Pokemon

I enjoyed our lessons during your visit to New York. You corrected a misunderstanding I had about bone alignment. When I read about Liszt's Bicycle Spokes Exercise I tried it on a table top. I lined up a finger straight and stubbed it into the table with a firm thump. I was impressed that it was possible to transmit so much energy with no particular physical effort. Translated to the keyboard this action became a poke. When I played something forte like Chopin's Etude Op. 10 No. 1 it was kind of nice to play by poking because it was easy to produce a huge sound without strain. It made my fingers feel strong as steel. However, doing it in front of you made it obvious that it wasn't easy to make the sound consistent and attractive. The fifth finger notes and the thumb notes really poked out and other fingers sometimes didn't sound. Since the whole arm is involved in a poke and it can be done with no tension, I thought I had the right idea. When you made me back off and breathe with the arm using no pressure in the keys, you described the bones "swimming" around in the hand. It promoted a different kind of engagement of the whole arm that you described as "organic." This was a very different sensation. The whole arm feels engaged in this approach, too, but it isn't the same engagement as the rod-like solidity of a full-arm poke. Trying things this way reveals now that my "poke-mon" approach lacked richness of sensory feedback. It was solid all right, but now it is evident it wasn't letting me feel the keys very much (and it didn't have so much mobility either). A straight-fingered poke really does enable you to give the strings a good, powerful whack free of any tension, but not being able to control it with any refinement means that probably it's sole application is piano tuning! When I look at the videos of our sessions, I see myself doing this poking all over the place. Since I had been actively attempting to cultivate it, it was creeping in all over the place even when I wasn't trying to do it, and of course you can hear it every time, too. Disturbing, but encouraging on the other hand, since you made the correction and the places that need fixing are so obvious now. Jai Jeffryes

I enjoyed our lessons during your visit to New York. You corrected a misunderstanding I had about bone alignment. When I read about Liszt's Bicycle Spokes Exercise I tried it on a table top. I lined up a finger straight and stubbed it into the table with a firm thump. I was impressed that it was possible to transmit so much energy with no particular physical effort. Translated to the keyboard this action became a poke. When I played something forte like Chopin's Etude Op. 10 No. 1 it was kind of nice to play by poking because it was easy to produce a huge sound without strain. It made my fingers feel strong as steel. However, doing it in front of you made it obvious that it wasn't easy to make the sound consistent and attractive. The fifth finger notes and the thumb notes really poked out and other fingers sometimes didn't sound. Since the whole arm is involved in a poke and it can be done with no tension, I thought I had the right idea. When you made me back off and breathe with the arm using no pressure in the keys, you described the bones "swimming" around in the hand. It promoted a different kind of engagement of the whole arm that you described as "organic." This was a very different sensation. The whole arm feels engaged in this approach, too, but it isn't the same engagement as the rod-like solidity of a full-arm poke. Trying things this way reveals now that my "poke-mon" approach lacked richness of sensory feedback. It was solid all right, but now it is evident it wasn't letting me feel the keys very much (and it didn't have so much mobility either). A straight-fingered poke really does enable you to give the strings a good, powerful whack free of any tension, but not being able to control it with any refinement means that probably it's sole application is piano tuning! When I look at the videos of our sessions, I see myself doing this poking all over the place. Since I had been actively attempting to cultivate it, it was creeping in all over the place even when I wasn't trying to do it, and of course you can hear it every time, too. Disturbing, but encouraging on the other hand, since you made the correction and the places that need fixing are so obvious now. Jai Jeffryes Have you tried just adding movement to it? I've been doing a lot of work on trying to get every finger finishing in that kind of near vertical position- but always with an act of extending out the finger during depression. I wouldn't want to get locked into that position before the sound occurs. I think it's too slow for control to be feasible if the arm generates all the key movement, but when the finger is moving the key as it creates the position, you can get good results. I also find the pre- extended finger makes for a fair impact- compared to when it's actually moving. The movement bounces some of the energy away- rather allow it all to crash down into an abrupt stop.

I'll respond to Jai's initial post. A nice description of your experience, Jai, especially so because it illustrates the didactic nature of many of my exercises. A crucial part of understanding any exercise or technical approach is figuring out where it lies on the line between purely educative and completely practical - for use in performance. And a big mistake many of my students (I include myself in that group) make is to take something didactic and use it in practice. However we are not the first to make that mistake: I believe that most of the arm weight school's present problems stem from the same error. Thanks for posting this! AFF