Thomas Mark: What Every Pianist Needs to Know About the Body

Thomas Mark has written a fine work bringing to light many crucial aspects of how the human body moves that, until now, have remained in the dark. The illustrations and the practical exercises to educate the bodys feeling make the abstract concrete (a favorite phrase of Moshe Feldenkraiss to describe the aim of his own Method) in a tremendously empowering way, and do so while avoiding tedious, overly technical language.

Body Mapping
Mark mentions Body Mapping, the process whereby different parts of the body that may take part in a certain movement are brought into ones sensory awareness. This of course is a key process - perhaps even the core process - of both the Alexander Technique and Feldenkrais Method of somatic education, and readers are advised to practice such disciplines if they wish to make best practical use of the information found in these pages.

Welcome to Reviews on Piano Technique.net, a site devoted to comparing and evaluating the various approaches to piano technique on the market today. 100 years ago Germany, France, Russia and England each had their version of the finger action school, and were developing the arm weight techniques of Deppe and Breithaupt in Germany and Matthay in England as well as a more active use the arm to produce rich tone in Russia. Pianistic lineages had evolved stemming from the great pianist-composers: the Beethoven-Czerny-Liszt line in Germany, the Chopin-....-Cortot line in France, and Anton and Nikolai Rubinstein and their descendants - Goldenweiser, Neuhaus, Essipova, Tatyana Nikolayeva et. al. - that formed the nucleus of the Russian school. Chapter One In Basic Concepts, Mark points out the dangers of understanding technique only in terms of finger movements, and cites several 20th century pioneers (Otto Ortmann, Arnold Schultz, Dorothy Taubmann) who break new ground in understanding the involvement of the whole body in playing. He then goes on to explain how we can involve our bodies more - by cultivating the kinesthetic sense. He stresses the need to train the attention, because parts of the body that are not included in our awareness are likely to become fixed, immoveable. Playing with the whole body He suggests improving the body map to develop a better functionality The body map is the self-representation that governs movement. A person may know about the structure of the

body, but if that knowledge does not govern the persons movement, it is mere intellectual knowledge and not a part of the body map. The body map corollary in Feldenkrais is selfrepresentation, or the self-image, the improvement of which is a key component of that method. Mark continues: Many pianists are unaware of their torso, back, pelvis or other body parts as they play They are disembodied, out of touch with their own bodies. To remedy this situation he recommends beginning by attending to tactile sensations of all kinds, and later on offers specific strategies for developing awareness of those parts of ourselves especially important to playing the piano. Finally, in Kinesthetic & Musical Imagination, Mark writes wonderfully on the organic relationship between the way we move and our musical conception. The continuing enrichment of our kinesthetic awareness will influence our musical conception, and the ongoing refinement of our musical conception will further develop our proprioceptive sense. Chapter Two Mapping the Structure provides a clear, comprehensive account of the main supportive parts of our skeleton - the legs and torso. Most importantly, he explains the crucial function of this skeletal structure. The Spine His discussion of the spinepoints out that a fixed spine is a non-functional one, that leads to non-functional piano playing. Mark takes great care to discuss the entire body rather than focusing on the hand and arm alone. He aims well when he aims to help pianists involve their whole body in playing. His description of the spines natural capacity to lengthen and gather with the in and out breaths is wonderfully empowering. The simple practice of trying to feel this natural function in yourself, and monitoring what you may have been doing to inadvertently inhibit it, can totally transform not only your posture but the way your hands feel on the keys. Chapter Three Mapping the Places of Balance deals with the articulations of the skeleton, the places where movement takes place. His wonderful discussion of Posture vs. Balance is a vivid illustration of Feldenkraiss concept of unstable equilibrium, though Mark never actually uses that terminology. He expresses well the key concept that a posture held rigidly is of no use, and must be moveable to be potent. He describes how the body is a marvelous feat of engineering designed to rise up elegantly in the downward pull of gravity, and lists key places of flexibility where alternately losing and recovering balance are constant functions that keep us in good movement health. Mark stresses that the illustration of a standing skeleton with several points of balance all vertically aligned does not show how we must always stand: As I move and perform different actions, I will continually depart from balance and return to it. Balance is not a stance or position but a means of organizing movement, a place of reference, that place from which movement in any direction is easiest. (p. 36-7) This statement correlates wonderfully

with Feldenkraiss concept of the neutral point, the position in which you possess the greatest amount of potential energy. The Head Mark says that the head balances exactly on the top vertebra of the spine, the atlas, and offers several awareness exercises to help the reader approach this state, which relieves pressure on the entire spine underneath (p. 38-9). Although this is virtually true, in practice the head is held very slightly tilted forward, and the extensor muscles maintain just a bit of tonus to keep it from falling further. Thus we can understand Horowitzs posture, straight back with head bowed forward in concentrated listening, not as an aberration but an expression of excellent body organization. This is a slightly more practical arrangement than absolute, precise balance of the head, but most of us would improve much by even approaching the quality of balance that Mark describes. Sitting Mark then discusses sitting in a back-oriented way, where you perceive your spine as just under the surface of the back. In reality, the weight-bearing spine is closer to the core of the body, midway between the back and the front of the chest. Perceiving this can lead us closer to balanced sitting. Mark correctly points out that many pianists do sit in a back-oriented way, stiffening their torsos and drastically limiting movement. I myself have tended to sit in a front -oriented way, where my body is overly flexed or hunched and thus, once again, restricted in its movement - another possible anomaly that Mark neglects to mention. Thus for me, the discovery of a wider, taller and more expansive feeling in my back was wonderful. For me, becoming more back-oriented improved my sitting by moving me closer to a core orientation. The direction in which you may improve depends largely on your initial subjective perception. The Legs Mark says that in sitting the legs are out of the way and the torso is balanced over the sitz bones (p. 46). But the legs do play a role in sitting: they act as pontoons, an important means of fine tuning balance of the upper body. Mark also points out that in sitting down, many people bend at the waist instead of the hip joints, thus losing postural balance. Feldenkrais teaches an effective way of moving from sitting to standing by avoiding any stress in the legs or torso but merely rocking forward until the weight of the torso itself pulls the bodys center of gravity forward until it comes off the sitz bones to hover over the feet. At this point, it is merely a matter of straightening the legs to stand up. The reverse process, where you dont think of sitting down but of squatting, but at a certain point your rear end kisses the chair as if by accident, is what Mark describes as mainly a bending of the hip joints, knee joints, and ankles. Bench Height Some years ago a colleague of mine, Natasha Dukan, enrolled at Peabody Conservatory as a graduate student in piano. When she arrived, she was astonished at how high everybody sat, and she had a problem finding benches that were low enough for her to sit comfortably. She also noticed that nobody else could produce the big Russian sound that is one of the trademarks of her playing. Theres a corollary here. Mark says that most people sit too low,

but here I would venture to disagree. Perhaps he feels this way because injury avoidance issues, but too much is lost in terms of sonoric possibilities by sitting high. The human body is very adaptable, and the physics of piano playing dictate a lower bench height as most useful for producing the maximum sonority. Many pianists such as Hoffman, Horowitz, or more recently Kemal Gekich provide ample demonstration of this, although others have indeed produced wonderful sonorities with a higher bench height - in the end, bench height is an individual matter. Chapter Four In Mapping of the Arm and Hand, Mark continues to stress the moveability of each part of the skeletal system, and how important it is to avoid fixation. Mark is wonderfully diplomatic: he himself avoids referring to the great author-pedagogues of the past who did indeed advise fixation, and simply concentrates on the task at hand, coming to an as complete and up-to-date understanding of human movement function as possible. The arm attaches to the breastbone Mark points out that the arm does not end at the shoulder; rather, the shoulder blade and collarbone are an integral part of the arm. He quotes neurologist Frank R. Wilson: the hand is an integral part of the entire arm, a specialized termination of a crane-like structure suspended from the neck and upper chest. Mark continues, The arm structure attaches to the skeleton in only one place, the sterno-clavicular joint, where the collarbone meets the breastbone. The Hand is a Group of Fingers He later points out that the fingers end not at the metacarpal-phalangeal joint (the top knuckle), but at the wrist: Pianists should map their hands on the basis of the underlying sturcture, not the appearance. We should feel that our fingers do not end at the knuckles, they end only at the carpo-metacarpal joint - where they connect with the wrist bones - and they include the metacarpal bones. Thus Mark says that we basically do not have hands, only fingers and wrists, and if we feel and experience ourselves as such, our hands function much better on the keyboard. He also points out how many of us fail to use the powerful third part of the thumb, the joint closest to the wrist. A wonderful exercise is offered where you fold the thumb over to meet the fifth finger, noticing that both the thumbs and the fifth fingers metacarpal bones move closer together, not only the phalanges Mark encourages the reader to investigate these facts and most importantly, to feel them in ones own body - this is how this information becomes not only useful but transformative to ones playing. Chapter Five In Mapping Muscles, Mark begins by illustrating three layers of muscle in the torso: the deep and intermediate layers that control the bodys core, and then the sheath of the superficial layer, muscles that entirely envelope the back and chest, and which are devoted entirely to controlling the arms. These illustrations alone are worth the price of the book. An underlying

confusion concerning function leads to many of our bad posture habits. If the muscles governing the core dont do their job well, the arm muscles feel the need to help support the core, thus reducing their own capacity to move the arms effectively (this is another instance of muscular co-dependence - the same phenomenon whose occurrence between thumb and hand is discussed in my film The Craft of Piano Playing). Simply developing the capacity to feel these distinctions of function between layers of muscle in our torso can lead to a vast improvement in our technique, and Marks illustrations offer us an effective means of doing so. The Back as a Dual Suspension Bridge Later on, Mark shows how the arm hangs from the dual suspension bridgemuscular arrangement of the back.

Chapters Six to Nine Further chapters map Muscles, Breathing, and the Piano itself before Mark turns his attention to some Additional Concerns of Organists and finally, Injuries. These all present a goldmine of not only useful but fascinating information about the instrument we use to play our instrument. A Few Problematic Points The pelvis and the spine In Marks discussion of the sacrum (the central part of the pelvis - p. 20), he says that the pelvis does not participate in spinal movement. But from a functional viewpoint, the pelvis is the lowest vertebra of the spine, the point at which the spine connects directly to the legs through the hip joints. A few pages later he implies as much himself, noting that the spine of a pianist with a fixed pelvis cannot lengthen and gather. Cultivating the image of a pelvis as a unified part of the spine is simpler, more elegant, and more useful than introducing the complexity of the sacrum, iliae and isciae as separate entities. The problem of deducing function from construction rather than from required actions Understanding function from the point of view of how the body is constructed can lead to different conclusions than looking at it from the point of view of the action needed. The

former limits functionality; the latter capitalizes on the bodys wonderful capacity to adapt. Mark runs into this problem in two key areas: ulnar deviation and the hands arch structure. Ulnar Deviation (pp. 82-86) Mark rightly notes that the forearm rotates around the ulna: the radius moves while the ulna stays stationary. He calls movement that respects this aspect of structure fifth-finger oriented movements. He illustrates how the hand reaches out from the forearm in a straight line when it is fifth-finger oriented, whereas it is turned to the outside when it is thumb-oriented. This position is ulnar deviation, and Mark says it is bad, that it leads to tension and injury. Mark also mentions another school of thought that encourages ulnar deviation, because this has the advantage of equalizing the length of the five fingers. When the hand is positioned straight on to the keyboard, the thumb is much shorter and much further away from the keys. For the thumb to even reach the keys, the fingers must venture into the black key area. Ulnar deviation has the positive effect of bringing the thumb into the keyboard, making it equal in length to the fifth finger, greatly facilitating ease of navigation. However, Mark doesnt mention a further negative aspect to ulnar deviation: it tends to deform and thus destabilize the double arch structure of the hand (see below). And although the thumb is shorter than the fingers, its entire construction is different from that of the fingers, so trying to equalize them entirely is not necessarily a good thing. It actually feels good to nestle the fingers in amongst the black keys thus creating a nice space for the thumb on the keyboard. Mark intelligently approaches this complex question from the point of view of function rather than position: he notes that it is not the position itself that is dangerous, but the quality of movement with which you reach the position, and he says that it is possible to deviate effectively and without risk of injury. However, he notes that most pianists who do deviate are at risk, because they havent learned to organize themselves well in doing so (or in his terminology, the movement hasnt been properly mapped). The bottom line seems to be, if you map your hand and arm structure well, most of the time you will find a way to move effectively without ulnar deviation (because your structure dictates it so), and you will also be able to manage situations when some ulnar deviation is necessary. Ulnar Deviation and Rotation Mark says that pianists who rotate their forearm in a thumb oriented way are at risk whereas those who are fifth finger oriented are not. Hold a note with your fifth finger and raise your thumb to the sky. Rotate your thumb all the way to the outside, past your fifth finger that still holds its note. This is an easy movement, because the radius, which rotates in an arc to move your thumb, is not attached to the elbow. Only the ulna is attached to the elbow, and it remains stationary. This is Marks fifth finger oriented rotation. Try the same movement but holding a thumb note and lifting your fifth finger. Now your radius is fixed and it is the ulna that must move through an arc. This would seem to be thumb oriented forearm rotation, which Mark says is the result of mismapping the radius as the stationary bone, and feels stiff and awkward compared to little finger orientation (p. 83).

However, this movement is often needed in piano playing, tremolando octaves being the most obvious case. It can be accomplished smoothly and fluidly because of the arms unique construction: as the ulna is attached to the humerus, it cant rotate freely unless it gets help from higher up: the elbow rises and so the rotation now involves the upper arm as well as the forearm. Thus your fifth finger lifts not because of a thumb oriented forearm rotation but because the humerus rotates in the shoulder socket, lifting the ulna in space. Mark does mention rotation of the humerus as one of the three rotations of the arm that should be a part of the pianists body map (p. 87), but neglects to point out that its the practical way of achieving this quasi-thumb-oriented forearm rotation in a functional way. The Arches of the Hand Mark has a wonderful illustration of the foot, showing how both its longitudinal and transverse arches serve to bear the weight of the body coming down through the leg.

It is fascinating to see how the foots arch works in a similar way to the corollary arch of the hand on the keyboard. But Mark perceives the hands arch as extending not from fingertip to wrist but from fingertip to elbow. I believe he does this assuming that, because the construction of the hand is different from that of the foot, its function must be different as well. There is no leg bearing down on the metacarpal-phalangeal joint of the hand - instead, the arm is attached horizontally at the wrist, and so Mark envisions a different kind of arch comprising both hand and forearm.

There are several potential problems with this. Cultivating the natural double arch structure of the hand itself empowers the hand, enriching piano tone and avoiding injury. Pianists such as Yonty Solomon and Carola Grindea (protgs of Dame Myra Hess and excellent purveyors of Matthay school of Arm Weight), Horowitz, Rubinstein, Arrau, Argerich and others all demonstrate the practical truth of this. The metacarpal-phalangeal joint of the hand is equivalent to the ankle joint of the foot: Heinrich Neuhaus describes putting his full weight on the students hand to make that arch feel its function, just as the bodys weight comes down through the leg to the ankle forces the foots arch to do its work.

The danger of taking the wrist as keystone as Mark does is the potential of severely limiting the hands functionality. It potentially undermines one side of the arch whose peak is the metacarpal-phalangeal joint, drastically reducing strength of tone, hampering facility and even increasing the risk of injury. Careful observation of Horowitz, Rubinstein and others shows that they use the arch structure of the hand alone (metacarpal-phalangeal joint as keystone) when the dynamic level is not high, but always shift to the wrist-as-keystone as Mark describes when playing louder passages. Most important is that when theyshift to the wrist-as-keystone, they do not abandon the potency of the metacarpal-phalangeal joint - it stays fully viable and active rather than collapsing. Thus the denominator common to both these scenarios is the potent, effective action of the lumbrical-interosseous muscles. When these do their work, there is no danger of the metacarpal -phalangeal keystone collapsing, and the elbow-to-fingertip arch structure can indeed function effectively. The few points in which my view differs from Marks in no way reduce this reviewers fervent endorsement of this book. Marks whole book is wonderfully effective at empowering pianists by having them make better use of their skeletal structure, and I personally have benefited a great deal from his clear and cogent discussion. We can all be grateful that Thomas Mark has invested so much of his intelligent speculation in this fruitful investigation of how the human body works in movement at the piano.

Charles Aschbrenner and Pulse Patterning

Charles Aschbrenner has studied Dalcroze, Alexander Technique and Feldenkrais Method, and brings his experience of all these body modalities to bear on his understanding of piano technique. He zeroes in on rhythm as a key element of piano technique, and has discovered how the whole body involves itself in a specific way to generate the regular pulses underlying a healthy and musical pianistic performance. Healthy pulse originates in the pelvis (the bodys center of gravity and the point at which all the bodys most powerful muscles attach).

In well-organized sitting, as the pelvis rocks slightly forward it lifts the spine into extension the spine straightens up. As the pelvis rocks back again, the spine becomes more flexed, the back rounds itself. These whole torso movements are profoundly related to the generation of rhythmic pulse. In Aschbrenners experience, a subtle rocking of the pelvis forward transmits through the torso, arm, hand and fingers and enters the key as a rhythmic impulse. This pulse has an organic, integrated quality totally different from what you get by merely banging the key to make an accent. Accents generated locally have a superficial character to them. Pulse generated with the whole body is a powerful musical force: listeners can almost feel the rhythm physically moving them.

Ask a student (one who has a natural physical relationship to the piano and is not overly tense or overly phlegmatic) to play a series of slow, strong chords with a rhythmic accent on each one. Observe closely and you will see the students pelvis moving forward to generate the pulse even if she or he doesnt think about it the body naturally organizes itself to produce the pulse in the most efficient way. If you now ask the student to make a strong impulse on only every second chord, you should see the corresponding pelvic motion also on only every second chord. Its not necessarily a huge movement but definitely visible. If by chance the student doesnt do this pelvic rocking, try gently placing your hands on the upper ridge of the pelvis along the students sides and back, and gently encourage the rocking to happen. Subtly coax the movement into being instead of forcing it. Did you notice that in the moment when the student gets the connection, the sense of pulse in his or her sound becomes more palpable? When I first read about this and tried it, I used fairly big movements I noticed the powerful relationship of the pelvis to rhythmic pulse generation, but I felt kind of awkward. When I tried to involve my pelvis that way, I tended to overdo it. Then I had the chance to witness Charles demonstrating this technique (MTNA-CFMTA Joint Annual Meeting, Toronto 2007), and it was totally different to what I had done. The movements of the pelvis were so small as to be invisible from a distance but the profound change in the piano sound when he did the technique is something I shall never forget. A phrase that had been distinctly mundane and prosaic became sinuous, poetical, an utterance of sheer beauty. And Charles explained that the tiny movements of the pelvis are not just forward and back, but also side to side and all around the circle, similar to the movements of the classic Feldenkrais Pelvic Clock Awareness Through Movement lesson. Thus the entire choreography of a phrase can be mapped on to the pelvis or reflected in its movement. In the end it is not even clear whether the pelvis is actively generating phrase pulse and shape, or whether it is simply responding passively to the shape intention manifested by the player. Theres a synchronicity between the parts, a unity of intention and a physically organic way of manifesting that intention that makes other efforts seem pale and ordinary by comparison Many now recognize the important role the body plays in performance, but the torsos extravagant swaying and dipping we see so often actually works against effective body involvement. So much effort is needed to counteract the destabilizing effect of the swaying, that in the end little or no body movement is transmitted through to musical expression. Here unfortunately body shaping does not equal musical shaping. Aschbrenners Pulse Patterning offers the performer the combination of core stability and moveability that gives the bodys flexible involvement in the subtle gestures of advanced phrase shaping real integrity. Pulse Patterning never claims to be a comprehensive or complete approach to piano technique. But it does offer the pianist a crucial missing piece of the overall puzzle, a piece for the most part not discussed in other approaches.

Seymour Fink: Mastering Piano Technique

Seymour Fink has written a thorough and highly useful book taking the pianist through preparatory exercises both away from and at the piano, to get all the muscles needed in piano playing working in a coordinated, effective way. The exercises succeed in stimulating vital activity of the main piano playing muscles, enhancing the smooth easy execution of rotation, leaping and many other movements commonly done at the keyboard.

Fink tells the reader/viewer to do the beginning exercises away from the piano. This has the positive, intended effect of helping students to free themselves from their habitual movement habits and develop fresh, effective, new ones. However, this does make it more difficult to integrate the newly learned movement patterns to related passages in the repertoire. The exercises Fink presents are insightful, effective and relevant, and he eventually does always links physical action to musical result. However at certain points the link is not particularly strong and so the exercises tend to take on a sometimes slightly theoretical or at other times athletic character. Book and film are designed to be used together: I found the film especially helpful: seeing the exercises on screen proved a greater stimulation to my immediately doing them and understanding just how to do them.
The Potent 5th Finger and the Overall Geometric Design of the Human Hand There is a fascinating film kicking around the Feldenkrais community showing babies learning to sit up, crawl, stand and walk. It is fascinating to see their amazingly plastic, malleable bodies suddenly find the angle between two bones that allows leverage leading to a new locomotive ability. The angles are always right angles: it is visually palpable, the limbs locking in to a 90 degree angle and whoops, up the bottom comes or up the torso comes... Seymour Fink demonstrates the pianistic equivalent beautifully in Section 12B of Mastering Piano Technique. He pulls on his fifth finger and the whole hand comes up into a standing position where you can feel the potency of its right angled structure. Fink has attempted to cover all the main movements in piano playing and to provide the student with a really comprehensive regime for developing ones technique. However, he has also said that it is Mastering Piano Technique in tandem with Alan Frasers The Craft of Piano Playing that presents a truly global view of piano technique. Alan Fraser and The Craft of Piano Playing Alan Fraser is the junior member of the group of pedagogues whose work is reviewed on these pages. Born and raised in Montreal, his first exposure to physical issues in piano technique was through his teacher Phil Cohen, a student of Yvonne Hubert who herself studied with Alfred Cortot in Paris, and who produced such luminaries as Janina Fialkowska, Andre Laplante, Ronald Turini, Marc Andre Hamelin, Marc Durand and Louis Lortie. Cohen focused on the choreographic movement of the arm to sculpt exact phrase shapes

instead of using the arm for generic relaxation movements. Cohen also knew which arm movements would best cultivate the healthy maintenance of the hands natural arch structure, and which ones work against that structure. By subtle touch he could involve the whole body in a balanced way in producing tone, and the effect was a profound relaxation which left one empowered and aware rather than limp. After ten years in the Cohen school and a Masters Degree at McGill University under Tom Plaunt, Fraser was looking for a way to globalize the exciting principles he had been exposed to by Cohen. The teachings of Moshe Feldenkrais, nuclear physicist, mechanical and electrical engineer and European judo champion, seemed to offer the most scientific body of knowledge and practice, and so Fraser undertook a training in Feldenkrais Method. One month before his 4-year professional training in the Method was to start, Fraser heard Kemal_Gekic play at the Montreal International Piano Competition, and his world changed. This pianist had the physical poise, the athletic prowess, the blistering octaves, blazing passagework and exquisitely poetic, sinuous singing lines of a Horowitz, and the appearance of his hands on the keys was very different from those of average pianists (as Horowitzs were too). Could there be a connection between the look of the hand and the phenomenal sounds coming out of the Steinway? Here was the chance for Fraser to analyze a consummate piano technique at close quarters and to define the nuts & bolts of optimal movement at the piano. He moved to Yugoslavia and for the next 20 years worked with Gekic while developing his Feldenkrais skills. And he developed a series of exercises to evoke Gekics exceptional physical organization from hand structure & function to the optimal involvement of the arm and whole body in himself and others. As Gekics assistant at the Art Academy of the University of Novi Sad, Fraser saw his job as empowering the students physically to be more able to fulfill the musical intentions Gekic was demanding of them. This is how Fraser developed Craft of Piano Method as presented in The Craft of Piano Playing (book published by Scarecrow Press, 2003, DVD released by Maple Grove Music Productions, 2006). Craft of Piano Method encompass aspects of both the finger action and arm weight schools, linking both of these back to the hands innate structure and function to define exactly which elements of these older, alternately revered and reviled schools can still prove useful to us today. Kinesthetic Learning Fraser consciously cultivates kinesthetic learning, enhancing our natural learning processes through the improved functioning of the sensory-motor feedback loop (our neuromotor systems means of communication). Each chapter or section begins with exercises that minimize effort and maximize richness of sensation. This conscious lowering of effort allows the brain to create a richer and more exact kinesthetic picture of the fingers, hand and arm. The brain can now create new patterns of movement based on the new enriched body image. This is a fundamental learning process, one far older than verbal conceptualization and far more primordial: it is the brains basic mode of acquiring new physical ability, present and active in infants from birth. Subsequent exercises in each chapter increase effort and activity, allowing pianists to integrate the newly acquired capability into their daily keyboard regime. A crucial difference

This evolution from low-effort, sensory-rich exercises to more vigorous ones in each chapter points out a key difference between Fraser's approach and several others that specialize in healing and reducing the risk of performance injury. Whereas Fraser advocates and cultivates the same relaxation as they do, the crucial reduction of effort needed to free our hands and arms from bad movement habits, he doesn't stop there but moves on to introduce a new, vital form of hand activation based on the skeleton's innate structural power and the neuro-motor system's incredibly sophisticated means of controlling that skeleton. Hand Structure & Function The DVDs crucial first chapter addresses hand structure and function, zeroing in on its natural arch shape that must be stable and yet remain moveable if it is to stay functional:

He also shows how grasping, the fundamental action of the hand, generates that potent arch and thus plays a crucial role in virtually all piano playing even though the keyboard is flat and it would seem you cant easily grasp it:

Fraser makes a beautiful visual comparison between the arches of the hand and the arches of a cathedral: Fraser departs from optimal keyboard hand position Note that to demonstrate his hand's 4-ribbed double arch structure, Fraser departs significantly from the hand's optimal shape in piano playing. Fraser's metacarpal ridge slopes down from the 2nd to the 5th knuckle, which on the keyboard would rob the 5th finger of much needed structural support from the hand. His hand would fare much better if the 2nd and 5th knuckles remain more or less level - as they would if the thumb were not being used at all, as with the harpsichordists of old. This is clearly demonstrated in Seymour Fink, chapter 12B (link). Legato Fraser then address legato (DVD chapter 2, book chapter 10), which he takes to be the physical and musical foundation of piano technique. He shows how virtually none of us have really mastered a true physical legato, and how we continue to fail in really playing legato because we think we can already do so. The simple act of truly joining two notes galvanizes the hands innate arch structure into potent standing, forcing or rather encouraging the hands skeletal structure to rise up into its natural dome shape, simply in order to truly control the joining of the two keys. It also creates the aural illusion of a singing line, because holding two keys down for an instant in time blends their sounds in the ear, which interprets the resulting dissonance as a true melodic join. Fraser first demonstrates this ability in slow motion, allowing the viewer/reader to gain maximal physical appreciation of the new sensations involved. He then moves to overholding

and other exercises designed to consolidate this newly learned function. This approach differs radically from the Taubman theory that grasping and hanging on should be avoided as potentially leading to injury. Fraser shows us how to access the hands structural potency to grasp effectively, hang on fluidly, and thus expand our pianistic capability. The Thumb The thumb is the next stop in Frasers pianistic investigation (DVD chapter 3, book chapters 12-16). Similar to Seymour Fink, Fraser sees the thumb as a unique digit so different in its movement from the fingers that it can be virtually be considered another hand. One key theme is pianistic co-dependence, the idea that when thumb and hand mess with each other instead of leaving each to do its own job effectively, weakness and a disempowerment of the hands potent structure result. Fraser devotes so much attention to the thumb's role as a potent, moveable part of the hand because it tends to be one of the 'blind spots' in a pianist's self awareness. Fraser goes on to give many more exercises developing the thumbs sensitivity, strength, independence, and unique capacity for movement, showing how when the thumb is fully potent, the whole hand experiences a profound empowerment. Octaves & Chords Octaves & Chords (DVD chapter 4, Book chapters 17-23) get special attention because we tend to stiffen the hand into immobility to maintain the shape of an octave or chord. Fraser begins by teaching our hand to let go of the tendency to stretch against inner resistance when it expands. Though he seems to contradict his cultivation of the hand's potent arch structure, it is crucial to release unwanted tension from the hand: this is a preparatory step in rendering the hand more functionally powerful. When the hand learns to relax into an extension, it often gets perceptibly larger as it lies on the keyboard. A hand that can remain moveable in extension can continue to move the fingers independently while playing octaves and chords, making the sound blossom and acquire richer colour. Brilliant splashes of chromatic interlocking octaves close out this chapter to show that relaxation isnt an end in itself but can lead to a surprisingly brilliant and powerful sound. The Arm Fraser first demonstrates the various wrong uses of the arm commonly seen in pianists (DVD chapter 5, Book chapters 28-34). Some of these may be distressingly familiar to the viewer, but recognizing a problem is the first step to resolving it. He then shows how the arm plays a crucial role in Pulse generation Hand orientation Tone enrichment (arm weight) Phrase shaping Take special note of Frasers humorous illustration of relaxation taken to the extreme (DVD chapter 5 part v) this is one of the many instances in this film where Fraser entertains even as he educates.

Rotation Fraser also looks at rotation (DVD chapter 6, Book chapter 35), presenting a whole new take on this controversial and potentially confusing movement component. The hand is seen to subtly rotate through groups of notes in scales and arpeggios, facilitating the smooth melodic transition along with the choreographing arm. But rotation can also completely eliminate the sense of leaping when the hand must fly to a distant area of the keyboard. Aural Entasis The Enhancement of Pulse, Phrase & Orchestration Fraser takes a break from the physical aspects of technique to discuss how the careful distortion of pulse, melodic shape or harmonic colour can actually enhance the innate musical content, making it more expressive by bringing its unique internal characteristics of shape and content into heightened profile instead of distorting those characteristics (DVD chapter 7, Book chapters 3, 51-58). Maximal Finger Articulation The final chapter of the DVD integrates all that has come before, bringing it all together to create the palpable and visceral vitality that characterizes a healthy and capable technique (DVD chapter 8, book chapters 24-27). He shows how to raise the fingers in an integrated way creating no tension but rather empowering the fingers to feel their full potential for powerful yet sensitive movement. He also takes a look at hyper-curling the fingers for a super-articulated staccato. The common thread of logic running through the entire chapter is to maximize the colours one can draw from the instrument: it turns out this is best achieved by developing a physical coordination also guaranteed to leave one free from injury for a lifetime.

The Craft of Piano Playing represents a new stage in the development of piano pedagogy an approach that respects both the finger action and arm weight schools, an approach that includes the various forms of relaxation needed to treat performance injury but that also goes beyond, reconstituting and restoring to the hand its natural power to make it a fully capable, totally healthy entity.

Carola Grindea and Grindea Technique

Carola Grindea was a protg of Dame Myra Hess who herself studied with Tobias Matthay, the first and primary proponent of arm weight technique in Great Britain. She is the founder of the European Piano Teachers Association (EPTA)and more recently of the International Society for the Study of Tension in Performance (ISSTIP). When she dies last year at age 95, amazingly she was still going strong teaching and conducting clinics for focal dystonia, tendonitis and other performance injuries in Central London.

Carola once told me the story of her arrival in London in 1939 with a letter of introduction to Myra Hess. When she and her husband, literary mogul Miron Grindea rang the doorbell and were ushered in, they were surprised to see the two concert Steinways covered over with tarpaulin. War had been declared, and these instruments will never sound again until this calamity is over, said Dame Myra. No, this cannot be, was the young Carolas reply, Your music is a crucial asset to the war effort you must play to keep our morale up. And so the famous Tate Gallery concerts came into being every single day throughout the war there was courageous music-making at the Tate, often under blackout and with the sound of bombs falling as a background, and much of it by Dame Myra herself. Carola Grindea was one of the first pedagogues to focus serious attention on the problem of performance injury, and she rightly saw the relaxation inherent in arm weight technique (when done properly) as crucial to the resolution of many injury conditions. Her video focuses on simple relaxation techniques such as lifting the arms high overhead on a deep in-breath, then letting them flop down on the exhalation. Do you feel how much more relaxed your shoulders are? Now you can play with real absence of tension To evoke relaxation in the wrist, Carola has the student play a chord and flop the wrist entirely, so the hand almost falls off the keyboard but does just manage to play the chord. When I first saw Carola demonstrating these things in a London workshop, my reaction was, Jeez, here Ive gone and spent 4 years and $20,000 on a Feldenkrais training when all I had to do was lift my arms up and let them drop! I thought she was drastically oversimplifying the matter. But later while observing her private work I saw just how effective these simple techniques can be. It all depends on the students mindset some seek understanding as well as resolution, others simply want to feel better and are not that introspective or speculative about how its done. Simple, straightforward and to-the-point techniques can be very useful in many cases. Carolas demonstration of her wrist flop technique at that workshop proved occasion for our first quarrel I ventured to say that this practice was wonderfully educative but of course you cant really flop like that when youre playing, you would lose all semblance of control. Carola stuck to her guns, saying this should be done even in performance, and I stuck to my guns too and so the sparks flew! Afterwards when I found out she was Rumanian I understood: having lived for many years in Eastern Europe, I myself knew how much that temperament just loves a good scrap! Later on I had some wonderful lessons with Carola because I wanted as full an understanding of arm weight technique as possible. For a complete account of these lessons, including a description of arm weight technique at its best, please go to www.pianotechnique.org/carolagrindea-and-arm-weight-technique . How to Do Up Notes - With or Without the Arch? Although excerpts from the Grindea Technique video are not online, there are a couple of clips of Carola's work that do give one a feel for her approach.

The "Up" notes and "Down" notes referred to in these videos are notes played while the forearm is moving up or down. In Carola's version of arm weight technique, the wrist is never at rest but always in flux, thus maintaining a free relaxed relationship between arm and fingers. Tension disempowers, thus relaxation must empower, right? And if you are moving you must be relaxed - immobility indicates tension... I wish things were that simple! However, they are not. The inner organization of the wrist, hand and arm cultivated by these exercises is wonderful. But the wrist must also offer stability. It will often appear not to be moving in playing, but a perceptive eye may discern a certain inner freedom, quite possibly learned through these exercises, that enervates the wrist and arm allowing it to remain free and subtly moveable even as it offers the required stability to the hand and fingers... Wrist Relaxation and the Hand's Arches As this video shows, Grindea Technique does not pay special attention to the structural potency of the hands arch, and yet the pianist's arch is present and functional, serving her well. Carola never mentions the arch but focuses rather on the idea that the free movement of the wrist actually generates the tone. She says the movements get smaller the faster one plays, but she holds to the idea that that the wrist actually generates the tone of the note. This of course, as a subjective experience can be valuable. As a didactic tool, cultivating this idea can be very effective. The technique serves to keep the wrist flexible and functional, a very valuable thing indeed. But it does not bely the fact that the wrist does not actually generate tone. That is simply an illusion. Objective investiagtion does not bear out the subjective impression, and if the pianist doesn't understand this, there will possibly be problems later on. Althoug useful, this technique must not be applied across the board. The pedagogue must determine in advance the usefulness or the inutility and possible couunterproductiveness of the approach. Carola never mentions the potent arch, and does not even think about it and yet the wrist flop works for her precisely because she never allows her arms relaxation to disturb the complete integrity and potency of her hands arch. I never heard the late Yonty Solomon, another Myra Hess protg, mention the hands arch in his teaching, and yet he had one of the most pronounced and dependable arches Ive ever seen. It was really something, like the Rock of Gibraltar! I noticed that often Solomons students could not achieve the same stellar results he did in his demonstrations at the piano, and I suspected that his failure to mention this one crucial aspect of his own technique was the reason why. He took it for granted: it was so much a part of him that he simply didnt think about it, and overlooked the fact that his students were letting their arch go instead of following his lead and picking up on that crucial aspect of hand structure and function. How To Do Down Notes - Is It Really Just the Wrist Doing the Work? Here again, the wrist movement is described as actually generating the tone, instead of simply empowering the fingers to move precisely and freely. The pianist does the exercises well, and hopefully the well-balanced wrist function thus achieved will transfer well into repertoire performance. But we would like to see a more accurate description of what is actually going on physiologically. In their present form, this explanation and demonstration leave too much

room for misinterpretation and subsequent mistaken implementation of these eminently useful and effective techniques. Overall, Grindea Technique has many useful things to say about relaxation as an important component of effective piano playing. But note that the descriptions found in Grindea Technique are pragmatic and subjective rather than objective. They dont describe the underlying physiological processes of piano technique as they actually happen, but rather in terms of how one particular person experiences them, and thus are open to misinterpretation. Ive seen the wrist flop technique achieve a wonderful relaxation and let-go in an overly tense pianist, but Ive also seen it create immense confusion in a gifted pianist who was essentially destabilized by the radical relaxation Carola offered her, a relaxation far greater than she needed.

Barbara Lister-Sink: Freeing the Caged Bird

Barbara Lister-Sink has combined her knowledge of Alexander Technique with her own experience in the physical aspects of piano technique to create a film that aims to free you from physical restriction in your playing. Her aim is excellent, and much of the film provides highly effective advice on how to use oneself well at the piano - to organize one's body to best use all the tonal resources of the instrument. This review attempts to document both the pros and cons of Lister-Sink's approach to the physical in piano playing - by pointing out the few weak points in her argument I hope to make the positive aspects of her contribution even more effective.

Luckily for us, several excerpts from Freeing the Caged Bird can be found on YouTube. These provide us with a detailed look at Lister-SInk's approach.

Basic Moves Part I

This excerpt contains much sound advice: Habit #1) Don't retain tension in the shoulders (0:35-1:40). Notice the very evocative slow motion sequence at 1:10 showing exactly how many profound body changes take place when the shoulders really let go. And notice how much the Schumann Romance in F sharp major gains in eloquence, richness of tone and expressive depth. A great example of how a physical change evokes a corresponding musical improvement. Habit #2) Don't wave your elbows out to the side like a duck, what Barbara calls "elbow jutting" and what I call the "classic arm out to the side" (1:45-3:00). At 2:45 note how Debussy's "La fille aux cheuveux du lin" acquires a luminescent, transcendant impressionist tone when Barbara demonstrates a whole arm technique untrammelled by the distracting movement of the elbows (known elsewhere as the "classic arm out").

Habit #3) But then she advises not to play with high, flat fingers (3:06-3:55). It's a very interesting moment, because when she demonstrates how not to do it (3:20), it looks and sounds really great! She uses high, flat fingers to play a light, fast scale passage, beautifully articulated and even, bubbling with pearl-like energy, and then says that we must not do it this way because it overworks the extensors and cuts off our fingers from the rest of the playing mechanism! But she does it with no difficulty - it's effortless and tension-free, and then when she demonstrates the supposed correct way (3:50), her hand looks pinched, and the sound is not as even and pearly. This is a great example of dogmatic thinking clouding one's judgement. Fear of overwork here offers nothing but limitation and a blight on one's capability. Habit #4) According to Lister-Sink, high, curved fingers are another big no-no, even more dangerous than Habit #3 (4:00-5:35). Lister-Sink wants to save pianists from injuring themselves or from playing with unnecessary tension thus hurting their sound. She has seen pianists doing this by raising and curling the fingers while maintaining a low wrist, and has found through her own vast experience that often the way to help these people is to stop them from doing that. Her demonstration of how to return the hand to a natural alignment and level of effort is very educational and effective. However, she fails to note that the wrist tends to function as the keystone of the arm/hand/finger arch only at dynamics of mf and above, and that at lower dynamics the keystone is the metacarpal-phalangeal ridge. She also fails to note again how many great pianists play in exactly the way she condemns, pianists such as Horowitz, Argerich, Glenn Gould, etc. She also fails to notice how well she herself does the very technique she proscribes! One worries again about blanket proscription simply because in many cases it doesn't work well. HOWEVER: At 5:00, the "cure" Barbara shows for overly curled fingers is really beautiful. Look at the transformation of the hand into an organic, vital, breathing organism instead of the tightly held one she had before. Her citation of free, proper alignment, and everything else she says here as well is 100% accurate, true, and tremendously valuable. The tension-free, well-aligned hand is of course the ideal template from which we should begin our pianistic training, and here Lister-Sink rightly and beautifully presents it as such. To my mind, once that template is well-learned and securely in place, it is possible to depart from it without fear of injury. And many times it is necessary if we are going to exploit the full gamut of tonal resources the piano offers. Habit #5) Don't hold the hand's arch stiffly (5:40-6:55). Another brilliant plus in ListerSink's arsenal. Her she has zeroed in on one of the key problems many pianists struggle with, and her approach to solving it is 100% right on. My only quibble: she says "the hand and finger muscles eventually develop naturally by supporting more and more weight from the arm lever." No! They develop naturally, and maintain the arch naturally, by activating the fingers! Habit #6) Don't hold fingers off the keys. (6:55- ) Once again, the demonstration gives one pause to wonder, why is she sanctioning something that looks so good and obviously works so well? Her slow motion performance of Chopin's etude Op. 10 #8 (at 7:05-7:15) bears eerie

resemblance to the same slow motion view of the same etude by Horowitz. Take a look! Op. 10 #8 begins at 0:22 (before that is the octave etude Op. 25 #10)

It is uncanny how similar the two performances are - and yet Lister-Sink is saying you should not play like that! Again, her idea is good: many times it is highly useful to eliminate excess tension from the fingers by letting them rest on the keys. I devote a whole chapter (Quality of Movement in Thumb Pushups) to it in my own book. It is especially good as a therapeutic practice to return the hand to its natural organic state. But to extrapolate this idea and make it universal only robs the pianist of much needed activity in many situations. However, when she says, "Once we learn the subtle skill of directing weight into each finger" (7:14), she again expresses a fundamental misconeption about arm weight. If the subjective experience of "directing weight into the finger" helps you relax and play better, fine. But if you actually played that way you would be inhibiting the fingers from their natural ability to move robustly and vigorously (and of course, subtly and sensitively) - a profound act of selfdisempowerment. Again it is a very tricky question, because this one inaccuracy is mixed in with a bunch of really beautiful and helpful descriptions of some fundamentally good elements of piano technique, for instance: "The arm is so beautifully supported by the torso that the whole hand can rest without tension on the keys" (7:25). A great description which is immediately followed by, "when the fingers just rest on the keys, it saves a lot of energy" (7:33), which fails to note that if you need brilliant sound, you may well be better off expending that energy because if the fingers just rest there like limp dishrags, it's not going to happen! In this second video excerpt, Lister-Sink continues her documentation of bad habits...

Habit #7) Over-Pressing and Over-Moving. (0:00-1:30) Here Barbara gives a wonderful demonstration of both the negative results of overmoving and overpressing, and the wonderful blossoming of tone that happens when you let go of these bad habits. Bravo! But her verbal explanation again contains the misconception that this wonderful coordination is achieved by a "well-coordinated regulation of weight." Perhaps she believes that she is really doing that, but it appears to me that her fingers actually move - imagine! Habit #8) Supporting Weight on Lowered Wrists. (2:15- ) Here Barbara takes a poke at one other paragon of relaxation piano technique, Carola Grindea. She first demonstrates Carola's "wrist flop" technique beautifully (2:35-2:52) and then proceeds to give a cogent explanation as to why this doesn't work. However her demonstration of the "right" way aty 3:45-4:00 also suffers from an over-reliance on arm weight technique and a lack of activity in the hand itself, which would lend a more monumental quality to the tone and expression. Habit #9) Heavy, Relaxed Arms. (4:05-5:05) This clip bears detailed examination. She says, "The assumption that the released weight of the arm produces big sound is true, but it is only true while the arm is free-falling and at the split-second of tone production. The moment the

fingers contact the keybed, the weight of the falling arm should be transferred back into the torso , leaving just enough weight to keep the key down, just a few ounces." 1) She seems to assume that the ONLY thing producing a big sound is the released weight of the arm. She leaves the hand and fingers out of it, which to my mind is a rather glaring omission! 2) "It is only true while the arm is free falling": if this were so, then the arm would have to be free-falling for each single note or chord in a passage which might be moving with considerable speed. Another highly doubrful assumption, because to let the arm free-fall, stop it in the moment of contact and then start it again in the next instant to prepare the next note or chord is something that simply cannot be done rapidly. 3) How does one transfer the weight of one's arm into one's torso? Am I supposed to lie my arm on my shoulder? We think we know what she is saying, but the whole description is fraught with such inaccuracy and potential for misunderstanding that we need a new description - one that respects both subjective experience and objective physical process... The wonderful slow motion demonstration of what she is talking about clearly shows the limitations of the "Arm Weight = Inert Hand" school of playing (4:35-4:50). As far as it goes, this technique is OK. The hand structure is beautiful, and she is using virtually no tension to keep it that way. This is already great and very evolved. The way the arm releases into the hand is also wonderful - relaxed and precisely coordinated and balanced. But this way of playing fails to explore the wonderful capability of the hand itself! It's as if she did all the correct preperatory work, ridding the hand and arm of all its bad habits, but then left it at that. It's like setting a dining room for a beautiful meal and then not putting any food on the table. All this relaxation could serve to empower the hand into potent action, which would give each of those Chopin chords 100 times more colour, variety, power, and expressive content. But the hand just sits there like a bump on a log and lets the arm pump its weight through it into the keys. For me its sad because its a great opportunity that ends up a missed opportunity. She then says, "It's sort of like a falling brick transforming itself into a ping pong ball..." Too true, too true! Lister-Sink is a proponent of the arm weight school, but her presentation of the arm weight philosophy is problematic. Her description of what actually goes on in arm weight technique is inaccurate although it may well be one's subjective experience: The joints of the arm and finger must be fixed in the moment of playing so that the weight of the arm can successfully be transmitted through the hand structure into the key. Fixation can be a useful element of technique, but it is the antithesis of arm weight technique. Most often the stable and potent functioning of the skeletal structure takes place in the context of joints remaining free. Sensing the weight of one's arm is done to relax it in order to free the joints, not fix them. Skeletal stability is achieved not by fixation but through a balanced alignment of bone structure. This allows forces to be transmitted effectively through the joints without their needing to be fixed. The body retains a crucial quality: moveability.

Sensing your arms weight in free fall tends to relax the muscles that would otherwise bind the finger joints. The finger manipulates the key on the fly, producing warm, free, singing tone because there is never a point of stiff impact or over-definition of a notes attack. But when Lister-Sink demonstrates what shes talking about, she fixes her hand structure and then pumps her arm to move the hand into each note in turn, and she actually slightly collapses the arch of the hand loosening the very joints which she says should stay stiff. This subtle, hidden collapse, while she is attempting to stay fixed lends a pumped, note-by-note quality to the melody that is quite unattractive (unlike Mme Lister-Sink herself!). Analyzing and sensing the use of the body in piano playing is an admirable intention it is regrettable that the large amount of really useful information Lister-Sink offers on whole body organization, healthy sitting etc. is compromised by a central and fundamental inaccuracy in her approach. Let's round out this review with a look at how well Barbara Lister-Sink practices what she preaches... and then some! Her performance of Reflets dans l'eau is really beautiful, polished and shimmering, although at times we can detect a slight lack of activity in the hand as she insists on leaving it almost inert and letting herself feel that the arm's weight is doing most of the work. But look at the scales at 1:15-1:35! The arches of her hand leap into potent activity when it's needed. That glistening scale passage simply can't be done without the right, potent work of the hand itself. Yes, this potent work is supported by the optimal body organization she cultivates so well, but it's a pity she never speaks about the central fact of fundamental, crucial hand and finger activation, which she obviously knows cold!

Richard Prokop and Piano Power

Piano Power promises a refreshingly different approach that marries the athletic and artisitic in music... Many of the assertions at Richard Prokop's website, www.pianopower.com seem to contradict the accepted dogma about piano technique. He advises us to build the strength of the finger extensors for a capable technique - an approach distinctly different from the relaxation advised by so many others. Prokop quotes physiologists who know that muscular control is not based on relaxation so much as on the coordinated work of opposing muscle groups. His approach is based on sound physiology as well as his own 25 years of personal experience.

Review quotes "A most intriguing and interesting book. I urge all pianists to read it." -Anthony Newman, Harpsichordist, Organist, Pianist "It would be hard for me to imagine any pianist, or health care professional involved in the care and treatment of piano-related hand problems, not being interested in this book. It is my professional opinion, as a physician specializing in hand and wrist problems, that the information presented in

PIANO POWER is invaluable to pianists of all levels." -- Paul D. Fragner, M.D., Board Certified Orthopedic Surgeon, Hand and Wrist Specialist,Westchester Bone & Joint Associates, White Plains, New York "PIANO POWER presents a sensible approach in addressing the potential maladies of the pianist -- a welcome addition to the library of any pianist." -Lillie Rosenthal, D.O., Physician, Miller Health Care Institute for Performing Artists, St.Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital, New York City "Thank you for the pre-publication copy of your book. The subject is so important and has been kicked under the table for many years. Gary Graffman, President of the Curtis Institute, is one of my oldest and dearest friends; I watched the collapse of his fourth and fifth finger and his subsequent retreat to repertoire for the left hand. I have a personal theory that too much practice is as destructive as too little practice. I'm sure that either Leon Fleisher or Gary Graffman could fill you in on many more aspects of this strange malady that attacks pianists. It extends from Clara Schumann to Art Tatum, the latter playing those incredible arpeggios with really the thumb, second and third fingers of his right hand. Mr.Rachmaninov used to tell me that he constantly changed fingerings, especially for recitals because of the fatigue in his fingers. I certainly congratulate on your book, it should be shouted from the housetops." -- SKITCH HENDERSON, Music Director and Founder of The New York Pops, Pre-publication review, February 1999.

Debunking the Myths of the Taubman Approach

Dorothy Taubman is a true pioneer in the development of injury-preventative piano technique. She has analyzed the various activities of piano playing, coming up with a method that has empowered thousands and confused thousands of others. Disciples of the Taubman dogma have a disconcerting tendency to to be so devoted to their guru that they exclude all other approaches. Unfortunately this doesn't work in favour of a wider appreciation of her contribution, but rather arouses suspicion. It is dangerous to say there is a definitive right and wrong way of approaching something as complex as the pianists physical relationship to her or his instrument. Taubman's approach is based on profound truths about the human body and how it works at the keyboard - but for every one of these truths there exist so many exceptions that we are reluctant to make the truth a rule. Although Taubman's contribution is one of the most significant in the 20th century, it would prove even more valuable if it took account these numerous, significant exceptions, becoming more inclusive instead of exclusive in its approach.

Testimony to the real value of the Taubman approach can be found in the many technically and artistically successful pianists who swear by it Ilya Itin is one notable example. Then there are the many success stories, some verging on the miraculous, of her students' recovering from performance injury. All these pianists have succeeded in integrating the

kinesthetic knowledge gained through their work with the Taubman ideas into a natural, effective keyboard technique. Many of Taubmans principles hit the mark dead on in terms of the physics of the body at the piano. These include 1. coordinate motion, the idea that all parts of the body must work in synchronous harmony for an effective sound to be produced. What this means in practical terms is that the skeletal frame must be lined up such that there is no energy lost at the joints through shear or friction. 2. Avoidance of jamming, especially at the wrist where, if the forearm and hand fail to maintain their more or less horizontal relationship about 180 degrees energy is lost as the kinetic forces shear off from their direct line of transmission. I myself have worked with many students of the Taubman approach, and was especially impressed by one amateur adult who had assiduously practiced the rotations on every note as the Taubman dogma indicates. He had one of the best hands on the keyboard of any adult relative beginner (2 years of lessons) I have ever seen. The rotation practice apparently served to develop his hand's ability to stand well, and his whole hand structure and function was much more secure and much less prone to collapse than virtually any adult amateur I have worked with. Another moving testimony to the Taubman approach can be seen here:

This review attempts to define the key principles of the Taubman approach and analyze them in the light of recent developments in the field of kinesiology - the study of human motion. We hope to highlight the positive aspects of the system by weeding out certain points that risk being misinterpreted or understood in a confused way. Rotation One of the most contentious issues is Taubmans idea that a rotation of the forearm along its axis occurs on the playing of every single note. Taubman has her students diligently practice a rotation either to the right or the left and back again on every single note of a scale, arpeggio or melody, and sometimes will even introduce a double right or double left.

This has the doubly positive effect of 1. consolidating the hands structure as it stands on key (in order to rotate, the arm must have something firm and stable to lean into as a fulcrum point, and the hands arch tends to consolidate and strengthen itself to provide this fulcrum), and 2. allowing muscles that might have been holding further up the arm to let go. However, when Mme Goladnsky demonstrates this technique, she introduces a certain technical anomaly that drastically reduces its effectiveness. She rotates in to each new note with a seemingly 'relaxed' hand which is really a dead, inert hand. There is an insidious, subtle collapse within the hand's arch structure that lends a banged, ugly quality to the sound. The

rotation is overdone and awkward. She then plays a normal scale nicely and says that you can barely see the rotations but they are still there. Subjective vs. Objective Experience This brings us to an important question concerning any approach to piano technique. When she plays, Edna may feel a certain sensation in her hand that relates to the rotation exercise she just did. In Edna's subjective experience, a trace of the rotation remains. But if we slow down the video, we see that in fact, (objectively) there is no longer any rotation on each individual note. Any rotation that remained would only destroy continuity of musical line. Each note would become an entity unto itself instead of one jewel on a string. Interestingly enough, when Edna plays the scale, it sounds perfectly musical. And yet she says the rotation is still there! But if it was there, the scale could not possibly sound so well! Here subjective experience and objective reality, as is so often the case, simply don't match. The neurological image of the rotation might indeed remain as a trace on the brains motor cortex, reminding the arch to stay viable and the upper arm muscles to let go. But an actual rotation on every note can only interfere with a smooth, easy movement of the hand it works directly against phrase shape. Rotations that flow through several notes of a group can be a beautiful and effective means of achieving an elegant phrase shape, but rotation on every single note is in most cases anti-musical. The Taubman rotation exercise is highly effective and useful, but it is just that: an exercise, and cannot literally be incorporated into actual playing. The trouble is, the most dogmatic Taubmanites insist that their subjective experience is objective and that yes, an actual rotation does occur on every note, even when playing at very high speeds, and they spend inordinate amounts of time rehearsing or choreographing these rotations into their repertoire. When not properly undderstood, the rotation exercise becomes a paradox: helping the neuromotor system to organize movement more effectively and simultaneously creating a significant limitation to that movement. Dual Muscular Pull Taubman is also against dual muscular pull, saying that this indicates inefficiency in the work of the muscles. Every muscle has an opposing muscle that pulls in the opposite directions. These pairs of muscles are called agonist and antagonist. When there is too much tension in the system, it is often because the antagonist is working too hard, forcing the agonist to exert much more effort than would normally be needed simply to make a movement. This is the danger of dual muscular pull as understood by Taubman. However, dual muscular pull always exists in a movement! In even the most highly efficient movements, the anatagonist's role is important: it regulates and controls the agonists degree of effort by pulling against it. It's a crucial "movement fine-tuning mechanism." All our movements are guided by this phenomenon, although we are mostly unconscious of it. I believe Taubman is not against dual muscular pull per se, but rather, and rightly so, against the overwork of agonist and antagonist. But she fails to make this clear, and consequently cultivates a relaxation (the medicine for dual muscular pull) so extreme that it disempowers rather than heals, leaving muscles flaccid and inert instead of primed and potent. Observe the

previous video closely once again: this phenomenon is clearly perceptible in the musculature of Edna's hand and fingers. Stretching and Twisting Taubman also decries stretching and twisting, saying that one should always remain within the limits of comfortable movement. Stretching and twisting can lead to pain and injury. However, her 'cure' is so extreme - the way in which she avoids stretching at any cost - that it robs the pianist of much of her natural ability to get around a keyboard. It leads to a safe but emasculated pianism. his from 1:20-2:10 of the following video:

John Bloomfield says that joining the note C (played with the right hand 5th finger) to the note D a seventh below (played with the right hand thumb) would create too much of a stretch, which could be harmful, potentially leading to injury, and that it must be avoided. He advises joining these two notes on the pedal instead of physically linking them. I am really scratching my head in disbelief. I mean, this is a big guy! My 9-year old daughter can join the interval of a seventh no problem, and this big, grownup pianist, an obviously capable musician, is worried about hurting himself by "stretching" a seventh??? I simply cannot agree with a pathological need to avoid injury so extreme that it debilitates and disempowers instead of helping the pianist out. A pianist suffering or recovering from injury may well need to treat himself with such care, but to teach a healthy pianist to avoid stretching a 7th simply makes a cripple out of a perfectly healthy person. The sad thing is, this approach is well-intentioned. Taubman and Golandsky have the right idea - use the body effectively to play beautifully. But this does not justify taking a therapeutic practice, one designed to heal an injured technique, and applying it to completely healthy pianists. This simply ignores the facts concering the actual function of the fingers, hand and arm. The brain has an amazing capacity to let a muscle simply lengthen, with no strain, instead of stretching. The very concept of stretching implies a lengthening that fights against a muscles inherent tonus, which can indeed lead to strain and potential injury. When muscles elegantly let go, the hand can go into even an extreme extension or twist with no strain, expanding ones limits outward to greater capability instead of limiting ones options. Taubman and Golandsky even know this, as demonstrated here: And yet, as we saw in the John Bloomfield example, the Taubmanites fail big time in applying this fantastic exercise to a playing situation. The Arches of the Hand At 4:25 in the Princeton video excerpt above, Edna coaches Aya Nagatomi in Liszt's La Campanella. This young pianist's arch is completely collapsed, showing the classic role reversal between wrist and metacarpal-phalangeal joints where the metacarpal ridge abandons its role as keystone thus forcing the wrist to take over, creating a hand incapable of creating a

rich, juicy tone. But does Edna pick up on this? No, she simply 'coaches' the young girl, egging her on through the coda (which unfortunately but not surprisingly remains musically inert, slow and banged in its sound) and finally giving her a congratulatory hug amidst applause from the audience. Once again I am mystified: how can she leave such obvious dysfunction untouched? The basic inner health of the hand itself, generated by potent activation and arch generation, simply does not seem to be a part of the Taubman oeuvre. The Thumb

This excerpt on the thumb provides a wonderful example of just how insidiously misguided and destructive the Taubman approach can be. Edna begins by mentioning several basic movements of the thumb: curling, flexing (moving the thumb in under the hand to rest agains the palm), and abduction (what is elsewhere called 'reverse opposition' and which, as Edna rightly points out, is a movement the thumb often uses to play). She then goes on to say that all of these are either dangerous, leading potentially to pain and injury, or useless because they are too slow (abduction/extension). She then recommends introducing a forearm rotation to bring the thumb into its key. Thus in one fell swoop Edna has succeeded in completely emasculating the correct, appropriate and potent work of the thumb, leaving it powerless and weak, and robbing it of its crucial role as one of the main animators of the right action of the hand, one of the crucial physical and functional supports of the piano playing mechanism. I say this is insidious because, yes, there is a grain of truth in what she says. A forearm rotation will indeed often (though certainly not always) support the right work of the thumb. But it should never replace that work. When the forearm subverts thumb activity, ironically though the goal might have been the avoidance of injury, it is more likely to result in injury, because the dead thumb will evoke compensatory tension and rigidity elsewhere in the arm.

Legato Yet another misconception is found in the idea that by playing with a true physical legato you risk hanging on and tightening, and that you can achieve a more beautiful legato sound by avoiding joining the keys, connecting the tones on the pedal instead. This latter technique is indeed valid but highly advanced, and must be based on an aural and physical image of legato that is well-imprinted on the motor cortex. When a non-joined legato sound is attempted without this crucial preparation, the result is a slightly bumpy and unbeautiful sound sadly lacking in the melodic control that makes for great pianism. Arm Weight Another controversial theme with Taubman is arm weight technique. She advises letting your arm really be a dead weight and having all that weight express itself through the finger into the key, creating a rich, juicy, singing tone. The fingers remain limp, and the kinetic energy to move the key actually comes from the arms mass instead of muscular effort. Again, this subjective image may well work wonders in a pianist who is overly tight and needs to let go, and the arm weight teaching, even when this inaccurate, can often be a valuable tool.

The danger lies in taking such an idea as being true across the board. The total relaxation fostered by this technique tends to undermine the hands natural structure an overly relaxed hand does not maintain its natural potency (expressed in its arch structure) but collapses into flaccidity, and the fingers no longer have a basis for movement. Arm weight technique works best with pianists who have already trained their fingers to move vigorously, quickly and accurately: with the reflexes already wired in, the suffusion of relaxation and finer sensation of arm weight technique can be a great boon. But without the ability of the fingers firmly in place, it can lead to disaster. Octave Technique

The YouTube demonstration of perfect octave technique shows octaves far from perfect: played with a free arm and fingers that appear strong but which are actually dysfunctional they are held stiffly as is the hand, which remains completely inert. We are is advised to let gravity take our arm/hand/fingers down into the key and then to let the "upward rebound force" of the keys bounce the hand back up into the air. This strategy effective emasculates the hand's natural power which lies in its capacity to move, and the result is predictable: a harsh, slightly aggressive and ugly sound which is reflected in the look of the hand as well. Once again, a subjective experience (the keys 'bouncing' the hand up), which may indeed in many situations be valid and effective, here actually masks an objective dysfunction.

Curling the Fingers

In the YouTube excerpt on curving and curling, one also has to raise an eyebrow at Golandsky's blanket dismissal of finger curling as "negative." How does one reconcile such a judgement with the documentary evidence of pianists such as Horowitz, Argerich or Kissin to name just a few of the many who curl their fingers with robust exuberance thus getting an ebullient, blistering sound out of the piano and, wonder of wonders, not even hurting themselves!!! The rationale is that the action of the deep flexors (which curl the distal phalange) is more likely to create strain and lead to injury, whereas the superficial flexors which act on the medial phalange are less prone to overuse. Once again she has good intentions: indeed, a crucial part of every pianist's training should be learning and mastering the distinction between the action of the deep flexors, the superficial flexors, and the lumbricals. But the pianist should also be capable of any and all combinations of these three! By totally eliminating the curling movement, Taubman and Golandsky do away with one elementary and fundamental action of the finger, the most precise and efficient way of getting the key down quickly and accurately, an action that Bach himself said was the primary physical component of his keyboard technique. Once again we need to question eliminating injury as the prime motivator for an approach to piano technique. Should we not rather maximize our movement possibilities of course learning to do these healthily?

The Taubman doctrine again proves insidious here by mixing a large dollop of truth in with the inaccurate and damaging teaching. At 0:45 Edna does a wonderful demonstration of the greater freedom of movement in the hand when the fingers are only curved not curled. This is beautiful and highly educational - we should all strive to learn what she shows here. But next logical step she takes ("thus we must eliminate curling completely") is simply not defensible. Lifting the Fingers Taubman also censures a high-finger technique, seeing this as yet another thing leading to tension and injury. However, lifting the fingers is an effective way of activating them, bringing more brilliance and energy to ones sound and generally giving your playing an injection of vigor. Some schools such as Richard Prokops Piano Power emphasize this technique as central to developing finger strength and ability: Strengthening the extensors is one of the most important parts of building a good piano technique. Most importantly, if a high finger technique is done with the intelligent participation of the arm and body, there is no danger of hurting oneself. Again, Taubmans well-meaning attempt to help pianists avoid injury or recover from it ends up presenting an impediment to pianists who simply want to develop their ability. An approach based mainly on limitation and avoidance of stress cannot encompass all the possibilities of a comprehensive piano technique. Surely the intelligent expansion beyond our limitations will do more to develop a technique that capitalizes on the pianos wonderful capacity for rich orchestral color and sonority. In summary, the Taubman-Golandsky materials are rich in nuggets of wisdom, but make the mistake of applying one type of wisdom to all situations. Many of the techniques work beautifully in a therapeutic situation where a pianist is recovering from injury, but given to a healthy pianist may serve only to limit, confuse and disempower. Taubmans overall contribution to piano technique is not to be underestimated. Although there are numerous problems with her approach, these are mostly related to the exact use of language, the exact understanding of phenomena, and context. When the Taubman corpus of knowledge is applied non-dogmatically but selectively, according to the needs of a specific pianistic situation, it offers many nuggets of pianistic gold!