10 years ago by
A Pianist
Just got this request for advice from pianist Albert Rossi...
Dear Prof. Fraser,
I have purchased your 2003 edition book and your DVD, and am writing to you to ask for a bit of further advice.
I studied piano from ages 12 through 19, first with a private teacher and then for a year as a piano major at Indiana University (1973-74), but then decided to pursue a different career. I have continued to play on and off for most of my life (I’m now 55), though have never taken formal lessons again. During most of that time, I never had the good fortune to practice on a real piano (i.e., a 9-foot concert grand); but in 2007, I managed to purchase a used NY Steinway D; since that time, I have noticed that my right hand has manifested some very peculiar behavior, perhaps unnoticed over the years because I could get by on actions which didn’t really require as much work.
The origin of this behavior is uncertain, but I am convinced that the constant use of the computer mouse has something to do with it, because I don’t recall having these problems when I was younger, and I started using a PC at age 30, with a dramatic increase in the past 12 years, as I changed careers yet again to become a software developer; the fact that my left hand is unaffected tends to reinforce this hypothesis, as I am right-handed.
I have analyzed my finger and hand movements, and think I understand what I am doing; it is a combination of the following:
1. My second finger tends to adhere to my third, especially when playing with the fourth;
2. My third finger curls way under my palm, and thus is not free to cross over the thumb or to strike the key with clarity; to compensate, I tend to raise the wrist when using the third finger;
3. Descending, my fourth and fifth fingers draw up under the third finger, and in general, my hand closes up instead of remaining relaxed and open.
At times it almost looks like I am poking the keyboard with thumb/second/third. On the other hand (pardon the pun), my left hand fingers seem freer, more independent, and my left thumb abducts/adducts much more easily. My right hand thumb tends to get blocked by the curled third finger.
As a consequence, I cannot play any scale-like passage-work (some of the current problematic cases: Schubert op. 90 no. 2; Chopin Prelude no. 16; Chopin b minor sonata second movement, or the running right-hand passages in the fourth movement; there are numerous other examples …). I can zip along smoothly up and down the keyboard with my left hand on any scale you choose, but am totally blocked beyond a moderate tempo with my right, which also tends to be rhythmically uneven and bumpy, especially when doing 3-1, 4-1 or 1-3 or 1-4.
I have been trying for about 18 months now to find a way of correcting these “tics”, if I can call them that, through some routine of exercises and studies, but have so far been unable to cure myself of them. They are truly frustrating, and leading me to despair. I have thought that if I could just develop the same neurophysical “image” of rapid movement that I have for my left hand, I could finally “click” into the same pattern with the right. I tried contrary motion scales to see if I could mirror the left hand movements, and so forth, with no success.
With this, I turned to your materials. I was quite enthusiastic to find that they were an analytically more precise restatement of the technique I was taught by my second (university) teacher, Sidney Foster, who called his method “arm weight” as well, but which is clearly not what you intend by the “arm weight” school, because the weight is not compensatory and applied to the fingers, but is supposed to be supported by the skeletal structure of the fingers (he would call the support generated by, say, your Tai Chi walk-legato “hanging”, in the sense that the finger “stands” without collapsing and carries the weight of the arm with no extra/unnecessary muscular contractions, just those necessary for that equilibrium). Your approach to octave-playing is also very much like his was.
His method actually gave me my original break-through in technique; so how is it I developed these awful habits, then, you may ask? Well, I guess the fact that I only studied with him for a year, and that I started playing piano very late, I was more susceptible to growing improperly into this technique, when left to my own devices.
Now, at first I thought your thumb-second-finger arch, along with the supported 4-1 descending cross-over movement, were going to do the trick for me. But after some initial hopeful moments, I see that it is not curing me of the 2-3 stickiness or the 3 curl at anything but an extremely slow tempo. Your exercises doing c-d-e-f, d-e-f-g, e-f-g-a, etc., using 1-2-3-4, are revealing in this light, but so far only as diagnostics; I am unsure how to use them as correctives, at least for my peculiar habits. In the end, I am unsure that a loss of the 1-2 arch is the main issue here, at least in my case.
I would very much like your reaction to all of this. Do you perhaps see what I might do to apply your ideas more fruitfully? I know it is a bit difficult without observing me play. Serbia is a bit far away for me, though. I thank you most heartily for any response you might be able to offer me here.
Thank you!
Albert Rossi
P.S. I have also read your (followers’) critique of the Taubmann arm-rotation school, and agree that piano technique cannot be confined to any one physical type of movement, that in fact rotation will give you one color, some other movement another, and that one needs to master a range of articulations to acquire a full tonal palette. But there is something intriguing about the fluidity produced by this approach, and I’m wondering whether this application of rotation doesn’t actually “activate” the fingers in a way that is useful; in some sense, it seems to me that the sensation of throwing the finger laterally and forward is really what this technique is all about, rather than the twisting of the radius/ulna per se, which does seem to disappear at faster speeds. Moreover, if done properly, I think this throwing sensation can be achieved without destroying the hand-arch structure, that the feeling of support in the fingers and thumb can be combined with it. I’m thinking that it is the lateral or rotational movement which I do naturally with my left and which is lacking in my right. But I’m not sure at this point. In any case, my purpose is to cure myself of the above-mentioned habits; I should be able to play with my right the way I do with my left, and if I can accomplish that, I can go back to focusing on what is important: making music. (By the way, I also liked your application of _entasis_ to rhythmic, temporal and tonal agogé. When I first started to learn to play, my father, who is also a musician, showed me a trick to gain rhythmic stability: it was that we tend to rush off the first note of a group, whether it be triplets, sixteenths, etc., so if we think of lengthening the first note by putting a mental “comma” after it, as if the group actually started on its second note, all of a sudden you’re playing rhythmically more accurately — entasis!)
