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I know the article, thanks for linking it. I hate to say it John but a lot of Griepenkerl was a puff. He was extremely keen to set up a German keyboard school tracing its roots back to Bach. There's plenty of evidence here for, as you say, Bach's clavichord touch. There's nothing here about how to play the piano. That was Chopin wot did that.

I've only seen clips but the Fraser looks interesting to me.

Okay...one bone to pick.

In Fraser's blog, he shows some children stacking books on top of an egg to show how strong the arch of the egg is.

My hand is different from the egg in one very important way - I have joints, and those joints are held by ligaments, tendons, and muscle. If one were to stack books on top of my hand, the strength of my arch does not rely on the bone (the egg) but rather in the muscles and tendons that hold that bone together. Eggs do not have to worry about tendons and muscles. I do. Putting pressure on an egg does not place the egg in harm until the shell breaks. Putting pressure on the bones of my hand CAN do harm before the bones break.

Fraser titles his post "The Strength of an Ordinary Egg and Piano Technique" but the post only talks about the egg. He doesn't really say how it relates to piano technique, probably because it doesn't.

Fraser's Egg Post

Interesting point Kreisler, but isn't it rather likely to be less harmful to put a little bit of stress on solid bones and joints, rather than on muscles? Our body evolved with regard to the force of gravity. Various things are naturally supposed to line up along such principles. A good posture naturally involves various bones taking a lot of strain. Bad postures transfer the workload elswhere and cause such things as back and neck strain.

Above all, I certainly feel far less effort in playing now, than I had ever felt before. Whether I might encounter problems later on in life, I can't say for sure. However, I feel confident that the amount of effort I used to feel before learning a stable alignment would have led to far more long-term problems than the way I'm using my hands now. Obviously something somewhere always has to bear a certain burden of effort. I'm confident that seeking alignment is the best of way of making the burden managable, rather than harmful.

My post did show up! I thought it had puffed off when I got a blank browser screen. Griepnkerl maybe a puff, but the description of the technique provided enough for me to play my clavichord without the bag-of-mosquitos-sound. This made a big difference in my playing, and I've transferred many of these techniques to the piano.

Currently I am studying with a great teacher. We are working together to mitigate my physical stiffness not caused by poor piano technique, but instead the Parkinsons. Her exercises involve the back, arms, and wrists. These piano exercises are simply small scales and three-finger chords played with arms swinging and wrists moved up and down. The back exercises are done away from the piano, and are more for stretching, which I've done in the not-so-recent past. I've only been doing this for about a month now, and the tone difference is amazing.

John

Agreed!

I don't think anything about piano technique is 100%. There's no such thing as 100% relaxation, 100% finger, 100% wrist, 100% arm, 100% weight, or anything else. Since the body is in motion while playing, there's no 100% correct "position." Since different sounds are produced by different motions, there's no 100% correct way of using any part of the body 100% of the time.

I think when you keep that in mind, you can learn a lot from a lot of people - Lister-Sink, Fraser, Taubman, Matthay, Sandor, Leschetizky, or even the "puffy" Griepenkerl!

Sounds good John.

Yeah, I agree very much with that. The thing I like about Alan fraser's approach is that aside from showing ways of finding greater stability he doesn't tell you exactly what balance you have to use. He shows you how to find your own style. I think the problem with most 'methods' is that they do not have enough different angles of attack. Since I got my hand working for the first time, various elements of different approaches have become extremely useful. Sometimes I lift the fingers high for practise, sometimes I aim to start solely from the keys. Sometimes I practise (for short periods of time) entirely by gripping or pulling from the fingers, sometimes I practise dropping onto the keyboard from a height with minimal finger use. I had to get my hand supporting properly in the first place for these to start working, but I'm increasingly realising that the best way to go is to learn all the different extremes of movement (provided that you can do them without the wrong kinds of tensions). I don't think many things should be ruled out and I don't believe that there are many instances where learning different approaches should result in any true conflict. I'd have to stress that learning how to support from the knuckles was the single thing that permitted all of these apparently opposing approaches to start offering a wide range of benefits.

I think this is the worst part of methods that approach things solely from the "relax everything and minimise muscular activity" point of view. If you have the premise that the muscles should never be asked to do anything much, there's a far greater limit to what you can do with them. Not having the physical capability to play staccato from the fingers (with a still but comfortable arm), say, is a major handicap. I only just learned how to play this way, after years of having no choice but to move my arm constantly. Being capable of doing something one way should never impose any limit on your ability to do it another way too. Just because a player has learned to use their muscles actively, there's no reason why that should prevent them from also using weight. If I want to, I can slacken my fingers every bit as much as I used to, before I developed a more active hand and finger technique. However, before I learned to activate the muscles, that had been the only option available to me. Approaches that are focussed too much with 'protecting' the muscles from use simply result in fewer possibilities.

Wow this is very interesting, thanks john!

Kreisler / Jason,

I think someone started a trend of calling you John.

Rich

That's very true about no 100% in piano technique, now if only I had the money to try all these wonderful books out lol. BTW Your page has a lot of interesting articles on pedagogy, very informative

I have decided to jump in at the deep end.
I have purchased the book and DVD and will let you all know the results.
I have started reading the Thomas Mark book already but will hold off on expressing my opinion so far as I have not read enough of it.

Stay tuned....

Marcus

John as in John citron folks!

Forkel's descritpion of JSB's keyboard technique must be taken with some salt. Forkel, born in 1749, never met JSB. He apparently got his description from talking to CPEB and others. CPEB's own technique, described in his "Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen" is not similar to Forkel's description. As JSB was CPE's teacher one wonders why should be his technique so different from JSB's, if we believe Forkel.


ocd

on which of the books/dvd's?

The craft of Piano Playin by Alan Fraser as metioned by the OP in the original thread. I am expecting that with a couple of viewings of this DVD, preferably with a glass or two of nice red wine, that my technique will just flourish and advance in ways that no mere mortal has ever seen!

Do you think that I am expecting too much?