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…

I emailed Seymour about this (about what? See previous post) and his reply sheds more light on the matter:

“Let me give you some of my background on collapsed fifth fingers. Most students are given no awareness of their failure to use fifth fingers like the others fingers. In my early years of teaching I faced fifth fingers that were held needlessly high that tended to lock the other fingers, and fifth fingers that were always played as the result of an arm stroke. I experimented with my students and found out what worked. Scale and arpeggio training gives no practice or awareness as they circumvent use of the fifth finger. To make the finger work properly one must place the mechanism behind the finger in an advantageous position—-wrist out and low, pronated forearms, fifth finger knuckle higher than the others, the fifth finger touching the keys behind the fourth, etc. and then making sure that the third bone of the fifth fingers hinges at its knuckle with small muscle use. In chord playing the finger should be set in this position before the keys are played.

‘Read also 12 D and especially 12 E as these also shed some light on how to develop the use of an independently swinging fifth finger.”

Kind regards,

Seymour

I emailed Seymour about this (about what? See previous post) and his reply sheds more light on the matter:

“Let me give you some of my background on collapsed fifth fingers. Most students are given no awareness of their failure to use fifth fingers like the others fingers. In my early years of teaching I faced fifth fingers that were held needlessly high that tended to lock the other fingers, and fifth fingers that were always played as the result of an arm stroke. I experimented with my students and found out what worked. Scale and arpeggio training gives no practice or awareness as they circumvent use of the fifth finger. To make the finger work properly one must place the mechanism behind the finger in an advantageous position—-wrist out and low, pronated forearms, fifth finger knuckle higher than the others, the fifth finger touching the keys behind the fourth, etc. and then making sure that the third bone of the fifth fingers hinges at its knuckle with small muscle use. In chord playing the finger should be set in this position before the keys are played.

‘Read also 12 D and especially 12 E as these also shed some light on how to develop the use of an independently swinging fifth finger.”

Kind regards,

Seymour

Lately I watched parts of Seymour Fink’s DVD, Mastering Piano Technique, and part 12B hit me like a ton of bricks. Avoiding ulnar deviation is not bad!!! This one section about moving the arm into the fifth finger to help it play, exposes a major weakness of my own approach. You can see it in my film: to illustrate the second, transverse arch of the hand, I allow my metacarpal-phalangeal ridge to slope down to my fifth finger. But this lowers its potency! I also demonstrate how to rotate in leaping to a high note played with the fifth finger, thus emptying out the fifth finger’s metacarpal-phalangeal arch and weakening it. I developed these strategies because I saw people trying to bring out the top voice by stiffening the whole outside ridge of their hand and I wanted to cure that.

I had other good reasons as well: I had seen many avoiding ulnar deviation to avoid injury, but they were consequently collapsing their entire arch, and also pulling their thumb away from the board, thus forcing it to make a big, ungainly movement to get back to the board for its next note. Ulnar deviation helped me to equalize the length of my thumb to that of my other fingers, thus, I thought, making my whole hand more functional.

So now comes a major recant: what I didn’t see was this: when I equalized my thumb’s length to that of my other fingers, I dis-equalized the length of my four fingers! I was losing more than I was gaining, but didn’t realize it. Because I rightly saw the thumb’s function as an independent entity from the four fingers making it equal in importance, I tried to make it equal in function as well - but this is stupid! Four fingers can stand as a secure structure more easily than one thumb. Thus it feels much more secure to play with a “fifth finger orientation” as Thomas Mark puts it, and leave the thumb to stick out to the inside as a kind of outrigger.

The past few days I’ve been putting this into practice and changing the entire way I play piano - at age 53 and after a film and two books!!! I really swing my arm forward and in to my fifth finger any time it plays. This does pull my thumb away from the board (what I used to consider a no-no), but that pulling actually helps it feel its independent outrigger function. Look at videos of the greats: their thumbs stick out to the inside; they are not just hanging relaxed. It looks almost awkward - in a way, it goes against nature as Micheal Furstner puts it - but it is functional.

I don’t experience it as fifth finger orientation but more as a 2nd-3rd-4th-5th finger orientation. Those four constitute a wonderfully secure structure, and I feel my whole arm - both its bones - moving in in a straight line behind those four fingers and creating a structural alignment and integrity which is the hallmark of my approach, but ironically enough, which I never fully realized until now! I finally have myself the total ease I have been talking about for years!

It is a fairly muscular action: I feel a real, robust effort in my upper arm which comes forward to make this happen. I also feel my pelvis rock forward in synchronicity with the movement. You can feel the movement yourself by doing the following:

Place your hand on your thigh or a table top and roll it forward so it folds over your fingers. Your fingers lie on their backs and your wrist goes forward over them. Feel how your upper arm participates in this, and your pelvis. You can either feel that the fingers pull the upper arm / pelvis forward, or that the pelvis rocks forward making the whole thing happen. Leave your thumb out of it. Leave your thumb sticking to the inside, and make this a movement only of your hand itself. When your hand finds its functional integrity, it allows your thumb to be fully free and functional too.

Watch Seymour’s 12B to get more ideas on this. More from me later… Any response to this? What happens when you try it?

AFF

I’ve been away from my blog for some time. I had a recital in Muenster, Germany, and have been paying a lot of attention to the forum and our new site, www.pianotechnique.net. But many interesting things have been happening so I I am trying to find the time to share some of them with you!

Lately I’ve been giving Feldenkrais lessons to an Olympic athlete. Ivan Lapchevich played handball for Yugoslavia in 2000 and 2004, and plays professionally now in Germany. He has been out for 6 months with a knee injury, and he came to me to see what Feldenkrais could do for him.

When the body is hurt, the musculature around the injured area automatically seize up. They inhibit movement to prevent further injury. This is smart. But when the injury heals, the movement pattern often remains in the brain, preventing complete recovery of movement even though there is no longer a physical flaw. This is dumb!

But it’s the perfect situation for Feldenkrais. The fine neuromotor communication of Functional Integration (FI) loosens things up and restores that part of the body’s ability to sense itself fully and thus to remember how it moved before. With Ivan I’ve also been finding other places in the body that weren’t moving at 100% - these may well have contributed to the initial injury. If you are hit hard, your body needs to be flexible enough to give way in enough different places that nothing snaps. Thus in these FI lessons we have been improving not only movement around the injured area but also elsewhere - this learning process will leave him in better shape than he was before the injury! Improvement is better than healing, because there is no upper limit.

The other day he came for a lesson and his shoulder had completely seized up - but it had been nice and loose the previous evening. I asked him what was going on and he said he had been catching the medicine ball (a big, heavy ball used for muscle development) and needed to stiffen his body to resist the shock. I told him that if he wants Feldenkrais to be effective, he is going to have to relearn how to do the various movements in his training program as well as in the game itself. He has to learn to catch the medicine ball in the spirit of Feldenkrais - to sense how he’s doing it, how the fingers and hand can transfer the ball’s energy into the core skeleton which has more power to deal with the stress than the digital extremities do.

In the lesson his shoulders loosened up beautifully, and so did his hip joints. The next day he came to me and said, “I couldn’t run normally in the training yesterday, my legs felt so bizarre.” I told him he’ll have to learn to run in the spirit of Feldenkrais as well. Using brute power to achieve speed stresses out the hip joints, makes them tighten, increasing the possibility of injury and making you tire more quickly. If your hip joints are looser, use this to your advantage! Learn to use your legs more like whips - if the hip joints learn to stay loose, you’ll achieve greater speed and quicker acceleration with less effort because you’re not fighting against yourself. “Gee, I never thought of that,” said he. But he likes the idea.

Isn’t this supposed to be a piano blog? Yes, but it’s Alan Fraser’s piano blog. Can you make a connection from what I write above to any of your own experiences at the piano? How do these ideas relate to piano technique? How can we practice technical exercises to cultivate a finer ability, something that will improve our playing - something worth bringing from the abstract to the concrete?

AFF