Arm Weight, Free Fall And Grasping

Hi all, I believe "free fall" of the relaxed hand is a key concept of arm weight school. You should learn to rise and drop the hand correctly to get powerful chords for example with minimum stress and effort. Barbara Lister-Sink among others teaches this kind of playing. If I am right, Alan gives kind of an alternate to that: with hand laying already down on the keyboard you can make it go up ("stand") with grasping motion. Playing like that a chord or an octave makes hand form its powerful arch structure. My question is: can you combine those two ways? At least to my fingers this feels nice and you can get higher dynamics easily. I mean, first take Lister-Sinks ideas for rising and dropping your hand and then exactly when contacting keys take Alan's grasping for arch generating motion. thx, Pekka

The instant you are in free fall, you are screwed. You now have to catch yourself, to prevent yourself from falling further. Therefore you are not occupied with moving a key; you have another task to fulfill. It is quite distracting and functionally destabilizing. Falling forces you to seek stability, and when you find it, you tend to overstabilize so now you have a new problem. Why bother with all this? I don't get it. When you stand up, the key moves down in a controlled way. The two actions are functionally linked - they are synonymous. You don't have to catch yourself. You don't have to compensate for anything. You simply ACT, and the act creates the sonority. Pianists use free fall to seek the physical freedom they need to move as they would like, but it fails. Standing gives you that freedom; falling actually robs you of it. AFF

Explained very well in this video:

Hi, I understand the idea of grasping / standing up (when playing chords or octaves) when you begin the hit hand already laying on the keys. But there are of course times when your hand is coming from somewhere and downwards more or less higher above the keys. For example, you are playing chords with jumps. I think the question is that how to approach this motion? Arm weight school teaches this phase as "free fall". So how would you describe this phase if the idea of free fall is leading to wrong direction? Cheers, Pekka

Free fall implies loose hand tonus. I believe this form of playing disempowers. The hand should be highly tonused as it travels through the air. It is the loss of tonus evoked by the sense of free fall that screws everything up. Imagine a runner's hips. Do you think the tonus of the left hip returns to neutral as the right leg is taking its stride? Of course not. It's a similar case here. The muscles should already be 'playing' while the hand is still in the air. This is NOT a stiffening preparation, but a sense of lithe readiness. AFF

I was playing Chopin's G minor Ballade for Kemal Gekic several years ago and I was kind of struggling with the coda. Couldn't get it up to speed really, or at least how fast I wanted it to go. He basically told me to strengthen my pinky (right hand) and practice accenting the downbeat. You see, the reason I couldn't play it fast was because my hand structure was weak. As soon as I provided support for my hand by standing on those pinkies, it started to flow. Never had any issues with it ever since.

Ok. Thanks for clarifying it further! In fact I've been wondering about this quite a lot because those videos I've seen haven't touched this issue that much. Grasping is presented more often "bottom-up", hand laying down on the keys. So now I have to experiment with a right amount of tonus to keep solid structure, when hand is moving from A to B. I think it's also a lot about timing, to start "grasping", right? Still I need to find out what's exactly the best way to practise this, fast, smooth chord jumps with grasping? Very interesting indeed P

Exactly. AFF

The newest video "Q&A with AFF - Episode 15 " nicely further covers this theme. Well, I was one to ask it... thx, P

You're welcome! AFF