The piano as two different instruments/Note attack and decay

I guess I'm a bit lost here - what you describe sounds impossible to me so obviously I am not understanding something... AFF

Where do you have that discussion with kemal G about Horowitz playing soft? My mother heard him some times (befor his long abscence) and did the same observation.That's why his >mf are so efficient he keeps his cool and doesn't waste them as easily as I do. That was in my blog which unfortunately got infected by an MySQL something or other and my administrator had to take it offline. We want to put it back on but haven't managed to do so yet... Soon! AFF

I guess I'm a bit lost here - what you describe sounds impossible to me so obviously I am not understanding something... AFF Move the same way you move in your DVD with one modification: the starting position has the knuckles a bit more flattened than your typical position. Do not scratch, just move from the knuckles. (One feature of this is that the range of motion is increased. When one starts with a pronounced knuckle one "consumes" some of the range of motion of that joint.) ocd

Feels awkward to me! But like I said, we want as many different strokes as possible for maximum variety of colour, so if it works for you, more power to you! AFF

This is for me, actually a subset of a bigger problem. Remember the original objective of this thread was to get one important aspect of playing from something a bit ambiguous to something perfectly concise. I also want to do this with the standing finger - we know that if you stack your bones up a certain way, they won't collapse. But there a way to figure out precisely when this occurs? Is there some particular set of angles between the joints in the finger and the key where it is stable, and if you go outside this range, it collapses? No doubt something like this could probably be pretty involved with geometry or physics, but considering the crowd this forum has drawn I wouldn't be surprised if there was someone reading who knew exactly how it worked.

Feels awkward to me! But like I said, we want as many different strokes as possible for maximum variety of colour, so if it works for you, more power to you! AFF Isn't that essentially the Horowitz way though- where all the movement comes from the knuckle and the fingers are pretty flat? Or is this about something slightly different? Personally I'm keeping that as being my long-term objective for technique. After I have practised with the more pronounced knuckles for a time, I can often switch to the flat fingers and retain the comfort and balance (and gain the advantage of greater surface area on the keys). However, if I go straight into it, it doesn't always work very consistently. At the moment I'm making very consistent progress though, so I'm hoping to reach the point where the mechanism becomes solid enough to use flatter fingers as the most normal way (at least for lyrical passages, if not necessarily rapid fire semiquavers). I think the flaw in the Taubman method is that is doesn't seem to involve active grip in the final joint of the fingers. The finger seems to flaccid to me. Personally, I'm trying to find a point where the last joint grips enough to achieve solid contact with the key, but still with almost neglible curvature. I think this position ought to offer the strongest contact. The closer to being flat that joint is, the more pressure will be applied by gripping (although if it is completely flat and not pulling back at all, obviously you go back to minimal grip). If it comes back too far, the force from that joint begins to act on a horizontal, rather than vertically against the key itself (and the amount of flesh that grips the key is also reduced). I don't know anything close to enough about the complex physics and biology to speculate about the science behind lining up bones to stand up on each other, but it strikes me as being scientifically sound to suggest that a virtually flat finger (but importantly ones that DOES grip rather than merely sit on the key), is in a position to achieve a far more stable connection with the key, than a finger that has a pronounced curl. Of course, this relates purely to grip at the key itself however, without involving issues further back in the hand or arm- so it doesn't necessarily mean that this must be 'better' than other means. It's obviously a matter of weighing up this particular benefit against various other issues. However, I do remain very skeptical about the benefits of curving the fingers to an extreme. Still, I realised around Christmas time (when I was literally slipping off key after key, due to my poor grip) that this was the weakest link in my technique and since I found proper contact at that point, things have improved enormously. My 2nd fingers still end up playing on the nail very easily though (which has often caused painful bruising, in the past) so I actually need to minimise curling out of necessity. I'm finding this extremely hard in the Scriabin study op. 42 no. 5. As each left hand group begins, after the jump, my finger naturally tends to bend enormously and come down very uncomfortably on the nail. I haven't yet managed to find a way of avoiding this. I've noticed recently that some students have very long nails that, even when trimmed right down to the pink part, extend just as far as the fleshy part of the finger that normally protrudes above the nail. The only way they can comfortably play is with the kind of flatter approach mentioned above. Personally I have this on my 2nd, where there is virtually no flesh beyond the nail itself. I'm starting to seriously wonder if it would be a good idea to deliberately chew the nail down some of the way (like when you see people who have chewed down to tiny stumps of nail, with a huge lump of flesh beyond that point), in order to allow myself to play on flesh rather than nail. I couldn't exactly recommend this to such students, but I honestly think that for some people, it would be an excellent solution to a huge problem.

I also prefer playing with flat fingers it does add a bravura and sensitivity which couldn't be there otherwise. However since i started with the DVD and the book I've changed my views quite a bit. It's easy to mix up flat fingers and handposition.Recently I watched a video with Rubinstein playing in Moscow and he has pretty flat fingers but a very arched hand and so does Prats a marvelous pianist with a very intelligent relaxed technique.And a fantastic bright sound. Golfers have very different swings, and the same amount of esoteric discussions around different schools as pianists, but the last part of the swing before the hitting is almost identical for all pros proven by cameras. I agree that "active grip in the final joint of the finger"-as cziffra writes- probably is crucial besides that nothing can be acheived with a collapsed arch. This is the only part in the end that connects with the key and maybe we can as well unconsciensly "correct" momentary flaws in the posture if this part of the finger is sensitive. I still play with flat fingers a lot but I've changed the handposition to more like Prats. The sound is much more homogen and all is more relaxed. The mechanism became so to speak more solid just by altering the handposition. Horowitz technique looks very different from others but I have the impression that he does pretty much the same thing as other virtuosi does. It's not the flatfinger technique that differentiates him (it's not that flat) it's the economy of movement and nobody uses curled fingers more than he. I'm esoteric now but I've found that the more you try to imitate Horowitz the less you sound like him... Eric