The more I think about it, the more I come to feel that the single most important feature of technique we pianists want to pay attention to at all times, or as often as possible, during both practice and performance, and during slow playing as well as fast playing, is the sensation of WEIGHT, BUT ONLY A TINY BIT OF WEIGHT, NEARLY ZERO WEIGHT, ALL THE TIME.
The great pianist Paul Smith (longtime accompanist for Ella Fitzgerald, for example) once told me, you never need more than the relaxed weight of the arm, mainly the forearm, to play even the loudest notes. People who push harder than that are not really playing any louder. I believe he was right.
Letting the relaxed weight of your arm “rest” on the keys is all you’ll ever need in passage work. But the little extra trick is that you want to keep that weight minimized to ALMOST ZERO, i.e., just enough weight to have all the notes go down. This way your wrist can remain (again, aided by some awareness of sensation) completely freed and relaxed, which allows for nearly miraculous velocity. For those of us chronologically accomplished enough to remember, think of the image of a phonograph needle on a vinyl record. The needle needs a tine bit of backup weight to stay in the groove and in contact with the surface variations, but not too much or the record will be damaged. THAT’S similar to the sensation you want of PART of your arm weight resting on the keys.
Once you can actually sense this condition, you will LOVE it, I promise.
Of course you also will probably like using other guidelines, such as keeping the position of the hand, wrist, and forearm “unit” invariant as a function of register. For example, if the arm points straight at the keyboard for passages around middle C, then the arm should also point straight at the keyboard, i.e., with the elbow far out to the right, for passages near the highest C on the piano, and not angling out to the right. Also, you’ll want to keep your forearm, wrist, hand and fingers all aligned pretty close to a straight line to avoid creating strain and tension; think of your forearm, write, hand and fingers as being like a more or less solid unit and more or all all in a line with each other almost all of the time.
Of course if we think of this forearm “unit” as an arrow, then certain passage my suggest aiming the arrow out to the right as seen from above, rather than straight forward; at other times you may even aim the arrow a little bit to the left. A good example of aiming the arrow to the right is the right hand in Chopin’s Etude in 3rds, during ascending passages, so the fingers can “crawl over each other.” However, at all or almost all times, I like to keep my hand LEVEL, i.e., so that my fingers go roughly straight down at the keys. The extreme opposite of this, and obviously wrong thing to do, is to “unlevel” your hand by rotating it to the right as if you were going to deliver a karate chop to the keyboard. In that case you’d be playing all your notes into thin air instead of into the keys.
By the way, for leveling the hand this way, don’t rotate your wrist and hand, but instead, bring your elbow out and up from the side of your body, so that your hand is naturally leveled with no strain in the forearm, wrist, hand or fingers.
A few other “smaller” pointers: When crossing the thumb under or over, DO indeed been the thumb to get under or over; don’t rely just on hand shifting. Also, don’t just cross under or over to the next note, but rather to the next entire sequence of notes the hand and fingers will need to play after the cross. An exercise to facilitate and help understand this, is to play arpeggios as block chords instead of sequences of notes, using the same thumb passing techniques; this will get you accustomed to moving all at once for readiness for the entire next sequence of notes rather than just the one note you crossed to.
Are exercises useful and helpful? Hell, I don’t know for sure. But I do sometimes feel like using them. If master teachers and concert pianists suggest them, then they probably know something. Mostly, I don’t bother with a lot of Czerny or Tausig or Hanon; instead I make exercises out of the passage in the piece I am learning or practicing instead. For example, I already mentioned the exercise of crossing under over over the thumb and then ALL THE WAY to the next several notes of an arpeggio or scale.
Another great exercise if the 4 rhythms exercise. Pick a short passage or passage segment, and stop for longer every 4th note, say, starting on the first note. Do this maybe 4 times. Then maybe use the 2nd note in the passage for the “stopping” or long delay, and again stop on every 4th note. Most passages are in units of 4 notes, so you will go through 4 rhythms in this way. For this exercise, I can actually se some meaning, for it helps you to “stop” long enough on each note of the passage to not get the hand confused or rushed to the point where you foul up the passage.
Another exercise I love, but use less often, is “aller et retour,” or “go and return,” which I learned from Mme Aline Van Barentzen in Paris. For that exercise, you use shorter groups of notes from the passage and go both forward and back, holding to the actual fingering of the passage in both forward and back (reverse) directions. Mme VB taught me to do these exercises in 3 note groups, 5, 7, and 9 note groups. Thus, numbering the notes in sequence (NOT the fingers used), I might first play 12321 a few time for the separate groups of 3 note in the passage. Then I’d do 123454321. Finally, I’d be doing 12345678987654321. She said once you practice a passage in this way, you’ll have it as solid as can be.
Yet another natural exercise is, for double note passages as in Chopin’s Etude in 3rd, or the one in 6ths, is to practice only the upper voice of the passage for a while. Then practice the lower voice of the passage for a while. Again, we must hold to the actual fingerings used when playing both voices together in the same hand.
Another very good exercise, or at least it FEELS like it must be valuable, is to practice separately all the different fingerings you might use on a given passage or short motive. I like to get “concert speed fluent” in all the fingerings I may have discovered for a passage, not just the one I plan to use in a concert.
Then, I don’t know if we’d call this an exercise, but practice a passage not only slowly, but at ALL different tempi, very slow, slow, medium, fast, very fast, so you can play it at any tempo and so your hand and fingers learn “physically” what the real challenges of that passage are. Thus you might repeat a passage, e.g., short segment, or entire phrase, or even entire section, at all these various tempi, a few times. For example, I might practice a 12 or 16 note grouping 6 times while paying close attention to the important sensations: First time slow, 2nd time a bit faster; then by the 6th time maybe at concert tempo, or close to it. Or you might use 8 repetitions. Don’t repeat a passage forever, blindly. I’m not sure that accomplishes anything. Spread such repetition groups across different times of the day in your practice; not all at once.
Speaking the most generally, when you practice at various tempi like this, you can “sense” with your body, especially at the “medium” tempo, what is causing the difficulty of the passage and can then adjust to deal with that difficulty. Practicing intelligently like that, you won’t need as much time repeating passages. As you adjusting to deal with the specific difficulty you uncovered, you can also devise special exercises of your own to focus on that difficulty. An example might be the exercise I mentioned earlier on arpeggios, where you cross over or under and then play the entire chord, not just the next note.
Normally I might sequence my practicing in this way: Very short groups of notes, e.g., 8, 12 or 16 or so, repeating a few times, e.g., 6-8, varying the tempo across all tempi. Then practice the entire phrase in the same way. Don’t practice any one thing for too, too long. Usually 5 minutes is far more than enough, say, for a short group. Come back to it later in the day or the week if you want, after your physical brain has had time to build the new cells and connections.
And ALWAYS remember that wonderful feeling of weight, but almost zero weight, like an old phonograph needle, with the wrist thus always relaxed and always a feeling of ease and freedom from any tension, even at fff times..
I think if you do all these things suggested here, you may become a VIRTUOSO! (At least in classical, or serious, piano playing. Jazz and pop improvising have their own separate issues of course.)
Love and best wishes to all of you who are foolish enough to try to play the piano!
withthesongstillinsidethem 