This post was eventually incorporated into Honing the Pianistic Self-Image
February 20th, 2008
Overly depressed 5th knuckle hinders my own piano technique
Lately I watched parts of Seymour Fink’s DVD, Mastering Piano Technique, and part 12B hit me like a ton of bricks. Avoiding ulnar deviation is not bad!!! This one section about moving the arm into the fifth finger to help it play, exposes a major weakness of my own approach. You can see it in my film: to illustrate the second, transverse arch of the hand, I allow my metacarpal-phalangeal ridge to slope down to my fifth finger. But this lowers its potency! I also demonstrate how to rotate in leaping to a high note played with the fifth finger, thus emptying out the fifth finger’s metacarpal-phalangeal arch and weakening it. I developed these strategies because I saw people trying to bring out the top voice by stiffening the whole outside ridge of their hand and I wanted to cure that.
I had other good reasons as well: I had seen many avoiding ulnar deviation to avoid injury, but they were consequently collapsing their entire arch, and also pulling their thumb away from the board, thus forcing it to make a big, ungainly movement to get back to the board for its next note. Ulnar deviation helped me to equalize the length of my thumb to that of my other fingers, thus, I thought, making my whole hand more functional.
The difference between position and function in piano technique
So now comes a major recant: what I didn’t see was this: when I equalized my thumb’s length to that of my other fingers, I dis-equalized the length of my four fingers! I was losing more than I was gaining, but didn’t realize it. Because I rightly saw the thumb’s function as an independent entity from the four fingers making it equal in importance, I tried to make it equal in function as well – but this is stupid! Four fingers can stand as a secure structure more easily than one thumb. Thus it feels much more secure to play with a “fifth finger orientation” as Thomas Mark puts it, and leave the thumb to stick out to the inside as a kind of outrigger.
Cultivating the thumb’s ‘independent outrigger’ function transformed my piano technique
The past few days I’ve been putting this into practice and changing the entire way I play piano – at age 53 and after a film and two books!!! I really swing my arm forward and in to my fifth finger any time it plays. This does pull my thumb away from the board (what I used to consider a no-no), but that pulling actually helps it feel its independent outrigger function. Look at videos of the greats: their thumbs stick out to the inside; they are not just hanging relaxed. It looks almost awkward – in a way, it goes against nature as Micheal Furstner puts it – but it is functional.
I don’t experience it as fifth finger orientation but more as a 2nd-3rd-4th-5th finger orientation. Those four constitute a wonderfully secure structure, and I feel my whole arm – both its bones – moving in in a straight line behind those four fingers and creating a structural alignment and integrity which is the hallmark of my approach, but ironically enough, which I never fully realized until now! I finally have myself the total ease I have been talking about for years!
It is a fairly muscular action: I feel a real, robust effort in my upper arm which comes forward to make this happen. I also feel my pelvis rock forward in synchronicity with the movement. You can feel the movement yourself by doing the following:
Involve the pelvis/whole body in this new hand organization
Place your hand on your thigh or a table top and roll it forward so it folds over your fingers. Your fingers lie on their backs and your wrist goes forward over them. Feel how your upper arm participates in this, and your pelvis. You can either feel that the fingers pull the upper arm / pelvis forward, or that the pelvis rocks forward making the whole thing happen. Leave your thumb out of it. Leave your thumb sticking to the inside, and make this a movement only of your hand itself. When your hand finds its functional integrity, it allows your thumb to be fully free and functional too.
Watch Seymour’s 12B to get more ideas on this. More from me later… Any response to this? What happens when you try it?
AFF