Two things inspired this post:
The first is Concert Hands, a completely ridiculous piece of technology that you strap on to your wrists and hands to help you learn to play. (Seriously, watch the video, it’s hilarious!)
The second is a description of a teaching technique in Julie Knerr’s excellent article on elementary technique in the first issue of MTNA’s e-Journal. (To view back issues, open the current issue and click “Archives” in the upper left corner.)
What Knerr described is that successful teachers go beyond which key to play and help students learn where to play it. In other words, we shouldn’t always position our finger on the same spot on the key every time. Sometimes it’s best to move a bit – towards and away from the fallboard.
What bothered me so much about Concert Hands is that it treats piano technique as one-dimensional, back and forth along the rail.
As teachers, I think an important part of teaching technique is in the realization that technique is 3-dimensional. We don’t simply move our arms and hands left and right, we are in a constant state of motion that includes left, right, up, down, away, towards, and every imaginable combination. Incidentally, this is also why I find discussions of hand position and hand shape unnecessarily tedious – while playing the piano, our hands have many shapes and find themselves in many different positions.
One of my New Year’s Resolutions is to bring more 3-dimensional awareness to my teaching:
- How do I help my students feel at ease moving side-to-side along the keyboard?
- How do I help my students better control the descent and release of the key?
- How do I help students negotiate the surface of the keys?
Feel free to share any thoughts or exercises you have that address these important questions, I’d love to hear them!
Jason,
This is a remarkable and helpful blog – please keep up the good work!
Deborah
How do I help my students better control the descent and release of the key?
This issue is very important to me and I work diligently trying to help my students accomplish control of going into (descent ) and lifting out (release) of the key. I use the tennis racquet analogy – like you learned to swing the golf club. I think the follow-through is the key to a beautiful tone, or that perfect golf or tennis swing. I continue with the tennis racquet when teaching them to keep their arm behind the fingers – hand is the racquet head and it can’t twist.
Relaxation-release of weight after reaching the keybed is also ultimate, IMO. If not, the student produces a harsh, stabbing, tone. Probably more than you wanted to hear
Concert Hands! Hilarious. Treats our hands as if they were almost separate from our brain. Ridiculous. I’ve found that most students think there is only one point (on the outer edge of the keys) to play. It’s a revelation when I help them discover it’s much easier to play combination of white/black keys by following the natural contour of the fingers/hands on the keyboard. It’s even more evident when playing a series of chromatic octaves, where it is much easier to play along an imaginary horizontal line on the white keys close to the outer edge of the black keys. So hard to put into words – hope you can get the picture.
@Marcia
Hi, Marcia,
I can see how your critique might sound right to some people; but, actually, piano tradition’s perception of fingers as sort of direct nervous extensions of the brain has not been right, either.
It taught us to see fingers as no more than ‘noodles,’ sort of ‘snail’s fillers,’ etc. – perpetual, incurable weaklings which cannot be turned into anything useful – unless one wants to follow the outdated, terrible “finger school” (see videos of Wanda Landowska on youtube).
On the other hand, certain idea (which gains popularity among the unaware) turns fingers into ‘adjustable teeth’ in the “rake” of the stiffened forearm/wrist/palm unit…
It all looks to me like we have serious, *basic* issues in piano pedagogy which aren’t really addressed.