Cans of Word Worms: Now, Weight! Part One

Anyone who has been on the planet for any length of time knows that body weight changes. And we are not always happy about that!

Body weight changes slowly, over a period of time. It does not change in a matter of moments or from one measure of music to the next. For this reason, it is not possible to change body weight to change the sound produced by the piano. We can't make an arm weigh more or less in the blink of an eye.

Heretical? Counter to everything you've ever been taught about piano technique? Stand next to me. Over the course of my ever-lengthening career as pianist and teacher, I've been given the advice to use arm weight many times. And I taught this concept many times, until.....

I met Chris Stevens, a British Alexander Technique (AT) Teacher and physicist. He was on a mission to prove the merits of AT under laboratory conditions. He observed people going from sitting to standing while measuring the effort exerted on a force plate. He observed himself in movement by inserting wires into his leg muscles. He was affable, and he was serious about his work.

As I sat on a soft leather sofa, drinking wine and chatting with Chris and other AT teachers after an all-day workshop, I took the opportunity to ask many questions. When it came to the subject of weight at the piano, he simply said, "it is not possible to put weight into the piano keys". And who was I, a would-be AT teacher without a physics degree,  to argue?

I took this idea back to the piano, back to my teaching, and back to the drawing board. More questions, more answers, and eventually a return to basic physics. Sit back on your comfy sofa, and follow my exploration.

Cans of Word Worms: Wrist Circles Part Two

Watching ballet dancers, I can be convinced that they have elbows unlike mine. Their elbows are not pointy or edgy or rough but seamlessly fluid, almost as though they have no bony structure at all. Dancers achieve this artistic skill through disciplined movements of the arms, a series known as port de bras, translated as "carriage of the arms".        

What dancers learn is that each joint of the arm has a particular range of motion, thanks to its shape and attachments. The elbow can flex, extend, pronate and supinate. The upper arm joint is the most freely moving joint in the body, and the joint where the collarbone meets the breast bone has small but critical horizontal and rotational movements. These movements, in conjunction with wrist movements, create the flowing sequence of port de bras. 

 

Just as the well-trained dancer deceives me, pianists can deceive me into thinking I am seeing movements that are not humanly possible. As explained in the previous post, there is no fully circular movement potential in the structure of the wrist. But the upper arm does have circular potential. Put this in combination with the semi-circular rotation at the elbow, and it is a short leap of faith to translate these movements down to the wrist.

The problem with this optical illusion is that pianists may attempt to make movements with the wrist that happen in other joints of the arm. This is both limiting and potentially dangerous. Because the nerves that run the fingers move through the carpal arch on the underside of the wrist, putting stress on the wrist can compress these nerves. Potential outcomes are pain, numbness, tingling, and limited range of motion.

 

If you know the ranges of motion for the four main joints of the arm, you will be able to determine the actual movement from the perceived movement. With that information, you will be "armed" to create artistic illusions without fear of injury.

Cans of Word Worms: Wrist Circles Part One

More than one Englishman has awoken to the mysterious beauty of a crop circle in his field. A crop circle is a symbol created by tamping down dry crops, leaving a design that is most appreciated from a high perspective. That may be the reason that believers in alien life decided they were created by interstellar visitors.

The truth is, there were two guys named Doug and Dave who figured out how to use a plank and some rope to beautify the fields at night, having drawn out their "mystical" shapes in the local pub. Kind of a disappointment, but also a joy to meet these agricultural artists.

Circles have a mystery all of their own because a true circle has no ending and no beginning. In mathematical size, it includes 360 degrees from any point on its circumference, and all points are equally distant from its center.

The wrist actually does have boundaries that are discernible. There are 8 little bones in two crooked lines that make up the wrist. They fill in the space between the bones of the hand and the two bones of the forearm. Each bone has a unique shape and a unique Latin name that relates to its shape. The wrist is quite beautiful in its own way.

But it is not a circle, nor does it describe one as it moves through space, earthly space, piano playing space. The wrist bones allow the hand to move in many directions, but none of them is a circle. A segment of a circle is an arc. Allowing the hand to drop from the wrist creates a visible arc through the bones of the wrist,  especially when viewed from above, but the arc can not continue into a circle.

Like the hand, the wrist does not have one ideal position for piano playing. Encouraging a flexible wrist helps pianists access the intricate movements of the wrist bones. Celebrate these movements the next time you lift a pint in honor of Doug and Dave.

                                                                 

                                                              wrist bones

Cans of Word Worms: Crossing Hands

Thing was the name of the disembodied hand that greeted visitors to the Addams Family manse in the famous cartoons created by Charles Addams. Many of us recall an image of Thing from the TV series of the mid-60's. Actor Ted Cassidy, who also played Lurch, usually played Thing as well. He used his right hand to complete his duties, but occasionally he would use his left hand to see if anyone realized the difference. While we were well aware that the table on which Thing rested covered up the rest of Ted's body, we were still fascinated by the movements of the helpful hand.

Hands are probably the things we are most aware of in our own bodies when we play the piano. First of all, as I mentioned before, they are highly touch sensitive. Secondly, they are always in our peripheral vision. Thirdly, we learn those abbreviations "RH" and "LH" almost from the first lesson. Those abbreviations are very helpful, but they can suggest a bit of the disembodied "Thing".

Crossing hands, for example, is something Thing could never do, in part because we believed he had only one hand. Those of us with two hands can actually cross them. If we lay one hand on the other, they are crossing. That is not usually what pianists do when we cross hands, however.

What we usually do is move one whole arm in front of the body so that the left hand is playing keys higher than those the right hand is playing. It can happen over a small distance or a large distance. In close hand positions, the hands can actually be sharing the same keys. They still rely on the arms to get them there, however.

Now when I teach "cross hands" pieces, I remind myself to say "cross arms". This may often be accompanied by some large arm movement away from the piano, allowing the student to sense how the whole arm takes the hand through space. We also explore how spiraling through the spine can help with very large crossings.

This may seem a little kooky, but it's not mysterious, creepy, or ooky, whatever that word means.

Cans of Word Worms - Hand Position, Part Two

Most pianists learn to play from basic methods that include tunes written in major five-finger patterns. Translated for the non-pianists, that means do-re-mi-fa-sol in a given key. Working from these patterns helps students to hear major and minor scales and chords early in the process. These patterns also help students to learn how to move all five fingers over a variety of locations on the piano.

Notice these words from the above paragraph: patterns, locations, scales, chords, and move. Oh, you already did because I put them in bold typeface?  Well done!

In some method books, the word "position" is used instead of "pattern".  Position is an accurate term for a location on the keyboard.  It allows the student to begin to connect scales and chords with arrangements of whole and half steps and the resultant black and white key shapes they generate. If the student and teacher understand that, no harm, no foul. However, if somehow this word gets linked in the brain with holding the hand over a precise spot in a precise way, the trouble begins.

A more important word is the word "move". Our hands move over patterns every time we play. Our fingers move to play notes in patterns. In fact, the whole body is engaged in movement - small and large - when we play even one note. If our students don't understand that, they will tighten up physically and often musically in an effort to stay in the perfect position.

Teaching desirable hand "position" really means teaching the hand how to move. By matching functional movements of the hand - and body - to the music, we can help our students gain fluid control over their playing. By assessing each student's structural peculiarities, we can help each student find the easiest and healthiest way to play any pattern of notes. Those of us who teach small children are also aware that the development of small muscle coordination varies from child to child.

Elements to consider when teaching hand movement:

• How the hand and fingers balance over the notes to be played
• How the hand moves through a series of notes. This is especially helpful when playing patterns with wide skips. Often moving from key to key is easier than straddling the skips.
• How the whole arm is engaged in moving the hand
• Where the joints of the hands are and how they move
• How the keys feel in terms of contact and shape
• How the whole arm/whole body participate in playing

For resources on the structure of the hand and arm for musicians, visit www.bodymap.org.

Cans of Word Worms - Hand Position Part One

MS, MRS, KSH, BM, MM, ATI, AE,  No. 27 in the deli line.

Any of these abbreviations could be applied to me, depending on the setting and the reason for the reference. None of them describes me fully. The same sort of problem shows up when I attempt to shortcut an instruction for my students. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

When I first started teaching, I purchased packs of progress reports with shortcut descriptions of desired outcomes. I would go through the list, check off what a student had done well, and make suggestions for improvement. I dutifully put them in the mail to each student's family, hoping they would be able to make sense of the shortcuts, even when I was fudging my own understanding.

I'm re-evaluating them now, starting with "hand position".  I think I'm pretty sure what my hand is, and I hope I'm not alone there! It is a magnificent structure of 19 bones, with tendons, sheaths,  muscles, nerves, and blood vessels. The fingertips have up to 16,000 touch sensors per square inch, and pianists develop remarkable sensitivity thanks to the amount of time we spend touching the keys. Including the wrist adds 8 more bones to the total, as well as some intriguing joint movement options. The word "hand" is clearly a shortcut term for an organic, complex structure.

I'm OK with this. I show my students pictures and models of hands so they understand the options hands provide. I let them play with movements so they feel these options.

Position - not so much.

One of my favorite scenes in "The Music Man" is the piano lesson with Marian and her student Amaryllis.  Amaryllis, like my students, is enthusiastic about playing her "cross-hands piece".  However, Marian advises her charge to "keep the fingers curved as nice and as high as you possibly can." How can this be? How can she make a very large movement like crossing hands (we'll get to this abbreviation later, by the way) while "keeping" her hands anywhere?

Oh, right, it's musical comedy. Suspend your disbelief and all that. Truth is, I've said similar things many times. Truth is, the sheer act of sending down a key is antithetical to keeping any sort of position. And that's just one key, not the multiple keys and movements needed to play an actual piece.

So, what do we mean when we say hand position? Tune in to Part Two for more options.

Cans of Word Worms: The Project

Thanks to Ray Kurzweil and his team, Siri will guide you and your iPhone to the closest coffee shop. Or music store. Or gas station. The Jetson lifestyle is well on its way.

Ray Kurzweil is a genius. He has been an inventor and explorer of artificial intelligence for a good long time, his latest accomplishment being the creation of Watson, the Jeopardy!-playing computer. In his recent Viking Press book,  How to Create a Mind,  he gives new insight into the way the brain processes information.

The basic premise that I find most fascinating is this: the mind is not very good at logic, but it is excellent at patterns. I could have guessed at the first, having been on the planet for a while observing an abundant amount of human behavior, including my own. It is reassuring to hear it from a genius, I'll admit.

Which only goes to show how excellent my brain is at patterns. In my pattern of a genius, there is an assumption of intellectual perfection. After all,  "genius" and "genie" are almost the same word, right? And genies can make anything happen, right? They have all the answers, right?

Only if you believe in genies. Only if you believe in a pattern that may or may not reflect reality.

At this stage of my teaching and learning, I am spending more time exploring time-honored expressions that show up, like genies from a bottle, over and over in piano pedagogy. It gets me in some trouble, I will admit. Rather than magical ideas stored in beautiful bottles, I'm coming up with cans of word worms - squiggly, wiggly, hard to define, the kind of worms that seem to reproduce themselves when cut in half.

This series of posts will take close looks at phrases like "wrist circles", "hand position", and, gulp, the dreaded word "weight". The project is designed to look at these words as representatives of patterns, for good or ill.  If I get stuck, I'll ask Siri, the genie in the iPhone.