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This sounds promising. First, you communicated willingness to work with what she has given, and then asked a question that told her how she can guide you. Now you have been given something specific that you can work on. If you work on those specific things, in your next session she will hear where you are at in this thing. You may also end up with new questions that are even more specific, or observations that may come up if she observes that you are doing this or that - or she may just be able to lead. Since she seems to have more to convey, if you work on what she said, this may start taking direction.

It sounds much more promising than your first post. Looking forward to what comes of it.

Impendia,

Sorry I got so personal, wasn't trying to hijack your thread. I just wanted to support your concern for more detailed, more explanatory teaching. I quit piano long ago essentially because I wasn't get helpful enough instruction. I am now and I love practicing. Music is at the center of my life again.

You will teach your teacher to be a better teacher, which I'm sure she'll be happy for. Sounds like you are on the right track.

I'm not advocating rigidity or a "cook book" style of connecting movement to musical expression. If I could just sum it up in one sentence, it's good to play every note and every phrase with "intent." Eventually you'll have more ideas on what you want the sound to be and how you get it. Experiment. You can change your mind at any time. Why not? Developing the ear, making choices and connecting those with movement eventually becomes more intuitive. Best wishes!

While practising just now, I thought of this thread - namely the idea that the musical sound you hear in your internal ear will lead your body to do the right movements. I was practising a series of chords, 3 notes per hand, mostly an octave apart, played as sustained whole notes. The actual piece consists of eighth note arpeggios dancing up and down the piano, but to memorize them, you might play them as block chords as I was doing. Essentially you end up with a whole other piece which is beautiful and poignant in its own right.

Ok, the last thing I just wrote: I hear this exercise as music, with feeling to it. I am also hearing those whole note chords as a sustained sound. And since I hear them as a sustained sound, my internal ear tells me to hold those notes down for as long as they sound. If the sound is to endure with their intensity as much as possible, my body wants to "push forward those notes for their entire duration". This is what my musical ear tells my body to do, and it is WRONG. Some elements of playing an instrument are counter-intuitive.

I have a feeling like a bruise in a corner of my right elbow, and I know it is a precursor to "tennis elbow" or "golfer's elbow, or in the least, sign of strain. It is why I watched this morning how I was doing this. Instead of subconsciously and therefore physically "keeping those notes sounding" with the hands, I have to let go of the down-push the moment the (virtual) hammers are sent flying. When you "push forth and let go", the natural thing you'd expect is loud-soft, but that is not how the piano works. There is a disconnect. To get myself into the right habit, I plan to play the whole note chords staccato with the hands, since the pedal will hold the sound, and gradually allow the hands to remain on the keys. Now there is an absolute disconnect between what my hands are doing, and the sound I'm producing. Well, I can play them without pedal, so that I actually hear the staccato, and thus create a connection --- then mentally still hear that staccato feeding into the hand motion I want. At that point I am training my body to connect a particular motion (hands and pedal) to a sound, and only then will it become a "natural subconscious spontaneous action" that we don't want to interfere with.

But first we have to get there.

And this is where I think it falls apart when teachers tell students to make it sound musical, show them how it should sound, when the student does not have the underlying trained reflexes of this nature.

Does this make sense to anyone?

It makes sense.

Making music combines lots of skills and sensibilities, among them a certain athleticism. Some people are naturals, some have varying degrees of potential. Just about everybody can benefit from good instruction to wed thought and action. I was surprised when I first started recording myself that passages where I felt the most emotion fell flat. It is really valuable to listen and evaluate.

It does. A mature, accomplished musician can let his or her experience and mastery of sound (tone) production take over and not give it conscious thought. But not initially. You don't just arrive the first day at the piano knowing how to make the desired sound magically happen. You have to figure out--better yet, have a teacher dissect and then reassemble--the motions that are necessary to make a particular sound. And practice them until they become automatic.

It seems that me and keystring agree on almost every point.

keystring is absolutely right that without knowing the mentioned basic principles a good technique to do things can hardly be found from scratch. Particularly the idea that keys can be held pushed down just by the weight of the arm is really not very intuitive; it is really more intuitive to push the keys down. And I suppose the idea that keys can be released while the sound is being sustained by the pedal is also not very intuitive; it probably requires some time to figure this out, sometimes maybe much time. So the technique initially acquired solely by intuition is in most cases inferior to the technique based on appliance of knowledge, and it requires much time to improve. And I suppose that for people with motional problems the intuitive way may really lead to a dead end. Otoh, if you know the basic principles and you knowingly forbid yourself to do some plainly wrong things on the initial stage of learning, you get a shortcut - you aim your brain's learning abilities in the best possible direction right away. So the knowledge of the basic principles is extremely important, I totally agree.

I also agree that it takes time to establish the connection between the pre-imagined sounds and physical motions. First of all it requires experimenting, because the brain needs to understand the relations between different physical motions and the resultant sounds. Then it takes time to "transfer" these relations from conscious area to unconscious area. In fact this is true for any physical activity that involves external devices, e.g. for driving, for operating machinery, for operating endoscope. Then the stage of technique optimization begins and it virtually lasts for lifetime.

It is unclear if the brain stores the very fine "pre-programmed" elements of every trained motion and then re-assembles them one by one on the fly in order to create a full motion that will produce the desired sound, or the brain operates with the "pre-programmed" functional relations between individual joint movements and sounds, or maybe both. I think it's not very important.

What I was trying to emphasize is the necessity to stop typing in the sounds (a very good metaphor!) at some point, as though you had a mental list of motional formulas (techniques, in the narrow sense) to execute, and to switch to mental concentration on the aural images, letting the cerebellum do all the "dirty work" for you. Not only it frees cognitive resources to allow you to play at a high tempo, but it also allows you to change your plans very quickly, to alter a piece interpretation right on the fly according to your mood or imagination and to express yourself naturally. In my mind it's the only way to really play the piano. Executing a list of motional formulas is not nearly comparable to this second way in terms of self-expression.

And again I repeat that what I was just talking about is not a replacement for learning basic principles.

In person, agreement would have taken much less time :-). Different emphasis with different types of students in mind.

Appreciate your perspectives, Iaroslav--especially with your teaching and performing experience. There is a danger of mechanical playing with thinking too much about every move. There are technically brilliant pianists who leave their audiences cold. Just wanted to say, even with my limited knowledge, that your concerns and observations ring true.

I agree with your post, Stubbie. It's certainly part of my experience--though starting in early childhood and/or having musical environment probably would make some difference!

Again, not advocating a rigid "cookbook approach." Well, the cooking analogy might be appropriate. If one cooks enough, eventually the cookbook isn't needed.