An Old Approach To Piano Technique?

Recently I received the following letter, which was so pertinent that I thought I should post both it and my reply here on the forum. Any further insights about this? "Dear Sir! I should, firstly, think a little about your website's contents. You doubtlessly are a truly gifted pianist, but your piano technical ideas are of rather deeply historical character... All these "arch" stories were present in the Malwine Bree writings. And your approach to legato as well is sorrowful to me, as hers was. Did you ever hear any singer singing in the way you propose to pianists? Or, maybe, you have sometimes heard a violinist or cellist who performs a melody just CONNECTING the two sounds in such a MUSICALLY terrific way...? I would bet that you never do legato in the such musically dirty way you propose while interpreting a Chopin Nocturne (op. 55 No 1 or 2, for instance) or the slow movement of any Beethoven Sonata (let's say, op. 10 No 3)...! Being so deeply talented musician and evidently, so human friendly human being, you surely could never accept such kind of quasi-impressionistic color-making in music that definitely does NOT belong to THIS category." This provocative letter screams for a rebuttal, which I of course supplied... Dear Stefan, I had to laugh when I read your email! It is very refreshing to get a "negative" evaluation of my ideas instead of all the "bravo's" etc that mostly come in. Thanks for both your honesty and your perceptivity. I understand what you are saying, but I think we are going to have to agree to disagree! 1) If my approach to the arch is so old-fashioned (Malwin Bree and many others have indeed espoused it long before I did), then why do so many suffer from not using it properly? My presentation aims at being , to fix a gaping hole in the fabric of piano technique. 2) As for legato, I indeed use overholding, as I describe it in in the film, in my own playing of Chopin, Beethoven and even earlier composers - not to create a quasi-impressionistic sound inappropriate to the style, but to create the illusion of a singing line, as I clearly say in my video. Singers and string players do not have to deal with a mechanism that produces sound percussively, by a hammer striking a string. We need to compensate for this percussiveness in a way that they don't. By the way, it is not a widely known fact that Beethoven in his "method" which he compiled for his nephew Karl, himself advises to do exactly the same thing, to overhold in many passages to enrich the beauty of the tone. And what about Beethoven's own impressionistic proclivities in performance, for instance, the famous episode where he played the entire slow movement of the C minor concerto with the pedal held down... Overholding is also of course a common practice among harpsichordists: one of the most effective and widely used ways they have of overcoming the inherent "plink plink plink" nature of their instrument. Incidentally, I have achieved the same wonderful "tone transformation" results in my work with harpsichordists as I have with pianists by combining exactly these two elements: restoring the hand's double arch and establishing a true physical legato. As for quasi-impressionistic color-making in something like the Chopin Nocturne op. 55 No 2: listen to the Horowitz recording on his last CD - isn't he doing exactly that? Isn't it ineffably beautiful? And any seasoned concert pianist knows that the larger the hall, the more you not only can 'get away' with this kind of "blurring" of the tones but the more you are obliged to do it in order to 'secretly beautify' your sound, to compensate for the tendency of the large hall to swallow your sound and render it thin and empty. Many teachers (yourself included it would seem) suffer from an overly dogmatic approach to clarity: this is one of the things I am trying to rescue pianists from. The whole idea is to expand one's tonal palette, one's aesthetic possibilities - to have . Whether or not you choose to overhold in actual performance, the practice is valuable from a didactic point of view - it shows you clearly where your arch is falling down and ruining your legato. And if you reduce overholding to a minimum, you can indeed achieve that classical clarity that is so important in so many situations. The time frame in which you are actually overholding is so short that the blur becomes inaudible. BUT, as Arnold Schultz so clearly points out, IT WILL SOUND BETTER. What I find over and over again (as Schultz did too) is that pianists step over the fine line. and LOSE the legato connection. Then they have lost their physical basis for control of what they are doing, and an insidious unevenness creeps in which ruins the beauty of the tone. This unevenness is so widespread that it has become an accepted part of our pianistic-musical aesthetic, but with this I cannot agree... Another fact about string players' legato: I once asked the Russian cellist Natasha Margulis about overholding to achieve legato on her instrument, and she showed me how her fingerboard hand actually articulated with extreme clarity and and almost détaché (as you would seem to advise), while it was her that created the legato. Fascinating! Here she achieves both clarity and a singing line by setting up a conflict between two opposing forces: the non-legato of her fingering hand and the legato of her bow! I speak about the pianistic equivalent in my book chapter on "inflected legato," where the pianist's forearm acts like a string player's bow to create the illusion of legato between notes too wide apart to be physically connected by the fingers. Thank you for a thought-provoking email! Warm regards, Alan Fraser

Dear Alan! Thanks a lot for posting my humble letter on this Forum. As I think, I rather would not like to be an anonymous person here... My larger answer on your "rebuttal", which I have read with greater interest and – of course – without any shadow of acceptation (wow), will be published on my Web Site within some nearest days. Before it comes, since the situation is likely exceptional in a way, I am inviting you to make the acquaintance with the theoretical base, on which my letter to you came into existence - I will add that it stayed provoked by your invitation to the exchange of links between our Web Sites... Besides, my Site could be easily found just typing in the search box of Yahoo or the Google, for instance. As the last word, here today, I would like to say that in my opinion all the signs of imperfection must always stigmatize the discussions related to the piano, still completed afar from the instrument, I'm afraid... With many friendly Greetings to you all here on this Forum, - escu

I would add one more thing about overholding: it is mainly a didactic exercise and not so often used in actual playing. The danger in overusing overholding is that it begins to PREVENT the very thing it was designed to improve: the movement of the fingers! Overholding empowers the fingers in the degree to which it shows them how to stand up well - in the degree to which gives them an experience of possessing and availing themselves of a stable structure. However, that is a didactic experience which will be used only occasionally in actual playing for special effect, but more often needs to be laid aside. If you use it indiscriminately in actual playing, your fingers will begin to on overholding to provide them with their support - but that support must ultimately derive from their internal activity, not from a stable base. Beware, "over-overholding" leads to lazy fingers!