Posts Tagged ‘thumb and piano technique’

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monkeys, thumbs, rotation and piano technique

Wednesday, January 27th, 2010

I’m visiting for a few days at my friend and colleague Jens Schlichting’s studio near Heidelberg where I will be giving a master class next month (last weekend in February). He’s been telling me about some of the posts on one of the German piano forums which are rather amusing. Apparently there has been a big kafuffle because I say in my film that monkeys cannot oppose their thumbs, but actually some of them can. Some people on this forum are ready to dismiss my whole approach because I got that one detail wrong. Some ask why am I talking about monkeys at all  because monkeys obviously have nothing to do with playing piano!

Actually, whether the statement is accurate or not, I said it to make a valid point – that thumb opposition is a key hand function, and that although it doesn’t appear to apply to piano technique (the keyboard is flat, how could you grasp it?), the function is actually present virtually all the time we play.

Finally one scientist wrote in with a detailed list: many monkeys can’t oppose their thumbs at all, some can to a certain extent – one species can oppose 17 degrees, another 28 degrees, another 35… but none of them can do as much as humans. He was really great, extremely precise and complete in his account. So as it turns out, I was indeed more or less right when I said it in the film!

Jens also mentioned his gym teacher who told him to “grasp the parallel bars not like monkeys, thumb and fingers together, but to oppose the thumb.” Again, whether monkeys can oppose or not, they do use their hands differently in one of their fundamental actions…

Fun and games…

I am reminded of a similar “missing the point” in a couple of emails from pianists who’ve said, “When I rotate my hand sideways I can’t stretch an octave, my hand is too small!” And I’ve had to spell it out for them in my response: “Yes, but could you reach a larger interval than you can with your fingers splayed horizontally the way we usually do?”

“Oh yeah!”

How about that?

AFF

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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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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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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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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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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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hyper-raised thumb in piano technique

Saturday, August 29th, 2009

Originally posted April 5th, 2008

I’ve written elsewhere about co-dependence between thumb & forefinger, where the thumb raises itself to help a flabby hand arch maintain position while the arch follows the thumb into its key, collapsing in a vain attempt to help the thumb play. But I have one student whose habit of chronically raising the thumb is so strong that none of my entreaties and interventions have had the desired effect. The other day I was inspired to try something new, because when I finally got his thumb to let go and lower down to a more or less useful position, he told me, “Professor, this isn’t normal.”

I understood him: this way of moving the thumb is so different from what he’s used to that his body image rejects it, defining it as abnormal. So I said to him, “Imagine you see a guy walking down the street, and he is holding his arms out horizontally to the sides, like pontoons, with his forearms hanging down from his elbows. You tell him, ‘hey, relax your arms, let them hang by your sides’ and he replies, ‘no, that wouldn’t be normal.’ So you gently coax his arms to let go and sink down, and succeed to a certain extent – but as soon as you stop your intervention, up they pop again. This is how your thumbs behave.” And I walked around the studio like a scarecrow with my arms in this bizarre position. “Yessir, this is certainly normal. It must be, because this is how I’ve been all my life. I don’t know how to be any different…”

I also worked with him with great intensity at the keyboard (Mozart C minor concerto, 3rd mvt), constantly monitoring his thumbs with my hands literally on his, and gently, repeatedly drawing his thumbs down to a position under his hands. This repeated physical stimulation was an important teaching tool; simple intellectual understanding was nowhere near enough for him. But I think that nice visual image of a scarecrow walking around the studio helped him too, something clicked…

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