Help, I've Fallen And I Can't Get Up

Actually, Alan, I fell, but I did get back up and I want to run this one by you. It relates to the role of the upper arm. One of the things that caught my attention when I first encountered your DVD several years ago was your observations on grasping. I had dealt with this in my own experiments, so when you brought it up it helped me relate to you and was one of the things that provoked me to find out more about you. However, I now think I had a wrong idea about grasping, or at least an incomplete one, and I have made a change which I think has helped me with a problem you and I encountered in one of my lessons. As a youngster, I always sat very high and I leaned into the keys. My shoulders always rode too high and I drove hard into the keys. I was tense. As a young adult, I believed I solved these problems by lowering my sitting position and fostering grasping. My reasoning was that my former high sitting position made me rely on moving the keys by driving my upper arm forward and down into the keyboard and employing a finger action dominated by extension over flexion. I speculated that this extension of the fingers was part of the reason I had a tendency to curl my fifth finger up and why it was so hard for my hand to have a relaxed position with the fingers lying down in contact with the keys. I believed I corrected these problems by sitting lower and seeking to pull my upper arm back, fostering a grasping motion, a flexion, of the fingers. This seemed to work better and I played that way for many years. Much later, I encountered your work and I realized that the problems I had as a youngster must have had a lot to do with weakness in the structure of my hand, and now as an adult your ideas help me with other problems I still have. Meanwhile, I still maintained my approach of sitting low and trying to grasp the keys by pulling my upper arm back. Lately, I have worked with the thumb strut exercises from your book, "Honing...," and it has provoked me to reevaluate my assumptions about the direction of upper arm exertion. If my wrist is high and I experiment with thumb strut positions, it is easy to find the nice place where the thumb supports the arch structure across the hand. However, when I lowered my wrist into a more usable playing position, I found myself becoming confused. Now, my thumb didn't have that nice "standing up" feeling. I searched for the activation in my thumb that would enable my hand to stand up. It was elusive. I found, in my case, the problem wasn't a matter of the thumb in isolation. The problem had a lot to do with this idea I had in my head of maintaining a pulling back exertion in my upper arm more or less all the time. That turns out to be the wrong direction for supporting the thumb. If I want to stand up on thumb and forefinger playing, say, C and F#, my upper arm can't be pulling straight back. The thumb doesn't work in the same direction as a finger and it isn't in a position for pulling the key down and back. The direction for standing the hand up into the thumb while holding a C and F# is sort of 45 degrees forward into the fallboard. You observe in your DVD that grasping fingers focus towards the center of the hand. The movement almost resembles the closing of a sphincter . My former mental image of grasping at the keyboard was pulling down on the key levers and pulling back with my upper arm; one straight-line direction of effort and movement. I had to dispense with my mental image because the hand doesn't function in a rectilinear way. I think I keep falling into this trap because of my focus on the keyboard itself with it's straight lines and right angles. I noticed my mistake with the upper arm when I was floating a thumb strut position on perhaps C and F#, and when I was trying to transfer between thumb and forefinger. As soon as I let go of my forefinger on the F#, my arch collapsed. I finally ascertained it was because I was still pulling back with my upper arm while trying to stand up on the thumb. When I instead let my upper arm hang or push or somehow find the right direction necessary for supporting my thumb, the arch didn't collapse. You pointed out passages in Chopin's Black Key Etude where I was collapsing my arch while playing the thumb. Now I have found that every time this happens to me, it's because I am maintaining a pulling back in my upper arm in a misguided attempt to grasp the keyboard. Once I accommodate the roundness of grasping towards the center of the hand by allowing my upper arm to adjust its direction of effort forward, back, or towards whatever angle is necessary to support the thumb, that collapsing stopped. The upper arm doesn't necessarily have to exert that much, in any case. Maybe it depends on what I'm doing. Mostly, I'm finding that I just need to turn off this old idea I acquired when I was young that I need always to maintain a positive pulling back exertion with my upper arm. What do you think about all that, Alan? Am I expressing this clearly? Jai Jeffryes

You're expressing it extremely clearly. Sounds like you're ready for a lesson because I have a lot of answers but I would have to show it all to you - I can't really write it all down here... AFF

Sign me up! Sounds like a lot of fun. I'm already looking forward to your next seminar at Smith College. Jai Jeffryes

Actually a lot of what I would like to share with you is in my next book, so it possible to write about it. It's just that I can't put the whole book into this post! AFF

I might have misunderstood the whole thing (easily done if you don't take a lesson) but I've come to clearly distinguish standing up frpm grasping in my practise. When actually playing that distinction is probably impossible you have to rely on the neuromotor. With both thechniques there is an upward direction. When grasping there is no need for a full arch. Or at all. In the DVD the example is the octave-playing. It can be done with wrist-only that's the feeling.Works tremendously well in a passage like the first page in Liszt's Tarantella (Venezia&Napoli) it gives speed and clarity. When standing up it's exactly like you stand up on your legs.You can start with fingers on the key and keep them there-the end result is an arch.Or you can start from above and then it's like jumping. Not so long time ago I invented some exercises to develop the "muscles" involved in standing up. And I found out that my hand wasn't educated at all to stand up.It looked fine with a nice arch etc but there was no power behind it. If you do the famous Neuhaus demonstration that is holding eg your left hand over the right pressing it down and then try to stand up-that's what you have to work with. What I'm trying to say is that the ability to stand up does not come without a conscious development of the hand. At least not with my heavy hand. When these "techniques" start to work the first (surprising?) effect is that your arm feels totally relaxed and above all it will look very professional like they say "he played with no effort at all". So I start to understand Alan's utter disgust for the armweightschool. On the other hand the armweigh approach might come in handy when it comes to moving the arms making leaps etc.

Hello Eric, 'utter aversion' might be a little closer than 'utter disgust!' I thank you for a really great post - you are saying something very important, and saying it both clearly and simply - great! But I don't use the arm weight school for leaping either. What I do use it for is to get a really tense arm to loosen up. One of my best students needed many such lessons at the beginning, but finally they really did the trick. Then I could go on to all my other shticks... And also remember the "kernel of good" in that school when it is rightly understood - see my chapter in on my lessons with Carola Grindea. This weekend I presented at the EPTA Netherlands Annual Meeting and managed to explain it even more clearly - they're a great group, they must have inspired me! AFF

Your post is very interesting, as I've been through very similar experiences myself. At the moment, I'm using the extension style of action mostly- where the arm can be extremely passive. However, I think it's also very useful to work with the pulling action, balanced out by a slight pull of the arm. I wouldn't see that as being a bad way to play, if you have access to both. "I found, in my case, the problem wasn't a matter of the thumb in isolation. The problem had a lot to do with this idea I had in my head of maintaining a pulling back exertion in my upper arm more or less all the time. That turns out to be the wrong direction for supporting the thumb. If I want to stand up on thumb and forefinger playing, say, C and F#, my upper arm can't be pulling straight back. The thumb doesn't work in the same direction as a finger and it isn't in a position for pulling the key down and back. " Why can't the thumb do that? I think this is a very important action to develop. I've put quite a few different thumb exercises in the above post, that relate to the actions involved there. I think that both the "pulling" thumb and the extending thumb are extremely useful actions to develop. Even if you don't want this to be your default, surely it would be useful to develop a means to balance the thumb this way? I think this style of balance "challenges" the space between the thumb and the second finger a good deal more. But if you can deal with that when the arm is pulling back, it should be extremely easy to deal with all other situations. Personally, I think that both styles of movement and balance are useful in much the same way, for both fingers and thumb.