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Musicality: The First Rule of Piano Technique
by Seymour Fink

Technique is best defined as purposeful movement towards musical ends and must be presented in ways that reinforce music’s existence only in perceived or actual sound. It follows from this that the first rule of piano technique is to audiate musical intention before moving – to project in the mind what one wants to create before any attempt to do it. It is this projection of musical understanding and intention that triggers the physical movement. Otherwise, technique becomes a dull, precision-building, muscle-building exercise related more to typing quickly than to music making. The union of aural image and activating movement is what lends authenticity and authority to a performance, both important ingredients of musicality.

Early technical training lays the groundwork for a lifetime at the instrument. Its presentation should be carefully sequenced as follows:

Instill the experience of grace, expressive freedom, and joy in pure movement before concerning students with notes and levers.
Focus on listening carefully to the types of sound that various movements produce. Harping on rounded hand position and broken nail joints does nothing for the ear, and has a proven history of locking shoulders and wrists, hobbling future development.
Coordinated movement linked to musical intention is the essence of technique – not static position. Larger elements of the playing mechanism should be dealt with first. General posture and graceful movement in the shoulder girdle, shoulders, upper arms, and wrists are extremely important. Generous arm motion fills in both physical and temporal space, ingredients necessary for rhythmic understanding. A pulling arm stroke (in continuous, pulsating form – like petting a cat) is an appropriate first coordination.
Students should be encouraged to explore the entire length and depth of the keyboard. Cement the relationship between students’ movements and the sounds they create, between kinesthetic feel and carefully monitored end product. Slower or faster swinging arms change tonal dynamics; extending upper arms outward affects the alignment of the fingers with the keys, which also affects the tonal result. Understanding these relationships and experimenting with the variables empowers students to take an active role in their own development.
A pure finger technique should be taught only after several years of study, when the technique is needed for increased speed. The premature introduction of the complex coordination often creates unwanted tension. Beginning students get along quite nicely with arm strokes for which the fingers are supple landing gears. Independent finger action is usually not necessary before the sonatina level of study, when the ability to use the arms efficiently will ease the learning of new coordination. It is important to remember that technical training should not outpace the musical sophistication of the students.

Practicing should be thought of as wiring the sounds heard inside the head to the physical motions necessary to create them. Training that follows a course of slowly building skill upon skill, in the proper order, with little tension and strain, monitored by the ear, and always in response to expanding musical demands will insure that this all-important connection is never severed. New skills require new habits; specifically the ability to perform new, useful, and automatic movements that demand minimal mental effort. These are acquired through thoughtful repetition, inner awareness and well-considered feedback. Practicing should ultimately take us from self-conscious, deliberate, and effortful behaviors to goal-oriented, automatic ones. As we move from conscious factual knowledge (knowing what to do) to procedural knowledge (knowing how to do it), we become freer to concentrate on the goal-oriented purpose of the behavior – producing an imagined musical idea.

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SYMPOSIUM FOR PIANISTS AND TEACHERS
Gail Berenson, Jacqueline Csurgai-Schmitt, William DeVan, Dr. Mitchell Elkiss, Seymour Fink, Phyllis Alpert Lehrer, Barbara Lister-Sink, Robert Mayerovitch, Dr. Norman Rosen & Dylan Savage
LORENZ CORPORATION

Bringing together the unique perspectives of top pianists and pedagogues, along with physicians specializing in the treatment and rehabilitation of performance-related injuries, this text is truly unparalleled. The collection covers such topics as developing an advanced technique, myofascial pain and its treatment, benefits of fitness, performance anxiety, a child's first lessons, mechanics of the piano, and musicality. The best of the twentieth-century thinking on the subject, including references to the works of Matthay, Schultz, Ortmann, Whiteside, and others, is also organized and presented in an accessible manner. These broad-based subjects are included in one of five sections - Mechanical, Technical, Musical, Healthful (Mind and Body) and Pedagogical - and include goals and exercises clearly articulated in a concise manner.
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