I must confess I’ve found myself very guilty as pianist after playing the instrument for 20 years still only know very little about the construction of the keyboard and anatomy of my hands. Also in my past education I did not spend as much time analyzing the physical movements, or technique so to speak, particularly the involvement of the joints and arms. Strange enough I wasn’t raised from the lift-finger-high school of playing neither. Anyways, my whole point is, I’m not sure if it’s true for everyone, but I think the education trend, and perhaps also our culture, is leading us to ‘feel’ the music more than to intellectually analysis it. Yes this could be true, as we all agree ‘every technical issue has a musical solution’, the very feeling of music is our ultimate goal in music making. However I learnt that we often forgot that every problem we encountered with expressing musical meanings has a technical issue behind it. For too long we’re kept unknown to these knowledge and we tried to solve problems in more difficult ways by not going with the nature of the instrument and our hands. I think this is pretty essential in the learning process. We all should ‘cold-bloodily’ diagnose the problem and break it down into smaller units hence the physical principle behind it that we need to learn. In doing this I think we can struggle far less in ‘trying to get the music out of the instrument’ than we used to.
Frankly it is a bit overwhelming to read a chapter full of all these detail description of the pose and hand positions. I feel sorry for all these names because they were not as well known as they deserved to be, but apparently they did spend lots of time in their studies. Sadly though I couldn’t pick some specific ones to comment on because they all look pretty much similar to me in words. However I wonder how differ they would sound on the piano, which I couldn’t get from the book except those very vague descriptive vocabularies. In my opinion different approaches of technique has a lot to do with the different tones produced from the piano. I don’t think there’s an absolute technical solution or just a single ideal tone. Our differently built bodies, so as the pianos, determined us to play and project differently. I also think there’s more than just one good tone, or just one legato and staccato. I believe music is far more expressive than only that, thus we would need more than one approach in technique at times as the music requires.
I like your thoughts on analyzing our physical approach. It may seem 'cold-blooded', but it is important, and I think it can save time to know basic principles and your personal weaknesses when it comes to technique. When something does not sound the way you want it to, then, you could go through a checklist, so to speak.
ReplyDeleteI have say too that I did not spend much time on the physical approach of my hands and arms toward the piano. And I was taught the idea of 'feeling' the music for expressing emotion, or at least I have always assciated 'feeling' with expression. The idea to technically analyze music to get a good tone is relatively new to me but it makes good sence I think.
ReplyDeleteI agree with the need to have the ability to dissect the problems we face in order to find the best solution. Often many of these solutions are very simple and easy, we just don't take the time to think about it. For example, I was having trouble with a staccato run. I could not execute it with every note staccato and was slurring some of the notes. On one of my auditions, a teacher asked where the specific problem was. I was able to locate which specific note I could not play staccato. He then asked why I could not do so. He asked me to think about the design of the piano. The black keys are further back from the white keys. I listed other simple observations I could make. After not listing the one he was looking for, he explained that the note I was having trouble with was the only black key, and as simple as it is, black keys are higher than the white keys, and therefore, we have to lift our fingers a little more than we would for the white keys. The problem was fixed almost instantly, but it took that type of dissection in order to figure it out.
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