"Pulling back" piano technique pros and cons

How about it, Razvan, is it time to blow your cover? Shall we tell them where you live? And about the convenient minivan service that exists between your town and mine? AFF

Arhi, have you considered that, several years on from your last lesson with Alan, it might be time to have another one? For a long time I relied on advice on these forums (which has been to a consistently high standard, for me), but having a lesson (or three) in person with Alan was something else entirely. Of course, I don't need to convince your of this. Since I had those lessons with Alan, though, I've found it immensely useful to make contact via Skype lessons - it gives both you and him real time feedback and I'm sure that way you could work together to figure out what kind of help you need now. 2 years and a half have actually passed since my lessons with Alan. There is clear need for a new set of lessons and I will set a meeting with him as soons as possible. For the time being here are the first 16 measures from Chopin's Waltz in B minor in the stage I'm at with this piece: I hope this will make the picture more clear. As soon as I can I'm going to arrange some lessons with Alan. I'm very confused because my current teacher seems to spoil things even more. She keeps constantly asking me to press the keys harder in order to obtain a clear difference between p and f. At her place I also play on a digital piano but I keep mine at 100% and she is keeping hers at 10 maybe 15%. She keeps telling me that this is the level you have to practice at and be able to obtain a perceivable f even with a very low master volume. I don't know if this should be normally good but it's definitely ruining things for me. We had a lesson yesterday and I was able to play Chopin and the scales better before the lesson. When I came back home and tried to play the same passages the kind of attack suggested by p2u (which proved to be efficient) was gone again. The kind of key attack she is suggesting makes me loose my stability and control. What's the use of hitting the key as hard as you can if you don't have the necessary muscular training to obtain a f without very high effort?

Arhi, have you considered that, several years on from your last lesson with Alan, it might be time to have another one? For a long time I relied on advice on these forums (which has been to a consistently high standard, for me), but having a lesson (or three) in person with Alan was something else entirely. Of course, I don't need to convince your of this. Since I had those lessons with Alan, though, I've found it immensely useful to make contact via Skype lessons - it gives both you and him real time feedback and I'm sure that way you could work together to figure out what kind of help you need now. 2 years and a half have actually passed since my lessons with Alan. There is clear need for a new set of lessons and I will set a meeting with him as soons as possible. For the time being here are the first 16 measures from Chopin's Waltz in B minor in the stage I'm at with this piece: I hope this will make the picture more clear. As soon as I can I'm going to arrange some lessons with Alan. I'm very confused because my current teacher seems to spoil things even more. She keeps constantly asking me to press the keys harder in order to obtain a clear difference between p and f. At her place I also play on a digital piano but I keep mine at 100% and she is keeping hers at 10 maybe 15%. She keeps telling me that this is the level you have to practice at and be able to obtain a perceivable f even with a very low master volume. I don't know if this should be normally good but it's definitely ruining things for me. We had a lesson yesterday and I was able to play Chopin and the scales better before the lesson. When I came back home and tried to play the same passages the kind of attack suggested by p2u (which proved to be efficient) was gone again. The kind of key attack she is suggesting makes me loose my stability and control. What's the use of hitting the key as hard as you can if you don't have the necessary muscular training to obtain a f without very high effort? To be honest, I'd indeed be rather skeptical as to whether this is good a track. It seems like a rather coarse way of trying to inspire you to play louder with minimal consideration of other issues- in a way that will encourage brute force rather than quality of motion. On the video, it's your connection to fingers AFTER you have played them that is lacking- which in turn forces the arm to be held in place too stiffly. The fingers aren't creating enough quality of support for the arm to remain stable when loosened. If you attack the keys with great force, it strikes me as likely that you will alternate between forcefulness and excessive relaxation. You need a style of movement that evolves into a balance as a natural organic process. Banging hard from the fingers won't make that happen- but will only encourage you to flee from the finger activity altogether as soon as the key has gone down. You need to perceive the activity that is useful to KEEP. The left hand is where this is most obvious to look at. The fingers aren't connecting you to the keys. You need to let the wrist come down after playing the chord and find a more secure balance by activating the fingers more to open the hand and create stability. This quality of connection then needs to be found as the natural follow-up to playing each chord- rather than something that you need to adjust into. I'd practise Alan's basic skeletality exercise from youtube on each chord- rolling backwards and forwards, and feeling lengthening of the fingers getting space between thumb and second finger and then actively sustaining it. Also, in the right, a very good exercise is to tap the surface of the next with the finger three or four times before actually sounding it. Pay at least as much attention to the finger that played last while doing so and make sure the knuckle doesn't droop. This is a great way to train the continuation of the lengthening action and makes it much easier to keep fingers stable after reaching the keybed, once you go back to normal. The fingers can't afford to let go of the action that creates length and keeps the knuckle high, or the arm must go rigid to compensate.

To me the most telling indication is the way you play the first note. The idea is that the arm comes in behind the finger to help you get power and stimulate the finger to stand up into its structure (as a response to, or resistance to, the input of arm weight from above). However the result is the opposite: you actually DISempower the finger and encourage it not to do ANYthing. Instead of helping the finger play well, the arm has taken over completely and now the finger doesn't play at all; it just provides a kind of inert connection of the arm to the key. Your teacher, if she is encouraging you to play louder by using more arm, is only making things worse. If, however, she wants you to play louder by moving your fingers more, she at least has the right idea. However, this 'brute force' approach to developing your technique lacks the sensitivity and finesse that would actually bring this development about. By the way, the minivan service is at Contact them at I am in Belgrade until January 5 when I take my daughter skiing... AFF

@ I'd like to add that the impression/result in terms of music is that there is no clear artistic sound image, no "intonatsia" as the Russians call it. What Alan describes is directly related to that. Don't wait; act!... Paul

This is always a problem for me. If you just tell them, "play with intonatsia" they will try but may do it wrong. If you tell them, as I like to do, how to connect to the key effectively, they might do it well but So, thank you Paul for this crucial addition to what I had to say. I tend to tell them what to do but forget to mention the musical reason for doing so. When you tell them , then they are empowered to be better technically and better musically as well - a potent combination! AFF

Good idea, maybe, for one of your following books?: "Moving with a purpose"... It's not just about loud and soft or about pressing down little pieces of wood as an end in itself; the movement of an active finger helps creating an artistic image on the fly, an intensity that cannot be created otherwise. With dead or lifeless fingers, there can be no real art. At the same time, if there is no clear artistic image in the mind, the fingers become lazy etc., etc... Paul

I'm on it! AFF

This is always a problem for me. If you just tell them, "play with intonatsia" they will try but may do it wrong. I discovered a very interesting thing along these lines recently. When playing Mozart I could never make sense of the short phrase marks that group things by bar. My musical sensibilities always told me that it makes no sense at all not to have a musical connection between the end of one bar and the start of the next- and no matter what I attempted, I found it totally anti-musical to do them as notated. If teachers told me to do them as marked, I would attempt all kinds of things, but it only interfered with the sense of musical phrase and made things sound choppy and amateurish. Recently, I discovered that if the arm follows a smooth horizontal path, it's possible to execute these markings in a way that has tiny literal silences between the markings- but in a way where the musical effect is still that of the bigger line that I had always wanted to preserve. If the arm drifts in same fashion it might through a legato connection, the tonal control can be retained. It's like the arm carries a sense of a long phrase still- allowing the fingers to sort out the shorter units. Although there's a minute separation, the lack of the up and down movements stops it feeling like a brand new musical start each time and preserves the logic of a line that carries across the bars. Quite honestly, I don't think there's ANYTHING I could have done in terms of musical thinking that would have led to what has now become possible via a physical principle. In a sense, my musical conception is largely unchanged (and there are still places where I'll continue to make short phrase marks into longer ones where I feel there's more logic from doing so) but by learning this particular quality of motion it has added a sense of extra detail to that prior image. From observing the results, I recognise that Horowitz uses these tiny commas more than I had realised (although not pedantically and rigorously- he was equally happy to play legato through small phrase marks, much of the time). On his recordings, you sometimes get a feel that you are actually hearing the mechanism of the piano, during these minute separations. I'm hearing that effect in my own playing sometimes now- where a slight kind of "creak" from within the piano breathes a little extra life into the sound, compared to a legato join- but without actually taking the overall aural impression from a long line to isolated segments. I've been teaching the concept to some of my students, but I think that even the most advanced of all would take some considerable time to arrive at a point where a musical description (rather than a physical demonstration of how to move) would be the most likely way to achieve the desired result.

I see what you mean, but maybe we have lost something along the way? Something that was understood in the "old school"? I remember reading that Neuhaus gave paintings to his students when they asked him how to play this or that opus by this or that composer. Is that really enough formal instruction? For some it was. And do you remember the beautiful Rachmaninov E flat major prelude Alan gave the link to? When Ruth Slenczynska first came to the lesson with it, Rachmaninov was dissatisfied with her rendering. He took her to the window and pointed to the trees below. A description of Ivanovka in his youth about apple trees in spring was supposed to give the girl enough info to make it better. And how she understood the picture! On another occasion, Rachmaninov asked a student what his prelude op. 32 no 10 in B minor was about. The student was lucky to have sensed that it was the idea of "return" (the prelude was inspired on a painting "the homecoming" by Arnold Böcklin), or he would have been sent out of class. Now how do you express "return" if you don't know what it is to have been forced to leave your motherland? My answer: by listening to great artists of the old school and do lots of reading, going to museums, etc. Even if you don't know what to do with a certain composition in the sense indicated above, you should at least have a sound image, expect some kind of sound that can be reproduced at will and drive it home to the listener. This takes practice, of course. Practice in movement, but also practice in executing certain artistic ideas. Do you know how difficult it is for actors (even native speakers) to pronounce the line "to be or not be..."(c)? Exercising the muscles in your mouth, practising vowels and consonants or controlling your breath won't do anything for you; you have to have a clear image of the effect it is supposed to make upon the listener. Recalling the artistic image will trigger the right mechanics. You should also know how to make your listener cry without getting involved yourself, because crying yourself on stage will make you look like a fool. You should also know how to time a good joke, because otherwise, people won't laugh, etc. P.S.: Sorry for the off-topic rambling. I just felt I had to. Paul