Edna Golandsky and Bob Durso are such incredible musicians and teachers. Edna helped me recover from a debilitating injury and taught me the motions that allow me to play with tremendous ease and facility.
I really REALLY appreciate Seymour's teachings because he just puts it in a way that's so easily relatable. Even someone who doesnt play could understand his teachings on mechanics
Great video! I’m a professional pianist for forty years and a university professor of jazz piano and a student of jazz piano legend Boston based teacher Charlie Banacos. Excellent!
Benjamin Zander talks about one-buttock and two-buttock players - he recommends the former. Shifting from buttock to buttock while playing the piano (or any instrument, really) ensures this rotation. It is also easy to remember!
Thank you presenting this fundamental concept in such a simple and understandable way and also for showing how to incorporate it repertoire snippets. I highly recommend anyone who plays the piano to explore its application in more depth.
A great piece to train rotation, I found, is the Mendelssohn Concerto No.1 in g minor, particularly the 3rd Movement. He is almost forcing you to use this technique, and the piece suits the hands very nicely, making it an easier concerto, but still not the easiest😅.
Rotation definitely completely changed my playing for the better 3 years ago when I had a really bad case of RSI. (I couldn't even hold a cup of coffee with one hand). My teacher Susan Cohen taught me that.
But he’s a lovable troll, if you want to call him that. It’s this crazy thing we do - piano. You may hate someone’s playing, but you have to respect them if they’re accomplishing what they set out to do. With Seymour, the classic example is Glenn Gould. How can you say Gould is “bad?” He’s obviously a genius level performer. He’s put in the work. The time. The effort. The analysis, the… yadda yadda yadda. But he hears music wayyy differently than a lot of us do. I respect what he does, but even if I were practiced at his sound, I’d never play that way. Bernstein knows Gould is of a special kind of greatness, but one that’s irritating to listen to, because his conception of the music is practically opposite of what many of us hear. Thus… Seymour is a gentle troll.
Forearm rotation contributes to total fingertip momentum when striking the key, but is not all you should do. Hope one day someone give an explanation of pianist biomechanics, because is not as complicated it can seem. Piano mechanism is ballistic, we throw the hammer against the string. As the hammer is a fixed weight, the only variable that can change its momentum is velocity. So to play louder one has to add velocity to the key mechanism. The higher the velocity you add, the more momentum you need in you body focused on your finger so it can be transmitted to the key mechanism. All pieces from the fixed point of the body system, that’s it form the surface of the bench, can contribute to total momentum in contact of the key, in the same way that all the segments of a football player from the foot in contact to the ground till the foot in contact with the ball is going to add momentum to a proper kick. Forearm rotation, elbow extension, wrist flexion, shoulder extension, metacarpal flexion (abduction in case of the thumb)… all add together to the stroke in the piano. The louder the note, the more you need from heavier elements as back and shoulder: at mow volumes on can only perceive metacarpal flexion and wrist movements but still they are there. Immediately after kicking the string, no other thing can alter the sound so we release tension of the system as fast as we can in order to preserve energy and relax muscles, just we leave around 40-50 gr in order to keep the dumper away. Also the third law of Newton implies that same momentum is transferred backwards to our body: with the release we “recoil” a little bit because this two factors (release tension and reacting forces together). So a pianist is an system of a lot of motions organized in cycles of down/approaching-up/ separating in which pronation and supination play one of those roles.
It's amazing, if you play sports of any kind these , hand and arm gymnastics come naturally. Sports like proper TENNIS, GOLF, TABLE TENNIS, PICKLE BALL ETC.
Wow unfortunately I never had piano lessons (I had organ lessons as a child) and my forearms tend to feel tired after a couple of hours of practice. This is an eye-opener for me. Thank you for this valuable lesson!
Rotation is a helpful concept but is difficult to teach because if you don't understand it, you can't do it naturally. For me a higher-level concept is don't lock the wrists. Ever. Wrists can go up and down as needed, and side to side, and rotate as needed. And if you try to play with your forearms, you lose the connection to the fingers that the wrist provides. The slight amount of relaxed flexing in the wrists can alleviate the chain of tension that leads to the shoulders and back. What's tricky is learning how the forearm rotation creates the wrist motion, and recognizing the wrist motion is a byproduct of the forearm rotation. Probably martial artists have a better science for this.
After 20 years as a professional pianist trained only in the shoulder-arm-wrist "weight" method I've only recently discovered what my fingers and hands should have been doing all along. Moving the focus from the arms to the fingers and metacarpophalangeal joints has completely revolutionised my technique. I actually quit playing for a year through burn-out (and an incredibly well-timed pandemic) in order to discover this. Although I also discovered that *willed* forearm rotation is much less useful than I had been led to believe and that rotation should be seen as an epiphenomenon of active fingers supporting the weight of a relaxed arm.
Under normal playing conditions the wrist should be flat, or even a bit lower than the curve of the fingers, particularly in Mozart. It's a similar ergonomics to typing on a computer keyboard. If you type with your wrists much higher than your knuckles problems arise. @@heifie2540
Taubman is right on many things. But the true originator of rotation was Chopin. And yes he spoke about it to his students. But not in the somewhat faulty nonsensical way as taught in the Taubman approach. She got these concepts from Matthay who was also… missing something important. It’s really quite amazing to me how few people have bothered to really look into what Chopin was teaching. Mind blowing really.
Do you have a source for this assertion? I can find no mentions of rotation in the Eigeldinger book or in Chopin's unpublished method sketches. As far as I'm aware, Matthay was the first person to discuss rotation as a teaching tool.
thanks for all these tips. Would you have information about piano-technique for people who have fingers that don't fit between the black keys of the piano.
Curious, how does the smooth rotation occur when tucking the thumb up and down the scale? I find myself doing half a rotation then winding up for a full rotation, after the thumb is tucked, to finish the scale. If you could direct me to a resource that covers this specifically, that would be very helpful. Thank you.
Only Golandsky explained rotation in the way that functions for me. The others introduce weird angular movements that will be counter productive for the musical line imo.
You have to feel the movement in a overreact way, then you reduce to its minimum, still u can feel it but invisible for others. Look into invisible technique from Matthay
Well........... what you are actually looking at is..........circumduction. The ability for the finger or wrist or whatever to circulate around the fixed point at its base.
Circumduction occurs in the shoulder, hip, wrist, metacarpophalangeal, and metatarsophalangeal joints. This video deals with the forearm. The forearm pronates and supinates (rotation).
Much has been said about rotation. This needs in depth scientific research to find out what really happens under the hood. When I start applying rotation consciously, it destroys the evenness of the playing. The fingers need a stable platform imo and not one that wobbles from right to left and vice versa. But maybe I use rotation unconsciously.
I'd like to point out that the arm is too heavy to change direction with rotation as fast as needed for each note. Something else is going on with good playing. Calling it rotation is a simplification, but useful
Use it on a piano NEVER on a pipe organ. . or Harpsichord/clavichord etc. it calls wrist rotation. I heard 'circles' on youtube.. There are a lot of bad teachers on youtube. Don't you think?
#1 - 5:20 Sorry but this is total nonsense, the rotation does NOT extend the range of your hand at ALL, and that's not even what he did in the following motion he demonstrates. He didn't just rotate his hand, he completely EXTENDED HIS ARM AT THE ELBOW (and also the entire arm at the shoulder joint a little bit most likely) (AND he also moved his entire body a little bit, but that's kind of beside the point) Any rotation of the hand actually makes it's span SMALLER. FACTUALLY. This is very basic physics, it's simply rotating a relatively flat surface above another surface... factually that SHRINKS it's cross sectional area of the shadow it casts from a light shining straight down. Now it may be slightly easier to EXTEND THE WRIST and/or the FINGERS when incorporating rotation, but that doesn't mean the ROTATION is PHYSICALLY EXTENDING YOUR REACH because that is literally the exact OPPOSITE of whats true. Even great teachers sometimes spout nonsense sometimes and I'm not afraid to tell it like it is. I know I'm just a nobody but I also know when I'm factually correct about certain very basic physics principle such how much the rotation of the hand at the forearm actually extends one's "reach" or not. Yes, rotation is good and helps and is necessary to incorporate but not at all because it "EXTENDS YOUR REACH".... it's just about the natural flexibility of the hand and incorporating it's motion into either A - arrpegios and B rolling large chords and C - for DEXTERITY AND ACCURACY when bouncing back and forth between extremely large intervals, but it has nothing to do with "extending the reach".... There is arguably some aspect to it's incorporation of playing any sort of scale figure but much less so. #2 - Want to know the BEST way to strengthen your back arms shoulders and fingers so they NEVER will get "tired" or sore from something like piano playing...? GO TO THE GYM and do some actual RESISTANCE TRAINING. Please, musicians neglect their physical health so much and it pains me how almost every single elderly piano teacher is so frail and weak and it's completely unnecessary
IF your body is relaxed, which it almost never is with beginners. That's exactly why you teach them rotation and correct movement. You are talking about putting the cart before the horse.