To Alan Fraser: Peter Feuchtwanger - Ever Heard About Him?

Moshe Feldenkrais had an assistent who was married with a student of Peter Feuchtwanger. When Feldenkrais once saw, how the wife of his assistent and other students of Peter Feuchtwanger played the piano, he noticed that they behaved and moved completely natural, in total agreement with his insights and ideas on body- and movement functionality. Therefore he wanted to get to know their teacher. Several meetings took place. Feuchtwanger accounts: "Feldenkrais has worked with me and confirmed that, intuitively, I had done everything right and there was nothing to improve in my functioning." His "Piano Exercises for Curing Playing Related Disorderns and for Acquiring a Functional and Natural Approach to Piano Playing" have been published some years ago and can be obtained from his website (which contains, by the way, all of his essays on piano playing). www . peter - feuchtwanger . de / english / startenglish . html Best wishes, Paul

Having seen Feuchtwangers Video and reading his exercises, I do have to say that his aproach seems 'healthy'. But I also think that, at least in his published material, he is covering only a few aspects of piano technique.. especially repeated notes and 'skips'. One could almost get the impression, that most exercises are preparation for his piece "Tariqa" in the appendix.. I never saw/heard him live and I wonder, how he'd teach for example Chopin Op 10 No 1.. or something 'very legato'.... In the video, his hands -for me- look a little bit too relaxed. And for completeness sake: he also makes references to the Alexander Technique.

I attended one of his masterclasses last year. I don't know exactly how old he is, but it must something around 80. He did barely demonstrate anything, but maybe once or twice when there was a discussion on technique or so, someone asked if he could demonstrate some stuff like trills or scales. Having seen his hands on video (where they looked indeed totally untertensed and weak) I thouhgt that his attempt to demonstrate scales and trills would become a quite embarrassing thing...but WOW these lifeless seemingly untertensed hands seemed totally transformed...he played the most incredible scales and trills I've ever heard, incredibly fast, incredibly clean, incredibly BEAUTIFUL and with an ease and economy I have never seen with any other pianist (including horowitz and the likes). I just can't imagine ANY piece that he could not play...when you see him on the video you get a total wrong impression...maybe he wants to encourage the pianist to begin with too little tension, remember he said something like "at first most of us will have to play extremely loose in order to gradually build up a healthy, good tension" and never forget that "the exercises are not the technique itself but the WAY to good technique". best wishes, Paul

That is very interesting. Did he really categorically say that starting from 'very loose' going towards more healthy tension is the way he recommends ?

yes, it is in the exercise book! didn't you read all the essays before and after the part with the exercises? "At first one must completely abolish the tension, in order to build up a new, right tension. At the beginning one will therefore lack energy and feel week. But gradually just the right amount of tension will establish itself which will enable one to produce a big sound." Best wishes, Paul

yes, it is in the exercise book! didn't you read all the essays before and after the part with the exercises? "At first one must completely abolish the tension, in order to build up a new, right tension. At the beginning one will therefore lack energy and feel week. But gradually just the right amount of tension will establish itself which will enable one to produce a big sound." Best wishes, Paul Well... that is much better than many 'methods'. But it is also a bit vague in some circumstances. As far as I remember the book, he emphasizes that the fingertip initiates and the rest should freely follow. This is only one way to describe piano-playing, although it is of highest importance I think. If only all these intelligent people got together (let's call it a pianistic round-table ) and took the time to agree upon and define some common ground. Participants (in NO particular order!): Alan Fraser, Rudolf Kratzert, Peter Feuchtwanger, Dorothee Taubman, .... the list sure goes on. The problem (apart from financial/existential interests of teachers) could be that everyone thinks his/her approach is all-encompassing. Now this may be ok, IF pianoplaying remains a subjective matter and forever defies scientific evaluation and finding objective best-practices that are valid for everyone (which I think exist!). That would tremendously help in eliminating the tendency of thinking: "one approach is correct because it helped me some, and another approach sounds unfamiliar, so I won't take it too seriously"

Peter & I both presented at the EPTA UK annual conference in Bath, England a few years back. I had a great opportunity to familiarize myself with his work first hand, and although he didn't play himself, one of his students did a wonderful job of playing some exercises and also a couple of compositions that I really liked very much. Now about his technique. To my mind, it is great as far as it goes. He never mentions the arches of the hand, and I was interested to see whether this almost "flabby" starting point would lead his student into problems. Well, it was fascinating to see how the student would let the arch go completely whenever that was expedient, and whenever the arch was needed, it was THERE. He never spoke about it, but I saw! But would the others see - that is the question... Yes, we are all trying to arrive at a comprehensive piano technique; I say as much at the beginning of my film. The reason none of us (including myself) succeed is that we all have the same limitation: we must start from ourselves. My technical understanding developed the way it did because of WHAT WAS MISSING FOR ME. Peter developed his unusual approach from being self-taught and thus being free from the standard indoctrination. Students gravitate to a teacher who had similar technical problems to the student's - thus the student is in the hands of someone who knows how to solve those problems; someone who has already walked down that road. I went through a long period of thinking my approach was the best, because it addresses certain things that I don't see anybody else addressing, and those things are causing lots of problems in lots of pianists. However now I see that although I may help many pianists, there are many others whom I would hinder more than help, because their internal process doesn't match mine - they need a Dorothy Taubmann or a Peter Feuchtwanger or a Carola Grindea or whoever. And my 'method" is constantly changing and evolving, as I learn from people like Carola Grindea or Raymond Banning and try to develop my own playing, with which I am far from satisfied. What I DO try to address in my teaching and in the book and film is the tremendous potential for misunderstanding that exists in any "method." I try to cultivate an exactitude of language that attempts to minimize the possibility of someone taking what I have to say the wrong way and screwing up. However, by no means is that possibility eliminated - far from it! We acquire new knowledge and ability step by step, and inevitably we will take wrong turns - hopefully the system is set up so to make the process of self-correction accessible and straightforward.

Feuchtwanger says in an article on his website that in playing the piano "the keys are extensions of the fingers." He also says that the keys are not struck but manipulated. These assertions didn't mean much to me until recently, when I was reading a popular book on neuroscience (The Body Has a Mind of Its Own, by Blakeslee and Blakeslee). This book talks about how our brain maintains maps of each part of our body, and when we use tools, our brain expands its maps to include the tools. So, for instance, when we are eating with a knife and fork, our brain incorporates the utensils into its neural mapping of our hands, as if the knife and fork are actually extensions of our body. This allows us, among other things, to feel the detailed texture of the food we are manipulating, even though we are not directly touching it. Something similar happens when we use a toothbrush, or dig with a shovel, or walk on a pair of stilts. Our brain treats the tool as part of us, so we can create a detailed representation of the work we do with it, and use it efficiently. So what about piano? I decided to experiment. I wanted to see how it might change my playing if I treated the piano keys like any other tool, as extensions of my hands, . In this case, the individual key-tool extends through the piano's lever mechanism to the string, allowing us to indirectly feel the contact of the hammer with the string. That contact would now become the important one, rather than the more immediate contact of fingers with the keys. I set about trying to sense that my fingers were making contact with the strings by way of the playing mechanism, rather than thinking of my fingers as stopping at the keys. Well, it turns out that with this approach, right away I get a better sort of leverage that gives me a fine clear singing tone. But not only does it give me a better tone, it gives greater evenness to my playing, it enables greater speed, and greater control of relative volume. I can make quick movements more lightly and with more control (my trills are transformed!), I can consistently play chords so that the notes sound simultaneously rather than raggedly, and I make fewer mistakes overall. I can even produce a true legato, without practicing overholding to get it. In general, it gives me greater sensitivity to the interface between hammer and string. And I find that I can resolve a variety of specific technical issues just by making sure I'm maintaining the tool-extension idea for each note as I play slowly and repeatedly through a given problematic passage or figure. At first I could only get the right sensation one note at a time. But gradually this way of approaching the keys as tool-extensions of my fingers has started to happen more and more of the time, so that it is slowly getting integrated into all of my playing. When I relapse to the old way of approaching the keys (especially when I get tense), I can soon hear it in the poorer sound and the raggedness of my chords, and feel it in the sluggishness of my contact. That ready feedback helps to keep me focused and pull me back to the tool-extension idea. I don't have any video-making capability, so I can't show you what this looks like when I'm doing this, but f you want to see someone approaching the keys this way, look at any video of Jorge Bolet. I can't do even 1% of what he can do, but now I feel like I can share in a tiny part of his genius. (Of course, many other fine pianists presumably do it too but it really shows in the distinctiveness of Bolet's way of approaching the keys.) Having learned this, the various issues usually mentioned in discussion of piano technique--such as arm weight, relaxation, hand-drop, rotation, finger curvature, even the arch and skeletality--now seem distinctly secondary to me, like putting the cart before the horse. So much seems to fall naturally into place if I just do this one thing of treating the keys as extensions of my fingers. I did gain quite a lot of ground from Alan's approach, and it could be that it has enabled me to go to this next level in my playing. But I also think it is conceivable that players who know nothing about skeletality and the arch could be taught to use the keys as tool-extensions of the hands and might automatically begin to generate a better arch as they began to get the feel of the tool-extension idea. At the same time, as Alan noticed with Feuchtwanger's students, the arch presumably would be secondary to the integration from hands through keys to the strings, so that if it served some useful purpose to let the arch go now and then, they could do that, and the hand-key unity would be maintained even so. Anyway, maybe some of you will try out this approach and report what it does for you. --Rush

Dear Rush, This post is brilliant! You describe an amazingly potent process, and your description is wonderfully accurate and makes that process palpable for us. Moshe Feldenkrais would have loved this as well. As he said, he was trying to develop flexible brains, not flexible bodies... As for what you say at the end: " 'maybe' all Alan's stuff about the skeleton and hand's arch helped me get there... " That was exactly my intention. I am all too aware that the danger with 'my method' is to get bogged down in physical perceptions. I conceive all that 'physical' stuff as a preparation only. Some gestalt, some synthesis has to take place that can only happen in the context of an artistic process. What you describe is one such process - a way of becoming one with your material. It's exciting that you did it consciously. Mazeltov! AFF

Hi Alan, I figured you would appreciate this. Yes, the brain must be the key thing. The really big differences in skill and talent between people with roughly similar technique and similar bodies surely cannot be accounted for by overt physical issues. Think of all the cognitive functions that must go into high-level musical ability. There's attentional focus, working memory, reaction time, information processing speed, spatial memory, "executive control," error correction, task switching, pattern recognition, pitch and interval recognition and discrimination, and rhythmic processing and discrimination, to name some of the most obvious. I'd like to see the experts do cognitive assessments of a bunch of stand-out pianists, measuring the above functions, and compare their assessments to some run-of-the-mill folks (like me). Then we might find out which basic brain skills are especially well developed in the superior players, and with any luck, most of these skills would be separately trainable. (There is now a proliferation of "brain training" sites and companies on the web that already provide games and tests to train some of these functions.) I'm sure, for instance, that any musician who can beautifully shape a long musical phrase must have strong auditory "working memory" (working memory is what we use to keep information in mind while we're working with it). By contrast, students who can't "hear themselves" or who don't seem to listen to the shapes they are producing may well have poor auditory working memory. Strong working memory in turn apparently makes a person less susceptible to distraction, hence more able to focus and presumably less error prone. Working memory, though, is indeed separately trainable. Most of the brain training sites offer some form of training for working memory (though auditory training is less common than visual/spatial). --Rush