Sense of gravity, touch sensitivity, supple wrist motions, relaxed arms.. creating a singing tone, and learning to shape lines. READ my blog: arioso7.wordpress.com/2023/02...
For a long time now I've meant to mention that when I watch you play, your arms, wrists and fingers move in a way that reminds me of dancing, of ballet and it seems as though you change the dance choreography when you change the style of music which you are playing. Your movements are always fluid and graceful, it's quite fascinating to watch. It's looks to me like you never have even a single wasted motion, every movement you make is super exact and produces its own sound effect. Your coloring is really marvelous. I'm glad to hear that you give credit to your teacher for helping you learn how to polish your technique. I'm sure that you were a wonderful student.
My teacher just told me today (for the millionth time) that I need to use more arm weight in my playing. And now I'm watching this video that was just released a few hours ago 😂 I feel like using arm weight kinda slows me down, and that's the reason I tend to not use it all the time
But arm weight is variable as you play... one does not feed the same arm weight through various phrases.. We don't play flat lines, but we imbue various contours and shapes as I demonstrated.
A problem that some students encounter is that they interpret the drop to the keys as a true dead weight drop because the action appears to be a dead weight drop which produces a fairly loud sound. The question becomes, how to drop onto the keys and produce a quiet, controlled sound when necessary. Thank you.
You are right! A true dead weight drop is an incoordinated movement and therefore useless according to Otto Ortmann in his book The Physiological Mechanics of Piano Technique. Only when the armdrop is slowed down or accelerated by muscles it becomes controled and coordinated. Also, in order for the armweight to reach the fingers, at least one joint of the arm has to be fixed otherwise the arm will fall of the keyboard as Shirley shows. Very interesting this book with scientific experiments with a mechanical arm, showing the mechanics of arm weight in pianoplaying and the fallacies.
Supplement: In his book Ortmann shows the best position for arm weight to be effective. Very usefull for slow cantabile melodies. But not for fast and loud passages. Then a 90 degree position of the upper-and forearm is a must. Fixation is then neccesary. The force of the fingers on the keys will react and spend itself against bones (instead of musles) via a 90 degree position of under and upperarm.
