Arm Weight Debate On My Website

British Pianist Rayond Banning and myself have been engaged in a stimulating debate on the Arm Weight School vs. my Hand Structure & Function school of thought. It is all too long to put on the forum here, but I have created a page on my website with the complete transcripts for those of you who are interested... it's online now, enjoy!

I would be extremely interested to see this.Mr Alan Fraser's book and articles have really been a life saver for me.I have had many teachers saying to me that weight school is the only way (and always telling me that i am tense and i should relax) I have never managed to follow the principles of the weight school myself despite the efforts of those people that i had as teachers.I have to confess that i was always a little bit skeptical towards the weight school.When i used the principles of that method the results for me were always kind of sloppy without good articulation in the end as the tempo was faster. To most of my teachers playing a very fast bravura passage was a combination of doing numerous repetitions with wrist building exercises slowly and fortisimo and then go to fast tempo and wish that luck is on my side. However after reading many other piano instruction books i understood soon that luck is not an option when doing complicated movements.In fact i understand that difficult passages should be repeated often indeed but without the need to kill any musical content.While listening to many great artists of piano music and watched to their videos i am pretty sure that luck is never an option for them. I felt these people were like an acrobat doing dangerous things and many combinations that our eyes fail to observe when those movements are done fast.An acrobat when he flies and is risking his life on the air -(a slight miscalculation can easily cost him his life)- is not depending so much on luck or on other variables that are not controlable.He knows the precise movement to do at any time and has practiced a lot.So why should we as pianists depend on luck of the moment? Good pianos have sensitive mechanism capable of various microadjustments to create different sonorities.So luck is not an issue here.Specific movements can produce specific sonorities. While many of the people i knew had great results with the weight school aproach,i never had any success with it.Maybe this has to do with the fact that i was always trying to monitor my inner self and examine the options,example:my wrist is supposed to drop freely but what happens with the shoulder?with my spine?what is going on at that moment with my muscles in my whole body?should they assist?should they relax ?should they offer some help?should antagonistic set of muscles work together ?The answer i had from my teachers was "you are tense",try to relax the shoulder and up arm.Actually i was not tense.From reading the book i understood that tension was a result of a weak unsupported hand that could not stand and support my apparatus. These were questions that were always present in my mind when i wanted to start perfoming a Beethoven sonata or a Brahms piece. I could not fool and trick myself and think and feel that "my shoulders are empty relaxed and hovering in air" -(like my professors demanded)- and then further fool myself and think that -"my wrist is only raised with minimal needed effort and then dropped only by releasing the previous muscle contraction but without ever tensing the uparm and shoulder muscles".In the sense of my proffesor my muscles was like an on-off switch:Contract and relax,but i was feeling that this was not so.Muscles may contract a little more or less more. I was feeling the needed small tension in my shoulders in my triceps in my biceps and general i had a never stoping "kinesthetic" alarm system that was probably configured to work wrong after all these years of faulty instructions.I could never hyper-relax my wrist as my proffesors wanted. My question to all those that are trying to teach strict weight school only to pianists is: "If someone was a hunter and wanted to shoot a single very small bird fast how should he do it?" In the style of the weight school training, i have a feeling that their advice would be to use a large cannon with huge cannonball and shoot not only the bird but destroy the fence maybe, and anything else in the enviromental area.(I think the free relaxed empty hand and wrist dropping without much control.So hand not only hits that note or chord that you wish,but plenty of times it results in a cacophony because many more unwanted notes are strucked because of the uncontrolled freedom) These are some thoughts from me about the weight school training i had. I apologize for my long reply and sorry if my grammar and syntax is not correctly.I understand that improper use of weight school techniques could be due to the fact that i was not following the advice of my teachers correctly,so in a sense it is my fault too. Best regards

Dear Nicholas, You have given a wonderful description of the arm weight problem, much better than I ever could have - thank you! Your post is not too long, it is great! I may answer at greater length later, but there is a lot to chew on there, I will have to put my thinking cap on... thanks again, AFF

Could you please place a link? Thanks!

Thanks!

It seems the major cause for disagrement is how people see things in terms of cause and effect. I guess depending on who you talk to or what his particular problem is or what his experience had been, cause can become effect and effect cause. If it's the different experiences that are at work, then it's very hard to convince anyone. If I have to pick one approach, I would choose the one that'd solve the problem I have.

hmm... from a subjective and pragmatic viewpoint... sure, that would be the quick answer for many pianists. But if we can assume somehow that even such illusive things like 'sensory experience' must be similar to a significant degree in every human being, then, isn't the quest for exploring and teaching piano playing , helpful to everyone ...?

hmm... from a subjective and pragmatic viewpoint... sure, that would be the quick answer for many pianists. But if we can assume somehow that even such illusive things like 'sensory experience' must be similar to a significant degree in every human being, then, isn't the quest for exploring and teaching piano playing I agree with your last "statement". I was trying to say that barrier to communicate was the lack of experience the other party has. In such case, it is very hard to get ideas across. If the other party tries out new ideas and experience them, then real communication takes place, because real changes occur. Also, what one learned previously, however helpful it might be, can become hurdles in learning new things.

All points well taken. Can subjective experience be described in such an exact way that another person will not misunderstand it? How do I prevent the listener from that what I said means something that they experienced that is actually totally different than what I wanted to describe? Here's where Feldenkrais comes in: the Awareness Through Movement (ATM) lessons aim to give you experience, so you experience it directly rather than having to rely on descriptive words. The language of an ATM does not so much describe as guide you through exact movement sequences and the directing of your attention - the subsequent learning is experiential rather than conceptual. Of course, then we try to put into language, so we run into even more problems! But I must say that one of the underlying fundamental goals of all my work is to create an exact language, one that resolves the misunderstandings that abound and that lead to the many opposing 'camps' in piano pedagogy.