What I've learned about piano technique in the last three years

A "craft" post

Clara and Robert Schumann.

I’ve written about my history with the piano before (quite a few times, actually), and the short version is this: I started lessons young, continued until around age twenty or so (and passed my ARCT exam), briefly toyed with the idea of becoming a professional musician before realizing I wasn’t anywhere near good enough, and then played off-and-on (with long stretches of off) since then. During COVID lockdown I started lessons again, over Zoom, with a teacher down in San Jose. She has high standards and takes me seriously, which is the best thing that could have possibly happened for my playing. I feel pain when I disappoint her (which is often) and pride when she praises me. She’s also articulated some points on technique and musicality that weren’t obvious to me before — I’d been making so many assumptions about my musical sense that I’d forgotten to really think about it. Below are the three that have brought me the most benefit, and that have relevance beyond the piano.

One: understand where the important notes are

I sometimes think about this TED talk in which Benjamin Zander illustrates one of the differences between beginning and advanced piano students by demonstrating that it’s not just speed and fluency that makes a pianist sound more professional — it’s where they place their emphasis. The beginner labors over every note, thumping them out noisily, while the slightly more advanced student emphasizes every second note, or every fourth. Once true skill has been achieved, the pianist will be very careful about musical emphasis, guiding the ear to those notes that are most musically important to the phrase. The lines grow longer. Suddenly instead of notes, there are phrases; not just words, but sentences.

My teacher often asks, usually rhetorically because she already knows the answer: what do you want to show? What she means is, what’s interesting about this musical moment? It might be an unusual harmony, a sudden contrast in volume, a beautiful melody. A tricky bit of finger-work might need to sound tossed-off or it might need to draw attention to itself, depending on on the context.

I thought I had already reached that point of sensitivity, with a good understanding of how to shape a phrase. But in the last few years, I’ve learned how to shape even more carefully. Emphasis needs to be managed not just at the lowest level, the weak and strong counts in a single bar of three or four beats, but at the middle level — where is the climax of the phrase? — and at the higher level — where is the climax of the piece? Each phrase, each section, each piece can only have one emotional peak, and they are all in relation to each other. A piece might have three or four subsections, each with its own exciting climax, but if you spend all your dramatics on the first peak, the more important final peak will lose its impact. Crucial to musicality is directionality: you should sound like you know where you’re going, and let the listener know when you’ve arrived. If you don’t know where you want to guide the listener’s attention, the piece will sound uninspired.

Two: the shape of your hands matters

I’d only ever thought about the shape of my hands in terms of their size. My small handspan is a continuous source of frustration, as it makes certain repertoire — particularly the virtuoso showpieces of the late 19th and early 20th century — inherently more difficult to play, if not out of reach entirely. I can reach a 9th with some strain; Liszt, Ravel and Rachmaninov, and even Debussy, routinely demand a 10th.¹

What I didn’t know before, even though it seems obvious now: good technique must account for the fact that our fingers aren’t all the same length. The middle finger is longer than the pinky finger, and if you hold your hand above the keyboard without some attempt at correction, some fingers will be closer to the keys than others.

I struggled for a long time to figure out why my scales didn’t sound perfectly even like a professional’s, or why I couldn’t consistently get all the notes of a chord to sound at precisely the same time (which especially bothered me in the opening of Clair de lune, with its opening sequence of thirds). When I realized that some of the physiological points of piano technique — curving the fingers, tilting the wrist, keeping the fingertips close to the keys — are meant to correct for the natural unevenness of the hands, it came as a revelation. I’m much better now at playing those impressionistic thirds.

Now that I’m starting to learn pottery, this is coming up again. If you don’t account for the asymmetry of your hands and fingers, whatever you make on the wheel will be asymmetrical too. There’s probably some branch of aesthetic philosophy discussing how whatever art we make with our hands — dance, music, arts, crafts — is molded by the shape of those hands. A keyboard, with all its identically-sized keys lined up in a row, is a rational ideal to which my imperfect hands must adapt.

Three: think ahead, find efficiencies

I’m a decent sight-reader, meaning that I can look at sheet music for a piece I’ve never played before and play it while reading simultaneously from the sheet. This requires being able to continuously read a little bit ahead of what I’m actually playing, and doing a bit of pattern-matching. But I’ve developed the bad habit of learning to play a piece by repeatedly sight-reading it, which means I’m not thinking ahead intelligently.

I wrote above about needing to plan out a phrase and understand its direction and climax, but there’s an even smaller-scale level of planning required for great technique: making sure that at the time you need to play a note, the finger is already poised and ready above the key. This sounds obvious, but when you learn by sight-reading it’s easy to miss. For example: consider a group of five notes that need to be played in sequence. When sight reading, I’ll move my hand to the first note, then the second and so on, usually getting to the right place at the very last moment and filling my playing with little lags and hesitations while I try to figure out where my hands need to be. But if I’ve studied the section beforehand and worked out the best way to play it, I might find that it’s possible to position my hand such that all five notes are within reach — perhaps even with each individual finger already in place — so that the section can be played without needing to move my hand at all. This is actually easier than the other way, and will sound smoother and more assured. But it takes study and planning. Similarly, making scales or trills sound faster might not be a matter of more velocity: it might be about making smaller movements, reducing the amount of time and effort needed to get to the next note. This probably just seems like common sense, but in the thick of learning a skill it’s not at all obvious.

It’s a cliché to say that professional pianists make everything look easy. Often the trick is that they play such that it is easier, at least physically: part of what good technique accomplishes is taking advantage of every possible efficiency in movement, so that the musical tasks can be executed with less physical effort.

A lot of craft manuals, across various disciplines, talk about how “effortlessness” is an illusion. What they mean, usually, is that getting better at something takes lots of work. But the appearance of effortlessness isn’t entirely a lie: reducing the effort and learning to ration it intelligently is, in fact, an enormous part of the work itself. Effort spent beforehand, in the mind, reduces the work you need to do at the keyboard. Good technique involves some tricks, yes, but in large part it’s like anything else: paying focused, sustained attention. Where do my fingers need to be, and what do I want to show?

1. There’s a small movement of pianists and piano-makers dedicated to popularizing the use of keyboards with narrower keys, such that an octave spans a distance of 5.5 inches rather than 6.5. Their argument is that the current standard octave width dates only from the late 19th century, the age of the great male virtuosos; pianos with narrower keys would have been widely available before that time. Only 13% of female pianists, they claim, can comfortably reach a 10th on the current standard size.