Letting The Key Push Your Finger Up

I hear (And see) alot about letting the key push your finger up, but whenever I see anyone (Including virtuosi like Cziffra, Michelangeli) playing a trill with 4/5 the 3rd finger is always flailing up and down. Also I see the 5th doing the same during 3/4 trills. What's going on here?

Good question: Most likely it is simply that the fingers share some tendons and it would take too much energy, energy working against the basic, easy movement of the trill, to individuate the adjacent finger to that degree. It's one of the less common cases where differentiation would actually interfere with the easy execution of the figure... (I think) AFF

But why should that imply that they're not feeling the key pushing their fingers up? I don't really follow.

But why should that imply that they're not feeling the key pushing their fingers up? I don't really follow. Sorry, my question wasn't very clear; what I mean is that there is sympathetic movement from the fingers (3 & 5) when you lift 4.However, you usually let the key push your fingers back up. You can see in plenty of videos where a virtuoso is doing a trill with 4 &5 and the 3rd finger is flying up, which means that they are lifting the 4 instead of letting the key push it back up.

The purpose in trying to feel the key push your finger up is to INCREASE SENSATION and LOWER MUSCULAR EFFORT. The lower your muscular effort, the more refined and evolved it can be, the more you can FEEL EXACTLY what you are doing and thus do it BETTER. Here the adjacent finger flying up does NOT indicate "parasitic contraction," (a contraction that has no purpose) but rather a sympathetic movement which it is better NOT to inhibit. AFF

If the key is pushing your finger up, then should there even be been a sympathetic movement in the first place? Doesn't it only happen if you lift the finger "manually" ?

But why should that imply that they're not feeling the key pushing their fingers up? I don't really follow. Sorry, my question wasn't very clear; what I mean is that there is sympathetic movement from the fingers (3 & 5) when you lift 4.However, you usually let the key push your fingers back up. You can see in plenty of videos where a virtuoso is doing a trill with 4 &5 and the 3rd finger is flying up, which means that they are lifting the 4 instead of letting the key push it back up. Okay, I see what you mean, but letting the key push your finger up is clearly going to be virtually impossible in any fully literal sense (even if you remove all sense of armweight by very deliberately holding the arm back). I think the point about letting the key push your finger up is that you should feel how it the finger back up, not that you are supposed to feel that it does everything for you. Also, because 3 and 4 are so inherently connected together, I suspect that any movement of the 4th finger (whether directly iniated within the hand, or by an external force) will be likely to move the third. Similarly, echoes of any force applied to a key will reverberate back though the hand. You wouldn't be wanting to lock certain fingers to prevent them moving, would you? I don't think such movements (or the lack of) would necessarily have any bearing on how much the force from the key is being permitted to assist. Even if the key is pushing the finger up in a trill, the muscles are going to have to take it right back down again. Incidentally, I have a question for Alan on a strongly related issue, regarding a theory that I recently had about all this stuff about 'feeling the bottom of the key'. One of the ideas mentioned in those Taubman snippets on youtube was about the idea that a key and finger actually bounces when you reach the keybed. I hadn't thought much about this before but, no matter how minute it may be, this will certainly occur, according to the laws regarding transfer of momentum. I then came to realise that although I always strike the key to the bottom (after all it would be almost impossible not to do so- for this reason I had always been a little puzzled when people talk about the idea of apparently the key has first reached the bottom, if the finger is fully to find rest. Anyway, this got me thinking and my ability to play the study has improved immeasurably, simply by practising with a little additional act of pressure, to ensure that the keys go properly down after any strike that doesn't quite settle. Do you have any further thoughts on this bouncing effect? From what I've experienced recently, when practising slowly it's incredibly beneficial to conciously play through this point (initially in a 2nd seperate pressure at the finger tips, that follows the actual process of sounding the notes- rather than being directly combined). However presumably, when going at speed, it's important NOT to resist this force too much and to allow it push you off towards the next note. I can't fully get my head around why so willfully resisting this force in slow practise should improve the ease of faster playing, but it's certainly working. Presumably its the case that the more you can sense how the force operates (even when that means wilfully resisting it, rather than exploiting it as a spring-board between notes), the more experience you have of its feel. The same thing seems to apply with repeated notes, where the more I feel myself playing through this point in slow practise, the easier it seems to be to use it to spring the finger back up when playing faster. All the talk about playing to the 'bottom' of the keys makes so much more sense, now I'm aware of this bouncing. Do you think that the idea of following through this bounce is indeed what people have always been talking about, albeit in a slightly indirect manner? Similarly, would you agree with my theory that it might be beneficial to feel two concious pressures separately (the first to sound the note and the second to fully re-bed the key)? Or would you look to combine them as one from the start?

Whew, that's some question! I am going to have to think about this some more and try some things out myself before answering fully. Wanda Landowska talked about her 'bouncy' legato technique (see article at ), and now that I am practicing on her piano I can understand it much better. Bob, somewhere else on the forum, talks about 'down weight,' 'up weight,' and 'touch weight,' this third being the force needed to overcome the inertia of the key. On Landowska's Steinway this 'touch weight' is noticeably lower than on most pianos I've played. This is also the case with Horowitz's piano. The key literally seems to bounce your finger back to the surface much more robustly than on a normal (oops, this ) piano. It's a wonderful sensation! But this idea of 're-bedding' the finger (or the key) is new to me, I'll have to go try it out... Thanks! AFF

Whew, that's some question! I am going to have to think about this some more and try some things out myself before answering fully. Wanda Landowska talked about her 'bouncy' legato technique (see article at ), and now that I am practicing on her piano I can understand it much better. Bob, somewhere else on the forum, talks about 'down weight,' 'up weight,' and 'touch weight,' this third being the force needed to overcome the inertia of the key. On Landowska's Steinway this 'touch weight' is noticeably lower than on most pianos I've played. This is also the case with Horowitz's piano. The key literally seems to bounce your finger back to the surface much more robustly than on a normal (oops, this ) piano. It's a wonderful sensation! But this idea of 're-bedding' the finger (or the key) is new to me, I'll have to go try it out... Thanks! AFF I was trying on my home piano just now and while it doesn't have much of a bouncy feel at all, I just saw for definite that the bouncing effect can noticably occur. When playing with a slack finger, I saw a couple of keys clearly hitting the bottom and then returning up by half a centimetre or so. I'm pretty certain now that the idea of bedding is really about reducing this bounce by feeling through it. It is certainly possible to play an extremely soft note without the key reaching bottom in the first place, but I suspect that it's actually extremely rare not to make true contact. I'm thinking now that the way of overcoming this should almost certainly be a single movement through every key, but with a little continuation of pressure through the point of resistance (as the key reaches bottom) to damp the bounce before it has a chance to become very pronounced. I suspect that my problems were caused by sensing the reaction of the key, but responding to it by easing up, rather than playing the finger through the bounce for that split second longer. I do suspect that feeling a second pressure could be good as remedial practise for anyone who isn't playing through the bouncing point. However, I don't think that anyone would want to conciously think of the key touching the bottom any more than once, when going at speed. The piano where I noticed this as being heavily pronounced is at the school I'm at tomorrow, so I'm planning on trying things out rather more on that one. What do you think about the idea of trying to feel the bottom of every key in general, by the way? I know that some people insist that it should always happen (Lhevine mentions it, if I remember rightly). Obviously, if you play through the bounce, it's going to be easier to reinforce the structure of the finger. Maybe it's not so much about the notes that you strike, but about finding a stable balance on the finger that you set off from (rather than being left hovering half-way back up the key)? Also, presumably the stronger the connection to the key, the less likely the key is to noticably rebound in the first place. Obviously the big surface area from a flat finger would be of assistance is softening it. It may be that bouncing keys are simply a sign of a weakness in the connection, rather than a direct source of problems.

Have you played Gould's piano?