Bending thumb/straitening works fine it's a bit like Kemals pushing the fingertips forward? I don't know if it is something to do all the time though I think You can see pianists do this momentarily without thinking of it.
As for the pinky placing your thumb can of course strenghten the fingers in different ways I saw that Sokolov even literally grasped the border under the keys with his thumb quite often last time I saw this was with prof Hans Leygraf long time ago.
But the muscles working with the pinky are activated with abduction of the pinky (I think I might mean the contrary!) more than anything else so moving the thumb might just do this. What I mean is the pinky is in it's strongest position like when you play octaves.
Tried the thumb-thing a bit more what a mastertip now the thumb can really participate in the orchestra and with som more stability even.
Keep inventing Andrew!
Great! All credit to Alan for making me notice this though. These ideas and observations are a very direct offshoot from some of the thumb actions he showed me recently, which were completely new to me. The lessons I had have been spectacularly useful.
I've been practising a lot just now on diminished 7th chords. With this feeling of extending the thumb forward/outwards but pulling the finger back, it's absolutely incredible just how stable the entire hand becomes with scarcely a trace of effort (except in the particular finger and thumb). I'm going through every combination of fingers plus the thumb. Sometimes the thumb stays down on the key permanently (feeling more outward than down against the key though), sometimes I'm sounding 1+2 then 1+3 with that forward/backward combination. It's interesting to note what the other fingers do when remaining in balance. If any finger is slightly collapsed at the knuckle I try to feel it's simply dangling. When the supporting fingers work well enough, they all feel like they are merely dangling but take on the shape a very formed hand. It's extremely well shaped, but I only feel the effort in the balancing finger plus the thumb.
After this, I've been eliminating the thumbs and merely moving the fingers. Somehow they already seem to be learning to move as easily yet clearly as when the thumb is involved. The hand stays very heavily formed into much the same alignment, and there's very little effort in maintaining it. I think there were a lot of habitual bits of stiffness that served no purpose, but when the effort is exclusively between one finger and the thumb, the others seem to be able to hang ultra-relaxed yet well formed. This state then carries across without the thumb playing. It's never been easier to feel the arm is truly hanging back behind the fingers, rather than held up around the elbow etc.
I think I might use this exercise as my starting point for explaining the finger actions, on the blog. I've been thinking a lot about exactly what should come first, but I think it's a great way to introduce the idea of a very stable structure from which the arm can hang.
If you lay your forearm on the table top and pull with your lumbricals, the action of the fingers is an entity unto itself. If your fingertips are stuck to the surface, the lumbrical pulling action will pull the heel of your hand (and your forearm as well) towards them. If you could lay your forearm on a supporting surface near the keyboard so your fingers could manipulate the keys while the forearm was thus supported, it would be clear that the finger's action is solely to manipulate the key, not to act against some counterforce from above.
As I mentioned in the other post parallel to this one, the thumb being rooted in the key creates an internal muscular organization, a hierarchy of latent tonuses, which can continue even when the thumb is no longer rooted, and which empower the functionality of the hand. Here it's the forearm lying on a supporting surface that creates a set of internal muscular organizations that can continue to empower the right work of the fingers when the forearm is not actually supported. Wirth's approach aims to facilitate precisely this organization.
In actuality, there IS of course the weight of your arm, the counterforce against which your fingers pull. But it's this other scenario is in effect.
My fear is that if you actually talk about counterforces etc, the brain will organize the musculature in this optimal way. Making that perception conscious and overt may actually mislead the brain. Wirth's method is pragmatic: it aims simply to create a neuromotor organization useful to piano playing.
Just been going back through this thread. There's a lot of stuff which is making sense in a totally new way. Although I hadn't gone as far as to rule out pushing altogether, I was looking at the arms role almost entirely from the perspective of pulling back before. I realise now that this was due to conceiving everything as a rather pure pull from the knuckle, without having understood the role of extension actions. With this alternative available, pushing actions are now making equal sense. There had been a missing link before, that wasn't giving me access.
Anyway, the above post got me thinking. I just tried a similar scenario where the wrist rests totally on the keyslip- but the fingers start rather curved and use the extensions. When the wrist is resting, the fingers can still make pretty big sounds- but it's really a very uncomfortable landing. I wouldn't do this too vigorously!
Anyway, the arms rests heavily- but you have the seeming contradiction of being DISCONNECTED from the whole arm's mass and getting extremely poor shock absorption as a result. Conversely, when the arm starts in the floating state, a fully pronounced act of extending the finger (but importantly letting the knuckle get pushed up in response) actually serves to CONNECT to the arm's mass in a way that stabilises and absorbs the shock. The seeming paradox is that it connects the finger to the arm's mass substantially better (allowing impact to be absorbed) when it FEELS LIGHTER! The arm's involvement basically comes of its own accord- but only if the finger extends far enough to involve it adequately! By bringing in the different style of finger motion, I can now completely relate to Alan's description of how simple it should be.
I've almost finished writing up my description of the basic background for how to conceive and perceive this style of finger movement and will post a link once its done. I cannot overstate how much improvement has been resulting in, now I've been able to match the idea of the extremely lightened arm to this specific style of finger movement. Instead of causing problems with stability, lightening the arm is now greatly improving it.
