10 years ago by
A Pianist
Just written a new post covering various issues:
While the last one was about perceiving the fullest sense of release possible, this one is about starting to put some activity back in at the shoulder. There's an exercise at the end that is intended to develop the mechanism by which lightening of the arm is carried out- hopefully enabling sensitivity towards a massive range of different states (rather than simply a corpse-like arm or a stiffly witheld arm).
Funnily enough, I had the basic idea for this exercise ages ago. However, after spending time thinking about it and writing it up, it's made a massive difference to the quality of balance and ease. Spending time on this makes it vastly easier to perceive place where the arm is trying to press through the hand, rather than hang behind it. I feel I can hold back vastly more at the shoulder- but without compromising the sense that everything is hanging between shoulder and finger. There's still a feeling of the chain keeping itself together by release in the arm matching the activity of the finger- rather than the "held" arm that can so easily occur. I'm often reducing the release a lot more than before- but there's always some amount of release remaining for the finger to stabilise against.
I'm going to write another post soon about efficiency of energy transfer. I realised from the lessons with Alan that starting actions with a little give in the finger was wasting a spectacular amount of the energy at times. I've come up with a practical experiment that proves just how spectacularly wasteful many standard actions are- especially when energy comes from the arm. I think I can also give a pretty concrete practical proof that a static hand that only transmits arm energy gives very poor efficiency- due to the arm being physically incapable of performing a productive lever style of action. These wasteful actions send the extra energy where you least want it- crashing into the keybed.
