Chapter 16

Briethaupt loves weight! His weight technique is certainly worth a place among all other methods. In my opinion, his studies have successfully brought out the idea of playing piano with the least tension. This is the basis of arm technique. Breithaupt has indeed gone to the extent of ‘no muscular movement’ which we all knew it’s a lie. But the microscopic analysis of the arm movements is definitely worthwhile to explore on. It’s true that among his books he published, he included quite a number of confusing ideas, yet the scientific observation is definitely very beneficial to all pianists. As a pianist I found myself too overly relied on feelings and lack of the cold-blooded scientific analysis of my own arms and also the instrument. Doing what Breithaupt suggested us to do might be a bit too much but having more knowledge of how our joints and muscles work while playing the piano would surely help improving our piano playing. As if we’ve discussed before, if we all have more critical self analysis and awareness towards our physical actions during practices, we could have saved a lot of time hitting our heads towards the wall.

There’re a couple of things that I am not totally agree with Breithaupt’s teaching. First I think the extent of relaxation is exaggerated. At some point I think he’s even suggesting anti-gravity, almost like your arms can float if you back off the muscular force. ‘Controlled weight’ sounds more realistic to me. The other thing I disagreed on is taking the weight technique totally out of musical context. I think technique always goes with what’s happening in the music. It is what the music demands the arms to do. At times we might need pure technical studies to brush up our tools, but we can never learn which tool to imply without learning music. Breithaupt’s studies neglected the necessity in knowing the implication of different techniques according to the musical context. In lack of this part of training would also resulted not being able to identifying the ‘good’ tones by ears, or even creating the sound image in the head before actually playing a piece. Also the attempt of giving everything a terminology complicates things. Maybe this is Breithaupt’s trick to make his studies sound more professional.

In my experience, learning and feeling the participation of arm weight in piano playing is a pretty abstract thing. But I think every instrument have its abstract part. For me, sometimes thinking of other instruments’ technique and sound might help in capturing the arm technique in piano. I also believe this is a life-long process. There’s not a point that ‘you now qualified as a perfect-arm-technique pianist’. The last thing I want to mention here is that the training of the arm weight couldn’t be separated with listening. After all, no matter what technique we’re applying on the piano, it is the sound produced that we want. We need to be first able to identify what good and bad sounds from the instrument first, then have the desire to produce that sound out of the musical context, and lastly know what technique to apply and execute it accurately.