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True - at my age and ability I'm mostly working in short blocks of time before I take a break and on less lengthy pieces.

My first lesson with Lennie Tristano, he went through an involved discussion about posture. Back straight, hands parallel to the keys, etc. etc.. I happened to walk into his studio the following week while he was playing. He was sitting diagonally to the keyboard with his legs crossed and slouched over. Crakt me up)

I think you guys are super caught up on something that's not important. From a physical therapy point of view, posture is good to keep well for your own health sake, unless you do weights and have a strong back, its not good to be hunched over for long periods of time due to strain on vertebrae. But arguing about how good you are at piano and posture is silly IMO. There are plenty of AMAZING playings that play with "poor posture" and plenty that play with "great posture". It has to do with health and nothing to do with piano as evidence shows us. I'd say as a PIANO TEACHER, you tell the student, explain the health benefits and if they choose not to, well you told them and so be it. I'd say your job is to only correct students on things that effect their playing, like tension in the hands/shoulders blah blah blah.

I"m a jazz piano teacher and feel that good posture is essential. Yes, Keith Jarrett goes into contortions and his health suffered badly as a consequence.
My students, because they are improvising and 'getting into it' they hunch forward, tap their feet furiously and often become very tense. So perhaps student jazz pianists need to attend to their posture even more than classical players!
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I disagree with much of what is in this post.

Are you writing this as a physiotherapist, or in terms of what you have read about physiotherapy or been told by a physiotherapist?

I think you are saying that because some pianists play with apparent poor posture, that this is proof that posture does not affect piano playing. I believe that if you do more research, you will find much to the opposite.


In other words, piano teachers should not teach students those things that affect their ability to play well. They should only be interested in nice sounding music, but not address those things that can become obstacles in getting there. To me this is like doing half of a job. Build a wall with quality bricks, but don't worry about the wall being straight. We won't worry that it will collapse over time.

Hi everybody,

I wasn't going to chime in on a resurrected threadlike this, but I thought I should add a few bits and pieces here after reading over the more recent discussion.

The mechanics of a slouched posture are all really bad. Nobody in a siting posture doing work with the hands should maintain a slouch for long.

1- The compression of the intervertebral disks along the length of the spine is not good and can lead to a variety of problems over time if you are prone to them.

2- A slouched posture leads to compression of all the viscera, enough to compromise respiratory capacity, blood flow from the heart, and even digestion. For example, habitual slouching can deprive many people of enough oxygen to make them think they need a nap.

3- Slouching distorts the spine enough that skeletal support from the vertebrae disappears. This means that spinal and pelvic muscles have to take over the job of keeping you upright, much more than they would if you usually maintained an upright posture. So a slouching posture is ultimately more fatiguing to the back and neck over time than an upright one.

Poor posture also has specific concerns for the pianist technically, as it also affects the use of the upper extremity. For instance, in order to have any of the technical elements function well, the shoulder girdle, neck and trunk must have an almost complete freedom of movement. Slouching interferes with this in the following ways:

1- Excessive activation of the front and lateral deltoids. Dropping the chest and letting the shoulders roll forward even slightly will make the deltoids work much harder than they should.

2- Excessive activation of the scalenes and trapezius. This also happens in the same posture - your neck tightens up, along with your deltoids. If your shoulders have a tendency to creep up while you're playing, one of the reasons this could be happening is postural.

3- Excessive activation of the pectorals and biceps. In a full slouch, when the pelvis rolls backwards from its vertical placement, the player will overuse the pectorals and biceps in order to maintain stability further down the chain. Sitting backwards while resting against a chair back from the vertical axis will do the same thing.

Somebody mentioned "tension" earlier in the thread. Well, any of these conditions will create tension that starts in the upper arm but telescopes down into the forearm, hand and fingers. At the very least, this will bring on some technical limitations.

The reason jazz players can get away with slouching is because the typical piano texture the jazz pianist habitually performs is not that demanding physically. But when it is, they suffer from these limitations. A player like Keith Jarret is so gifted technically, he can get away with it for a while. But to be clear, he is getting away with the lack of one thing by overcompensating for it with too much of another. These things all catch up with you in the end.

Lastly, there is another good reason to maintain an upright postural habit, and that is avoiding injury. I've retrained a number of jazzers over the years, and I can say that while being prone to all the injuries other pianists get including back and neck problems, they are also more prone to bicepital tendinitis more than others just because of their poor postural habit.

I've read a lot of people defending bad posture here and elsewhere because of aesthetics. That's just plain silly! It certainly is no reason to tell your students, of any kind, that posture doesn't matter. Because it fundamentally does.

I think it matters to know what a good posture is supposed to be, and that you use them in practice. While performing as a jazz artist, unless your doing 8 hours a day which I doubt many people are since there are no gigs, I don't think it matters much. And as a jazz improviser you're usually not covering the whole keyboard anyway, which I assume would require a better posture in the long run.

One can also see Dave Brubeck showing a lot of stability at the piano, as here (his solo starts at about two minutes in). He does move a bit but looks very solid as with any tilting the back is basically straight:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tT9Eh8wNMkw

Jacques Loussier on the other hand moves around much more as here, and with a curved back, and later in life his posture seems to have acquired a permanent curve and there is some impairment to his motion/range of sound (maybe there is a connection?):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14AhD3xdoMk

Jan Johansson looks fairly solid . . . http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ej4P6m7L-4U . . . (I just threw this one in because it is nice to hear ).

When improvisatory elements are involved I don't think it is normal to be totally bolt upright. There is something about music being created in the moment that causes one to focus in on the area of the action very intently and to be somewhat pulled along by it in a different way than recitation of a classical masterwork for which everything has been totally internalized, revised, tempered, et c.

I do a bit of improvisation, some of my compositions really are improvisations and not produced just sitting at a desk (or they can also be a mixture of the two), and the different mental approach of interpreting vs. creating does seem to induce some extra motion.

I'm not a jazz pianist, but I improvise frequently and sometimes jam with friends.

But the only difference in my posture is that I tend to look up, and gaze into 'nothingness' a lot more (and maybe frown, and grimace ), in order to 'free' my mind, as opposed to looking at the keyboard. I can't see how contortions or adopting any unnatural postures help with this, but that's probably just because I didn't grow up watching jazz pianists . (Jazz pianists learn by watching & listening to other jazz pianists a lot more than classical pianists, and invariably will pick up on what their idols do). An aching back or neck is the last thing I want when looking for inspiration, or to get my mind to wander......

Incidentally, classical pianists who improvise, including those who wander into jazz, don't contort their bodies either - have a look at Gabriela Montero, who frequently includes improvisations in her otherwise straight classical concerts.

One's gaze might be more upward depending on the complexity of the improvisation . . . when there is a whirling chromatic scale which can go off on any direction for any reason . . . and one's mind is free as you say to experience the force, to not think about it or question it, having total faith that it will make sense and be okay, yielding to it enirely, with risk of hands crossing at any moment, and time magnifying . . . that can pull one's gaze down to the keys quite intensely! That is how the chromatic scale section of the Södermalm Fantasy Ballade was "composed" starting with the opening D# tremolo (at 4:30 in Tim Adrianson's recording) . . . entirely improvised, at one go. That entire composition was improvised, but in sections as the force departed and returned, the religioso chorale is excerpted from an earlier improvisation ("Reverie"). It isn't the same as composing at a desk while getting the music from the ether or the beyond . . . either way one needs to really feel the force flow through oneself, having cleared one's mind and opened up to the divine.

It depends what you're playing and how you want to play it. If you follow jazz history, you'll see that much of it was developed by unskilled players "beating" the wrong notes on out of tune pianos (similar to they way most music developed anyway). That developed into quite a progressive form of music if you take for example "The Duke's" compositions, which require technique.
So generally you can play most of the stuff as is, but if you have the technique, coupled with the right "feel", you can "zoom" you way through the music. Adding of course the right fill ins, colorations, and improvisation is another story and has to do with the music rather than with technique.
Regarding posture, you basically do what you have to do to play and fit in with the ensemble, the place you're playing, the crowd, and whatever else is required to get the audience (and yourself) into it.