Relativity Formula of piano playing
pianistic process view	mental work	body-work	Fingering	Movement analysis	fingering- edition	practising-brackets	programming muscles

Programming of Musle groups of the Pianists hand during practise

Generally pianists do a lot of motoric pratising without using the different kinds of memory systematically like optical, acoustical, functional or haptical memory. Or like in the Czerny exercises they practise a variety of similar figurations.
As an enlargment of the training repertoire I would like to propose a number of functional exercises which train certain muscle groups of the hand selectively although the hand can never be cut out of the context of the whole body. Important is the neurological/learning-physiological working-out of exercises to store a complex moving pattern precisely in the long term memory. Also here the integration of the hand movement into the whole-body-movement is of essential dimension.

A view of the pianistic process as a diagram

As a basic program all parameters of a note must be learnt by a multi-sensorical learning program before higher context between the notes can be "interpreted"....
I think there is a logical movement-development-physiologiy-teaching-system which builds up with small consequent learning steps. The wonder-kids seem to jump over many steps but later after the adolescence they have to re-work it step by step.

With the practising-bracket you can create a "standing-movement-picture" by always repeating a defined limited number of notes which can then be "swallowed" and digested by the brain as an extra-pyramidal pattern.

For the musculi interlumbricales there is an exercise with "wandering positions" that program all lateral changes of the hand.

The integration of flexor and extensor movements in a polarity between peripherical and centralized movement must be done consciously: That makes the difference between just pressing keys and "supported/gestütz" piano tone quality.

1) Hand and Finger positions

Very important for positioning of the hand is the article "Fingering for piano playing" and it is fully published in this website in german and english. Only a consequently fixed fingering makes possible to enter into a deeper extra-pyramidal motorical program.

Impulse law

The pianist has to know several natural (physical) laws like the
impulse p=mv
and the impulse maintaining law
m₁v₁=m₂v₂because he creates the sound by giving an impulse to the hammer by moving the key. Mass 1 is the pianist and mass 2 (the piano) remains constant. Thus the speed of the hammer is the only parameter which can be influenced by the pianist. He works with the product of his mass and his velocity which makes conscious that the hand itself has only a little mass and has to cooperate with the whole body to get the "Stütze" ("appoggio") of the piano tone.

If you put the index finger vertically on the keys and repeat a note several times slowly moving from the vertical to the horizontal position you will notice the change from the elastic impulse to the inelastic impulse after a lowering of about 30 ° because the finger-"tip" is softer than the very top.

The most important law for a pianist:
The law of impulse......

....and the "conservation of momentum":

"Hand-Bock"

means an antagonistically fixed position of the hand like a table and this word was used by the old pianists like Breithaupt. In this position like a claw the hand gets put into the keyboard with the arm/body.
A nice exercise for the antagonists of the fingers is the "kitchen scale"-exercise: You put a finger vertically on it at up to one kg. Then you go front, back, left, right with the always stretched finger without letting the pointer of the scale change his position close to one kg. The highest test is to circle around without the pointer moving much....

Hand flat or steep?

An example for steep: The french pianist Kalkbrenner let his pupils play scales gliding with the wrist over the lean of a a chair which was put in front of the keyboard. This meant finger play with little body.

An example for flat: The canadian pianist Glenn Gould is known to sit on a very low chair so that he generally had a flat hand-position with active finger play.

How always no dogma is to be applicated here: It is purely a polarity and the adapted position depends fully on the context.....

2) Simple Movements

On the 4th congress of music medicine 1996 in Hannover I gave a workshop about the "Relativity formula of piano playing" .The three dimensional movement of the pianist gets splitted in three partial levels: saggital, frontal and horizontal level. In each level a "moving atom" as an elementary exercise is established, a circuit movement which makes a wholistic body movement, all in fluctuation. Naturally this can be demonstrated better in a workshop...

Transmission of the weight

The transmission of the body-arm-weight from one finger to the next is comparable with the pendling movement of the whole body with slightly divided legs. It would be a usless movement to move the knees because you only need to shift your balance: The same is valid for two fingers: Try to shift from the 2nd finger on d to the 4th finger on f. Like in the picture of the relativity formula in the second box (click a bit higher). In a movement from a white key to a black one there is another aspect overlayed: the back and front movement.

3) composed movements

The divided Hand

It is a pity that not in every education for pianists this terminus technicus is used systematically.

Some examples for divided hand:

Chopin Etude op. 25, 1: A good elementary exercise to work on the sound perspective of the divided hand to differenciate the melody notes from the accompanying notes. You sould announce every note if it is loud or low. The sextoles make it like this: loud-low-low-low-low-low-----loud-low-low-low-low-low----etc.

Schubert Impromptu op. 90, 3: Also here you have sextoles like in op. 25,1. In addition you can get a much more relaxed movement overlaying a back and forth movement at the 1st and 4th note. Like this the movement marathon will be more relaxed.

Sound balance is not done by all pianists but is an important differenciation of the tensions (appoggio) of the fingers : Play a 6-voiced chordrepeatedly and pick out of the complete sound always a different note as melody note. This differenciation has to be dedvelopped so strongly that at any time the sound gets plastical by having a clear hierarchy of the loudnesses of the single notes played at the same time.

4) complex movements

A simple C-major-scale with both hands is a great task under learning-physiological aspects. Easy to understand is this remark when you teach a beginner who builds up this movement from the very beginning.
When you work with Computer-pianos all biological irregularitiess are boostered up which appear because hand positions are changed and the steps from white to black keys and vice versa have to be done. To closely analyse these facts and optimize the movements would mean professional working methods to my opinion. With the computer-piano you can listen and watch the key movements of your just recorded take and thus get a microscopic view. In plus you can watch your interpretation in an optical way by transmitting it to a PC with Cakewalk professional sequencer software and choose the "piano roll view". These essential points of view should be integrated in a new department of pianists´ education called "micro pianistics".

But it seems that the honourable pianist colleagues at german music academies seem to fight against computers in the computer age...! Only about six out of 18 academies have a computer piano, and some have it and rarely use it systematically. Here I offer my cooperation! For just ridiculous 12.000 DM an existent grand piano can be furnished with one of the best systems by PianoDisc, and I don´t say it only because I am dealer of the systems...

5) Wandering positions

To practise the linking of several hand positions you need a muscle group of the middle hand:

the musculi interlumbricales.

The special exercise for this are the so-called "wandering positions": Keep as many fingers as possible but at least one finger on a pressed key and "walk" around the piece playing this sequence of clusters or single notes; it is not at all important how it sounds but only how the changes of the griping hand feel like. Of course it is easier to explain this in a workshop, I am working also on a music sheet with examples.

6) Practising-brackets

There are only two kinds to practise: Play through or really practise. When you practise it is obligatory to enter deeper in a part of the composition or a 4-bar-passage or even a sequence of a few notes by repeating them many times always reflecting about the way how to do it. It is rarely taught systematically to focus more and more the essentiality of a technical problem. In my terminology I call the very focus "Practising-bracket": Between the two notation systems for piano I draw a sharp bracket which exactly shows from which note to which other note the problem is present. It can be position changes, jumps or difficult steps from black to white keys and vice versa (which means a height difference which often requires an arm movement).

The learning-physiology-trick" is now to repeat this sequence of notes from the first to the last note in a non-stop manner whithout even hesitating between last note of one run and first note of the next run. Through this non-stop movement it is created a kind of "standing wave image" as we know it from the physical experiment with transversal waves. (Only) this image can be "swallowed" by the brain towards an extra-pyramidal-movement-program. Thus the technical node gets dissolved and the problem can be reintegrated in the greater context.

7) Psychology of mistakes

To my opinion a complex moving pattern consists of a clearly structured hierarchic building of movement elements.

I believe in a law of mistake psychology: If I make a new learning step the former mistakes of former steps like to come up again even if I had superated them. This shows how the brain tries to keep up the limits of a personality by setting limits to new informations. Sometimes learning new things seems to me like putting informations through a very small hole....

Often I am happy because students make mistakes (of course only the small ones...): Because it shows me according to the law of mistakes´ psychology that the student has learnt something! At the end the mistake has to be eliminated of course.

Final remark

Thanks for following so far. Written expression is always very limited in these things of practical movement, but I invite everybody to visit me (see adress at homepage, just click the logo) and to get the practical imformation. Or you choose the more expensive way to invite me to your place for a workshop.....

Yours sincereley

Wolfgang Ellenberger

ClassiCulturCentrum Zentralseite
Presse- Neuheit Veranstaltungs- service Verlag Agentur Musiker- Ärzte piano master Links Einkaufskorb

ClassiCulturCentrum Zentralseite

Presse- Neuheit

Veranstaltungs- service