3 ms·

Tangential but your comment has just given me a penny drop moment that I can isolate each degree of freedom (finger, wrist, elbow, shoulder) and still play a ke

Tangential but your comment has just given me a penny drop moment that I can isolate each degree of freedom (finger, wrist, elbow, shoulder) and still play a key to sound a note. For context I have been working on playing multiple lines of music with right hand lately (Chopin etudes, much struggle...) and saw a video from a professional recommending playing the main melody "with the arm". This has helped a lot with the visualisation and now I can really have a cleaner technique playing the accompaniment above the escapement (using nice flat fingers) and the melody with a much richer tone (using the arm typically for the pinky). I sort of understood in an intuitive nonverbal sense what I am doing but after your comment, the mechanics now makes a lot more sense of what I'm actually doing - thanks!

pama 2y ago
Glad it helps. Claudio Arrau thought of the fingers as “dead” with all the piano playing happening using larger muscles. It is a struggle to internalise this concept in some Chopin etudes (op 10, no 2 especially) but it almost immediately helps in others (op 25, no 1).
- bondarchuk 2y ago
  Interesting, I've read similar things about calligraphy/writing (from the elbow!), hadn't connected it to piano playing.
cbtones 2y ago
Yes, that's where this model is massively missing, an accomplished pianist plays with the whole arm, the elbow is crucial, it needs to stay very relaxed in order to accommodate the peculiarities of the human hand, the ring fingers and little fingers don't have as many tendons connecting and having a little sway in the elbows is crucial to making those fingers deliver the weight of the arm properly to the keybed. This model appears to ignore rotation of the wrist, and easing the elbows, where at a bare minimum it needs to start at the shoulder, and I'd argue the whole body.
- djtango 2y ago
  Yeah but as gp pointed out that was the style du jour of baroque and early classical as the plucking keyboards were mostly played with a finger technique

pama 2y ago

Glad it helps. Claudio Arrau thought of the fingers as “dead” with all the piano playing happening using larger muscles. It is a struggle to internalise this concept in some Chopin etudes (op 10, no 2 especially) but it almost immediately helps in others (op 25, no 1).

bondarchuk 2y ago
Interesting, I've read similar things about calligraphy/writing (from the elbow!), hadn't connected it to piano playing.

cbtones 2y ago

Yes, that's where this model is massively missing, an accomplished pianist plays with the whole arm, the elbow is crucial, it needs to stay very relaxed in order to accommodate the peculiarities of the human hand, the ring fingers and little fingers don't have as many tendons connecting and having a little sway in the elbows is crucial to making those fingers deliver the weight of the arm properly to the keybed. This model appears to ignore rotation of the wrist, and easing the elbows, where at a bare minimum it needs to start at the shoulder, and I'd argue the whole body.

djtango 2y ago
Yeah but as gp pointed out that was the style du jour of baroque and early classical as the plucking keyboards were mostly played with a finger technique