Born in Montreal in 1955 Alan Fraser studied piano but also delved into composition, cello, classical singing and had several stints as a pop musician. Alan’s main pianistic influence was the pioneering research of Phil Cohen who studied alongside Ronald Turini, Andre Laplante and Janina Fialkowska with Yvonne Hubert, who had been Cortot‘s assistant in Paris. Alan spent several years with Cohen after an apprenticeship with two former Cohen students, Alan Belkin and Lauretta Milkman.
Alan breaks down how to make music feel disorienting, tense, and emotionally unsettling
Alan and Rafael critique the performance, focusing on physical techniques like thumb activation, correcting rhythmic err...
Think softening your thumb makes impressionist passages sound more delicate? Think again. In this lesson, we dig into me...
We finally addresse the age old question of finger curling, putting it into a more functional context of the hand's moto...
39:05 Chapter 27 pronates and supinates the hand while holding a large interval, to increase the suppleness of an octave...
Forte Flying Fox is explained and dispensed with in only a few seconds, integrating the movements of the previous chapte...
We explore growing the hand arch suddenly, as if the fingers were a diver's legs springing off a diving board
We explore keeping the hand supple in an octave by pronating it and supinating it while holding onto a large interval
Slinky Snail has the same kind of quick finger action, but while overholding - to inflate the hand in a deliciously free...
Free the arm and the fingers for maximum velocity
We are talking about extending the thumb without collapsing the hand arch structure
Activates the thumb, drawing it towards the fingers but in a moving way whether rather than a static, overly structured...
Walking between two Yang fingers instead of a Yin and a Yang finger
The Tai Chi empty step. Here we see the value of preparing the ground with the thumb individuation exercises of Section...
