Body Posture, Shoulder Face & Neck Tension

Hi Alan Congrats on a great site - very interesting discussion all around. Would like to hear your views on body posture, seat height, role of upper body and upper arms in sound production and speed facility. Some comment on ways to avoid shoulder face & neck tension would also be great; it seems so easy to transfer active tension in fingers through excessive concentration into upper body & facial tension, possibly impacting sound production and speed facility. Many thanks.

Thanks for your kind words, and for some great questions - would you like me to simply post my entire second book here as an answer? body posture My first book and film focus on the hand and arm, because this is where I perceived pianists' most pressing need for help. My second book investigates, among other things, the fact that if the hand is really well organized but doesn't have the correct support from the body, it will find it difficult to keep that organization. Charles Aschbrenner's Pulse Patterning, which works to bring a slight rocking of the pelvis into the creation of healthy pulse and phrase shape, is an excellent approach: when the pelvis is involved in this way, it's as if the action of its "dome" shape helps maintain the hand's "dome" shape. Unfortunately Charles's web page is no longer online, but hopefully it will be again soon. I tend to sit low. This goes against the advice of someone like Thomas Mark (see my review of his book at ), but I find that my sound is bigger and I feel more comfortable down low. My arm hangs easier. I find it easier to feel close to the piano, for my hand to "hug" it, and I like that feeling. Look at the Thomas Mark article, especially the pictures of the upper and middle back "suspension bridge." This is brilliant. If I simply visualize that image as I play, I begin to use my entire upper body in a completely different way. When the hand is well organized, a lot of neck tension can disappear. A lot of the body, shoulder, neck and face tension is simply misplaced effort. When the activity is transferred over to the place where it's really needed, such as creating a more fifth-finger-oriented hand position to stabilize the four-finger structure, a lot of this body tension can disappear. efforts, which, again because of ineffective organization of the hand, results in more tension instead of action. Sometimes the solution for tension is to simply relax. More often it is to find a more effective organization. I could go on all day, but you really are going to have to wait for the second book! Cheers, AFF

thank you Alan for the comprehensive reply will have to buy both books indeed have recently purchased the 2007 new edition of Gerig - yes it's back in print, however, whilst academically very interesting, am still missing a pragmatic approach to the topic. Find your website material much more accessible and action oriented - so thank you for providing clarity where we have had several centuries of confusing and mostly inaccessible theory. lastly I noticed some heated discussion on who is right and who is wrong, as I interpret it in a basic way, on "prescribing one basic technique for all" vs "letting your inner ear direct the musicality". I guess this is nothing new, and I suspect both camps are right, however until a solid technique is grounded, one does need to be prescribed intensively for most students. If not, only the previously called "naturally gifted" will survive into the advanced repertoire. I do believe good teachers - using technical principles similar to yours - are now responsible for turning out far more technically robust students. Teachers owe their students good tecnique grounding; sadly the majority of garden variety teachers still don't get this right for their kids. Cheers and thanks again

For me it's a no-brainer and it is why I do what I do. The greats of the past had tremendously rigorous technical training. I talk about Rachmaninoff, a case in point, in my book intro (). Yes, a baby learns to walk even if nobody helps it. But it doesn't learn to dance like Nijinsky - I mean, who are we kidding here? My whole approach is a constant linking of these two seemingly opposite qualities. You can't prescribe one technique for all, because, to take the simplest example, the flabby student needs to be firmed up while the tense one needs to be relaxed. But you can acquire a comprehensive body of knowledge about how the piano and our playing mechanism works, and then apply whatever detail of this knowledge is most needed in any particular situation. How do I decide what to tell a student about their physical organization? I listen to their sound and hear what's missing. Then if I observe carefully I can usually figure out what they're doing wrong to create that lack. Thus the first requirement to learn technique is to educate one's ears. I enjoy these posts because they force me to say something valuable in very few words - it's a good exercise! Thanks for your post! AFF