The Craft of Piano Playing: A New Approach to Piano Technique

After Barack Obama’s historic win on Tuesday, I sent the following email to everyone on my list, not realizing what a response I would get:

>>>> Dear friends,
>>>>
>>>> After 8 long years of Bush – a fresh start!
>>>>
>>>> Entrenched interests stand in the way, but Obama's victory brings a
>>>> chance for the US to finally join with the world community to take
>>>> on pressing challenges on climate change, human rights, and peace.
>>>>
>>>> After years, even decades of distrust, let's seize this moment of
>>>> unity, reconciliation and hope to send a message of warm
>>>> congratulations and invitation to work together to the new President
>>>> and the American people.
>>>>
>>>> We've built a huge wall near the White House in Washington DC where
>>>> the number of signatures on our message and personal messages from
>>>> around the world will grow over the next several hours. We've also
>>>> asked Obama to personally receive our petition from a group of Avaaz
>>>> members. Let's get to 1 million signers and messages to Obama! Sign
>>>> on at the link below and forward this email to others:
>>>>
>>>> http://www.avaaz.org/en/million_messages_to_obama/98.php/?cl_tf_sign=1
>>>>
>>>> This is a time for celebration of democracy, but already the sharks
>>>> are circling – oil companies, war contractors, conservative
>>>> lobbyists, and the powerful neo-con clique that brought us the war
>>>> in Iraq are furiously lobbying to dim the prospects for change.
>>>> Obama has promised national unity, and these interests will ask a
>>>> high price for that unity.
>>>>
>>>> Let's act quickly to make sure the people of the world are heard as
>>>> Obama makes crucial choices in the coming days on how to live up to
>>>> his campaign promises to secure a strong global treaty on climate
>>>> change, ban torture and close Guantanamo prison, withdraw carefully
>>>> from Iraq, and double aid to make global poverty history. Rarely has
>>>> a US President been more likely to listen to us.
>>>>
>>>> We'll make the point that on most of the pressing issues faced by
>>>> Obama and the American people – from the financial crisis to climate
>>>> change -- we need to work together as one world to achieve change.
>>>> Sign below and forward this message on:
>>>>
>>>> http://www.avaaz.org/en/million_messages_to_obama/98.php/?cl_tf_sign=1
>>>>
>>>> With hope,
>>>>
>>>> Ricken, Brett, Alice, Iain, Paula, Paul, Graziela, Pascal, Milena,
>>>> Graziela and the whole Avaaz team.
>>>>
>>>> PS – Send us a picture of yourself for our wall - email it to
>>>> obamawall@avaaz.org
>>>>
>>>> PPS – Here's a link to a report on Avaaz's past campaigning –
>>>> http://www.avaaz.org/en/report_back_2/
>>>>
>>>> PPS - And here's a list of 10 of Obama's campaign promises that
>>>> concern the world – you can find his full platform here
>>>> http://www.barackobama.com/issues/
>>>> :
>>>>
>>>> · Reduce the US's carbon emissions 80 by 2050 and play a strong
>>>> positive role in negotiating a binding global treaty to replace the
>>>> expiring Kyoto Protocol.
>>>> · Withdraw all combat troops from Iraq within 16 months and keep no
>>>> permanent bases in the country.
>>>> · Establish a clear goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons across
>>>> the globe
>>>> · Close the Guantanamo Bay detention center
>>>> · Double US aid to cut extreme poverty in half by 2015 and
>>>> accelerate the fight against HIV/AIDS, tuberculoses and Malaria
>>>> · Open diplomatic talks with countries like Iran and Syria, to
>>>> pursue peaceful resolution of tensions
>>>> · De-politicize military intelligence to avoid ever repeating the
>>>> kind of manipulation that led the US into Iraq
>>>> · Launch a major diplomatic effort to stop the killings in Darfur
>>>> · Only negotiate new trade agreements that contain labor and
>>>> environmental protections
>>>> · Invest $150 billion over ten years to support renewable energy and
>>>> get 1 million plug-in electric cars on the road by 2015

The next day, this was in my inbox:

>>> Alan Fraser, is this really from you?
>>>
>>> If not you need to stop it.
>>>
>>> If so, see my response below.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> To borrow an immortal phrase from Joe the Biden, "Is this a Joke?"
>>> Where was the chapter on climate change in your video . . . or
>>> redistribution of poverty?
>>>
>>> It's pretty easy to claim the high moral ground when you've got no
>>> opposition. Do you care to go man to man with someone with a brain
>>> and
>>> knows how to use it?.
>>>
>>> Speaking as someone who's gotten a great deal out of your video,
>>> you're like many others these days: when it comes to politics you
>>> have
>>> no idea what you're doing.
>>>
>>> Please save further bilge such as this for committed marxists friends
>>> of yours!!
>>>
>>> In disgust, R. E.

So I wrote this answer:

>> Dear Ron,
>>
>> Yes it really is me!
>>
>> And yes I don't know much about politics. I live in Serbia, and
>> although I
>> heartily supported Kostunica, the "freedom figher" who replaced
>> Milosevic,
>> in the end he was hardly any better and certainly could do virtually
>> nothing to clean up a government mostly run by the Serbian mafia...
>>
>> However, if you didn't experience Obama's acceptance speech as a great
>> moment in history, even if I know virtually nothing about politics,
>> I do
>> allow myself the indulgence of holding an opinion diametrically
>> opposed to
>> yours!
>>
>> It remains to be seen how much of this glory will translate into real
>> improvement, but I think our chances are far greater with Obama and
>> the
>> Democrats than with 4 more years of Republican thievery and lies...
>>
>> As far as I can humbly perceive, Obama has an excellent mind and
>> excellent
>> intentions. In other words he does indeed "have a brain and knows
>> how to
>> use it" - this already puts him way out in front of everyone else.
>>
>> Respectfully,
>>
>> Alan Fraser, author of The Craft of Piano Playing and political
>> amateur!

And received the following huge explanatory email, which has many interesting ideas in it (whether you agree or not, I believe it is worth following this because we need to be informed about the underlying issues now facing us):

> Dear Alan,
>
> I appreciate your temperate tone in response to my email, which to say
> the least, was vitriolic.  Thank you for that. And I shall try to
> respond in kind. It was fair of you to refer to your view as an
> "indulgence" given the way I responded, but I wouldn't ever call it
> that. I'd say you are exercising your rights a free man. I do feel
> that you have engaged me on these issues though, so here goes.
>
> I know very little of the history of Serbia. What I have observed
> elsewhere is the repeated replacing of one despot with another. So I'm
> sorry to hear that you supported someone who turned out that way.
>
> In my view, the great divide in politics is individualism vs
> collectivism, and the central issue is a man's right to his life. The
> indispensable  corollary to a man's right to his life is his right to
> property. In a free society, a man acquires property by exchanging his
> work or goods for the work or goods of another man, in a mutually
> agreed and unforced trade. In a free society an individual's rights
> end where another's begins. He is not allowed to use force or fraud to
> obtain a value.
>
> The basis for this is not a governmental decree, or a gift from god.
> It derives from man's nature as a being of volitional consciousness.
> He has no automatic knowledge. He must first decide to use his mind.
> He must, to remain alive, by his own mental work, discover what is
> true or false. Then he uses that knowledge, to guide the course of his
> life, benefiting when he's right, experiencing setbacks when he's not,
> all the while self correcting, and refining his knowledge by
> integrating the newly acquired with the old. Such is the way a man
> produces things of value. Your DVD for instance, has been a tremendous
> value to me, (and if you give me a chance I will illustrate shortly
> how I'm consistent with regard to your property rights).
>
> So to obtain a value from someone by force, implied use of force, or
> fraud is anti-mind.  In effect it is  saying "I know your mind, if I
> left you free to use it, would not agree to this, my argument
> therefore is this gun",(or this threat, or this rubber check, etc.)
> It's in effect saying, "If you use your mind, it will cost you your
> life"
>
> And since the mind is a man's means of survival, to be anti-mind is to
> be anti-life.
>
> Provided he doesn't violate the rights of another, a man with no right
> to the dispose of the fruits of his labor, is a slave.
>
> You mentioned the Serbian mafia. Would it be correct to describe their
> regime as institutionalized gang rule? And would it be safe to say
> that the initiation use of force or the threat of its use, was their
> principle means of persuasion?
>
> So what would a proper government do? It would protect individual
> rights in 3 ways-from outside invaders (military), from internal
> violations of  individual rights (police) and by providing a system of
> courts for adjudicating matters in dispute.
>   It would have a legal monopoly on the use of force, but be
> restrained in using it only against those who initiate force against
> others. That's the principle behind limited government, consented to
> by the people.
>
> A government that INITIATES  the use of force becomes mankind's
> greatest enemy. A government that expropriates private property is in
> effect making property out of its citizens.
>
> Hopefully you can infer how many of the recent actions of my
> government I have been supportive of. I am not blind to the abuses of
> power it has committed.  Nor am I blind to what my government and my
> country represent historically compared to everything else that came
> before it.
> People say America was built on the backs of slaves. Of course there
> was slavery, and it was a despicable chapter in our history. But there
> was opposition to it from the outset. Remember the 3/5ths compromise?
> That was instituted by the northern states to weaken the southern
> ones. It stated that if the southern states were not going to treat
> their slaves as full human beings that they would only be counted as
> 3/5ths of a person for the purposes of representation in congress. It
> took "four score and seven years" and several hundred thousand lives
> to settle that one, but the bottom line is that the US, and individual
> liberty, and its concurrent explosion of prosperity, drove slavery out
> of the civilized world. It is a triumph of the good. It is something
> to be proud of.
>
> I say that, to be ashamed of that history is to completely drop the
> context. It's to ignore the kinds of governments that preceded ours,
> and the fact that in Philadelphia in the late part of the 18th
> century, men who didn't all agree, put their lives on the line for
> ideas borne of reason and rationality, not of power lust, mysticism
> and despotism, and created a government that protected the people, not
> the other way around. And with all the contradictions and
> inconsistencies, it created an example to the rest of the world of
> what was possible to a free man.
>
> If you want to see slavery, it's still around, and so are the
> political systems that led to, and further it.  They are
> collectivistic. They hold that "rights" of the group supersedes the
> rights of the individual. They hold that there is only so much wealth,
> and that anyone who acquires a lot of it must have taken it from
> someone else, therefore it must be redistributed. But it's self-
> evident that there's vastly more wealth now than in the middle ages.
> So where is the source of that wealth?  I say it's the individual
> acting and creating freely, when he's left to deal with others in free
> exchange. (But to get to the bottom of it Alan, what is the source of
> the lie about the source of wealth? I believe that lies in other
> branches of philosophy which are outside this particular discussion.)
>
> But no matter how romantic the appeal to "justice", to vindicate the
> masses, the "voice of the people" invariably becomes one man who leads
> one pressure group, . .  and the gang wars go on.
>
> It's also very important to distinguish between people who produce or
> EARN  wealth, and those who  acquire it through government loans,
> subsidies, or other legal distortions of the free market. The latter
> are people engaging in "legal plunder" which always ends in ruin for
> everyone.
> Redistribution of wealth, in practice, has always been redistribution
> of poverty.
>
> I've been on Obama's website, I've heard his books on tape, I've
> listened to a lot of his speeches. I don't traffic in republican
> national comittee talking points. I respectfully say to you there's
> nothing new here. It's retreaded Marxism, and exploitation of class
> envy.  It's been tried, and tried, and it's resulted in misery and
> mass murder. Throughout history the apologists for these outrages have
> claimed that it wasn't the fault of the "plan", it was people who
> didn't implement it correctly, as in Zimbabwe or Cambodia or North
> Korea or Venezuela, Soviet Russia, or Red China.  They say that the
> ideal still exists, of a classless society, it's just that they used
> the wrong means to achieve those ends. Alan, there's only one goal of
> a person who seeks power over other people, and whether they get there
> or not is determined by time, and the grace of the victims, but in
> those cases I cited above, the gulags, the political prisoners, the
> economic ruin- those means ARE the ends.
>
> People who advocate such political schemes are looters in matter. Even
> the doctrine of collectivism is intellectually parasitic. If thinking
> people didn't take it upon themselves to create a value, how would
> there ever be anything to loot?
>
> You live in Europe. Do you know the history of the Weimar republic?
> They had their conservatives and liberals too. The liberals wanted
> economic control, and the conservatives wanted intellectual control.
> And along came a charismatic demagogue who said "let's have total
> control". The germans had been prepared philosophically, steeped in
> the ethics of duty and self sacrifice, and a hatred for reason, went
> for it. Hitler told them what he was going to do. It didn't arouse a
> controversy. Lust for control of others was "priced in" to the
> monolithic philosophic cultural atmosphere of the time.
>
> Obama and his ilk have said they want to take from the rich to "give
> back" to the middle class.
>
> Let me tell you how that would affect me.  I haven't made more than
> 20,000 a year for some time. I live very sparsely. I don't begrudge
> the rich their estates and their yachts, provided they earned their
> riches honestly. Their wealth is what allows me to live on what I live
> on! Take that from them, and yes I might see a short term benefit,
> from some dole from the government, but ultimately life will become
> more expensive for me! If wealth is outlawed, only outlaws will have
> wealth.
>
> And while I'm on the subject of my own finances, this gets me to your
> DVD. I love your project. It's made an enormous difference for me. I
> am finding that passages that I've struggled with for decades are
> suddenly, (and I mean on the first try!!) easy, thanks to your
> insights. I wanted to share it with a friend. And I thought long and
> hard about whether to just send him a copy of mine. But I valued your
> work and your right to it enough to buy another copy for him. I try to
> walk the walk too. But I'm not trying to impress you with my self
> sacrifice. It was an act of self defense and self esteem. I want
> people like you to continue to produce things of great value (self-
> defense) and I believe that I'll be able to afford them (self-esteem.)
>
>
> If you'll excuse me, right now I'm feeling overwhelmed by an torrent
> of ideology (and ideologues) that I believe is inimical to my freedom
> and the future of liberty in general. Your video has been a real
> bright spot for me for several months and has revived my playing in
> very surprising and enjoyable ways. So when I received that kind of
> political message I lashed out. I apologize for that. I don't know
> you. (And noticed on re reading it that it was actually a forwarded
> letter!)
>
> I have to mention this. Obama has tried impute racist motives to
> anyone who disagrees with him. I find this reprehensible. Especially
> with regard to McCain. But I want to state this unequivocally. There
> are many black conservatives in this country, Thomas Sowell, Walter
> Williams, Ward Connerly, Clarence Thomas, Larry Elder, to name a few,
> and I would have been proud to have any of those men as my president.
> It's what's between a man's ears that counts for me, and by all the
> sources I referred to earlier, all his own words, Obama fails to meet
> my standards very badly.
>
> And lest I not mention Bush (both of them actually) I blame him (W)
> most for this turn of events. People have such a visceral hatred of
> the man, much of it with good cause, they were willing to do almost
> anything to rid themselves of any remnant of him . . .  and they have,
> (done almost anything). I will be committing myself to rebuilding a
> legitimate pro individual rights conservative movement, and many of
> today's so called conservatives wont be welcome. (FYI, McCain won't
> make the first cut)
> I would ask you to consider the issue of private property as an
> indispensable component of liberty, and whether or not Obama's stated
> convictions on the subject are anything to celebrate.
> I would also ask you to review the list of goals in that email you
> forwarded to me, goals that had as their theme the evil that is the
> United States. Please consider, no matter how emotionally appealing,
> whether they actually serve the cause of individual rights.
>
> I hope I haven't overtaxed your courtesy.
> Take care,
> R. E.

Finally this is the answer I sent back to Ron - this is not a political blog but for me, this is truly an historical, pivotal moment in modern history and I don’t want to behave as if it didn’t happen!

Hello Ron,

Thank you for being so generous with your time and sending me this
wonderful email. I haven't read Obama's books, I didn't know the things
you tell me about him. I am surprised to hear them. If it's really as you
say, then yes, we face the danger of swinging to the other extreme.

I agree with you about private property. And interestingly, what you say
about the society's power being in the strength of the individual was one
of Moshe Feldenkrais's core beliefs and one of the key foundations of and
motivations for the development of his whole method. So obviously I am
with you on that one.

What I thought Obama meant was that he would redress the wrongs of the
rich not doing their part, of their being able to earn millions and pay
only pennies in income tax on all that while normal Joe Blows like you and
me bit the bullet. And I sincerely hope he does mean that, and not what
you interpret his words to mean.

I earned far less than 20,000 a year for almost two decades in order to
develop the ideas of my approach. I do appreciate a great deal your buying
a second DVD for your friend instead of copying it. That helps pay me for
20 years of sacrifice, and I am grateful for your real, practical support.

There is something about Obama that makes me suspect you are wrong about
him. The man radiates integrity. The man who made that acceptance speech
on Tuesday night didn't resemble in any remote way the type of communist
who wants to substitute one type of thievery with another. His ideals may
seem utopian but for me they are realistic because they arise from a place
of human truth within him. The better person in each of us resonates to
his words - he inspires in the best sense of the word.

I think Barack Obama was not elected because he is black, nor because he
is a closet socialist, nor because the other side was just too awful. I
think he was elected because he is a great man, and I am hopeful that the
quality of greatness in him will guide his presidency and ennoble us all
in the process. And I think this is a realistic hope, not a fantasy!

Another way of putting it: to me he is trying to do for the world what I
in my humble way aspire to do for piano.

In sincere respect,

Alan

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

October 31, 2000: Testing the Strength of an Ordinary Egg

“Everybody knows how easy it is to break an egg, because of its very thin shell. Today our young scientists learned that an egg can also be very strong. Nature made it to be both light and strong, so that it can withstand the impact of falling to the ground when the egg is laid.

‘We talked about the properties of an egg: it is round, light, smooth and white. The children were asked to hypothesize (make a scientific guess) about the egg’s strength. Is an egg strong and powerful, or weak and fragile?

• five students said the egg was strong and powerful
• eleven students said the egg was weak and fragile.

‘To find out the answer to our question, we carefully placed the uncooked, ordinary egg in some soft clay. Using the egg and the two blocks of wood, we made a triangular base to support a large, lightweight cookie sheet.

‘We slowly added books, one by one, to see how much weight the egg could help support. Excitement was building as each book was placed on the stack.

‘In the end, we found the egg to support sixty-six books: over twenty pounds! Why didn’t the egg break sooner? The egg has an arch at each end, an excellent structure for supporting weight.”

You may be wondering why I posted this at a piano technique blog. It’s because of a similar segment in my film where I liken the hand’s arch structure to the light, tensile strength of a geodesic dome… or an egg. The only difference is that in this student demonstration they don’t show what happened when they put the 67th book; in my film, I do show what happens when the structure finally collapses!

I just spent a very pleasant and productive week in New York City presenting my work to the MTNA-CFMTA symposium on Empowering Musicians: Mind, Body & Spirit. An exciting week full of surprises, one of the nicest of which was my meeting with Kathleen Riley who has been doing important work in developing biofeedback techniques for pianists. I just wrote an article about it for pianotechnique.net, which I submit for your enjoyment here…

“When Kathleen Riley invited me down to her studio to hook myself up to her electrodes and measure my muscle contractions as I play, I must admit I was a bit sceptical. I myself tend to focus too much on the physical, and here was someone going even further into that strange land where one risks being so distracted from musical concerns that one’s playing loses any life and creativity it might have once had. But I was curious, so off I went down to her office at NYU in lower Manhattan.

She put two electrodes on the extensor muscles on the upper outside of my forearm just below my elbow, and another two on my trapezius - if you reach up and over your right shoulder with your left hand to touch the soft spot between the shoulder blade and your spine, that’s about the place. She put a laptop on the piano where the music desk usually is, showing two thick lines moving on a graph, one blue (trapezius) and one brown (extensors in the forearm). These lines jumped every time I used those muscles. If I didn’t do anything, the lines trundled along at a steady 3-5 microvolts, indicating that a small amount of tonus remains in the muscle even at rest - it remains ready for work. However, Kathleen told me that many students come in with an “at rest” level of over 100 microvolts! The effort they invest in playing becomes residual tension, continuing long after the playing has stopped - it becomes a chronic contraction.

I started fooling around to see what I could do with those lines. First Katherine took me through a short calibration process where I figured out how to keep the blue shoulder line low and smooth. She also pointed out how when my hand’s arch became too flat, the tension in both muscle groups rose and the lines moved higher. This was interesting to me, because as far as I had understood it, I am the expert on the hand’s arch! But the sensors were showing me right off the bat that I could do better at practicing what I preach!

Minimizing extensor activity

Then I tried seeing the difference between playing with curved or flat fingers. Everybody agrees that using curved fingers causes less stress than either curling or flattening, but I often use the flat finger to get the biggest, boldest, juiciest sound possible - the brilliant scales near the end of Liszt’s B minor Ballade for instance. I knew that my extensors would probably work a bit more with flat fingers, but I was amazed at just how much higher my flat fingers made the graph peak. I could play a curved finger scale and keep the brown line down around 40 microvolts, but flat fingered scales pushed the line up above 80 and even 100 microvolts or more. I believe this happened because the flat fingered scale invoked the work of my lumbricals whereas in the curved-finger scale I was more likely transferring my effort over to the more subtle action of the interossei.

“Hmm,” I thought, “is this difference just because of the change in technique, or could I be doing ‘flat fingers’ incorrectly somehow, introducing a misalignment of structure that contributes to the higher levels of stress?” I played around with it and found that by being more attentive to exact alignments (something I am always bugging my students about), I could significantly lower the graph - even more for the curved finger scale than for the flat fingered scale! And when I did this, my curved finger scale started sounding almost as brilliant and full as I had wanted the flat fingered scale to sound!

It was an uncanny process: with the help of these sensors, I, the “guru” of skeletal playing, was learning better how to play skeletally! I found I was moving my hands into new, unusual positions that accentuated their capacity for 90-degree angle skeletal alignment. When I did what I usually do, the graph lines didn’t really bottom out the way I wanted them to - there was still too much tension, and so I naturally sought a new solution.

There was a really big improvement here, not something marginal. The graph showed me that I hadn’t been doing exactly what I thought I was. It helped me to do a lot better what I had initially intended to do.

Neutral shoulders

Next I played a bit of Brahms, the Intermezzo in E flat major from Op. 117. Why was that blue shoulder line peaking? Once again I had thought I was maintaining an arch in my hand that was not fixed but structurally powerful, using it to get big, warm tone in the chords and melodic line of the Brahms, but often I would see that blue line bulge up. I noticed it rise whenever I was even slightly unsure about a note (a very revealing observation in itself), but that wasn’t the whole story. Eventually I pinned it down: the blue line shot up whenever I inadvertently allowed my arch to just sightly empty out, so slightly that I failed to notice it. I had thought I was just relaxing, but the graph instantly showed me whenever this verged into an over-relaxation that caused a misalignment of my one structure. This in turn led to a rise in tension somewhere else in my body. This was aggravating! I thought I knew what I was doing, but the machine is telling me a different story! Finally I told myself, “OK, I’m going to play that Brahms again, and this time that blue line is going to bottom out and stay there!” I was determined to beat the machine!

Finally I succeeded in this, and lo and behold, I found myself in a mental state where my attention was 100% focused on what I am doing, where my arch didn’t even hint at over-relaxation or self-emasculation, and where my shoulders remained so free that any contraction there was neutralized long before it became a reality. I was now in that state of heightened attention I always strive for in performance. It was a palpable, recognizable mental calm that served my artistic purposes ideally.

Kathleen’s machine showed me that I hadn’t been doing this consistently in my practice but I thought I had. It was disturbing to discover the degree to which I was not even close to that mental state in my everyday work. But finding a way to finally achieve it was wonderfully encouraging!

Breathing spaces

One of the nice things Kathleen saw in my graphs was the frequent dipping of the lines, indicating that my muscles were capable of returning to neutral very quickly in between spurts of effort. “You should see some of the graphs for students doing something like Chopin Op. 10 #1 - it hits 160 microvolts and just stays there.”

“But there’s nowhere to breathe in that piece,” I said.

“Yes there is, give it a try.” I played a few bars of that fiendishly difficult etude and yes, you could see a significant trough in the brown line during the 16^th rest at the beginning of each bar - even when I didn’t think about it and overdo it. And if I paid a little more attention to keeping that blue line well-behaved, the etude started humming and blistering really nicely!

It was fascinating to take mental control over aspects of my playing that I had never really brought into my awareness. Such a strange, empowering experience to look at the graph lines and consciously change the state of muscles in my shoulder or the shape of my hand on the keyboard to lower the height of the lines. This was my first experience of classical biofeedback and I must say, I am a convert!

Most interesting, if I now manifest a clear intention to “make that blue line bottom out,” I experience the resulting positive changes in my shoulder even when the electrodes are not attached. I can also adjust my hand position the way I would have done to keep the brown line to a minimum, and this improves my facility, sense of comfort, and most of all my sound. My hand is more skeletal than ever before!

Throughout the piano playing community there is a widespread failure to maintain a healthy arch in the hand. But the potent arch is a central tenet of Kathleen’s technique: her work with the sensors and graphs had confirmed that without that fundamental structure working well, tension levels go sky high, and when the arch becomes potent it helps the rest of the system calibrate to much lower levels of tension. Interestingly enough, she says she knew about the potent arch even before she began this work, but it is certainly nice to see such a resounding confirmation of this technical fact.

For more on Kathleen Riley’s work, please visit www.pianoperceptions.com.

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Article submitted by Alan Fraser for PianoTechnique.net

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 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.

A couple of days ago a new student showed up at my door. She has a fascinating story: she saw my demo video on the internet, emailed me and asked if she could come to see me for some lessons. Nothing so unusual about that, except 1) she lives in Reunion, a tiny island off the coast of Madagascar, and 2) she is a total beginner at age 40! It’s an 11-hour flight from Reunion to Paris, then another 2 hours to Belgrade, but when Emilie arrived she was bright and ready to work. I knew then that she was really dedicated!

And when she played a couple of the simple pieces she had learned, I saw that I was certainly going to be able to help her: I had never seen a more collapsed arch. Her hand reminded me of the pictures I had seen in a book on the technique of Marie Jaell, the student of Liszt who taught in Paris. Her hand was tense, her arm stiff, she was obviously struggling and knew so; she just didn’t know what to do about it. But when I lifted up the center of her arch, she said, “But my teacher said to keep that top knuckle down, to press it down as low as possible.”

“What!!!???”

“He studied in France, and he says that the top knuckle must be pressed down flat. When I told him that I couldn’t move my fingers in that position, he said, ‘You just have to develop the musculature, then your fingers will work fine.’ ”

At first sight this seemed like the most bizarre thing I had ever heard, but then I got to thinking, how many pianists have I seen who actually play with this hand shape? Many! Despite the fact that this makes your sound tiny and forces you to do all sorts of relaxation movements in an attempt to free yourself of the resulting tension, they do play with this ridiculously low, anti-functional arch - there must be some reason!

I had Emilie learn the grasping action generated by the lumbricals and interossei, and then showed her how to apply it on the piano. I had her touch a key with her second finger and then stand up using an intense effort at her top knuckle. When it stood up, I had never seen such a pronounced ‘hillock’ in my life - her metacarpal-phalangeal joint was wonderfully, beautifully prominent. She could do the same with each of her other fingers. Soon I had her ‘walking’ from finger to finger, each time transferring the weight and sending one ‘hillock’ after another into glorious, soaring prominence. Great!

But she complained that it took tremendous concentration to do this, and she was soon tired - mentally more than physically. Aha! So that’s компютриwhy the low knuckle approach is so popular. It’s easier - at least in a totally superficial way. It is actually not easier physically, because it leads to all sorts of tension and blocking. But it doesn’t require that initial investment of attention - you can play like that and stay unconscious…

Anyway it has been very gratifying to work with Emilie: the intense series of Feldenkrais Functional Integration lessons I am giving her combined with the piano lessons is really doing the trick, transforming her hand and indeed her entire body at the keyboard. But most important is the transformation of her sound: she has quickly moved from ‘typing notes’ to really inflecting a rich, singing melody, and instead of pushing the keys of a chord down mechanically she now makes them blossom in an orchestrated way. She accomplishes this through quite simple means - a constant activation of the grasping function in her hand combined with a breathing wrist/arm which helps her to transfer the grasping smoothly from one finger to the next: in other words, to play with a true, overheld legato.

The Integrative Power of the Breath in Piano Technique

In the past it has been an unwritten rule in master class teaching to “stay away from technique and just deal with issues of interpretation.” I have long felt obliged (reluctantly) to break that rule - to my mind, you can’t separate the two realms. This rule has often led to what seemed to me insipid classes that don’t get to the heart of the matter. That’s why it was so inspiring and refreshing to to attend Thomas Hampson’s master classes last week as a part of the Heidelberg Spring Festival. The great baritone was here all week working with a group of really talented young singers in addition to singing a stunning recital of Schubert, Mahler and Schumann. His teaching is amazingly full of knowledge about technique and about the philosophical and literary content of the music - he is a man of Energy with a capital E. I learned so much from watching him work with these kids, who his synthesis of musical and technical understanding simply opened up and transported to a whole new level of interpretation motorola q ringtones ringtones for metro pcs phone free verizon wireless ringtones boost free ringtones alltel download free ringtones info nokia remember ringtones mp3 ringtones maker motorola v3 ringtones music real ringtones download free ringtones nextel real music ringtones blackberry ringtones download free ringtones t mobile caller download hotlink ringtones cell phone ringtones wallpaper cell cingular free phone ringtones download free polyphonic ringtones get ringtones hot new ringtones cingular wireless ringtones and sonority. I also found many parallels between his use of the body in singing and my own approach to piano technique.

Today when I sat to play the the F major Chopin Ballade, my colleague Anna Zenzius-Spengler began to talk about Thomas Hampson’s approach to the breath, why don’t I try it as I play the opening? He had taught largely in German so I hadn’t been able to follow the details of what he was saying, but now she explained to me the difference between Hampson’s “inhalation” and standard breathing. Normal breathing is a relatively mechanical affair of inbreath, outbreath, and there is a certain quality of stiffness or control. But the sense of inhalation is of a column of air coming in and expanding you, suffusing every tiny inner cavity and filling you out, and this continues all the time, even as you sing. It’s not logical to sense air continuing to come in and fill you up when you are breathing out, but when you cultivate the feeling, it engenders an amazing flexibility of torso and a corresponding richness of sonority. We had heard voices literally transformed in seconds as the singing students visualized and used this image, could I do the same at the piano?

The second element of breathing we brought to piano playing was the sense of the complete pharangeal column being open and available. This means you feel the laryngeal pharynx, the glottal pharynx, the palate (palatal?) pharynx and the nasal pharynx as you breathe. You get a sense of a long column going all the way up the back of your neck right into your brain cavity. If you breathe through your nose and slightly constrict the stream of air to make that slight, airy rasping sound that is a prelude to a snore, you can get a clear sense of this. You begin to actually feel the sensation of the slightly cool air flowing over the skin of the pharynx.

Anna had me breathe like this a few times, then asked me to continue to pay attention to this quality of the breath not only before I started the first phrase, but all the way through the first page. When I tried this, the focus of my attention as well as my sound was remarkable - a new quality. The integration of what I teach in terms of physical organization was more complete, and more at the service of musical expression. I found I was doing all the technical things I talk about without having to think about it so much, and that this sense of breath made the piano sing more.

Previously I have always avoided thinking about breathing as one plays. To my mind, if you did everything musically and physically that was needed, one’s breathing would take care of itself. I had tried in the past to figure out whether I was breathing in or out at a particular point in a pianistic phrase, and the results were disaster: it distracted me from what was coming out of the piano - better not mess with it. But this way of working empowered my musicianship and served as an integrative force. Another nice strand to add to our thinking…

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.

Piano technique is not only about the physical organization of the hand and body - what we’re really dealing with is the transmission of musical expression. This letter that I recently sent to the Pete Seeger Appreciation Page (http://www.peteseeger.net/) expresses my appreciation for a very valuable early musical influence…

Dear Pete,

When I was a boy, around 1960 my parents bought a Folkways record of you singing children’s songs. I think that one record formed me more as a musician than anything else. I think you’re one of the greatest musicians on the planet. I’m talking about the freedom with which you play, you take phrases out of the boxes they’re locked in and make them live, capital L Live, the way you sing ‘em it takes one’s musical soul out for a ride, makes it laugh, cry, dance, run & jump - it fills one up with joy. I am talking about real musical Art, which most classical musicians have in distressingly small amounts!

I am from Montreal. I had the great pleasure and privilege to hear you sing in Place des Arts one night, and my feeling then was that you filled the people there that night up with their own capital H Humanity more than any Montreal Symphony Orchestra concert ever did!

I just want to thank you and pay tribute to you. That old Folkways record is now doing the same thing for my daughter Masha that it did for me. We’re having fun jumping around, digging the ground, and all the time she’s learning what it is to be a real musician. The way you pluck the strings of that banjo sets the strings of one’s soul humming, and the way you sing makes one’s heart sing too.

So from the bottom of my heart, THANK YOU Pete for the greatest gift a man could give me!

Warmly yours,

Alan Fraser

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…