Scales, octaves and arm weight focussing

"I don't know if this has anything to do with my attempt to lower the arch but I noticed that when playing at slow speed the shoulders sometimes go up and forward. I don't know if this was already present and now I just noticed the problem or the problem was caused by lowering the wrist. Now even in pronounced position at certain drills and pieces my shoulders go totally loose then when learning new material or practicing already learned passages with adding a new task(counting aloud, playing it from the sheet) my shoulders get tense again. I even noticed the shoulder of the opposite hand going very stiff when I practiced hands separately and used the other hand (which...strangely enough was functioning fairly well)." Just to be clear, when starting with flat fingers, what I mean is to play one finger totally outstretched so it wholly contacts a key. Then very slowly feel the progress from totally flattened, to exaggerated standing by pulling yourself up from the finger. And careful not to press the wrist down, by the way. It's a case of from a released wrist, not one that is forced downward. It's largely an exercise for feeling all available positions, not something to force in normal playing. Feel every step on the way, as the wrist drifts up, and then gradually lower the wrist back down again- so it cannot lock up anywhere. The muscles have to make many tiny adjustments to retain balance. If anything, you should feel your shoulders sinking down much more as you slowly lower the wrist. Slowly releasing (not pushing!) the wrist downward ought to make it easier for shoulders to let go, rather than encourage them to stiffen- as long as your finger continues to support properly at the keybed. From there, I suspect that you may well find a slightly less curled up finger to be more comfortable, in the long run. But I'm not advising totally flat fingers or a collapsed arch. Just be sure to train yourself in the entire range of balance, so you have your options open. I think your fingers are curved to the point where their movement is limited. Any natural action from the knuckle is more towards you than into the keyboard. It limits what the fingers can do. Starting flatter (but still feeling the action is very much inward- so you don't force the fingers flat but merely begin from there) might open a lot more options. Also, I don't mean you need to collapse the arch at all. Just try taking the act of forming it to a slightly lesser degree. It's not about releasing, but perhaps no longer going quite so far to exaggerate it in the first place. If you've gone too far, it feels odd to go backwards- which can then prompt what is indeed collapse. So if you start from more released position, with flatter fingers and lower wrist etc. then everything is still felt as a positive action of formation- rather than as a confusing subtraction. From collapsed fingers to slightly rounded but supportive, all the way to standing fingers, you feel every stage on the way. Then you can then incorporate every type of balance into normal playing. "So the feeling should be the same even at a slow speed, right? What exactly do you reffer to when saying that I have to let myself to bounce away at once? You mean....not taking in consideration the duration of the staccato and just seek for that "repelling" feeling?" Yeah, not necessarily all the time. But certainly some of the time. Lighten your arm, but feel that a little of its weight is available to be pushed away. If you can't feel that force is knocking you away it may suggest either pushing down or holding still too much in the arm. The arm should be repelled by the fingers action. True stacatto is only one single pull of the finger- not playing then stopping at the keyboard and then finally letting go. The problem is that being overly heavy makes the instantaneous action hard work, but being overly witheld in the weight gives the finger nothing to push against. You need just the right amount of weight to push away. I practise resting my hand faintly against my leg (but with the shoulder feeling relaxed) and then whipping the fingers back like the one hand clapping. My wrist bounces about 6 inches or so away from my leg, via the returned force. If your arm were released to feel as heavy as a stone, you would not bounce much at all. But if it were totally witheld, the finger would simply skim across your leg (say if you stiffened your elbow and wrist while doing this) and the arm would stay put. You have to judge a partial release of its weight. What the finger can do is totally dependent on the amount weight that is released by the arm. "And regarding the wrist weights. I found very very many models. Is 0.5 kg/wrist enough?" Certainly enough for trying anything at the keyboard at the moment, I'd say. However, it may be a little too light for exercises that are based on moving the arms around your body away from the keyboard. There are some of variable weight.

I think I either missed this one or read it unattentively or simply was not able to feel that in my body. I could not find that backward pulling sensation because I never tried dropping the hand and loosening the elbow at the same time. I was too concentrated on my wrists and shoulders. Once I had tried I started feeling the shoulder letting go but only for a short period of time. Though the holding is much weaker now, the original "completely loose" sensation never came back. Anyway...the hands seem to have a little more counterweight now. Yes. I am now working on broken fifths. It is a strange feeling. It gets quite frustrating when going back to octaves and noticing that your hand "gets" so small. Maybe it's a matter of practice. If I am not able to play octaves, I never imagine how can I ever play 4-note chords in various inversions. It is incredible how Cziffra had medium sized hands(I assume), yet he ripped the piano with his octaves.

"I think I either missed this one or read it unattentively or simply was not able to feel that in my body. I could not find that backward pulling sensation because I never tried dropping the hand and loosening the elbow at the same time. I was too concentrated on my wrists and shoulders. Once I had tried I started feeling the shoulder letting go but only for a short period of time. Though the holding is much weaker now, the original "completely loose" sensation never came back. Anyway...the hands seem to have a little more counterweight now." Ah, that's good. I'd do a lot of the one where you simply collapse everything onto a cluster and slowly let your hand slide towards you until it falls off the piano. This is natural path in which gravity pulls your arm as a whole. Even though gravity is of course downward, the resultant action is notably towards you, rather than perfectly down. I think this is why inaccurate gravity thinking can be dangerous. Because it's not actually perfectly downward, people try to make it more downward, instead of actually releasing it. Just let go of things and notice where it's going. Remember that some of this counterweight is integral to the hand's holding. Although you don't want to do it to excessive, when you do not feel any sense of counterweight at all, the only alternative to get stabilisation is stiffening. I think that's what I sensed from your videos. When the return forces come at you, mechanically speaking, it ought to be possible to release the wrist even more than before you played a note. Try one thing, by the way. Hold out your arm and shake your hand around. Then let it hang down as limply as that of a "fan of musical theatre". Very slowly move it from there to a straight line. This should take at least twenty seconds or so. Try to move it with the minimum of effort. When you get there, you have aligned it in the least effortful way possible. When you put it over the piano, there should be no more effort. With you play, if the finger works properly, it should become possible to let go even more, as the keyboard is now providing some of the support. I've been having a lot of success recently, through this "clucking" business. I feel that my shoulder starts from a netural collapsed, sagging position (which you need to be able to feel first), but then it just ever so slightly drifts out. The feeling of the elbow always drifting away (albeit with nearly zero movement, once I've already opened a slight space in the armpit) has given a huge sense of freedom. My hand is neither feeling 'heavy' nor is it feeling short of counterweight for the fingers to act against. The fingers are working so much better from this setup. "Yes. I am now working on broken fifths. It is a strange feeling. It gets quite frustrating when going back to octaves and noticing that your hand "gets" so small. Maybe it's a matter of practice. If I am not able to play octaves, I never imagine how can I ever play 4-note chords in various inversions." Despite having a comfortable 11th, I still struggle with some basic shapes in my right hand- because I had always collapsed in the past. However, it has improved a lot through using the fingers better. If you feel a squeeze inward (not a stretch outward) the keys push back and gradually improve your stretch. Try lightly squeezing inward and against the adjacent keys on increasingly large intervals (but check that the wrist is not tightening by moving it up and down with the other hand) "It is incredible how Cziffra had medium sized hands(I assume), yet he ripped the piano with his octaves." It's all about the finger action. If you collapse at a big stretch, you feel out of control. If you feel the fingers doing something, you can control it. I used to do octaves almost solely from the arm. By avoiding any pressure agains tthe return force from the keyboard, I'm starting to see how Cziffra got that explosive sound all from the fingers. If you fight the force and dig in with the arm, it gets heavy and lumpy. But with an explosive finger action (which the arm is allowed to be knocked away by) I'm starting to feel how to get that sharp edgy sound, even in quieter dynamics. I'm no Cziffra, certainly, but the difference in the quality of the sound is amazing. It has as much to do with how you gauge the release of the arm as the hand itself. But the fingers are what move. Personally, I'd drop the rotation you were doing entirely for now and practise standing up from a low wrist. In the long run, the hand initially "hovers" but there's a split second release of gravity, as the fingers activate- for the effect of pushing away from a trampoline. But first you need to feel the fingers simply standing up slowly against some gravity in a clear way. The low wrist is vital for that sensation. There's no chace to collapse then. PS. Because you aligned so much from the thumb, your hand probably seems smaller. Align from the fifth and just stick your thumb out sideways, before it start to act inward. A huge part of the stretch in any hand comes from simply opening the thumb. Don't feel outwards as you play, but simply open up properly first and then begin to feel that the muscles are acting inwards.

The problem is that the hand bounces very high when doing the exercise on the leg. I can't say the same when trying it on one key, not to mention more voices. I guess that if the "grasping" is slower the effect is not nearly similar. Staccato becomes more facile as the tempo increases. However there also has to be a way to practice it at slow speeds. Maybe playing the key as I normally do (2% pull should be enough, as Alan said) and exaggerating and speeding up the motion(without stopping it) it as the key reaches the key bed....Or maybe the counterweight is not present enough yet and that's why the fingers just slide off the keys. The bouncing is present but is very weak. The hand is thrown upwards and a little bit forward. The whole forearm is dragged towards the point where the keys start from. However I can't compare it to the feeling I have when doing this on my leg. That's a major problem for me. I try to implement it during scales, arpeggios, Hannon drills or elementary Czerny etudes. Must I move it laterally or as I would got ready to play piano? Wow. I can barely reach a 9th. Maybe a 10th on the white keys. How much is this going to limit my future repertoire? *** Just bought wrist weights. 1.15 kg each. It made my fingers so tyred that they shaked quite much for several minutes when I removed them and tried some exercises on the table or even at the piano. It was something like going back to the old days when I played with a blind perception which Alan succeeded to heal.

"However there also has to be a way to practices it at slow speeds." Yeah. This is always a problem. I think the key is not to practise in ANY speed. Simply play one note and be bounced away and put your hand by your side. Then start the next from nothing. This is the only way to truly perceive the interaction between the finger and the returned force. Remember that you cannot deal with the force until you understand it first. It takes patience but you have to learn not to either push in or fight it. Until you can truly do this in a individual instance, there's no way to build a chain of efficient movements. Trying to combine them just makes it even harder to perceive the basic interaction and the movements all interfere with each other. Try doing exactly the same as on your leg without intending to make a sound for now. just treat that as a side effect of the same motion as on the leg for now. If you intend to play, almost everyone will stop to dig in at the keybed rather than be bounced off it- hence strain when you collide head-on. Pull in the fingers natural arc- don't think of the key's perfectly downward motion, or you will jam into it rather than bounce off. The finger acts as much back towards you as down. You need to perceive this, rather than contrive a downward action. "Or maybe the counterweight is not present enough yet and that's why the fingers just slide off the keys. The bouncing is present but is very weak." Yeah, that suggests the arm is fixed or the grip at the key is not enough. the arm should be drawn forward to meet the finger. Or is the finger starting in an excessively curled position? If you've already used up too much of it's natural action, it won't be able to achieve any grip. Better to start too relaxed, than in an excessively formed grip. If you curl too far before playing, the finger simply doesn't have enough action left to go into the key with. This leaves you with no choice but a downward prod or collapse, or to slip across the key with inadequate contact. "Must I move it laterally or as I would got ready to play piano?" I'm not sure exactly what you mean. Just find the minimum effort from collapsed to aligned and then put it on the piano. don't fix in a position but perceive the smallest difference possible between collapsed and aligned. "Just bought wrist weights. 1.15 kg each. It made my fingers so tyred that they shaked quite much for several minutes when I removed them and tried some exercises on the table or even at the piano." I definitely wouldn't go that heavy at the piano. I only use 1 kg myself and had built up by leaning one hand on the other first. Half of that weight would be much better. It's supposed to make everything feel clearer, not burden you. However, I'd try those for exercises based on simply holding out your arms and moving very slowly in different paths, from the shoulder. It gives a superb feeling of how to get the shoulder to take on a balancing role without any hint of locking or fixing- making it far easier to leave slack for return forces to disappear into, without releasing full armweight.

"Wow. I can barely reach a 9th. Maybe a 10th on the white keys. How much is this going to limit my future repertoire?" Sorry, I realised that didn't reply to this bit before. A tenth is fine. If you can do that then you can easily use proper action to sound an octave, rather than merely splay the hand out and collapse. Just practise lining up properly behind the fifth so it can operate, and use the thumb's full capacity to reach out. A lazy thumb makes can make the hand feel small. My stretch was limited by poor use of the muscles, not by size. It's increased a lot now- although I still need to free up more space between the fingers. 2-5 is one of the most important stretches. Ideally it ought to be capable of spanning an octave, for true comfort in thick chords. Also, just to add the above bit about practising staccato one action at a time- always check the rebound is perfectly upward/forward with no sideways slant. If it is, you can later go on to use gravity via muscular releases to cancel it and start staying closer. If it's even slightly sideways, only muscular effort (that is either staggeringly precise or which amounts to heavily fixing the arm rigid) can counter the imbalance. The aligment of the finger and arm needs to be very good indeed for the force to be in the right line. This is why it's a mistake to try to combine many staccato movements in a flow too early on. My staccato scales were truly hopeless for years, because of this. I only just learned how to do one single staccato action well enough to be able to start combining them without notable excess of effort. You have to give yourself a chance to feel and monitor the line of the forces, if you are to improve the efficiency of the action. When combining a few at once, you can almost guarantee that you'll be too busy stiffening in resistance of the forces, to adequately observe what they do.

"When the hand stands well on the keyboard, all tension falls away in the wrist, forearm, elbow, upper arm, shoulder, neck and back." Let's take this quote of mine as a starting point. Of course it needs to be qualified, but I would like to present it as a global concept. Remember our work to awaken the basic grasping action in your hand. When you stand well, you do NOT flop your hand onto the board and "allow the weight of the arm to be transmitted through it" to the key. Standing well involves a considerable effort from the lumbricals, just as in whole body standing, the hips maintain a considerable, healthy tonus. Then the thumb has its own unique contribution to standing. It doesn't possess a lumbrical but it can oppose itself to the hand and thus contribute full 50% of the effort involved in healthy standing. When the thumb fails to fully play its complex and unique part in the hand's potent standing, the scaleni muscles of the neck will tend to tense. Then when the fingers do play, there will be supporting activity in the upper arm (the triceps) but this is not the same as tension. Some people are so unused to this activity that they perceive it as tension, but if the upper arm hangs well, it should actually remain tension-free. So: • Try to regain that sense of standing well to cultivate that 'let-go' in your shoulders. • Find the sense of the thumb actively opposing to release the tension in your neck. • Learn to recognize a certain effort in the triceps which is not the same as undesirable tension. Given our lessons, I would advise thinking less about transmitting the weight of the arm to the key and much more about using your lumbricals to move the key and, by the way, stand your hand up well on the board. By the way, Razvan, our experience together led me to write the following, which I'll include in the forward to my new book, "Kiddie Craft: The Craft of Piano Playing for the Young Pianist." "A young adult beginner I worked with recently had good hand shape (he had seen my DVD), but I saw he consistently it down. When I took him through a series of exercises to awaken this essential function in his hand, he told me it felt very strange – but meanwhile his ability was improving by leaps and bounds. It was a telling indication that grasping, the fundamental action of the human hand and one so crucial to piano playing, is often completely absent from the young pianist’s technique. As my student put it, “It looks like pianists push the key down: they don’t seem to be pulling.” Aural difference between pushing and pulling the key down 'Most often you cannot see the pulling action in a pianist’s technique – but you can certainly hear it in their sound. Without it the sound is harsh, shallow, small, one-dimensional. With it there develops a sound that’s gloriously rich, colorful, both powerful and warm, both speedy and sparkling – all the characteristics most pleasing in a pianist..." Thanks for providing me with the inspiration! AFF

I agree very much with this, but I'm convinced that this is where proportioned countweighting comes in. You can't see it, because the fingers try to pull the arm forward to meet the tip- rather than slide along the key. But this movement is cancelled by the release of the arm and wrist- which tries to drag the arm back towards you- like when you slump onto the keyboard and allow the palm to slowly slide along the keys until it falls off. The two motions can be perfectly set against one another, rendering both invisible yet present in the action. In both perceptive terms and mechanical ones, I'm extremely confident that this is what goes on when I play now. I feel my finger pulling really hard but without strain. I release just what is needed to keep an aligned wrist- without any effort or 'fixing'. Personally, I felt that it's this interaction between backward and forward that does not seem 100% balanced on the videos. It's a stillness that comes via holding, rather than from comfortably matched forces. In order to feel a pull without it being visible, there needs to be contrary force to stop it creating a resultant force on the rest of the arm. On the films, I saw a hand that is being fixed in position rather too strongly and consistently (at the wrist and further back too) for the releases to give the finger something to pull against.

OK, look, I haven't even had the time to read through this entire extensive exchange, but from what I have read where I did dip in, it's a perfect illustration of the potential for real counterproductiveness and negative results from thinking in terms of arm weight, counterweight, etc, etc. You see, Andrew, you have basically been screwing Razvan's head up with your input. I know your intentions are very good, the highest in fact, and I commend you for that. But you must also acknowledge that your reality is a subjective reality that works for you but MAY NOT WORK FOR OTHER PEOPLE. Razvan is a perfect case in point. We worked together for five days and the whole thrust of our work was to get his hand working. He simply doesn't NEED to think about arm weight, it only screws him up - and I am using the politer form of this expression because it's a public forum! He even hints as such in such quotes as "It sometimes makes you think that you're playing wrong again and getting back to those old bad habits." I believe his perception here was probably accurate. So, Andrew, please be aware that your good intentions might not be getting good results. You really have to evaluate the process of the person you're working with - difficult to do at such a distance. You remember that when WE worked together, I adapted my language to your thinking and did indeed talk about arm weight. But my EMPHASIS was somewhere else, you recall, which is why the lessons were so valuable to you... I must make this post abbreviated but I did want to step in and try to keep things productive... All the best, AFF

OK, look, I haven't even had the time to read through this entire extensive exchange, but from what I have read where I did dip in, it's a perfect illustration of the potential for real counterproductiveness and negative results from thinking in terms of arm weight, counterweight, etc, etc. You see, Andrew, you have basically been screwing Razvan's head up with your input. I know your intentions are very good, the highest in fact, and I commend you for that. But you must also acknowledge that your reality is a subjective reality that works for you but MAY NOT WORK FOR OTHER PEOPLE. I see your point here. However, the reason I'm so convinced about this is because of mechanical laws. For mass and weight to play no role is an absolute scientific impossibility. That would be the subjective impression, not one that involves trying to judge the degree of weight that is released to perform a specific balancing function. How can a finger pull against a key with a large force, without the returned force having consequences? It definitely cannot. It is an absolute impossibility, based on Newton's laws. You can only absorb them with finely proportioned balancing forces, or fight them with stiffness. So there has to be a rational explanation for what else goes on, to match that force. That balance can feasibly be found by subconscious processes, but I cannot see how any full understanding could be complete without incorporating a mechanically feasible explanation of how to keep the arm still- other than that of resorting to excessive seizure and fixing, of course. Certainly, there's not one single approach that works for everyone, but I'm absolutely convinced that his arm looks too held back for the fingers to be able to operate to the full. I see him fighting the forces that are reflected back, instead of releasing in proportion to them. I am becoming increasingly certain that any physicist would explain the use of the hand, as you describe it, with reference to proportioned use of counterweight from the arm. I simply cannot see an alternate rational explanation for how a finger can use a powerful pulling action, without the return force acting notably upon the arm. It's the same principle as if you hold one wrist still with the other arm and start trying to play finger work. The finger action is not changed by that, but the arm could no longer contribute to the global model of forces (which it does simply by free to move in response to returned forces, instead of fixed in space)- changing everything. The finger feels the difference- but because of the absence of the arm's role behind it. It's simply not possible to makes the arm's weight anything even approaching non issue unless you seek to fix it in place. I see this in that film. The arm is visibly not responding to the return forces that are caused by the action of the fingers. If anyone thinks of gravity in an inaccurate way, that can cause problems. That's why I'm stressing the importance of perceiving and not simply thinking downward forces. That's why I value the exercise of simply pulling from the fingers and allowing the arm to slowly meet them, before feeling how a very slow and gradual release at the wrist allows the perfect opposite movement to occur without any collapse. It shows what gravity REALLY does in it's purest form (not what mistaken perceptions can lead to) and what two opposite actions interact to make stillness possible without stiffness. Surely this is the epitome of the unstable equilibrium- where the wrist can be supported by a combination of pull at the finger and counterforce via the arm? Excessive release would throw the balance as surely as anything- which is why it's all about sensitive proportion of release, not any nonsense about collapsing. What simpler way is there to find the physical necessity of a balancing force, in an arm that is not drawn forwards with each action- other than using a proportion of gravity's almost perfectly directed action? I cannot stress enough how valuable my lessons with you were but, right now, this understanding of how to balance the of using these natural actions of the hand has sent the basics on leaps and bounds further again- in terms of not merely reducing effort in my arms but in improving the hand's quality of action further still. I can do far more exagerrated and extreme actions from the hand, now that I have the understanding of how to absorb the greater forces that this sends back at me. Both sides of this mechanical interaction fuel each other. The reason I'm trying to integrate them is to avoid the possibility of slipping on one side of the equation. If one side goes too far from the balance, that also imposes limits upon the other.