Fundamentals of Piano Practice

Objective

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The objective of this book is to present the best known methods for practicing piano. For students, knowing these methods means a reduction in learning time that is a significant fraction of a lifetime and an increase in the time available for making music instead of struggling with technique. Many students spend 100% of their time learning new compositions and, because this process takes so long, there is no time left to practice the art of making music. This sorry state is the greatest hindrance to acquiring technique because making music is necessary for fast technical development. The goal here is to make the learning process so fast that we aim to allocate 10% of practice time to learning and 90% to making music, thus maximizing technical development. Now, in the larger picture, 10% is basically a negligible amount of time -- therefore, what we are saying is that we must start making music as soon as we possibly can.

Here, we define "learning a piece" as memorizing the notes and being able to play the composition basically at speed. One might logically think that learning a piece, and acquiring the required technique to play it, are synonymous. For pedagogical purposes, it helps to define technique more narrowly as the ability to make music; therefore, "technique" will be discussed in some detail below. The reason for this definition has to do with how to practice so that you can perform for an audience, such as your teacher during lessons. Most students have no trouble practicing to play a piece to their satisfaction, yet run into terrible problems when performing. They tend to blame such difficulties on nervousness, but it is much more fundamental -- it is caused by inappropriate practice methods. If we claim here that these practice methods work, then it should follow that nervousness should be greatly reduced and performances should follow naturally. And everything hinges on just one thing -- acquiring technique!

At this point, you can justifiably ask, "How can it be that simple?" Then consider this. Even students who have terrible difficulties during recitals have much less problems performing for the teacher during lessons. The reason for this is that you practice performing for the teacher about once very week. Obviously, if you practice it, you will become good at it. The rest of this book is dedicated to showing you how to practice so that you are basically performing every time you practice. In order to succeed in acquiring technique, you must quickly learn how to make music.

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What is Piano Technique?

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We must understand what technique means because not understanding technique leads to incorrect practice methods. More importantly, the correct understanding can help us to develop superior practice methods. The most common misunderstanding is that technique is some inherited finger dexterity. It is not. The innate dexterity of accomplished pianists and ordinary folk are not that different. This means that practically anyone can learn to play the piano well. There are numerous examples of mentally handicapped people with limited coordination that exhibit incredible musical talent. Unfortunately, many of us are much more dexterous but can't manage the musical passages because of a lack of some simple but critical information. Acquiring technique is mostly a process of brain/nerve development, not development of finger-moving muscles or strength.

Technique is the ability to execute a zillion different piano passages; therefore it is not dexterity, but an aggregate of many skills. The task of acquiring technique thus boils down to solving the problem of how to acquire so many different skills in a short time. The wondrous thing about piano technique, and the most important message of this book, is that piano skills can be learned in a short time, if the correct learning procedures are applied. These skills are acquired in two stages: (1) discovering how the fingers, hands, arms, etc., are to be moved, and (2) conditioning the muscles and nerves to execute these with ease and control. This second stage is concerned with control, not the development of strength or athletic endurance. Many students think of piano practice as hours of intense finger calisthenics because they were never taught the proper definition of technique. The reality is that you are actually improving your brain when learning piano! Acquiring technique is a process of developing faster nerve connections, creating more brain cells for the proper movements and memory functions, and for "speaking the language of music". You are actually making yourself smarter and improving your memory; this is why learning piano correctly has so many beneficial consequences, such as the ability to better cope with everyday problems or the ability to retain memory longer as you age. This is why, in this book, memorizing is an inseparable part of technique acquisition.

The above definition of technique tells us that, once you have learned something, like playing a scale, practicing it over and over does not materially improve technique and can waste a lot of time. We must understand our own anatomy and learn how to discover and acquire the correct technique. This turns out to be a nearly impossible task for the average human brain unless you dedicate your entire life to it from childhood. Even then, most will not succeed. The reason why it takes an entire dedicated lifetime is that, without proper instruction, the pianist must discover the correct motions, etc., by trial and error. You must depend on the small probability that, as you try to play that difficult passage faster, your hand accidentally stumbles onto a motion that works. If you are unlucky, your hand never discovers the motion and you are stuck forever, a phenomenon called "speed wall". Most beginning piano students haven't the foggiest idea about the complex motions that the fingers, hands, and arms can perform. Fortunately, the many geniuses who came before us have made most of the useful discoveries (otherwise, they wouldn't have been such great performers) leading to efficient practice methods.

Another misconception about technique is that once the fingers become sufficiently skillful, you can play anything. Almost every different passage is a new adventure; it must be learned anew. Experienced pianists seem to be able to play just about anything because (1) they have practiced all the things that you encounter frequently, and (2) they know how to learn new things very quickly. Therefore, acquiring technique might at first appear to be a daunting task because there is almost an infinite number of different piano passages -- how are we to learn them all? This problem has been mostly solved. There are large classes of passages, such as scales, that appear frequently; knowledge of how to play these will cover significant portions of most compositions. But more importantly, there are specific solutions for specific problems -- these solutions are the main subject matter of this book.

Some of the most important solutions we will discuss are powerful learning tricks that allow you to acquire difficult technique using general procedures that apply to almost any passage. These learning tricks provide the fastest way for you to discover the optimum finger/hand/arm motions for playing that passage. There are two reasons why you need to make your own discoveries. First, there are so many different passages that the methods for playing them can't all be listed here. Second, the needs of each individual are different, so that the set of rules in this book should only serve as a starting point for each person who must adapt them to the individual needs. Readers who truly understand the contents of this book will not only be able to immediately speed up their learning rate, but also to accelerate it with each added skill. The degree of this acceleration will largely determine how fast and how far you will advance as a pianist.

Unfortunately, many private piano teachers not associated with music institutions do not know these methods and they teach most of the beginners. At the other extreme, the great masters and professional pianists have written books on piano playing that discuss topics at a higher level on how to make music but do not deal with how to acquire basic technique. That is why I wrote this book.

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Technique and Music

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Although it is not easy to define music precisely, we can discuss how to play musically, as done at various points in this book. The relationship between technique and music determines the way we practice for technique. Technique is needed, and is used, to make music; therefore, we must always practice musically. If we concentrate only on developing "finger technique" and neglect music during practice, we can pick up non-musical playing habits. This is an insidious problem because practicing to acquire technique implies a lack of technique so, initially, there is no way to make music. Then, how is the student supposed to practice musically? Of course, you start non-musically. The error occurs when the students forget to add the music as soon as they are able to do so. One common symptom of this error is the inability to play the lesson pieces when the teacher (or anyone else!) is listening. When an audience is present, these students make strange errors that they didn't make during "practice". This happens because the students practiced without regard for music but suddenly realized that music must now be added because the teacher is listening. Unfortunately, until lesson time, they had never really practiced it!

There is an even more fundamental connection between technique and music. Piano teachers know that students need to practice musically in order to acquire technique. What is right for the ears and the brain turns out to be right for the human playing mechanism. Both musicality and technique require accuracy and control. Practically any technical flaw can be detected in the music. At the very least, the music is the supreme test of whether the technique is right or wrong. As we shall see throughout this book, there are more reasons why music should never be separated from technique. Nonetheless, many students tend to practice neglecting the music and preferring to "work" when no one is around to listen. Such practice methods are detrimental to technique acquisition and produce "closet pianists" who love to play but can't perform. Once you become a closet pianist, it is extremely difficult to reverse that psychology. If students are taught to practice musically all the time, this type of problem will not even exist; performing and practice are one and the same. We provide many suggestions in this book for practicing to perform, such as video taping your practices from the very beginning. However, the single most important concept is that of practicing musically.

Why is slow, musical play more effective than fast practice for increasing playing speed? There are three main reasons. The first is that both require the same amount of accuracy and control. The second is that you can avoid picking up bad habits and stress when playing slowly. The third is that you can concentrate on new or efficient motions, relaxation, etc., and practice them more effectively when playing slowly. All these factors conspire to produce a phenomenon called "fast play degradation" in which, one day, you suddenly find that you can't play a piece to your satisfaction although you played it very well (and fast) the previous day. Of course, methods for quickly developing speed are equally important, and are discussed in great detail here. A judicious choice of practice speed, alternating between slow and fast practice, is what enables you to optimize your practice efficiency.

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Basic Approach, Interpretation, Musical Training, Perfect Pitch

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Teachers play a critical role in showing students how to play and practice musically. There are some general and useful principles of musicality. For example, most pieces of music begin and end with the same chord, a somewhat mysterious rule which is actually a result of basic chord progression rules. An understanding of chord progressions is very useful for memorizing. A musical phrase generally starts and ends with softer notes, with the louder ones in between; when in doubt, this is a good default principle. There are many books that discuss musical interpretation (Gieseking, Sandor), and we will encounter numerous pointers throughout this book. Clearly, education in music theory, relative and perfect pitch, etc., will be very beneficial to the pianist.

Musical training of the very young can be extremely rewarding. Most babies exposed frequently to perfectly tuned pianos will automatically develop perfect pitch -- this is nothing extra-ordinary. Nobody is born with perfect pitch, because it is a 100% learned skill (the exact frequencies of the musical scales are arbitrary human concoctions -- there is no natural law that says that middle A should be 440 Hz). If this perfect pitch is not maintained, it will be lost later in life. Piano training of young children can begin as early as age three to four. Early exposure of youngsters (from birth) to classical music is beneficial because classical music has the highest musical content (deep, complex, logic) among all the different types of music. Some forms of contemporary music, by over-emphasizing certain narrow aspects, such as loudness or simplistic music structures that do not stimulate the brain, can detract from musical development by distancing the brain from music.

A person does not have to be especially gifted to be able to play the piano well. Although you need to be musically gifted to compose music, the ability to move the fingers is not that dependent on the musical brain. In fact, most of us are more musical than we give ourselves credit for and it is the lack of technique that limits our musical expression at the piano. We have all had the experience of listening to famous pianists and noticing that one is different from the other -- that is more musical sensitivity than we will ever need to start playing the piano. There is no need to practice eight hours a day; some famous pianists have recommended practice times of less than an hour. You can make progress practicing three or four times a week, one hour each. If you practice more, you will of course make faster progress.

One of the most important lessons of this book is to play relaxed. What should you feel when you have learned to play completely relaxed? Firstly, speed ceases to be an issue, not only because it isn't that difficult, but also because you have an automatic speed limit called music, which will limit your speed long before you encounter any difficulties. You will feel that the fingers actually want to go faster, and you will often have to hold them back. You develop "quiet hands" in which the hands move minimally while the fingers fly. You can play even moderately difficult material and actually rest the hands on the piano and feel the fatigue decreasing as you play. Note that relaxation applies only to the physical playing mechanism; the brain must never be shut off -- it must always be intensely focused on the music, even (or especially) when practicing. Thus mindless repetitions of exercises such as the Hanon series is the worst thing you can do to develop stamina in your musical brain. If you don't develop brain stamina during practice, the brain will tire out part way through any performance and you will end up playing like a robotic zombie with no active control over the performance. This type of situation is what naturally gives rise to nervousness because, without proper preparation, your brain knows that the chances of success are slim.

Finally, total music education (scales, time signatures, dictation, ear training [including perfect pitch], dictation, theory, etc.) should be an integral part of learning to play the piano because each different thing you learn helps all the others. In the final analysis, a total music education is the only way to learn piano. Unfortunately, the majority of aspiring pianists do not have the resources or the time to follow such a path. This book was designed to give the student a head start by learning how to acquire technique quickly so that they can consider studying all the other helpful subjects. Statistically, students who excel in playing the piano almost always end up composing music of their own. Learning theory later in life is often not a viable option; for example, learning perfect pitch becomes more difficult with age, see details in section III.12. On the other hand, studying music composition is not a prerequisite for composing. Some musicians frown on learning to much composition theory before starting to compose your own music because that can prevent you from developing your own musical style.

What are some unique features of the methods of this book?

They are not overly demanding, like older methods that require students to commit to a dedicated lifestyle to fit the piano instruction. In the methods of this book, students are given the tools to pick a specific procedure that will achieve a defined objective. If the methods really work, they shouldn't require a lifetime of blind faith in order to achieve proficiency!
Every procedure of these methods has a physical basis (if it works, it always has one; the past problems have been in identifying the correct explanations); it must further contain the following required elements:

Objective: what techniques to acquire, i.e., if you can't play fast enough, or you can't trill well, you want to memorize, etc.,
Then do: i.e., practice hands separately, use chord attack, memorize as you practice, etc.,
Because: the physiological, psychological, mechanical, etc., explanations for why these methods work. For example, hands separate practice allows quick acquisition of technique by making difficult passages simpler (one hand is easier than two) and the chord attack enables instant acceleration to the final speed, etc., and
If not: problems that arise if uninformed methods are used, i.e., acquiring bad habits from too many repetitions, developing stress from practicing with fatigued hands, etc. Without this "If not", students can pick any other method -- why this one? We need to know what not to do because bad habits and wrong methods, not insufficient practice, are the main causes of a lack of progress.

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The Practice Routine

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This section contains the minimum set of instructions that you need before starting practice.

Many students use the following practice routine:

(1) First, practice scales or technical exercises until the fingers are limbered up. Continue this for 30 minutes or longer, if you have time, to improve technique, especially by using exercises such as the Hanon series.
(2) Then take a new piece of music and slowly read it for a page or two, carefully playing both hands together, starting from the beginning. This slow play is repeated until it can be performed reasonably well and then it is gradually speeded up until the final speed is attained. A metronome might be used for this gradual speed-up.
(3) At the end of a two hour practice, the fingers are flying, so the students can play as fast as they want and enjoy the experience before quitting. After all, they are tired of practicing so that they can relax, play their hearts out at full speed; this is the time to enjoy the music!
(4) On the day of the recital or lesson, they practice the piece at correct speed (or faster!) as many times as possible in order to make sure that they know it inside out and to keep it in top condition. This is the last chance; obviously, the more practice, the better.

EVERY STEP OF THIS PROCEDURE IS WRONG! The above will almost guarantee that the students will not progress beyond intermediate level even if they practice several hours daily. You will understand this as soon as you read about the more efficient methods described below. For example, this method tells the students nothing about what to do when they hit an impossible passage except to keep repeating, sometimes for a lifetime, with no clear idea of when or how the needed technique will be acquired. This method leaves the task of learning the piano completely to the student. Moreover, the music will come out flat during the recital and unexpected flubs will be almost unavoidable, as explained below. The lessons of this section will demonstrate why the above procedures are wrong. You will know why the recital will come out flat, and why the wrong method leads to flubs. But more importantly, you will know the correct methods!

Lack of progress is the main reason why so many students quit piano. Students, especially youngsters, are smart; why work like a slave and learn nothing? Reward the students and you will get more dedication than any teacher could want. You can be a doctor, scientist, lawyer, athlete, or anything you want, and still become a good pianist. This is because there are methods that let you acquire technique in a relatively short period of time, as we shall soon see.

Note that the above practice routine is an "intuitive" method. If a person of average intelligence were marooned on an island with just a piano and decided to practice, that person would most likely devise a practice method like the one above. That is, a teacher using this type of practice routine isn't teaching anything -- the method is intuitive. When I first started to compile the "correct learning procedures" of this book, I was struck most by how counter-intuitive many of them were. I will explain later why they are so counter-intuitive but this offers the best explanation for why so many teachers use the intuitive approach. These teachers never really understood the correct methods and therefore defaulted naturally to the intuitive method. The trouble with counter-intuitive methods is that they are harder to adopt than intuitive ones; your brain is constantly telling you that they are not right and to get back to the intuitive ones. This message from the brain can become irresistible just before a lesson or recital -- try telling (uninformed) students not to enjoy playing their finished pieces before quitting practice, or not to practice full speed on recital day! It is not just the students or teachers. It is also any parents or friends with good intentions that influence the practice routines of young students. Parents who are not informed will always force their children to use the intuitive methods. This is one reason why good teachers always ask parents to accompany their children to the lessons. If the parents are not informed, there is a virtual guarantee that they will force the students to use methods that are in direct contradiction to the teacher's instructions.

Students who started with the correct methods from the beginning are the apparently lucky ones. However, they must be careful later in life because they don't know what the wrong methods are. Once they leave the teacher, they can stumble into the intuitive methods and have no idea why everything is falling apart. It's like a bear that had never seen a bear trap -- it gets caught every time. These lucky ones often can't teach either, because the correct methods are second nature and they can't understand why anyone would use any other method. They may not realize that the correct methods need to be taught and that many intuitive methods can lead to disaster. Something that is second nature is often difficult to describe because you never gave it much thought. You never realize how difficult English is until you try to teach it to a Japanese. On the other hand, the apparently unlucky students who first learned the intuitive methods and then changed over to the better ones have some unexpected advantages. They know both the right and wrong methods and often make much better teachers. Therefore, although this chapter teaches the correct methods, it is just as important to know what NOT to do, and why. This is why the most frequently used wrong methods are extensively discussed in this book; they help us to better understand the correct methods.

We describe the components of a proper practice routine in the following sections. They are presented in approximately the order in which a student might use them from start to finish of a new piece of music. Sections 1 to 4 are preliminaries; the really new material of this book starts in section 5.

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Finger Positions

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Everyone seems to have her/is own ideas about finger positions, so it is clear that there are no rigid rules. The only guidance is that the fingers should be in the most relaxed and powerful positions. First, make a tight fist. Then open your fingers and stretch them as far out as they will go. Now relax the fingers completely. In this relaxed state, place the hand on a flat surface with all the fingertips resting on the surface and the wrist at the same height as the knuckles. The hand and fingers should form a dome. All the fingers should be curved. The thumb should point slightly down and bend very slightly towards the fingers so that the last digit of the thumb is parallel to the other fingers. It is important to maintain this slight inward bend of the thumb when playing chords with wide spans. This positions the tip of the thumb parallel to the keys making it less likely to hit adjacent keys. It also orients the thumb so that the correct muscles are used to raise and lower the thumb. The fingers are slightly curled, curving down and meeting the keys at angles near 45 degrees. This curved configuration allows the fingers to play between the black keys. The tip of the thumb and the other fingertips should form an approximate semicircle on the flat surface. This is a good starting hand position for playing the piano. You can then modify it to suit your playing style. If you do this with both hands side by side, the two thumbnails should be facing each other. Use the part of the thumb directly below the thumbnails to play, not the joint. For the other fingers, the bone comes very close to the outer skin at the fingertips. Just inside the fingertip (away from the fingernail), the flesh is slightly thicker. This fleshy part should contact the keys, not the fingertip.

This is just a suggested starting position. Once you begin play, these rules immediately go out the window. You may need to stretch the fingers almost straight, or curl them more, depending on what you are playing.

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Bench Height and Distance from Piano

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The right height of the bench and its distance from the piano is also very much a matter of personal taste. A good starting point can be determined in the following way. Sit at the bench with your elbows at your sides and forearms parallel to the keys. With your hands on the keys in playing position, the elbows should be at the height of the keys. Now place your hands on the white keys -- the distance of the bench from the piano (and your sitting position) should be such that the elbows just miss your body as you move them in towards each other. Do not sit at the center of the bench, but sit closer to the front edge. The bench height and location are most critical when playing loud chords. Therefore, you can test this position by playing two black key chords simultaneously, as loudly as you can. The chords are C2#G2#C3# (5,2,1) for the left hand and C5#G5#C6# (1,2,5) for the right hand. Press down hard, leaning forwards a little, with the whole weight of your arms and shoulders, to make a thundering, authoritative sound. Make sure that the shoulders are totally involved. Loud, impressive sounds cannot be made using only the hands and forearms; the force must come from the shoulders and the body. If this is comfortable, the bench and sitting positions should be correct.

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Starting a Piece: Listening and Analysis (Fur Elise)

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Look over the new piece and start sight-reading with it, so that you become familiar with how it sounds. The best way to become familiar with a new piece is to listen to a performance (recording). The criticism that listening first is some sort of "cheating" has no defensible basis. The purported disadvantage is that students might end up imitating instead of using their creativity. It is impossible to imitate someone else's playing because playing styles are so individualistic. A mathematical "proof" of this impossibility is presented in section IV.3. This fact can be reassuring and relieves some students from blaming themselves for the inability to imitate some famous pianist. If possible, listen to several different recordings. They can open up all sorts of new vistas and possibilities. Not listening is like saying that you shouldn't go to school because that will destroy your creativity. Some students think that listening is a waste of time because they will never play that well. In that case, think again. If the methods described here will not make people play "that well", I wouldn't be writing this book! What happens most frequently when students listen to many recordings is that they discover that the performances are not uniformly good; that they actually prefer their own playing to some of those in the recordings.

The next step is to analyze the structure of the composition. This structure will be used to determine the practice program. Let's use Beethoven's Fur Elise as an example. The first 4 bars are repeated 15 times, so by just learning 4 bars you can play 50% of the piece (it has 125 bars). Another 6 bars are repeated 4 times, so learning only 10 bars enables you to play 70% of it. Using the methods of this book, therefore, 70% of this piece can be memorized in less than 30 minutes, because these bars are quite easy. Application of this method automatically commits those sections you practice to memory. Among these repeated bars, there are two interruptions that are not easy. When you can play these interruptions satisfactorily, using the methods described below, join them with the repetitions, and Voila! -- you can play, and have memorized, the whole piece. Of course, mastering the two difficult interruptions is the key to learning this piece, and we shall address that issue in the following sections. A student with 2 years of lessons should be able to learn the required 50 different bars of this piece in 2 to 5 days and be able to play the whole piece at speed and from memory. At this point, the teacher is ready to work with the student on the musical content of the composition; how long that will take depends on the musical level of the student. Musically speaking, you never really finish any piece.

This is the end of the preliminaries. We are ready to begin the real exciting lessons. The secret for acquiring technique quickly lies in knowing certain tricks for reducing impossibly difficult passages to not only playable but also to trivially simple ones. We shall now embark upon that magical journey into the brains of geniuses who figured out incredibly efficient ways to practice the piano!

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Practice the Most Difficult Sections First

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Returning to our Fur Elise, look for the difficult sections; there are two interruptions with 16 and 23 bars inserted among the repeated material. These are the difficult sections. Start learning the piece by practicing the most difficult sections first. The reason is obvious; it will take the longest time to learn these, so they should be given the most practice time. If you practice the difficult sections last and then try to perform the piece, you will find that the difficult part is the weakest and it will always give you trouble. Since the ending of most pieces is generally the most exciting, interesting, and difficult, you will probably learn most pieces starting from the end. For compositions with several movements, you will most frequently start with the end of the final movement.

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Shortening Difficult Passages: Segmental (Bar-by-Bar) Practice

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A most important learning trick is to choose a short practice segment. This trick has perhaps the largest effect on reducing the practice time because of many reasons.
(1) Within any difficult passage of say, 10 bars, there is typically only a few note combinations that stymie you. There is no need to practice anything other than those notes. If there are 10 bars with 8 notes each but there are only 4 difficult notes, then by just practicing those four, you can get to play all 10 bars, greatly cutting down on practice time. Let's revisit the two difficult interruptions in Fur Elise. Examine them and find the most troublesome bars. This may be the first bar or the last five bars of the first interruption, or the final arpeggio in the second interruption. In all difficult segments, it is critically important to observe the finger markings and to make doubly sure that you are comfortable with them. For the last five bars of the first interruption, the difficulty is in the RH where most of the action is in fingers 1 and 5. Finger 2 plays a key role on certain notes, but there is an option of using mostly finger 1. Use of finger 2 is the most conventionally correct way and provides better control and smoother play. However, use of mostly finger 1 is easier to remember, which can be a lifesaver if you haven't played this piece for a while. It is very important that you choose one fingering and stick to it. For the arpeggio in the second interruption, use the fingering 1231354321.... Either thumb under or thumb over (see section III.5) will work because this passage is not overly fast, but I prefer thumb over because the thumb under will require some elbow motion and this extra movement can lead to flubs.
(2) Practicing only short segments allows you to practice the same segment dozens, even hundreds of times, in a matter of minutes. Use of these quick, successive repetitions is the fastest way to teach your hand new motions. If the difficult notes are played as part of a longer segment, the longer interval between successive practice and the playing of other notes in between can confuse the hand and cause it to learn much more slowly. This effect is quantitatively calculated in section IV.5, and that calculation provides the basis for the claim in this book that these methods can be 1000 times faster than the intuitive methods.
(3) We all know that playing a passage faster than your technique allows is detrimental. However, the shorter a segment you choose, the faster you can practice it without ill effects. Initially, the most common short segment you will choose is one bar or less, often just two notes. By choosing such short segments, you can bring practically any difficult note combination up to speed in just minutes. Therefore, you can practice most of the time at or beyond final speed, which is the ideal situation because it saves so much time. In the intuitive method, you are practicing most of the time at slow speed.

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Hands Separate Practice: Acquiring Technique

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Essentially 100% of technique development is accomplished by practicing hands separately (HS). Do not try to develop finger/hand technique hands together (HT) as that is much more difficult, time consuming, and dangerous, as explained in detail later.

Start practicing any difficult passage HS. Choose two short passages, one each for the right hand (RH) and the left hand (LH). Practice the RH until it begins to tire, then switch to the LH. Switch every 5 to 15 seconds, before either the resting hand cools and becomes sluggish, or the working hand becomes tired. If you choose the rest interval just right, you will find that the rested hand is eager to perform. Don't practice when the hand is tired, because that will lead to stress and bad habits. Those unfamiliar with HS practice will generally have a weaker LH. In that case, give the LH more work. In this scheme, you can practice hard 100% of the time, but you never practice with fatigued hands!

For the two difficult sections of Fur Elise, practice them HS until each hand becomes very comfortable, up to speeds much faster than final speed, before putting the hands together. This may take from a few days to several weeks depending on your level of play. As soon as you can play HS reasonably well, try HT to check that the fingering works. It is best to try to use similar fingerings (or closely related fingerings) in the two hands; this will make the task of playing HT simpler. Don't worry at this point if you can't play it satisfactorily, you just need to make sure that there are no conflicts or better fingerings.

It should be emphasized that the HS practice is only for difficult passages that you cannot play. If you can play the passage adequately HT, by all means, skip the HS part! The ultimate objective of this book is for you to be able to quickly play HT with practically no HS practice after you become proficient. The objective is not to cultivate a dependence on HS practice. Use HS only when necessary and try to reduce its use gradually as your technique advances. However, you will be able to play HT with little HS practice only after you have become pretty advanced -- most students will be dependent on HS practice for 5 to 10 years, and will never completely abandon its use. The reason for this is that all technique is most quickly acquired HS. There is one exception to this rule on avoiding HS practice whenever possible. That is memorizing; you should memorize everything HS for several important reasons (see "Memorizing" in section III).

Beginning students should practice HS all the time for all pieces so as to master this critically important method as quickly as possible. However, once the HS method is mastered, the student should start to explore the possibility of playing HT without using HS. Beginner students should be able to master the HS methods in two to three years. The HS method is not just separating the hands. What we will learn below are the myriad of learning tricks you can use once the hands are separated.

HS practice is valuable long after you have learned a piece. You can push your technique much further HS than HT. And it is a lot of fun! You can really exercise the fingers/hands/arms. It is superior to anything Hanon or other exercises can provide. This is when you can figure out "incredible ways" to play that piece. This is when you can really improve your technique. The initial learning of the composition only serves to familiarize your fingers with the music. The amount of time spent playing pieces you have completely learned is what separates the accomplished pianist from the amateur. This is why accomplished pianists can perform but most amateurs can only play for themselves.

Finally, it should be understood that all finger technique is acquired HS because there is no method that is more efficient. If you can play HT immediately, there is no need for HS practice. However, if you can't quite play HT, how do you tell if you can skip HS practice? There is a clear test for that -- you can skip HS practice only if you can play HS comfortably, relaxed, and accurately at faster than final speed. It is usually best to bring the HS speed up to at least 1.5 times final speed. That is usually not difficult, and can be a lot of fun, because you can see the rapid improvement in your skill level. For this reason, you might find yourself practicing HS a lot more than is absolutely necessary, and will certainly use it all your life. Each hand must eventually learn its own set of skills independently of the other (you certainly don't want one hand to depend on the other). The quickest way to acquire these skills is to learn them separately. Each alone is difficult enough; trying to learn them together will be much more difficult and time consuming. In HS practice, you acquire finger/hand technique; then in HT practice you only need to learn how to coordinate the two hands.

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The Continuity Rule

2006-03-02T07:38:00.000-08:00

Suppose that you want to play the (LH) "do-so-mi-so" quadruplet (“Alberti accompaniment”) many times in succession, very fast (as in the 3rd movement of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata). The sequence you practice is CGEGC. The inclusion of the last C is an application of the continuity rule: while practicing one segment, always include the beginning of the following segment. This ensures that when you have learned two adjacent segments, you can also play them together. The continuity rule applies to any segment you isolate for practice, such as a bar, an entire movement, or even to segments smaller than a bar.

A generalization of the continuity rule is that any passage may be broken up into short segments for practice, but these segments must overlap. The overlapping note or group of notes is called the conjunction. If you are practicing the end of the first movement, then include a few bars of the beginning of the second movement; don't immediately jump back. During a recital, you will be glad that you had practiced in this way; otherwise, you might suddenly find yourself stumped on how to start the 2nd movement!

We can now apply the continuity rule to those difficult interruptions in Fur Elise. For the first interruption, the 8th bar (of this interruption) can be practiced by itself. Play the last note with finger 1. The conjunction is the first note of bar 9 (finger 2), which is the same as the first note of bar 8, so by using this C as the conjunction, you can cycle bar 8 continually for a good workout without any wasted time. This bar is said to be self-cycling -- see "Cycling", section III.2, for more details on cycling. Bars 9 and 10 as a unit are also self-cycling. Since all the difficult sections are for the RH, find some LH material to practice, even from a different piece of music, in order to give the RH periodic rests by switching hands.

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The Chord Attack

2006-03-02T07:28:00.000-08:00

Let's return to the (LH) CGEG quadruplet. If you practice it slowly and then gradually speed it up (HS), you will hit a "speed wall", a speed beyond which everything breaks down and stress builds up. The way to break this speed wall is to play the quadruplet as a single chord (CEG). You have gone from slow speed to infinite speed! This is called a chord attack. Now you only have to learn to slow down, which is easier than speeding up because there is no speed wall when you are slowing down. But -- how do you slow down?

First play the chord and bounce the hand up and down at the frequency at which the quadruplet should be played (say, between one and two times a second); it should be easier when played as a chord, but this may not be simple if it is your first time. Note that the fingers are now positioned exactly correctly for fast playing. Try varying the bounce frequency up and down (even beyond the required speed!), noting how to alter the wrist, arm, fingers, etc., positions and motions as you go through the different speeds. If you feel fatigue after a while, then you are either doing something wrong, or else you have not yet acquired the technique of bouncing the chords. You will need to practice it until you can do that without tiring because if you can't do it for a chord, you will never do it for quadruplets. In other words, you have just identified a weakness in the technique that needs to be remedied before you can progress to the next stage.

Play the chord with the most economical motions you can think of. Keep the fingers close to or on the keys as you increase speed. Get your whole body involved; shoulders, upper and lower arms, wrist. The sensation is to play from your shoulders and arms, not your fingertips. When you can play this softly, relaxed, fast, and without any feeling of fatigue, you know that you have made progress. Make sure that you are playing perfect chords (all notes landing at the same time) because, without this kind of sensitivity, you will not have the accuracy required to play fast. It is important to practice the slow bounce because that is when you can work on the accuracy. Accuracy improves faster at the slower speeds. However, it is absolutely essential that you get up to fast speeds (if only briefly) before slowing down. When you slow down, try to maintain the same motions that were required at high speed, because that is what you need to ultimately practice. If you think that this is the end of this simple chord business, you are in for a surprise -- this is only the beginning; read on!

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Gravity Drop, Chord Practice, and Relaxation

2006-03-02T07:26:00.000-08:00

Practicing to play accurate chords is the first step in applying the chord attack. Let's practice the above CEG chord. The arm weight method is the best way to achieve accuracy and relaxation; this approach has been adequately treated in the referenced books (Fink, Sandor) and therefore will be discussed only briefly here. Place your fingers on the keys and position them correctly. Relax your arm (the whole body, actually), keep your wrist flexible, lift the hand from 5 to 20 cm above the keys (the shorter distance in the beginning), and just let gravity drop your hand. Let the hand and fingers drop as a unit, do not move the fingers. Relax the hands completely during the drop, then "set" your fingers and wrist at the time of impact with the keys and let the wrist flex slightly to take the shock of landing and to depress the keys. By letting gravity lower your hand, you are referencing your strength or sensitivity to a very constant force.

It may seem unbelievable at first, but an under-weight 6-year-old and a gargantuan sumo wrestler dropping their hands from the same height will produce sound of the same loudness. This happens because the speed of gravitational fall is independent of mass and the hammer goes into free flight as soon as the knuckle leaves the jack (the last few millimeters before hitting the strings). Physics students will recognize that in the elastic limit (billiard ball collision), kinetic energy is conserved and the above statements do not hold. In such an elastic collision, the piano key would fly off the fingertip at high velocity, somewhat like when playing staccato. But here, because the fingers are relaxed and the fingertips are soft (inelastic collision), kinetic energy is not conserved and the small mass (piano key) can stay with the large mass (finger-hand-arm), resulting in a controlled keydrop. Therefore, the above statements hold as long as the piano is properly regulated and the effective mass for the key drop is much smaller than the mass of the 6-year-old's finger-hand-arm. Stiffening the hand at impact ensures that the entire arm weight transfers to the key drop. Obviously, it is not possible to produce the full sound of the gravity drop if you do not stiffen the hand at impact. You must take care not to add force during this stiffening; therefore, it takes practice to be able to produce a pure gravity drop and this becomes more difficult with increasing height of the drop. Not adding this extra force is a more difficult task for the sumo wrestler because he needs such a large force to stop the momentum of his arm. The best criteria for the proper stiffening force are the loudness and tone of the sound.

Strictly speaking, the sumo wrestler will make a slightly louder sound because of momentum conservation, but the difference will be quite small, in spite of the fact that his arm may be 20 times heavier. Another surprise is that, once properly taught, the gravity drop may produce the loudest sound that this youngster has ever played (for a high drop), and is an excellent way to teach youngsters how to play firmly. Start with short drops for small youngsters because in the beginning, a truly free drop can be painful if the height is too high. For a successful gravity drop, especially for youngsters, it is important to teach them to make-believe that there is no piano and the hand should feel like it is falling through the keyboard (but is stopped by it). Otherwise, many youngsters will subconsciously lift the hand as it lands on the piano. In other words, the gravity drop is a constant acceleration and the hand is accelerating, even during the key drop. At the end, the hand is resting on the keys with its own weight -- this action is what produces pleasant, deep, "tone". Note that it is important for the key drop to accelerate all the way down - see section III.1 on producing good tone.

The well-known Steinway "accelerated action" works because it adds acceleration to the hammer motion by use of a rounded support under the center key bushing. This causes the pivot point to move forward with keydrop thus shortening the front side of the key and lengthening the back side and thereby causing the capstan to accelerate for a constant keydrop. This illustrates the importance piano designers place on accelerating the keydrop, and the arm weight method ensures that we take full advantage of gravitational acceleration to control the tone. The effectiveness of the "accelerated action" is controversial because there are excellent pianos without this feature. Obviously, it is more important for the pianist to control this acceleration.

The finger must be "set" at the moment of impact so as to depress the key and decelerate the fall. This requires a brief application of force to the finger. As soon as the key reaches the bottom of the keydrop, remove this force and relax completely so that you can feel gravity pulling the arm down. Rest the hand on the key with only this gravitational force keeping the key down. What you have just accomplished is to depress the key with the least possible effort; this is the essence of relaxation.

Beginning students will play chords with too many unnecessary forces that can not be accurately controlled. The use of gravity to lower the hand allows you to eliminate all forces or tenseness in the hand that are the causes of certain fingers landing before the others. It might seem like a curious coincidence that the force of gravity is just the right force for playing the piano. This is no coincidence. Humans evolved under the influence of gravity. Our strengths for walking, lifting, etc., evolved to match gravity exactly. The piano, of course, was built to match those strengths. Remember: the amount of force you need to play the chord is roughly equal to that supplied by gravity -- don't bang those chords or tense the hands -- a lot of things will start to go out of control! For beginners or those who have developed a habit of tensing the hands to play chords, it is a good idea to practice the gravity drop for several weeks, or even months, a little bit every time you practice. And of course, it must be incorporated into the everyday practicing and playing. What this means is that when you are truly relaxed, you can actually feel the effect of gravity on your hands as you are playing. Some teachers will emphasize relaxation to the point of neglecting everything else until "total" relaxation is achieved; that may be going too far overboard -- being able to feel gravity is a necessary and sufficient criterion for relaxation.

The gravity drop also eliminates the need for momentum balance (see section IV.6). When the hand plays the piano, the downward momentum of the key is supplied by the momentum of the hand. This downward momentum must be compensated by the rest of the human playing mechanism which must provide an upward momentum if the gravity drop is not utilized. Although we all accomplish this without even thinking, it is in fact quite a complex feat. In the gravity drop method, this momentum is supplied by gravity, so that the piano is played with the absolute minimum action by the human playing mechanism. In this way, the gravity drop enables us to relax all the unnecessary muscles and to concentrate only on those that are needed to control the chord.

Gravity drop is therefore much more than just a method to practice chords. More importantly, the gravity drop is a method to practice relaxation. Once this relaxed state is achieved, it must become a permanent, integral part of your piano playing. The guiding principle in the arm weight method is relaxation. In addition to the gravity drop, it is important to learn to feel the effect of gravity as we play. We will treat relaxation in more detail below.

Finally, chord playing is an important component of piano technique. As such, it must be developed gradually in concert with your general skill level. There is no faster way of doing that than the use of the parallel sets described below. Also, see section III.7 for more details; section III.7e gives additional instructions on how to practice playing even chords when the gravity drop does not solve the problem.

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Parallel Sets

2006-03-02T07:18:00.000-08:00

Now that the LH CEG chord is satisfactory, (try to) switch suddenly from the chord to the quadruplet at several different bounce frequencies. You will now have to move the fingers but keep the finger motions to a minimum. Here again, you will need to incorporate the proper hand/arm motions (see Fink, Sandor), but that's advanced stuff, so let's back-track a little. You will be able to switch quickly after you have become proficient with this method but let's assume that you cannot, so that we can demonstrate a powerful method for solving this very common type of problem.

The most basic way to learn how to play a difficult passage is to build it up two notes at a time, using the chord attack. In our (LH) CGEG example, we start with the first two notes. A two-note chord attack! Play these two notes as a perfect chord, bouncing your hand and fingers (5 and 1) together up and down as you did previously with the CEG chord. In order to play these two notes rapidly one after the other, lower both fingers together, but keep the 1 finger slightly above the 5 so that the 5 lands first. It is just a rapid two-note rolling chord. Since you are bringing both fingers down at once and only delaying one slightly, you can play them as closely as you wish by decreasing the delay. This is how you slow down from infinite speed!

Is it possible to play any combination of notes infinitely fast in this way? Of course not. How do we know which ones can be played infinitely fast and which ones can't? In order to answer this question, we need to introduce the concept of parallel play. The above method of lowering fingers together is called parallel play because the fingers are lowered simultaneously, i.e., in parallel. A parallel set is a group of notes that can be played as a chord. All parallel sets can be played infinitely fast. The delay between successive fingers is called the phase angle. In a chord, the phase angle is zero for all the fingers. These and related concepts are explained more systematically in section IV.2. The highest speed is attained by reducing the phase to the smallest controllable value. This smallest value is approximately equal to the error in your chord playing. In other words, the more accurate your chords, the faster will be your maximum attainable speed. This is why so much space was devoted above to describing how to practice perfect chords.

Once you have conquered the CG, you can proceed with the next GE (1,3), then EG and finally the GC to complete the quadruplet and conjunction. Then connect them in pairs, etc., to complete the quadruplet. Notice that CGE is also a parallel set. Therefore the quadruplet plus conjunction can be constructed from two parallel sets, (5,1,3) and (3,1,5). This is a faster way. The general rule for the use of parallel sets is: construct the practice segment by using the largest parallel sets possible that are consistent with the fingering. Break it up into smaller parallel sets only if the large parallel set is too difficult. If you have difficulty with a particular parallel set, read section III.7 on parallel set exercises. Although, in theory, parallel sets can be played infinitely fast, that doesn't guarantee that you can play that particular parallel set with sufficient speed and control. You can play it only if you have the technique. Therefore, parallel sets can be used to pinpoint your weaknesses. Section III.7 discusses details of how to practice playing parallel sets and how to quickly acquire technique by their use.

After you can play one quadruplet well, practice playing two in succession until you can do that comfortably, then three, etc. Soon, you will be able to play as many as you want in succession! When you initially bounced the chord, the hand moved up and down. But in the end, when playing the quadruplets in rapid succession, the hand is fairly stationary, but not rigid. You will also have to add hand motions -- more on this later.

The second difficult section in Fur Elise ends with an arpeggio that is composed of three parallel sets, 123, 135, and 432. First practice each parallel set individually, then add the conjunction, then connect them in pairs, etc., to build up the arpeggio.

Now we have the necessary terminology and can summarize the procedure for using the chord attack to scale speed walls (see sections IV.1 and IV.2 for discussions of speed walls). Decompose the segment into parallel sets, apply the chord attack to these sets, and connect the parallel sets to complete the segment. If you cannot play any of the needed parallel sets at nearly infinite speed, you will need the parallel set exercises of section III.7. Whew! We are done with speed walls!

In order for the segment to sound smooth and musical, we need to accomplish two things: (1) control the phase angles accurately and (2) connect the parallel sets smoothly. Most of the finger/hand/arm motions described in the references are aimed at accomplishing these two tasks in the most ingenious ways. This is the most direct connection between the concept of parallel sets and the references. Since those subjects are adequately covered in the references, they are only briefly treated here in section III.4. Therefore those references are necessary companions to this book. The material given here will get you started; the material in the references is necessary to bring you to the next level of proficiency and musicianship. In order to help you decide which reference you should use, I have provided (extremely brief) reviews for several of them in the Reference section. As you speed up the parallel sets, experiment with hand rotation, wrist motion up and down (in general, lower the wrist when playing the thumb and raise it as you approach the pinky), pronation, supination, cycling motion, thrust, pull, etc. These are detailed in the references and briefly surveyed in section III.4.

You will need to read section III.7 in order to know how to use parallel sets to acquire technique quickly. The above introduction to parallel play is just an abbreviated description and is in fact a little misleading. The parallel play described above is what is called a "phase locked" parallel play and is the easiest way to start, but that is not your ultimate goal. In order to acquire technique, you need complete finger independence, not phase locked fingers. Completely independent finger-by-finger play is called serial play. Our objective therefore, is fast serial play. In the intuitive method, you take a slow serial play and try to speed it up. Parallel play is not an objective in itself, but is the quickest way to fast serial play. These issues are explained in the section on Parallel Set Exercises. The idea of these exercises is to first test whether you can play "infinitely fast" -- you will be surprised to find out that you cannot always do so, even with just two notes. The exercises then provide you with a way to practice only those sets that you need for that technique. You acquire the technique when you can play the parallel set with control over each note at any speed.

Of course, proficient parallel play by itself does not guarantee correct play. It just gets you there faster by at least getting you up to speed, so that you have fewer steps to take in order to arrive at the correct motions. That is, even with successful parallel play, you will still need to perform quite a bit of further experimentation in order to be able to manage the whole passage. Because the method described here allows you to try hundreds of trials in minutes, this experimentation can be conducted relatively quickly. If you apply the bar-by-bar method, each bar will take less than a second at speed, so in 5 minutes, you can practice it 300 times!

This is why you can't beat having a good teacher, since s/he can steer you quickly to the correct motions and bypass most of this experimentation. But having a teacher does not mean that you will stop experimenting - just that the experimentation will be more effective. Experimentation should be a constant part of any practice routine. This is another reason why HS practice is so valuable -- experimenting is difficult enough HS, it is practically impossible HT!

Parallel play does not solve all problems; it solves mainly material containing runs, arpeggios and broken chords. Another major class of problems is jumps. For this go to section III.7.f.

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Learning and Memorizing

2006-03-02T07:16:00.000-08:00

There is no faster way of memorizing than to memorize when you are first learning a piece and, for a difficult piece, there is no faster way of learning than memorizing it. Therefore memorize these sections that you are practicing for technique while you are repeating them so many times, in small segments, HS. Memorization is discussed in more detail in section III.6. The procedures for memorizing are almost exactly parallel to those for technique acquisition. For example, memorization should be done HS first. This is why learning and memorizing should be done simultaneously; otherwise you will need to repeat the same procedure twice. It might appear that going through the same procedure a second time would be simpler. It is not. Memorizing is a complex task, even after you can play the piece well. For this reason, students who try to memorize after learning a piece will either give up or never memorize it well. This is understandable; the effort required to memorize can quickly reach the point of diminishing returns if you can already play the piece at speed.

Once students develop memorizing-learning routines that are comfortable for them, most of them will find that learning and memorizing together takes less time than learning alone, for difficult passages. This happens because you eliminate the process of looking at the music, interpreting it, and passing the instructions from the eyes to the brain and then to the hands. With these slow steps bypassed, the learning can proceed unencumbered. Some might worry that memorizing too many compositions will create an unsustainable maintenance problem (see section III.6c for a discussion of maintenance). The best attitude to have towards this problem is not to worry if you forget some pieces that are seldom played. This is because recalling a forgotten piece is very fast as long as it was memorized well the first time. Material memorized when young (before about 20 years of age) is almost never forgotten. This is why it is so critical to learn fast methods of technique acquisition and to memorize as many pieces as possible before reaching the later teen years.

As you go through each step described in this section to acquire technique, memorize the music at that same step. It is that simple. Section III.6 also discusses the numerous benefits of memorization; these benefits are so valuable that it does not make any sense not to memorize. It is much easier to memorize something if you can play it fast; therefore, if you have difficulty memorizing it initially at slow speed, don't worry; it will become easier as you speed it up.

The major difference between practicing for technique and memorization is that for technique, you need to start with the most difficult sections first, whereas for memory, it is usually best to start with sections that are easy and repeated many times so that you can quickly memorize a large portion of the composition. Then, by memorizing the remaining small sections, you can connect the long easy sections and thereby memorize the whole piece quickly. In general, it is better to memorize first, and then practice for technique. That way, you can start to practice for technique while memorizing. Obviously, all these many requirements are often contradictory, so you must use your judgment on what to do first for each specific case.

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Velocity, Choice of Practice Speed

2006-03-02T07:08:00.000-08:00

Get up to speed as quickly as possible. Remember, we are still practicing HS. Playing so fast that you start to feel stress and make mistakes will not improve technique because playing with stress is not the way it will be played when you become proficient. Forcing the fingers to play the same way faster is not the way to increase speed. As demonstrated with parallel play, you need new ways that automatically increase speed. In fact, with parallel play, it is often easier to play fast than slowly. Devise hand positions and motions that will control the phase angle accurately and that will also position everything in such a way that the coming transition to the next parallel set is smooth. If you do not make significant progress in a few minutes, you are probably doing something wrong -- think of something new. Repeating the same thing for more than a few minutes without any visible improvement will often do more harm than good. Students who use the intuitive method are resigned to repeating the same thing for hours with little visible improvement. That mentality must be avoided when using the methods of this book. There are two types of situations you will encounter when increasing speed. One involves technical skills you already have; you should be able to bring these parts up to speed in minutes. The other involves new skills; these will take longer and will be discussed below.

Technique improves most rapidly when playing at a speed at which you can play accurately. This is especially true when playing HT (please be patient -- I promise we will eventually get to HT practice). Since you have more control HS, you can get away with much faster play HS than HT without increasing stress or forming bad habits. Thus it is erroneous to think that you can improve faster by playing as fast as possible (after all, if you play twice as fast, you can practice the same passage twice as often!). Since the main objective of HS practice is to gain speed, the need to quickly attain speed and to practice at a speed optimized for technical improvement become contradictory. The solution to this dilemma is to constantly change the speed of practice; do not stay at any one speed for too long. Although it is best to bring the passage up to speed immediately, for very difficult passages that require skills you don't already have, there is no alternative but to bring it up in stages. For this, use speeds that are too fast as exploratory excursions to determine what needs to be changed in order to play at such speeds. Then slow down and practice those new motions. Of course, if you lack the technique, you must go back to shortening the passage and applying the parallel set exercises.

To vary the speed, first get up to some manageable "maximum speed" at which you can play accurately. Then go faster (using chord attacks, etc., if necessary), and take note of how the playing needs to be changed (don't worry if you are not playing accurately). Then use that motion and play at the previous "maximum speed". It should now be noticeably easier. Practice at this speed for a while, then try even slower speeds to make sure that you are completely relaxed. Then repeat the whole procedure. In this way, you ratchet up the speed in manageable jumps and work on each needed skill separately. In most cases, you should be able to play a new piece, at least in small segments, HS, at the final speed during the first sitting. In the beginning, such feats may seem unattainable, but every student can reach this objective surprisingly quickly.

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How to Relax

2006-03-02T07:06:00.000-08:00

The most important thing to do as you get up to speed is to relax. Relaxing means that you use only those muscles that are needed to play. Thus you can be working as hard as you want, and be relaxed. The relaxed state is especially easy to attain when practicing HS. There are two schools of thought on relaxation. One school maintains that, in the long run, it is better not to practice at all than to practice with even the slightest amount of tension. This school teaches by showing you how to relax and play a single note, and then advancing carefully, giving you only those easy material that you can play relaxed. The other school argues that relaxation is just another necessary aspect of technique, but that subjugating the entire practice philosophy to relaxation is not the optimum approach. Which system is better is not clear at this time. Whichever system you choose, it is obvious that playing with stress must be avoided.

If you adopt the methods described in this book and get up to final speed rapidly, some initial stress may be unavoidable. Note that the whole idea of getting up to speed quickly is to enable you to practice at a slower speed, completely relaxed. As pointed out throughout this book, high speed is nearly impossible to attain without complete relaxation and de-coupling of all the muscles (especially the large muscles) so that the fingers can gain their independence.

Students who play with a lot of stress will know that the stress is gone when, all of a sudden, the playing becomes easy at speed. Those who had not been taught to eliminate stress think that this is the point at which they suddenly acquired a new technique. In reality, their technique had slowly improved to the point when they could start to relax. The relaxation allowed the technique to improve more and the improvement allowed further relaxation, and this feedback cycle is what caused such a magical transformation. It is obviously better to start with zero stress. Although starting with zero stress might appear to hold you back in the beginning, you tend to acquire technique faster starting with zero stress than rushing into a stressed state and then trying to eliminate the stress. So, then, how do you relax?

There are numerous instances in many books, with instructions to "involve the whole body", when playing the piano, with no further suggestions on how to achieve it. Part, or sometimes most, of this involvement has to be relaxation. In many ways, the human brain is wasteful. For even the simplest tasks, the brain generally uses most of the muscles in the body. And if the task is difficult, the brain tends to lock the body in a mass of tensed muscles. In order to relax, you must make a conscious effort (involve the whole body) to shut down all unnecessary muscles. This is not easy because it goes against the natural tendency of the brain. You need to practice relaxation just as much as moving the fingers to depress the keys. Relaxing does not mean to "let go of all muscles"; it means that the unnecessary ones are relaxed even when the necessary ones are working full tilt, which is a coordination skill that requires a lot of practice to achieve.

Don't forget to relax all the various functions of the body, such as breathing and periodic swallowing. Some students will stop breathing when playing demanding passages because the playing muscles are anchored at the chest, and keeping that part of the body still makes it easier to play. When relaxed, you should be able to conduct all of the normal body functions and still be able to simultaneously concentrate on playing. Section 21 below explains how to use the diaphragm to breathe properly. If your throat is dry after a hard practice, it means that you had also stopped swallowing. These are all indications of stress.

The gravity drop method discussed above is an excellent way to practice relaxation. Practice this gravity drop with one finger. Choose a different finger each time. Although there is never a need to actively lift the 4th finger, don't get into the habit of completely relaxing it, as that will cause it to hit some unwanted keys. This is because evolution has connected the last three fingers with tendons to facilitate grasping tools. Acquire the habit of maintaining a slight upward tension on the 4th finger, especially when playing fingers 3 and 5. Again, the test for relaxation is gravity: feeling the effect of gravity as you play is a necessary and sufficient condition for relaxation.

Relaxing is finding the proper energy and momentum balance as well as arm/hand/finger positions and motions that allow you to execute with the appropriate expenditure of energy. Therefore relaxing requires a lot of experimentation to find those optimum conditions. However, if you had been concentrating on relaxation from day one of your piano lessons, this should be a routine procedure that you can quickly execute because you have done it many times before. For those who are new to relaxation, you can start with easier pieces you have learned, and practice adding relaxation. The parallel set exercises of III.7 can also help you to practice relaxation. However, nothing can replace the daily experimentation you should conduct whenever you learn a new piece of music. You will then gradually build up an arsenal of relaxed motions -- this is part of what is meant by technique. One easy way to feel relaxation is to practice one parallel set and accelerate it until you build up stress, and then try to relax; you will need to find motions and positions of arms, wrists, etc., that allow this; when you find them, you will feel the stress gradually draining from your hand.

Many people do not realize that relaxation is itself a diagnostic tool in the experimentation. Assuming that you have a certain arsenal of hand motions (see section III.4), the criterion for "good technique" is one that allows relaxation. Many students think that long repetitive practices somehow transform the hand so it can play. In reality, what happens is that the hand accidentally stumbles onto the right motion for relaxation. This is why some skills are acquired quickly while others take forever and why some students acquire certain skills quickly while other students struggle with the same skills. The correct (and faster) way to learn is to actively search for the right motions and to build up an arsenal of them. In this search, it helps to understand what causes fatigue and what biological functions influence the energy balance (see section 21 on Endurance below). Relaxation is a state of unstable equilibrium: as you learn to relax, it becomes easier to further relax, and vice versa. This explains why relaxation is a major problem for some while it is completely natural for others. But that is a most wonderful piece of information. It means that anyone can relax, if they are properly taught and constantly strive for relaxation!

The most important element in relaxation, obviously, is energy conservation. There are at least 2 ways to conserve: (1) don't use unnecessary muscles and (2) turn off the necessary muscles as soon as their jobs are done. Practice the art of turning off muscles quickly. Let's demonstrate these with the one-finger gravity drop. (1) is the easiest; simply allow gravity to completely control the drop, while the entire body is resting comfortably on the bench. For (2) you will need to learn a new habit if you don't already have it (few do, initially). That is the habit of relaxing all muscles as soon as you reach the bottom of the key drop. During a gravity drop, you let gravity pull the arm down, but at the end of the key drop, you need to tense the finger for an instant in order to stop the hand. Then you must quickly relax all muscles. Don't lift the hand, just rest the hand comfortably on the piano with just enough force to support the weight of the arm. Make sure that you are not pressing down. This is more difficult than you would think at first because the elbow is floating in mid air and the same muscles used to tense the finger in order to support the arm weight are also used to press down. One way to test if you are pressing down is to take the arm off the keys and rest your forearm on your legs in front of you, totally relaxed. Then carry over that same feeling to the end of the gravity drop.

Few people bother to turn off muscles explicitly. You just tend to forget about them when their work is done. This presents no problems when playing slowly, but becomes problematic with speed. You will need a new exercise because the gravity drop has little to do with speed. You need to start with the key down and to play a quick, moderately loud note. Now you have to apply extra downward force and turn it off. When you turn it off, you must return to the feeling you had at the end of gravity drop. You will find that, the harder you play the note, the longer it takes for you to relax. Practice shortening the relaxation time.

What is so wonderful about these relaxation methods is that after practicing them for a short time (perhaps a few weeks), they tend to be automatically incorporated into your playing, even into pieces that you have already learned, as long as you pay attention to relaxation.

The worst consequence of stress is that it gets you into a fight you can't win because you are fighting an opponent who is exactly as strong as you are -- namely, yourself. It is one of your own muscles working against another. As you practice and get stronger, so does the opponent, by an exactly equal amount. And the stronger you get, the worse the problem. If it gets bad enough, it can lead to injury because the muscles become stronger than the material strength of your hand. That is why it is so important to get rid of stress.

Relaxation, arm weight (gravity drop), involving the whole body, and avoidance of mindless repetitive exercises were key elements in Chopin's teachings, but Liszt advocated exercises "to exhaustion" (Eigeldinger). My interpretation of the last apparent disagreement is that exercises can be beneficial, but are not necessary. Also, Liszt did not have the benefit of this book -- he probably had to practice a lot before his hands accidentally stumbled onto the right motion. Of course, the piano makes a big difference. Chopin preferred the Pleyel, a piano with very light action and small keydrop, and required less effort to play. Relaxation is useless unless it is accompanied by musical playing; in fact, Chopin insisted on musical playing before acquiring technique because he knew that music and technique were inseparable. We now know that without relaxation, neither music nor technique is possible. Technique originates in the brain. Non-musical playing apparently violates so many tenets of nature that it actually interferes with the brain's natural processes for controlling the playing mechanisms. That is not to claim that you can't train yourself to become a machine, performing difficult acrobatics with blinding speed. The claim here is that mindless repetitions is a long, roundabout way to learn piano.

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