10 years ago by
A Pianist
The article assumes that a human being is not adaptable, and so we must design chairs that take into account our limitation instead of learning to expand our movement possibilities. It's a poverty-stricken, limited approach to movement. If his subjects had done some Feldenkrais, all of them would have learned to have far more than 60 degrees of flexion in the hip joint - pelvis in sitting.
Horowitz's sitting was supreme. No back tension there. His spine soars high and free, he is not straining at all to be that erect. It's as if his spine hangs from his head, which is perched on top as free and alert as an eagle's. And he doesn't need the support of his hands pushing on the keys to stay there, he is balanced - his torso floats in space. The forward tilt does serve the purpose of absorbing the shock when he plays, but that's not the same as the arms holding the torso up.
If you really feel your sitz bones pressing into the chair, it is possible to sit fully erect with no strain. If you can find that sense of the sitz bones really rooted on the chair, you offer your torso a stable base upon which to sit, and all the muscles that were holding the torso in place can let go. The sitz bones support the trunk in sitting exactly as the hip joints do in standing. The hip joint is almost directly above the sitz bone and only a couple of centimeters higher - this makes the transfer of 'stable base' function from one to the other very easy.
Steinway used to make a chair that sloped slightly forward, and now there is a 'Beethoven chair' that's something similar (see post in TECHNIQUES AND METHODS) - I liked it for awhile but then realized that I am quite capable of learning to do on my own the same thing the chair was encouraging me to do: to sit just slightly forward of dead center on my sitz bones. And once I've learned that, the push forward the chair gives me actually becomes too much and turns into a constraint instead of a help.
The reasons for sitting angled slightly forward are twofold:
1) Your legs are in front of you, and they can act as pontoons in sitting. They can prevent you from falling further forward and will keep you in balance IF you use them as outriggers. However if you lean slightly back as the Danish guy advises, now you have to use muscular effort to keep your torso attached to the weight of your legs to keep yourself from falling further backwards. In the first scenario you use the legs as a support structure, in the second, as a dead weight counterbalance.
2) The slight lean forward is also useful for withstanding the force backwards that results from each key attack (for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction). It is even possible for the entire torso to become involved in clamping the hand-finger skeleton to the key, and it is important to keep it IN RELATION to the fingers. Leaning back effectively decouples it.
But let's give the Danish guy an A for effort!
AFF
