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I've been focusing a lot in the past years on getting rid of unneeded tension in my playing. In the last couple months I've made a few discoveries that I thought I would share, in case someone here finds it useful.

- Eliminating thumb tension

Most of the time I was concentrating on my thumb because it always stuck out or became stiff while playing, but progress in fixing the problem was slow. A teacher this summer pointed out that different pianists tend to tense up in different places. For me it was my neck/shoulders. I worked on not raising my shoulders while I played, and found that the thumb tension problem was better, but not fixed.

I got tired of trying to fix the thumb tension problem, so I gave myself 2 weeks to solve it once and for all. I could not play one of the pieces in Clementi's Gradus ad Parnassium without playing the thumb louder than the other fingers (#13 here ) . By accident, I discovered that I was holding my arms too tightly bent at the elbow, and that when I let go of the muscles on the top of the forearm near the elbow, rotation of the forearm was easier, and my thumb tension was gone.

- expanding the hand from a closed position to an open position.

This is today's discovery. I kept on having my pinky stick out and get stiff (causing an unintentional accent) when going from playing a broken fifth with 1 and 5 to playing an octave with 1 and 5. My habitual way of making this expansion was to stretch out the hand using the fifth finger, which was wrong, since this isn't possible. Instead the hand stretches out by expanding between the thumb and second finger. Then I only have to easily stretch out the pinky far enough to reach the octave.

And another observation from slow scale practice:
- I need use my arm to move my hand laterally up and down the keyboard instead of pushing my hand sideways with third or fourth fingers when passing the thumb.

Now if I could just remember these every time I play!

Arghhh, one general comment I will make is that tension inevitably builds in a presentation as a reaction to simply not knowing the music well enough. "Well enough" means anticipating BOTH the level of technical challenge AND the musical argument at each and every measure of the piece in question. One typical and natural reaction to any insecurity in either realm is to overcome the problems by attempting to "bull one's way through", and that's inevitably going to result in, at best, increased tension that will linger, or, much more often, a technical breakdown to varying degrees. That, at least, has been my experience -- music has to be "OVERlearned", particularly in difficult technical passages, because the "penalty" is typically increased tension as one proceeds.

I always have had problems tensing up, and I've discovered that it is mostly related to not breathing. I subconsciously hold my breath, particularly when the going gets tough. It is worse when I practice violin. Learning to simply remember to BREATH there made a noticeable difference on the piano too.

Just a side note about breathing: if you sing the melody, there should be natural places where you can breath, and by doing so you will also be helping your phrasing in playing - and staying conscious/alive by breathing