in the opposite of a rough way… there was more space between each of his notes, and that space got filled up with sheen and colour instead of emptiness. The metallic (but in a positive sense) sheen the Horowitz Steinway is capable of producing is nothing short of miraculous.

In a way, this week has been the culmination of a 30-year search. Our experience bears out everything I write in my book, plus everything from the second book which is not out yet (be patient please, because now there are going to be a couple of new chapters written before that one is done!). We took the principles of orchestrated differentiated sound, and how best to produce that sound, and applied it in a medium of undreamed of responsiveness. The instrument gave back to us so much more than we ever expected.

Tension anywhere in your body stops the magic happening.

But inaccurate skeletal alignment anywhere in your body  also stops it happening. You need to stay poised, alert in every way, physically vital and mentally astute like a hawk. Such heightened concentration completely lacking in tension or effort is something we are not used to striving for. 

My thanks go to Steinway – to the people who made this instrument back in the ’40’s, to the tuners who brought it up to this amazingly high level of performance, and to Steinway’s present management which makes this wonderful gift available to us.

And I venture to be so bold as to offer a piece of advice to any pianist lucky enough to play this instrument: don’t bring your normal arsenal of fireworks to it. Don’t think that banging it or trying to produce a big, explosive sound will even remotely allow you to enter Horowitz’s aural-expressive world. The impression that he banged is all illusion. You must change everything about your playing if you want to have any chance at all of unlocking its secrets. That is why so many pianists don’t like it – they bring their normal technique to it.

You can learn so much from this instrument if you give it the chance to teach you. But to do that you must abandon everything you have brought with you and enter an unknown world of finer touch, greater sensitivity, and a new, calm, almost disinterested centeredness deep within oneself. The power that can be expressed on this instrument is huge, almost dangerous in its electric intensity, but it is of a totally new order – it comes only from “non-power.” Of course you can look for these qualities no matter what instrument you play, but none will reveal so much to you about your internal processes as this one…

If Kemal Gekic, one of the top virutosi in the world today, can feel moved to rebuild his technique from the ground up on the basis of just a few precious hours on this instrument, don’t you think that maybe you too could benefit, if you give yourself the chance?

So, in preparation: demand more from yourself in terms of orchestration. Don’t be satisfied just to learn the text. When you can perform the piece at tempo from memory, look upon that as the starting point, not the end point, and start looking for colours. And start finding new ways to produce them – force yourself on purpose into unusual pianistic situations, things that throw you out of your usual habits. Throw yourself into the deep end and then learn to swim!

When you finally sit at this instrument, you will see the reason for this unusual preparation – all will be clear.

AFF

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A Piano Technique for Horowitz’s Steinway – an amazing instrument

Saturday, August 29th, 2009

Originally posted December 14th, 2008

Well it happened, I finally got my chance on the Horowitz Steinway. I heard Kemal Gekic played it Wednesday evening at La Gorca country club, and they took a day to move it back to the Steinway gallery, so it was Friday when Misha Dacic and I had the whole place to ourselves.

Wednesday itself was quite an experience. At the rehearsal, we could tell that no ordinary way of touching the piano would do the trick. Many people don’t like the piano – I think it is because they haven’t figured out how to coax that golden sound from it. I could see and hear Kemal adjusting his technique to suit the incredibly fine tolerances needed. An incredibly light touch is needed, but not a superficial one. And slowly, more and more of this burnished brass, golden velvet sound began to arise. Each voice is so clear in relation to its neighbours that you can get away with pedalling several notes and maintain clarity. At the end of the hour Kemal said he was more exhausted than he had ever been after a practice session or performance. The instrument demands the utmost in your attention – if you are even a micrometer or a milligram off, it won’t give you that special sound.

At the recital again you could hear him going further and further “in” to the instrument – by the end it was his totally, and the audience was wild with rapture – they had never heard anything like it.

On Friday I sat at the instrument and felt totally incapable. But I had to do something, this was my chance! So I tried a Mozart sonata and slowly acclimatized my touch, getting rid of any last remaining vestiges of collapse or pressing, allowing my fingers to just reach, just join and nothing more. I felt the need for my body to be more plastic. I felt my shoulders melting as my whole body tried to give itself more to the instrument. It is paradoxical – you must become more neutral and avoid digging in to the instrument in any way, avoid any sort of force, and yet you must give yourself to the instrument utterly – mentally, aurally, and there must be a corollary physical melting inside that has nothing to do with collapse but has to do with the body letting go of any inner constriction that may be blocking some minor part of you from total participation in this sonority-love feast.

Here’s a clip of that Mozart: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XERpWtToUXQ

I tried some Chopin, one of the Ballades, and as my sound got bigger I resisted the temptation to get excited inside. I could feel the “excited” impulse welling up in me, but I could also feel this impulse contributing to “excited” moves, a small amount of overmoving which was enough to disturb my contact with the instrument. The sound reverted to simply beautiful instead of astounding and never heard of before. It takes far more mental concentration than we are used to to maintain one’s relationship to this instrument. If husband and wife took such care of each other there would be no more divorce!

When Horowitz did a bold voicing, it sounded like he was banging it out, but nothing could be farther from the truth. I tried it, and it simply doesn’t work, especially not on that instrument. Much finer treatment is needed. The touch needs to be weightless and incisive. You need to stay totally calm inside, virtually detached. You have to monitor everything that’s going on – if even one component gets away from you, you are lost. The body needs to be fluid, not held but also not collapsed anywhere.

The thumbs need to stand up, to stand alone, to be gloriously independent from the rest of the hand.

At a certain point I felt so much electricity coursing through me that I had to jump up, run around, fall down on the ground and just shake for awhile, it was crazy. Misha recorded a few bits on his cellphone, and even on his cellphone you could hear that magical Horowitz sound. It was uncanny.

I am still in shock.

Today Kemal played a second recital on the instrument at Steinway Gallery, and spoke afterwards about his own artistic relationship to Horowitz and what he has learned from the instrument. He told of not really liking it when he first tried it several years ago, of feeling in the end that he shouldn’t really be playing it – as if his playing was too rough for it. But just at the end of that tryout, he played Liszt’s Waldesrauschen and heard some colours that he had never heard before, and this kept haunting him afterwards. It was the incredibly light touch of Waldesrauschen that opened up the piano and made it shimmer in an unheard of way, something unimaginable. This one experience “infected” his whole subsequent musical and pianistic development, and you will hear this documented on the next series of CD’s he will release next year. The Debusssy-Faure-Ravel CD is to die for – already he is exploring an entirely new colour world. But I am straying from the subject, back to here and now, Miami, December 2008.

I only pray that the entire La Gorza recital gets put on YouTube (I will keep you posted) because it was like having the old man back with us. Kemal’s playing was speculative, introspective, the playing of “composer’s mind,” just as was the playing of Horowitz. I have never heard Kemal play better. Nay, I have never heard him play nearly so well! It was the joining of Kemal’s genius and sensitivity with this miracle of an instrument that transported us all to some ethereal realm for a couple of precious hours.

So… it is possible – to make a piano sound that beautiful. Only three ingredients are needed. An instrument that responsive and beautiful in its expression, the talent to handle it, and the knowledge of how to handle it.

AFF

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Sound & Tonal Colour in Piano Technique – The Horowitz Steinway

Saturday, August 29th, 2009

Originally posted December 9th, 2008

I write this from Miami where Misha Dacic played a recital on Horowitz’s Steinway last Sunday. An amazingly beautiful recital, very emotional for me – one of those rare moments where why one does what one does becomes palpable and fully significant… Afterwards Kemal and I discussed that instrument and how Horowitz played it. He pointed out something that is not generally perceived, that Horowitz didn’t actually play very loud. He created the illusion of loudness. The instrument has the most beautiful set of rich overtones I have ever heard, but to have them sound fully, they must not be overpowered by any of the other voices – there must be space between the sounds. To get the multileveled tonal qualities you must have a precise, incisive touch but not a heavy one. Horowitz’s forte sounds so loud because it is full of upper harmonics: if he really played loud, all those upper partials wouldn’t be there in such rich supply, they would be drowned out by the fundamental note of each vibrating string.

And the instrument itself is not that loud. One thing you notice when you touch the Landowska Steinway B is not only the beauty and depth of tone but the sheer volume of sound – it is loud! But not this one…

To access this tonal quality in playing any piano, listening must take precedence in your attention over anything physical. We work a lot on developing the strength, sensitivity and organization of the hand, but there’s a very real danger that our concern with physical issues ends up hampering us from playing well, because if your listening is even just a little less than total, your physical mechanism won’t have the demands made on it to do the job right. You have to conceive of a very specific sound and then search for it with your ears. Do not tolerate anything less than that total beauty, that totally melodic joining of sounds that makes the piano sing. It takes a real mental effort to set up the correct hierarchy of attentions and then maintain them ongoingly in time. But when you succeed, your hand will do what it’s supposed to in a much finer and more evolved way than it ever could when your were developing aspects of physical technique, because now your ears and brain are sending it definite signals as to exactly the job it has to do. There’s a weird alchemy of combined attentions that happens when this works well – you’ll recognize it; it’s palpable and you will like the strength of Being that appears when you cultivate this for some time…

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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