Yet more on what gravity can/can't offer, touch weight myths debunked, and the benefits of timed acceleration (in both snooker and piano playing)

There are quite a few issues that I'm going to cover in this post, including an illustration of how the effortless power of a first rate snooker player has much in common with how a top pianist makes an effortlessly big sound. I'll show you the relevance of "timing", both in terms of how an expert snooker player strokes the cueball and how an expert pianist strokes a key (in order to pass on energy without any wasted force). In particular though, I also managed to assemble some extremely strong evidence of how limited gravity is for making a big sound from close contact. What these comments do not apply to is those situations in which there's time to play with larger flamboyant run up movements. It's certainly possible to harness gravity to help build momentum when coming down from a height (actually, it's impossible to descend without transferring stored gravitational energy into kinetic energy), so please don't misunderstand that any of my points are denying this. Here are examples of that technique in play.

Start this 2nd clip from around 5:50 in.

Later in the post I'll explain exactly what makes it possible to do this safely, including close-up video demonstrations of the basic actions (nb. it requires a lot more than gravity/relaxation alone). If you want to try the practical part right away, then feel free to skip to the videos and instructions at the end. To start with, I'm going to be be looking at playing from close contact, however. I have a strong proof that gravity can only generate a very moderate dynamic here (without additional acceleration through correct movements). Don't worry though, I'll keep the scientific explanations as simple and accessible as possible. The main thing I want to do is to convey quite how modest the result is when hoping to use gravity without any run up.

You may be a little shocked by this, but releasing even a literal tonne of mass on to the keys could not produce a significantly loud sound- if you begin from direct contact with the key!

The touch-weight fallacy

Before going back to that, I want to start by debunking an incredibly prevalent piece of misinformation about the level of force required to play the piano. Somewhere along the line it became trendy for people to start claiming that to play you require the equivalent of merely 40-60g or so of force. Their heart may be in the right place (and it's certainly true that efficient technique uses far less brute force than some people think is needed). But to imagine you can get results by literally stripping down to 50g worth of pressure is nevertheless a complete fantasy built on incorrect application of facts. As you'll see later, the most effortless results are earned by addressing the keys with the right style of positive input, not by simply choosing to put little in and then expecting a free lunch.

Anyway, what the static touch-weight of a piano key tells us is the amount of mass required to depress a key with quite so little energy or acceleration that it doesn't even produce a sound! Assuming you are playing anything other than John Cage's 4:33, you're going to need at least some of the hammers to succeed in arriving at the strings and often with substantial energy. A piano key may start with only a small resistance, but the moment you start trying to produce even moderate levels of tone, it pushes right back at you. By the time you are playing even fairly loudly there will be overwhelmingly more resistance to overcome. The relevant term is dynamic touch-weight. This is the term for the true force required to produce a certain level of tone. There's not a lot of clear information out there on how big this would be, although I recently got into a discussion about this on a Facebook forum that inspired me to start investigating more deeply.

Dead weight and volume

After this issue came up, another poster told me that he took a mass of around 680g and released it on a piano key (from direct contact). By his assessment, this mass (with far more than 10 times as much pressure as some people have tried to tell us is sufficient for the whole of pianism) produced no more than a rather moderate mezzo forte dynamic. Although I was already aware that dynamic touch-weight requires far greater pressures than the static figure, I have to say that this greatly surprised me. In fact, I cautiously took out a 2.5kg mass and tried releasing it on my own piano. Admittedly my experiment was somewhat compromised compared to a true scientific standard, owing to the difficulty of releasing the mass abruptly. However, not a single attempt was able to reach a notable dynamic. After seeing this, I was happy enough to trust his word of only reaching mf with 680g (particularly as he had been arguing that piano playing takes very *little* active force- a case which certainly wasn't helped by this result).

To give more context, if I "weigh" my arm on a kitchen scales, I exert a pressure equivalent to between 600-800g of mass. My arm itself has far more mass, of course, and this is admittedly based on too many subjective factors to be exact (hence the deliberately broad range). However, what I'm saying is that when I simulate the kind of pressure I'd expect to apply (while "resting" my arm via a held note at a piano, whilst maintaining an aligned wrist) it will not go past 800g without a notably obvious muscular pressure. I would have to start pushing significantly more than it takes to merely keep my arm out in front of me. By the way, I'm no Charles Atlas, but I'm not afraid to curl a 15kg dumbbell either. My arms are far from abnormally light. It might well have been assumed that 2.5kg would be substantially less pressure than a resting hand would apply, due to the arm's weight but, no. Check it yourself on a weighing scales if you don't trust me.

For the final experiment, I tried releasing my arm's weight down on the keys, to see if anything would be different. This is very difficult to assess objectively, so I channelled it through the end of a pencil. One reason so many people think gravity does so much for them is because of the pianistic instincts they have developed- in the actions of their hand and upper arm. By resting into an inert pencil it's a lot easier to eliminate any active contribution from the fingers. It is always going to be a little subjective and imprecise still (and this certainly can't be counted as laboratory conditions for actual scientific data). However, I'm confident that I have good ability to distinguish between notable pushing vs releasing my arm. When my arm is releasing you'll see the wrist sink downwards with gravity. If that doesn't happen when you try this, you are pushing forwards significantly (rather than solely dropping the arm's weight into the movement of each key). This is likely to become a big contributor to the volume being produced. You'll see at once how much more sound I can comfortably achieve when I wilfully deliver a more precise muscular acceleration to the key (even through the neutral pencil). If you want to see what genuine gravity alone does from contact, you must fight your every instinct to deliberately send energy into the key and simply release everything and observe. Notice how relatively weak and thin the sound is (even via a cheap camera phone which adds a lot of gain). At the end I also tried to go a little quicker. Bobbling on to every key with the arm alone is cumbersome and difficult. It's also hard to fully let go when you also have to get somewhere else in a hurry (thus the even weaker sound than before). When trying to genuinely pass on gravity alone there's no chance of speed or finesse. It would at least require some more active arm pressure but above all it needs living fingers that can move. One separate arm descent per note (plus a necessary reset to go again) is not something that is conducive to either speed or control.

Proof that gravity is ALWAYS this limited (from direct contact)

I'd already been considering the theory as to why dropping a mass from contact might well max out at a certain dynamic level, although what nevertheless caused real surprise is quite how low that dynamic limit proved to be. I'd anticipated something of at least forte or more, not a moderate mezzo forte. What I'd seen in practise now inspired me to dig a little deeper, to see if I could make a more solid proof that there is indeed a very low dynamic limit. As luck would have it, I could indeed. The thing about gravity is that it needs time and distance to create a large speed. Drop from a big height and you'll land on the keys with abundant kinetic energy already in play. When you start from a stationary contact, however, you have no starting energy at all. The only energy that you can pass on via gravity is that which is released over the 1 cm or so through which a piano key descends. The counter-intuitive part is that even a vast mass cannot generate much acceleration in so little time. Indeed, no free falling mass can ever accelerate at more than the basic gravitational rate (of 9.8 m/s squared).

Consider the famous experiment in which both a feather and a cannonball fall at the same speed (as long they are in a vacuum, to eliminate air resistance). They both equally represent the absolute upper limit at which any free falling object can accelerate. Strictly speaking a mass that starts in direct contact with a piano key cannot quite reach even that level of acceleration, because the key itself is putting up some resistance. Here the amount of mass really does matter. Below the touch-weight you can't move the key at all. Add barely enough and the key will first go down very slowly. However, as the mass gets larger the resistance becomes ever more inconsequential and key will start to move faster and faster.

HOWEVER, what we have to remember is that it edges towards an upper ceiling of possibility. Beyond a certain amount of mass the key will be moving at something fairly close to the rate of a free gravity drop. After this point you just continue to get slightly closer to the limit. No amount of mass may ever surpass this rate of acceleration, if it is acted on solely by gravity. To find the limit we can do a calculation of the results here. With even a huge mass released on the key, you would be looking at something marginally slower than a 1cm free fall (the basic distance by which a key descends).  It would therefore take at least 0.045 seconds for the key to descend and reach a maximum speed of just 0.44 metres per second. To give some context, James Ching did an experiment in which he found pianists to take between  a 10th and a 150th of a second to depress a key. This is very much in the slower (and therefore quieter) range of the available spectrum here. Even allowing for a degree of possible imprecision in these figures, both the observed practical reality and the mechanical theory are both clearly showing us that gravity is objectively incapable of offering more than very moderate dynamics, via close contact.

Briefly returning to forces, this graph (reproduced from "Pianos Inside Out" by Mario Igrec) suggests that you'd need around twice as much energy and more to produce FF or FFF, compared to mf. Clearly the weight of the arm is woefully insufficient, when we play from close quarters.

The missing ingredients

Somehow, gravity has become so widely viewed as the ultimate "freebie" that a lot of people wouldn't even stop to consider what else must be present in the mix here. They'll just assume my working must have gone wrong. I assure you it's air-tight, however. To see what's genuinely missing, imagine now if you dropped a bullet alongside your falling cannon ball. Again the speeds would be identical in a vacuum. However, if you fired it downwards from a gun, you would easily beat any object that merely falls. Gravity cannot begin to compete with the level of acceleration achieved by active propulsion. The idea of using only gravity to make a big sound via contact is pure fantasy. We should not be fooled into treating it as a good source of acceleration from a stationary start. Indeed, you don't even need to pack a weapon in order to beat gravity. Drop a ball from shoulder height and you should still be able to quickly swoop down and catch it. Yes, movement via muscular contractions can easily beat gravity for acceleration. Muscular pressures get a bad rap because doing it wrong leaves them tired, sore and overworked. However, the reality is that you cannot even get a basic result without instead learning to do them well. Pretending they have no role (or that you can get by on a mere 40g force) is not going to give you a thing (unless you're unbelievably lucky with instincts).

"Timing"- the effective delivery of movement from a run-up

At this point, I'm now going to show you the biggest secrets to making a gravity drop land effectively. The problem with colliding with a key whilst already in motion is that you tend to knock the hammer away more abruptly. That's because you get slightly slowed down when first meeting resistance. Experiments by Ortmann proved that a sharp blow from a distance can knock the hammer out of contact with the key before you reach the escapement level (where the hammer usually separates from the key, during a smoothly paced acceleration). It's a high force but tiny contact time. The full energy applied depends on both aspects, not on a single size of force. This means a severely forceful (yet brief) hit may reasonably transmit less overall energy than a longer one with lower force.

To clarify this distinction, imagine hitting a supermarket trolley as hard as you can with a baseball bat, vs resting your hands against it before accelerating it more smoothly away. A longer push can easily generate more acceleration and without the painful impact associated with a short but vast contact force. On this basis, some even believe that you can generate more sound by pacing an acceleration from direct contact with the keys, rather than dropping the arm in from a height. It's highly counter-intuitive but you can see and hear quite how much sound Nyiregyhazi could accomplish this way.

Start the clip at around 3:40 (where the sound is already huge, but he's really just getting started).

Interestingly, top snooker coach Barry Stark has published a video in which he works around the same basic concepts that I've applied to pacing the depression of piano keys.

As he says, it's not a conclusive scientific proof yet, but there are encouraging signs that (at 35000 frames per second) the well "timed" shots indeed seem to have a slightly longer collision with the cueball. The explanation for this would be down to pacing of acceleration. Top pros don't stab at the ball and stop. They are always trained to aim the acceleration specifically through the moment of contact. This is why a seemingly gentle stroke can generate huge power. Whether at the piano or playing snooker, it's not good enough to just reach a high speed and let the ball/key get in the way of that. You should pace it so acceleration is directed most specifically between the point of contact and release. This was why gravity was so poor at making sound from direct contact too. It cannot focus a special degree of extra acceleration into that small window of opportunity. Weight just stays as a lifeless constant, that offers no extra zip when it matters.

Accelerating the finger/cue tip through the contact means it can be less significantly repelled by the force of collision and thus could spends a little longer passing on energy before detachment. Even microseconds can make a significant change when we're already looking at a very brief contact. The longer you can make the contact via timed acceleration, the less absolute speed/force is required on average. The degree to which difference would show up would be very hard to prove, but it's certainly a theory that is consistent with Newtonian mechanics.

Applying the active acceleration of good snooker technique to chords/octaves at the piano

In snooker, all shots are made by collisions rather than "pushed" from stationary contact. However, at the piano we can work both ways. The real trick to landing arm drops lies in knowing how to push the knuckles AWAY from the piano key (rather than collapse them into it). This ensures the the peak acceleration goes to the fingertips and thus the key and that any excess energy can rebound safely rather than cause impact. When the knuckles are pushed away, the contact between finger and key is gaining extra distance away from every other moving part of the hand/arm- proving that it has the largest acceleration found in any part. When this is right at the business end, you can impart much more energy before loss of contact. Imagine a snooker cue where the tip actively shoots outward on a spring during contact- thus staying with it for longer. This is what our hands can do at the piano, to stay with the resistance of the hammer for as long as possible. They are not as rigid as a snooker cue, so if you fail to employ any of their activity at all, they will tend to give way (even when trying to be very stiff). Sending at least some extra motion from finger to key gives us an extra advantage that snooker players cannot access. The second issue is that a slight forward push of the arm can give some extra support from further back.

In this video I show three styles of movement, only the last of which is genuinely effective- please don't misunderstand that I'm recommending the first two ways to play! This is from contact first, before we proceed to the big arm drop.

The first group is mostly just collapsing the wrist with both gravity and a little extra active swinging down. This is not an effective way to pass energy and delivers little of the total energy to the fingertips. However, you should practise this a little, both to recognise the flabby sense of contact with the resistance (which prevents any good sense of acceleration through to the hammer's release) and to learn to let your wrist be capable of this type of looseness. The second group is based on simply creating a fixed structure and shoving the whole arm straight down on it. This isn't chiefly about releasing weight, but a very active pressing down of arm mass. The sound is loud alright, but this is a very awkward and unsafe way to play. The descent of the arm (via strong thrust) carries a lot of energy into an abrupt collision. This type of bad technique is almost certainly why people end up saying to use weight instead of pressure. The truth is that it's just the wrong way to use active pressure. That doesn't mean active pressure is wrong in general. It's essential for big sounds from contact! The problem is that the fingertips simply resist a very high energy arm movement- thus making no particularly good sense of acceleration through the contact, nor pushing safely back out of the key bed. It's all about a huge input energy plus stiffness, rather than a more sophisticated transmission of power.  The sound is loud via brute force. Watch the wrist abruptly jam when the key lands, with nowhere for the energy to go. In truth, it's not wholly unmanageable if used sparingly (and you'll see concert pros who actually use something similar at times), but you'll get into serious bother indeed if you use this technique too much. It should preferably be avoided altogether.

The third demonstration is based on trying to push the knuckles up and AWAY from the contact with the keys. You must bond clearly with the resistance of the key first and then push try to push the bridge of the hand back out and away from this contact. I exaggerated the visible action twice, although the subtler version at the very end is condensed down more. It can even be far more subtle still. Anyway, this slight internal hand movement is what actively throws the tips of the fingers out, thus prolonging the contact with the key's resistance to the fullest opportunity. This is why my arm really doesn't have to push especially hard at all. Thanks to the hand action, what little the arm puts in is efficiently directed to the target of the key- without wastage. I could just as happily use this blend to produce a fairly big sound with next to no perceived effort whatsover, or to make a truly huge sound with only a relatively small and still very manageable effort. Only with many very loud chords in quick succession might this motion even begin to get tiring.

You can reduce the amount of visible movement but you shouldn't be aiming to throw it away entirely. There's minimal impact or exertion, because this continuation takes you AWAY from the collision. This is what STOPS the fatigue caused by heavier collisions. Observe how the arm doesn't crash its mass down into a thudding collision at all. At most, it just stabilises the reaction movements. If the wrist were to move down hard and suddenly stop, you would face far more physical impact. The arm instead contributes a forward pressure, but it doesn't itself proceed downward. The continuation is slightly up and out of the point of collision, not straight down into a dead stop point. My wrist ascends a little (but slows before getting higher than the knuckles themselves) and excess energy is absorbed. Gravity is not the accelerator here but a natural braking force to absorb the remaining energy. The slight movement isn't the dangerous part but rather the reason the energy dissipates slowly. The ends of my fingers are literally the only thing going down in space, while everything else is pushed safely back the opposite way. This is the polar opposite of a gravity action. Learn to do this and you'll be able to apply abundant power with very little effort.

Now, here's the rather surprising bit. When I add in the swing of the arm, the hand and arm have to land in what is exactly the same basic manner as playing from direct contact. In the final group, watch for all the same key features I defined in the first film. Almost all the important stuff happens just as you arrive at the key and this is what you need to watch most closely.

The first movements sag down pretty uselessly again. Lots of flailing there, but not much energy is making it into the sound. Practise it again to develop freedom in the wrist, but not as a primary technique to use directly. The second style is only even worse now! Maybe try this once (and only once) to experience why this is not the way anyone should be trying to employ gravity technique. But preferably move on and then never look back. Incidentally the "tension to release" description is popular for arm drops, but it's simply a terrible and deeply misleading explanation. Relaxing after an impact already happened would be bad enough without the big run up. On this occasion, giving significant value to relaxing after such a brutal impact would be like imagining it's fine to slit your wrists, as long as you're sure there's a stock of plasters in the bathroom cupboard. If you use this kind of braced landing as a standard part of technique, it's only a matter of time before you should expect to hurt yourself, no matter whether you relax afterwards.

Anyway, watch closely when the landings occur in the third group. The wrist descends in space solely during the run up. At the landing it starts on the slightly low side, but rebounds while the keys move. We used gravity to help build the speed of hand movement, but that doesn't mean you need to actually land heavily. Yes, the secret to "arm weight" technique is to basically take virtually all the sense of arm weight away, in the split seconds before landing- allowing the hand to push the bridge of the knuckles more upwards and away. You actually need to pull back with the upper arm a fraction before you get to the keys and then let the hand swing free out of a slightly cocked wrist. This throws the hand and fingers outwards (again sending the peak acceleration to the business end), just like the crack of a whip or the casting of a fishing line. It's when you pull back slightly, that the far end really flies out into its main movement. You will see exactly the same when you watch the videos I posted, plus those of Volodos and Rubinstein etc doing similarly massive arm swings. They don't truly fall all the way into the landing itself. The arm lightens in advance and the fingers fly out of the hand. Nowadays you can use slow motion on Youtube, if you doubt that they're actually landing softly, rather than with heavy arm collisions. There are different degrees of this whipping action, but you always need a certain degree of it if you are to land softly. 

Merely relaxing all the way into the landing would take the edge off compared to the previous braced collision but it wouldn't either make all that extra arm energy vanish away, nor would it give you control over the sound. Relaxing just buys a slightly softer impact, rather than an effortless redirection of energy. Would you rather relax everything and fall to the floor mid-stride while running, or push off the landing into your next stride? Actively pushing out is safer than just collapsing into the floor (in spite of the fact that landing onto a stiffly braced leg would be worse still). At the keys the exact same upward redirection as before is taking place. The wrist rebounds a little upwards and therefore the arm energy doesn't crash into a stop at once. The slight throwing out of the fingers creates the springiness that rebounds remaining arm energy effortlessly into continuation upward, rather than into an abrupt collision downwards. Although the fingertips themselves will keep the key pinned down, everything else is free to bounce subtly around that stable point, until the remaining energy has been absorbed.  I was fairly modest in the size of my movement here, but the basic technique makes it equally possible to generate a lot of sound from a minimal run up and to generate even a huge sound from a far larger one (without landing hard in either case). 

Here's a film of similar movements in play in a Schumann example. The first time is deliberately exaggerated far beyond what I'd do for real. It's just to show that by thinking this way, I can comfortably land even the most over the top motions. Yes, this isn't just hypothetical talk, but something that really makes this approach possible. In the past I had been shown a lot of methods that make it chiefly about the arm (based on various notions of bracing or relaxing the hand, while chiefly working from the idea of supposedly just needing to be brave enough to drop the arm upon it like a sack of potatoes). None of this had ever allowed me to approach the keys like this without notable impact on landing- so small wonder it was hard to do it without both mental and physical restraint. It was only by concentrating on the basic hand action and on achieving lightness of the arm during landing, that this technique became a safe and meaningful option for me to use. The main reason I wouldn't want to go so far as this for much normal playing is that the size of movements makes it hard to give any real dynamic variety. The second time is more in line with how I'd really play the passage. Incidentally, although gravity is free to assist in both cases, it's not quick enough to account for arm movements of either size without active whipping action, even at this fairly modest speed.

Most people would need to work chiefly on the basic action of growth out of contact, before they will be able to safely handle landings from a run up. If you do try the bigger and more flamboyant gestures, you should film yourself practising and reference it against my checklist (particularly in terms of whether the arm or knuckles crash downward during the landing). However, with the right awareness of active acceleration, you can start to master those light whipping actions of the arm, as opposed to genuinely arm-heavy collisions. I actually practise this a great deal on a tabletop before taking it to the real keyboard, so I can see just how light and springy the landings are. If you're getting any of this right, a table should start to feel more like landing into a trampoline, rather than like missing it and hitting a stone floor!

I recently tried teaching a lesson through Skype and was pleasantly surprised by how much it was possible to help adjust a student's technique via a video lesson. If this has piqued anyone's interest (and you'd like to know more about how get this technique right) feel free to contact me on cziffra@yahoo.co.uk for more details.

Reevaluating the foundations of sightreading skill- how to use quickstudy to improve both sightreading AND study of repertoire

If you look online for advice on piano sight-reading skills, you will find plenty of resources. In the vast majority of methods, the primary focus is based around keeping the rhythm going at any cost, even if it involves a great deal of educated guesswork regarding some notes (or even omitting things altogether). This is for very good reason. If someone asks you to accompany them with an unfamiliar score, you're not going to be of any use if you regularly stop in response to any kind of doubt. You have to keep going ahead to stay with them. For that reason "never stop" has become a golden rule for practising sight reading.

It's truly unquestionable that any good sight-reader will have to learn to "fake" their way around some tight corners, rather than freeze in a self-defeating hope for perfection. So why am I writing a post to challenge the almost universal notion that this is the definitive mantra for all practise of sight-reading skills? Quite simply, it's because there's also a minimum level of accuracy required.

How much accuracy counts as enough?

Let's suppose that two pianists both manage to stay in time, while sight-reading a modestly difficult accompaniment for a singer. One fakes around 5 percent of the written notes- slightly rearranging the distribution of chords and skipping a few inner notes, while keeping a clear harmonic skeleton. Not a problem. It sounds fine. The other one manages around 70 percent accuracy, with failures including a missed change of key signature and a whole phrase where one hand is played in the wrong clef. Is it still fine as long as they remember not to stop?

Okay, I've plucked those theoretical percentages out of thin air. However, as a very rough working estimate I'd say that anything short of 90 percent accuracy is usually going to be enough to cause at least some awkwardness. That's open to debate, but let's say we were to fall back to as little as 70 percent accuracy. Could that sound fine? I don't want to try to define an exact boundary, so much as encourage you to ask your own serious questions about what would be feasible. However, if we get to a 50/50 success rate and you still think it might sound okay then you must be kidding. Not even Les Dawson fell to that.

https://youtu.be/DtK7Hg7PnnQ?t=407

In another field, 70 percent wouldn't actually be a notably poor success rate. In a maths exam you'd get a strong pass for that, if not necessarily the absolute top grade. However, let's say I offer 70 percent accuracy to a musician for whom I have been paid to accompany a diploma exam. After the exam, not only do I remind them that I did I not stop, but I also "boast" about how proud I was to have played roughly twice as many right notes as wrong ones. Will they book me again? I doubt it.

(Actually, as a brief aside, I'll just mention modern atonal music as the exception to this. I have actually fallen well below 50 percent accuracy while accompanying the ludicrously difficult final section of Hindemith's tuba sonata. In that case, I heard afterwards that the examiners felt it was the best they'd heard anyone manage with it before, so it's far from an ordinary case. I also recall agreeing to accompany a modern piece for a friend at very short notice, in which I probably managed to play around half the notes correctly in one hand, while playing literally anything in the other hand. While I doubt that the composer of either work would have been terribly appreciative of what I managed to muster up, you *can* sometimes get away with murder in atonal music. Apply a similarly poor level of accuracy to classical or baroque repertoire, however, and it's a very different story). 

My own sight-reading captured- warts and all

Let's link those hypothetical figures more to reality, via a couple of examples of myself sight-reading. I can assure you that the first two are genuine first attempts, which I hope will be evidenced by the handful of errors in the Bach, plus the rather more numerous ones in the Rachmaninoff. I also deliberately avoided any mental reading through (save for a very brief glimpse, solely to choose each excerpt), in order to go in as unprepared as possible. The third film illustrates the same Rachmaninoff excerpt as the second, but after around four or five minutes of quick study practise (in which all rhythmic pressure was removed, in order to feel around the notes, before a return to performance style playing).

I don't think it would be unreasonable to label myself as a pretty good sight-reader, but these neither represent elite level sight-reading nor even some of my own most focused reading. I made a couple of silly lapses in the Bach, although I think it only strengthens my arguments- if I connect them to an airing of "dirty laundry", rather than select some of my best work. Now, there are two notable lapses of accuracy- particularly at around 48 seconds, where I should have planned ahead. Instead I had to skip a couple of right hand notes, while the left carried the rhythm. In the last line I assumed an F sharp would resolve to up a G, in spite of the fact it doesn't- providing an excellent reminder of how hugely overrated prediction is. There's a really good way to avoid being fooled by the fact that composers don't always do the most obvious thing- which is to actually read the notes they wrote down, rather than assume what might be likely! I also rushed the last couple of notes. While careless, this was a smaller issue, given that they are just a slight addition after the main cadence.

Anyway, my point is that, even with these issues, the accuracy level was far above 90%. The rule of never stopping for uncertainty/mistakes did not directly produce any of the things that were genuinely good about my read-through. They merely saved those things which were not so good, from turning into outright disaster.

For the second film I deliberately chose something where I expected to have a notably lower hit rate, for illustration purposes. At an estimate, I'd say I'm probably above 80% accuracy there, but perhaps not too much more. If you compare to the version I did after some brief practise, you'll realise that while it's not a terrible approximation, the number of splashed/guessed chords is more than enough to show up to someone who knows how they should really sound. The fact it sort of works is not a bad argument for that "golden rule" of just keeping the rhythm going at any cost. Had I not kept going onward, it would only have been far worse still. However, let's think just how much accurate processing was necessary for even this dodgy version. Had I only read the lower chords at all and played random notes above (which admittedly happened fairly literally on a couple of occasions) I'd still be having to process a large amount of information correctly. Dwelling narrowly on the need to play past errors does nothing to shed any light on the majority of notes which I was able to both read and execute correctly (not to mention how a truly elite sight-reader still could certainly do a far more accurate job again).

Why top sight-readers often give the least helpful advice to amateurs

The problem with the advice given by most good sight-readers is that an evolution-like process of natural selection has taken place. If they hadn't got the right things down you wouldn't get to hear their advice. Instead, they'd be out looking for a new job. As part of that, if you don't learn not to stop at the first sign of uncertainty, you will be weeded out fast. Worthy accompanists know that once you're in performance conditions, you must continue at any cost. Their livelihood literally depends on sticking to this rule every day. The problem is that they first had to spend years developing the background skills for a minimum threshold of accuracy. This is more of a long and complex slow grind, that couldn't even begin to be summarised via a catchy soundbite. Perhaps this is why we hear phrases like "never stop" so much, yet scarcely anything about how to cement deeper foundations? Anyway, if the "cost" of pressing on literally proved to be as severe as ignoring the key signature for a whole section, they would not get paid work. Easy as it is to talk about the importance of playing past mistakes, it's a lot harder to explain how to be in a position to keep errors down to an acceptable level.

Moving away from a professional standard, now- when an amateur does not have the same core skills, there's a point where no amount of willingness to press on via guesswork can compensate for that missing backbone. Good sight-readers might be very good at creatively coping with potential emergencies, but they are also very good at having as few emergencies as possible. We need to think far more about the origins of how they became able to process notes with sufficient accuracy.

It's based on this that I have come to feel very strongly that a lot of weaker sight-readers are being given completely the wrong advice for building the foundations they are most urgently in need of. If we say you can only train sight-reading under performance conditions (where the rhythm must go onward at all times and you are never allowed to go back over anything), it may do more harm than good- simply perpetuating the feeling of being a terrible reader who cannot cope under pressure.

The problem with using pressured testing as a basis for learning

I'd suggest that it's irrational to assume that test conditions are either the only way to learn, or even the most important part of overall learning, in just about any field. Would someone expect to learn to drive by simply taking driving tests over and over? Or to learn trigonometry by sitting maths exams over and over without any training?

Testing skills under pressure is certainly important, some of the time, but it's not where first foundations are built. I remember hearing the conductor/pianist Andre Previn speak of learning his sight-reading skills by spending a lot of time doing pressured sight-reading of duets, with a teacher (who would carry on if he was floundering and expect him to catch up). I believe this can easily mislead though. Such stories are appealing, as they present a romanticised notion of a "hero" being resilient enough to endure challenge and come out stronger for it. However, I strongly believe that he already had excellent reading skills. It's a make or break scenario, in which you don't automatically become better unless the main foundation has largely been laid. The situation would chiefly test how his existing reading skills fared under greater pressure. But it was doubtless contrasted against plenty of less pressured reading, in which accuracy was the main goal. This is where the core foundations are consolidated, before being pushed to the limit under performance conditions.

Quick-study as the gauge of true reading skill

Stepping back from that pressured type of sight-reading, I believe the most important foundations are best developed through what I call "quick-study"- the missing link between performance style sight-reading and slower long term projects. This involves working under more moderate pressure rather than under literal performance conditions. It comes with expectation that errors and uncertainties should be fully corrected at source, rather than done badly once (in strict time) and then left behind forever. In short, you look to understand exactly what the score means and then expect to translate it into practical reality- *not* by imprinting it slowly into habitual muscle memory, but by playing to a clear and precise intention. This is the same fundamental skill as that for your baseline of accuracy in sight-reading- to read well enough to get a clear mental image of what you want (and to have the physical skill to realise that intention immediately).

When learning repertoire over months, it should actually be very little different. You shouldn't start by playing long sections badly over and over and assume they'll eventually become right. However, neither should learning be based on reading details one at a time and spending days before understanding how they fit together. Efficient use of practise is based on having a clear picture of a group of notes (be it one bar or a whole phrase) and then trying to turn that thought into reality as directly as possible. If you cannot command a clear result when given a little planning time, you cannot realistically expect to sight-read well under pressure either.

What can you accomplish in half an hour?

As a thought experiment, let's say that a pianist is given a fairly easy score and told to learn to play it well within a month. If they can, it tells us nothing much either way about how likely they are to be a good sight-reader. Alternatively, if they couldn't do it well by then, it's just plain obvious they'd have done even worse at first sight. But what if we gave them just half an hour? This is far more interesting, because it neither imposes the sheer pressure of performance sight-reading, nor allows the luxury of building things slowly into habit. This makes for a very good indicator of general reading skill. It's just a simple way to check you can both read something correctly and act upon it.

For those who could meet the challenge of playing well after half an hour, it doesn't necessarily mean that they will also be good at first sight. Even if they can figure things out this efficiently, it's still possible to be insufficiently used to either to processing literally immediately, or playing on through uncertainty. The classic advice would likely be appropriate for them. It might well be time to start to focus more on letting go of the need for one hundred percent accuracy and loosen up into some educated guesses.

However, what about those players who could not build a convincing performance of an easy piece, with half an hour to throw at it? Clearly the results would again be substantially worse still at first sight- no matter how willing they are to fudge details in favour of trying to keep time! If you're not a good sight-reader (and want to know how to improve), the very first thing you should look at is whether you have this crucial foundation. If half an hour isn't enough to master some easier repertoire, it shows there is simply not enough fluency with translating written instructions in general, never mind under pressure. Although quick-study skills don't fully guarantee good sight-reading skills, it would be fair to say that a lack of quick-study skills will always be complemented by even worse sight-reading skill.

The background ability to translate a score into correct execution is not something that should be developed solely under intense pressure, but neither is it something where you should need days or even weeks to figure something out. We seem to have become lost in a false dichotomy- where either you learn pieces very slowly over an extended period of time, or you have a single make or break shot at sight-reading and then have to move on. It is highly artificial to have such extremes without middle ground, and it does not serve development of the best reading skills. To say that you should never go back and make corrections (because "it's no longer sight-reading" second time around) is simply missing how learning works.

Getting things correct RIGHT NOW- the truest testament to good reading

Although I'm generally a good sight-reader, I used to struggle with composers like Bach and Mozart- where everything is highly exposed. I went through a period where I deliberately took a much more careful approach to reading their music. These can be some of the hardest to sightread well, because everything is so exposed that details really do matter. Rather than plough on ahead through errors, I'd now start to slow down a little for the most dense passages, to find a pace where I could process everything in advance rather than have to guess. I wouldn't just stop dead in the middle of ideas, but I'd happily stretch the tempo out- thus making more time, without ever destroying the rhythmic flow. If something went badly I might stop and think about that bar before correcting it and only then go on after resolving uncertainty. I wasn't exactly "practising" these pieces in the full way I would if learning them, but neither was I settling for any old rubbish- just because it's "only" sight-reading and "everyone knows" that you're not meant to stop.

In spite of breaking almost all the rules, this approach made me far more accomplished back in pressured situations. I got used to allowing fewer holes in the basic processing. I wasn't allowed to just skim over problems in my reading, but had to face them and solve them. In the end, I found myself needing fewer guesses in general. When I have to accompany another musician, I can still snap into performance style sight-reading at any time I need to. However, by having tilted the balance towards accuracy rather than always time pressure, I built a far stronger foundation in general.

In quick-study you should not keep ploughing on past uncertainty until you reach the end. You're looking to build a foundation of accuracy (both for the piece being studied and, by extension, for more general reading skill). You should imagine exactly what you intend to do for a small segment, with ample thinking time, and then check for the accuracy after execution. This could be as little as a bar or so (although it is usually best to add the first note of the bar after, in order to avoid dividing bars into separate entities) and then you try to execute the plan. If it goes wrong, you plan once again and then you try again. If it still doesn't work, you must now stop and have a big rethink. It's probably necessary to reduce it to something smaller until you have found a manageable sized unit that you can produce confidently on command. You're looking for the things you can get right with minimal fuss. You should never just "have a go" and hope for a fluke. Guessing is not part of this approach. Done well, most things should be right first time and nothing should ever take more than three attempts. If it's not working, you should find a smaller musical unit or even go back to easier repertoire, if need be. As you get better, the mental preparation becomes ever more efficient. You won't always need to start from smaller units. Actually, I often begin as normal sight-reading, but then stop shortly after anything I wasn't happy with. The idea of working with small units can then be used as something to fall back on for correcting things- in order to get to the heart of the issue. You can also practise trying to take just brief glimpses of a unit, before immediately looking away and trying to execute it perfectly from that mere glimpse. As you become sharper at this, the same processing skill feeds very directly into your pressured sight-reading.

Going back to get things right on a second execution will do far more for your core sight-reading skills than just doing it incorrectly once alone and moving on. Finishing with a correct version means we are meaningfully connecting every detail of the score to its execution, rather than to wild guesses which were fuelled by panic. There are lots of ways to go wrong (including guessing, incorrect reading, moving the hands without adequate control etc) but very few ways to get everything right. What kind of delusional optimism would lead us to imagine that the ability to work accurately is best developed with an exclusive routine of guessing things under pressure and then never looking back? This trains willingness not to stop, but nothing else at all. To further the ability to read correctly and then instantly do things correctly, we should at least expect to get things right on a second (less pressured) attempt.

When I went back to practise the Rachmaninoff, I just played the chords slowly and in free time, confirming every single note. Rhythm is essential to a lot of practise but, particularly in chords, there can be great value in simply making room to stay with each chord. No, rhythm shouldn't always come first (as is often claimed). Merely sometimes. At times you're better off stopping to clarify notes, before immediately bringing it back in. I already understood the rhythms but I didn't want to leave a single chord on a misunderstanding or on a guess. Admittedly, the 2nd execution is far from electrifying musically and could have been sped up plenty. My intent was not to show an ideal final performance however, but to show I could take command over the basic reading issues at once, rather than continue to approximate. Had I pressured myself into spirited guesses a second time over, I could have scrambled my perceptions. People sometimes say "Practise like you would wish to perform". Sometimes you should indeed, but I was much better off "practising like I would wish to practise". I just calmly built a link between reading each chord and then feeling/confirming the match between reading and result. Sometimes, I will even linger on the surface of a chord before playing, to confirm every last note before playing it. Then I linger once again after playing, to confirm a second time. This allows me to keep checking both that the reading is flawless and that the activity always matches what I see. After all, if I couldn't first take command of accuracy in freer time, how could I expect to be ready to process similar chords in future pressure situations?

Foundations before instincts

Think again about how we develop ability to work under time pressure in other fields. When a child first begins arithmetic, we don't encourage them to take wild guesses, under the assumption that this will later make them perform best at speed. No, it will fill their head with confusion. We get them to count on their fingers until they reliably know the sums on a more instinctive level.

This is not remotely unusual in human endeavour. If you want to learn to do something well under time pressure, first you must actually be able to do it well at all. We routinely apply this to learning a specific piece (eg starting slow for accuracy before speeding up) but we should also appreciate how this relates to the broader skill of reading something new and knowing exactly what it means.

The main skill behind sight-reading is not truly "different" to that involved in quick study, except in terms of having less thinking time. If I look at a small enough segment of music and imagine it in full detail, I should then be ready to execute it straight away. The core of sight-reading comes from the very same place. You understand it and then you do it. Yes, we also need an emergency plan B, to scrape through those situations where there is a more than we can fully be sure of. Willingness to keep going when uncertain is largely just something you can either do or you can't, however. Yes, you must practise it often enough to be sure you can indeed do it. The problem is that there's no  further summit to be reached here. Once you have that tool, further progress is almost chiefly about building on the deeper core.

Effective sight-reading skill is built by by training two opposite personalities side by side- one that demands absolute precision/excellence and another that is happy to occasionally scrape by on any old crap that stays in rhythm. It's only a balanced amalgam of the two that defines a truly great sight-reader. Think of the approximation aspect of sight-reading as being a bit like keeping a cupboard stocked up with ancient cans of cheap tinned spaghetti. It's always good to know the option is there, for a time when you have nowhere else to turn. But I'd far sooner take something fresh from the fridge.

The pianist and injury, part i- do common precautions do more harm than good?

(This first part will focus mostly on general pianists' attitudes to physical activity with the hands- exposing how a distorted myth regarding Robert Schumann has created completely unjustified paranoia that urgently needs to be countered. In a second part I'll also go on to explore why I believe the relaxation school may have actively contributed to making injuries increasingly common place- with proof of how the extensor muscles are generally worked considerably harder when trying to channel arm energy through a passive hand)

Introduction 

Firstly, I'll provide a couple of scenarios outside of piano playing, to set the scene.

Picture a tennis player who does no physical exercise apart from playing tennis. He aims to play to a high level and thus must often push his physical capability close to its limits, when holding a racquet in hand. However, don't fear. He won't be at risk of injuring himself. After all, he never goes to the gym, he consciously avoids all forms of stretching and flexibility based work, and he never warms up physically other than by actually playing games of tennis.


WHAT???!!! Let's rewind for a moment, for that's clearly the most deranged logic conceivable. This is not why he would be safe, rather it's why he is going to be actively prone to injury! To play top tennis, you must clearly CONDITION your body for the demands of the real life game, not exclude it from doing everything other than tennis. You don't get to have an incredible serve through avoiding all else!

If you're already complaining that music is an art and not a sport, I'm afraid I saw you coming.

In my second analogy, we have a ballet dancer. She never does any form of physical activity other than rehearsing the ballet routines that she is working at. After all, she must protect her physical apparatus from injury. She never works at flexibility prior to dancing nor does any form of non-artistic exercise to get started. Better to avoid such risks. This is exactly why it's safe for her launch into the splits at a moment's notice (as long as it has artistic context in a genuine routine), without any physical warm up.

WHAT???!!! Let's rewind again. This time you don't get to frown on a sport for being "different" to art, yet it's still abundantly clear that the whole premise is absurd to the very core. Anything that helps the body develop comfortable flexibility is clearly part of performing effectively and with safety. Alongside ballet practise itself, it's common for top dancers to do all manner of body conditioning- including flexibility and possibly even some degree of strength based work (especially for male dancers who may have to carry a partner's full weight). They don't serve their art by turning their noses up at anything that doesn't have artistic context. They work to keep their bodies limber and flexible specifically because it prepares them for the physical demands that they must meet during their art.

Finally, we have a pianist who is building up towards music college auditions. He never does any technique exercises beyond the odd scale, because he is too pure an artist to dirty himself with such matters (and he once heard a famous teacher say all drills are dangerous and should thus be avoided). He deliberately avoids all forms of "unnatural" hand exercise away from the keyboard. After all, everyone knows that Schumann damaged his hand beyond repair with some weird contraption. Other than practising his programme of difficult music, he keeps his hands fresh by resting them and avoiding activity. He has minimal risk of injury, because his hands do little other than musically artistic piano playing.

Now, this is the one where a great many pianists would nod in agreement, rather than shout "WHAT???!!!!". If so, why? If you do go on to continue thinking that's a good attitude, after having read this post, then very well. However, I have to insist that you at least stop to ask some serious questions. Now, there are also radically opposite stances- including pianists who obsess over an idea of extreme finger "strength" and genuinely overdo work on forceful exercises towards that end. I have no wish to promote that branch of extremism. However, the stance outlined above seems to have become widely accepted as if it were basic common sense, rather than the opposite pole of equally extremist madness. Did you notice how consistent it was with the previous examples? Somehow, something I'll call "pianist's logic" seems to have allowed this to be taken seriously within our field. Oh, and in the end, ironically enough that pianist does get injured by a "contraption"- an especially hazardous one, that subjects his poor hands to outlandish demands found nowhere in the natural world. It's called a "piano".

The Schumann myth

Before proceeding, yes I was indeed being facetious for the sake of a cheap gag. It was, however, also for the sake of making an incredibly serious point. This is where "pianist's logic" has come to differ from the default stance of virtually any ordinary human on this planet. Show us a little rubber band and suggest stretching it back and forth for thirty seconds (for the sake of building flexibility) and most of us will run for the hills, while screaming something incomprehensible about Robert Schumann's injury.

"Contemplate the possibility of facing such a wild risk as moving our fingers against incredibly mild resistance? No, thank you. Do you realise that I'm a pianist?".

But what if you ask us to engage them against the larger mechanical resistance of piano keys, for the continuous 30 mins+ it takes to play a Rachmaninoff concerto (featuring incredibly rapid runs, as well as vast physical stretches that must be taken with commanding ease while the hand bears the mass of the moving arm)?

"Sure, no worries mate."

 Contrast against any "ordinary" person and they're usually of sound enough mind to stretch that elastic band without fear, while quite probably expressing far more doubt about playing the piano like the clappers.

Who is right here? Well, how many people have you heard of whose career ended due to an injury associated with using an "unnatural" device (other than the piano itself)? If this were the gameshow "Pointless" and you knew of any tale other than that of Robert Schumann, you'd certainly be on to a winner. Compare to cases of pianists who were injured merely by playing their instrument and we have undeniable reams of evidence. Leon Fleisher and Gary Graffman are two famous examples among a huge number of piano based injuries. Glenn Gould too had a period of being severely afflicted. It's time to seriously reevaluate why the piano gets the "get out of jail free" card, while we are quick to call danger on all external exercises- which no ordinary person nor qualified physiotherapist would be faintly concerned by. Of course, I'm not saying we should ban piano playing based on the possibility of injury. The point is that it's completely irrational for us to issue blanket bans on almost anything else that involves significant hand activity and then happily spend hours at the "unnatural contraption" which has definitively been at the heart of many injuries.

Anyway, here's evidence of the fact that the old Schumann tale is almost certainly nothing more than a wildly distorted myth:

http://www.pianisttopianist.com/?p=10

http://focaldystonia.co.uk/#/robert-schumann/4563923100

Schumann may not have been wise to use the machine exactly as he did, but the severity of his problems already existed. Don't misunderstand, I'm not specifically saying we should all run to get a device like Schumann's, and then pull the crap out of our fingers, with expectation of becoming virtuosi. However, we should stop to ask questions before tarring all hand exercises in general! Where is the meaningful evidence for the crippling long-term injuries that can supposedly afflict those who dare to exercise their hands away from a piano? If there is any substance, I extend an invitation to anyone to point me to it. As far as I can see, it seems that we've been duped en masse, by scaremongering. Evidence suggests that the true worry is injury from playing wrongly, not from any complementary exercises. The pianist's paranoia about everything under the sun (except for pianism itself) does not seem to have any footing in reason at all. It lives in a legend, that somehow evolved into being taken as gospel.

Back in reality, it's widely accepted in science that engagement of muscles against comfortable levels of resistance is actively conducive to flexibility and general health- far more so than abstinence from activity. The only meaningful questions should be about what is a reasonable range to work within. In cases of significant existing injury, complete rest may sometimes be wise. However, even then a physiotherapist may well prescribe gentle work against low resistance- thus encouraging blood flow to assist healing. It's a remarkable situation, really. The very same exercises which are safe enough to be given by medical professionals to the significantly injured (to help restore function via gentle rehabilitation) are being denounced by a horde of medically unqualified pianists as too "dangerous"for the healthy. The idea that hands which perform extreme gymnastic activities at a piano must be protected from such simple exercises exists in the world of "pianist's logic" and nowhere else. Look around and you'll certainly see plenty of evidence of injury through repetitive activities like piano playing, typing and the like. But the Schumann legend seem to be both the beginning and end of the "evidence" behind this overblown hysteria about any kind of alternative hand exercises.

The evil of Stretching?

For some reason, Chopin has been pretty universally portrayed as the antithesis to Schumann- a pianist who respected the hand in its natural form and would never have considered trying to alter its natural state. Well, I'm going to have to shatter this myth too. Did you know that Chopin developed flexibility between his fingers by sleeping at night with wine corks wedged in between them? So much for the poster boy for leaving physical development to piano playing and nature alone...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122670581542929769.html

Now, it may be that Chopin changed his mind on this type of thing, but it's impossible to say with certainty that it had no effect on him. I'm not going to recommend going to such extreme lengths, but I'm certainly not going to rule out more gentle stretching exercises. When it comes to small handed pianists, people regularly cite Alicia de Larrocha as proof that they can flourish like any other. While this is spot on, what seems to be forgotten is the fact that she was obsessive about stretching her hands and actually managed to develop enough flexibility to strike a tenth. Weirdly enough, I've literally heard the same people who put her forward as an example to those with small hands, going on to argue that you should never stretch at all. Sometimes they even argue against basic legato. If someone wanted to construct a conspiracy by which to prevent those with small hands from ever transcending their slight disadvantage, they could scarcely do much better. Yes, there will be things which just aren't possible and which cannot be usefully forced. A whole lot of stuff can be coaxed, however. It's incredibly unlikely that de Larrocha would have reached the level she did, had she just decided that there was nothing she could do to improve on what nature gave her. People who treat their small hands as innately incapable (and a thing to be carefully protected from all challenges) are not going to come close to what she achieved. Also, even large hands need training. A large hand is not automatically flexible or limber, in much the same way that a tall person isn't automatically a professional level basketball player. There are good ways to train and bad ways. But it's a gross oversimplification to decide that piano playing counts as good, while everything else must be assumed bad.

Skepticism vs cynicism/"Hmm"vs "NO!"

The origins of this article were triggered by a post in a Facebook group for piano teachers- regarding *brace yourself* finger weights. Given the extreme nature of the responses that post received (displaying "pianist's logic" in full force), I will clarify at the outset that the only thing I wish to promote is the value of an open mind- that neither fully excludes nor fully accepts anything without reasonable cause. Skepticism is healthy. That's where we ask questions and seek further information, rather than accept any claim at face value. Uncertainty is healthy- where we recognise that we have inadequate information to give a final judgement. Cynicism, however, is not healthy. That's where we make a snap dismissal of anything that differs from the limits of our experience/assumptions- thus shutting ourselves in a cage and removing all possibility of someday being pleasantly surprised by a new discovery.

Anyhow, these finger weights were met with a torrent of casual dismissals (some arguably libellous in nature). I won't name or quote anyone, but I will summarise the prevailing nature of the responses. Other than myself, nobody had even cared to enquire about the size of the weight involved, before being ready to pass judgement. Needless to say, the Schumann references came thick and fast- only a couple of which tried to debunk the myth rather than spread it. Yes, one man got injured almost two centuries ago (in a tale of very dubious details) so from there onwards every conceivable mechanical device (except the piano) is to be assumed cripplingly unsafe for a human hand. Among a very large number of responses, I saw very few people who were raising questions or seeking to understand more deeply. Anyway, in the end one of few curious posters looked up the actual weight. It starts at...

10 GRAMS!!!!

As a skeptic rather than a cynic, I find it astonishing that the default assumption would be that putting 10g (!) on a finger will probably cause injury. Pop a pound coin (you'll have to Google your own closest equivalent if you're not in the UK) on the back of a finger and that's the corresponding level of mass and indeed danger that would be involved. I won't even tell you to do so "at your own risk". If you want to take me to court under the grounds that you injured yourself with that coin, all I can say is that you're welcome to try (although you'll need a bloody good lawyer). Remarkable claims demand remarkable evidence. The idea that a finger cannot handle 10g (one hundredth of a kilogramme!!!!) without probable injury is a truly remarkable belief indeed. Particularly given that the very same people who call danger are typically happy to preach the joys of setting the whole arm's weight upon the hand!

Most remarkable of all, the discovery that that merely 10g of mass are involved changed nothing in the tide of opinions! I was assured that the difference is that the arm's more substantial weight is "natural" and thus can't cause injury- in spite of applying radically greater forces. Conversely, I'm led to believe that as 10g is "unnatural", it will therefore become injurious. If you're happy with that as an explanation, then we certainly do live in a world in which facts no longer matter. In my second part of this post I'll go into detail as to how arm weight schools really can cause significant strain, when excess weight bears down on an underperforming hand. I can assure that 10g won't, however.

Anyway, it's not that I even recommend these weights. Rather, I was struck by what the response says about attitudes in general. As one poster mentioned, Liberace's rings were probably heavier than 10g.  You don't become an accomplished pianist by having the biggest and most rock solid finger muscles, but neither do you become one by wrapping yourself in cotton wool and 
living in fear of anything untried. Here's Tzimon Barto:

As a devoted bodybuilder, it's said that after a concert he could easily bench-press the piano for an encore. I think that's only a joke but, regardless, do you imagine that if you asked him to bear the weight of a coin on his finger, he'd back off in case his hands were crippled beyond repair? Or that he'd accept, only to be forced to cancel all concerts for the rest of the season (as a payback for such naïvely reckless bravado)? Other concert level pianists who are also into olympic style weight lifting include Leon Bates and Gen Hirano. I must stress, my point is not that you should lift colossal weights. But this gives some perspective on how utterly pathetic it is for a grown pianist to fear either a rubber band or the mass of a coin upon a finger.

Come back to our ballerina, or gymnast now. Sure, they might not be looking to benchpress double their body weight. However, why would they be scared to lift even small dumbells, when they have to execute chains of backflips? Likewise, why should a hand that is getting around virtuoso octaves be troubled by supporting 10g? I might not expect miracles, but injury via 10g is the very last thing that would be on my mind. No hand is going to shatter into a thousand pieces. The fact that fear of 10g reads like more like comedic parody, than observed reality, speaks volumes of how warped our culture has become. Pianists are being encouraged to cower in response to nothing- despite constantly facing serious gymnastic demands at a piano. And then they wonder why those precious little hands end up injured? You don't necessarily need to have remarkably strong hands, but if you want to tackle serious repertoire then you sure as hell need to have them agile and conditioned for activity!

Weights and Hanon exercises

One of the most useful exercises I've done is to practise occasionally with a 1kg wrist weight. I came upon the idea in a book by the pianist Seymour Bernstein. I'm not going to specifically recommend to anyone else, on an unsupervised basis. However, I will describe some of the details.When I play with a small weight on my wrist, it makes any flawed alignments extremely obvious. Holding the wrist either notably high or low would get tiring very quickly, if sustained. Without the wrist weight it can be like boiling a frog. If you don't know the expression, it refers to the fact that frogs can only detect abrupt changes of temperature- which means that you could theoretically boil one alive without them knowing they are in trouble. In much the same fashion, if I were to play a Chopin study with a slightly crooked wrist position, I'd probably both get away with it for a while and not realise that anything is amiss. Lots of slight imprecision of movement (none of which stands out on its own) slowly adds up though. All of a sudden, I'd eventually realise that I'm starting to miss plenty of notes and feeling everything seizing up.

I just about got away with much that kind of thing, in this rather old video of the black key Etude by Chopin.

The dressing gown slightly hides my long-term habit of holding the right wrist upwards, although you will visibly see a few rather jerky "hopping" movements of the arm, where the legato is poor and the arm is not properly supported by clear connection of the fingers. As I remember, although the accuracy didn't go horribly wrong, my forearm was rather tight by the end.
If I had tried the same with the wrist weights on, I'd know about the slight problems almost immediately, through a somewhat amplified sense of instability. I don't actually do it to make my hand work harder during a whole run-through though. Rather than struggle on while tiredness builds, I use the feedback to stop and adjust into easier coordination- where my wrist is properly suspended at length between a stable finger and the shoulder. The idea is to suspend that extra kilogramme without bearing the whole force down directly on the finger. I literally do it to AVOID weighing down hard on the hand, not to encourage it! When you get things wrong, there is indeed a significant sense of the hand being burdened by extra mass- which is why I don't try to plough through whole performances at speed. Instead, I explore sections (both at very slow tempos and fast burst of small units), looking for comfort and stability at all times. As soon as I detect any moment of awkwardness, I stop and fix it. Nowadays I play the same Etude with far less downward arm pressure and far greater ease of movement.

Also, this brings me back to technical exercises. I've heard many of people say that playing Hanon causes injury. If it can possibly do so, it's because your technique is wrong. Anyone with truly good technique should have no problem playing any of them safely. Avoiding Hanon because its dangerous is simply fleeing from your problems without actually solving them. It's far better to intentionally expose the problems (via only brief bursts) and then make corrections. There are few better places to both uncover and fix fundamental movement problems quickly. When I do the occasional Hanon exercise (with weights on or off) what I again almost never do is is run from start to finish. I'm not looking to build strength with endless repetition, but looking from immediate refinements of coordination. Instead I tend to do small bursts quickly (usually a bar plus one note) and then stop to assess how precise and easy the movement was. If I wasn't happy I'll then do it very slowly, checking for smooth sideways arm movement, while the fingers keep a clear legato connection (to stop the weight collapsing downward). If that works I'll probably do a little bit fast again. Eventually I may play through the whole exercise fast, but never to "feel the burn". If it's not effortless and precise I stop and build precision and clarity again. With this kind of focused approach (based on finding and solving slight problems in the movement, rather than drilling mindlessly) you can find the issues which get in the way of free and easy movement and then change things at once. If I find and correct any points of heaviness, with the wrist weights on, I know that I'll still be significantly clearer and lighter in my movements when I take them off again.

I'd have been far worse off had I simply shouted "Schumann!" (like some mindless parrot) when I first read about wrist weights.

A pianist's innate tone quality- an embarrassing myth of the past, or the innocent victim of bad science? Part i

Before going any further,  I'm going to lay my position on the table. Whether a pianist can vary tone (independently of volume) is a subject that generates such extremist fervour that if some people get any sense that I won't be stating exactly what they want to hear, they'll be off at once. If you're the sort of person who is only interested in hearing validations for your existing belief system, then by all means go elsewhere to cherry pick whatever you can find to agree with you. However, I'm actually here to disagree with any definitive position about a still uncertain issue. When someone is overly certain (either for or against absolute tone) then you should probably be suspicious. There's simply not enough evidence either way for a truly informed final stance yet.

What the science does show is that innate tone is definitely not as big an issue as some might believe (with the majority best explained by illusions of contrast). However, it also shows that it may be audible in particular conditions. It's certainly not a proven impossibility (either in theory or practice) and not enough conditions have been properly tested. After all, the fact that no search operation succeeded in finding flight MH 370 didn't prove that the plane doesn't exist. It showed that they didn't look in the right place yet. Experiments have been adequate to say that if tone exists it's not anywhere near as substantial or prevalent a factor as some have imagined. What they haven't done is provide a basis to dismiss it. In a future post I'll likely go into more detail about why the common theory (of only a single hammer speed being relevant) is unfit as a model for analysis. Recorded data has definitively proven that there's more going on. Accurate theory involves issues of flexion and vibration (which are variable based on how smoothly the hammer gets accelerated). For now, however, I'm going to concentrate on some of the problems with previous investigations and also show where I believe any future research should be directed, for the best chance of getting more meaningful data.

Relative effects proven

Firstly, lets start with what relationships can offer us. There are three main variables here- timing of key depression/release, intensity of each note and pedalling. I doubt whether anyone would wish to dispute that these are an issue. Many deny absolute tone outright, but I've never seen anyone who denies the fact that you could generate plenty via those elements alone. Today, proof of how much is possible without absolute tone is simple enough. Record yourself on a decent digital piano (which merely monitors the energy in the key strikes) and listen back. You can do a pretty good job of a great many things. If I try to play with what I consider "coarse" movements, to some degree I will hear that reflected in the sound of a digital. Styles of movement can still have corresponding effects on perceived tone, through intensities alone. However, I don't consider that quite everything is there. I feel both that awkward movements are punished far less than on a real piano, and that the most expressive playing comes to life far less than on an acoustic. See the following video:

https://youtu.be/Hway_tTFOzc?t=58

Hearing a pianist of Katsaris' calibre has a somewhat perverse effect. In a sense he is able to show off how much is possible from the instrument. In another sense, however, such a fine artist emphasises all the more how much is missing, compared to his sound on an acoustic. That film is now rather old, but I still find even the latest digitals suffer from a constant degree of neutrality. Absolute tone could indeed be the missing factor here, but that belief is not adequate to draw a scientifically worthy conclusion. Technology is advancing, but there are still plenty of other issues that could explain what is missing from the current level of simulation. We can only use it as clear evidence that a good deal of illusion is possible without innate tone quality.

The search for absolute effects

In this previous example, it was incredibly easy to isolate those variables from a possibility for absolute tone. Here, we have much a bigger problem- to isolate potential changes in tone quality from all other variables. The moment anything else is included, you risk making illusions via relationships, therefore no definitive conclusions can be drawn. In testing for tone, scientists have always reduced to a single note at a time (looking to pair notes at similar volume and see if people can h ear any other differences). The problem here is that some things will register clearly only via a build up, rather than in small quantities  Imagine a situation where someone shows you a single piano key. Let's say that key has a single mm shaved off its width. On its own you may have no idea at all that anything is amiss. However, build a whole keyboard out of the similar keys and now you have a piano keyboard that is missing 5.2 cm of width (if you're wondering- it's not 8.8 cm as I first thought, because only the number of white keys affects the total width). Still too small to notice? You could say the same about ingesting a trace quantity of poison, vs a number of trace quantities in close succession. 200 or so apple pips contain enough cyanide to kill a person (check it out, it's honestly not a myth!). A single pip wouldn't even cause a headache, however. It's another situation where effects can only be readily distinguished through accumulation.

In cases like this, the result does not even need to be more than the sum of its parts. The sum of its parts alone may register clearly where a single part does not. Just because scientific protocol can only draw conclusions from isolated notes, it does not automatically follow that isolated notes will therefore be adequate to judge an effect from. This is especially true when testing whether humans can hear a difference. Even when analysing sound waves with computers, no two strikes will ever be literally identical to start with. There's no definitive way to determine what traces of difference are meaningful on paper and which are not. If a scientist looks at a number of sound waves and says they show no evidence of tone, that does not mean they are the same waves, but merely ones that have been deemed close enough. This is an especially big concern when it comes to older research, such as Otto Ortmann's from the 1930s. With the extraordinarily primitive audio technology of the day, how could they possibly determine with any confidence what constitutes "close enough" for such narrow conclusions?

When many notes are played loudly into an open pedal, there is every reason to suspect that (should absolute tone quality be possible) the cumulative effect would be many times more distinct. That fact that we cannot segregate variables in any alternative way does not mean that failure to detect major differences provides a conclusive dismissal of tone in general. By extension, neither can we reasonably assume that when many notes are being struck, the relationships between those notes fully accounts for perceived tone quality. All we can say is that both variables could be in play and we have no meaningful way to isolate them (during a genuine musical performance) in order to assess whether there is a cumulative effect. This is not on a par with some "psychic" claiming that their powers would be stifled by testing under laboratory conditions, because the spirits of the ether would not approve. There's a vast and genuinely problematic discrepancy between those circumstances that are convenient to test and those circumstances that occur during real life music making.

Noise effects and the pedal as amplifier

In spite of this problem, I believe that current testing trends have missed a trick that could easily be added without compromising the standard of scientific controls. I have a proposal that I would encourage anyone involved in future empirical testing to pursue. Basically, I believe that the primary issue in perception of bad tone is the thud of the key into the keybed. I have heard for myself how loud this can be, after breaking a bass string on a few different pianos. Play the key with blunt force and you'll hear both the noise of the piano action (sending the hammer into space left by the missing string) and the noise of the key thudding into the keybed. The action noise was relatively superficial, creating more of a clattery sound. However, the key bed thud was deep and far from minor. In fact, on digital pianos there will tend to be a whole lot of noise. The pianist Frederic Chiu told me that when he was practising with headphones, not only could his wife hear the thuds from another room but she could feel the floor shaking in response. I've heard a lot of similar stories about people in apartment blocks unwittingly sending these substantial thuds into neighbouring properties during late night "silent" practise.

On a digital, the thud can occur simultaneously with the sound of the playing and thus compete against it. However, it cannot directly alter the musical sound at source. Back on the acoustic, there is a notable difference. However, it's specific to when having the sustain pedal depressed. When I did so, not only did the key itself thud but it also passed notable overtones into the other undamped strings. Play multiple notes in succession and you will cause a series of similar noises to start building up. To get some idea of this effect for yourself, try pressing very quickly and suddenly on the sustain pedal. It tends to cause something relatively similar. Alternatively, hold the pedal down and "knock" on the piano or even shout into it (open the lid first). You'll get an idea of how freely the undamped strings can be excited- not merely by other musical sounds but also by general noise effects.

Now, at this point I will add that I've seen many scientific papers that both referenced noise effects within sound waves and also tried to casually dismiss them on the grounds that they are not part of tone anyway. Even if we were to assume that outside noises could not interact directly with the sound coming from the piano's strings (in spite of having now proven that they both can and do), this would still be a completely inappropriate technicality upon which to exclude the relevance of this data. What human ear can knowingly distinguish between musical sounds and noises and then segregate them out into isolated components, in order to judge the music independently from the noises? Remember that it's specifically because the human ear cannot be trusted to separate out variables, that scientific protocol will only accept data based on the artificial limitation of an isolated note at a time. Yet we are going to casually assume it can make such impossible distinctions here?!!! Let's be blunt- that double standard is simply terrible scientific practise.

If you were to hear a recording of a pianist in which the start of every note triggered the corresponding sound of somebody breaking wind (with real vigour), do you imagine that you'd be able to easily separate out their musical performance in order to get a good measure of their perceived quality of sound? Yes, it's a ludicrous piece of hyperbole, but it shows that we can't simply decide that something is functionally irrelevant for the sake of convenience alone. It's for good reason that concert-goers are not encouraged to have a chat throughout a piano recital. Try telling security that it won't affect anybody's impression of the pianist's tone anyway... However, the things that we can't even consciously pick out might be more meaningful to perception than those which we know aren't part of the musical performance- and especially when those noise effects are also causing sympathetic reverberations directly within the piano itself. That cannot be considered "separate" from tone on any objectively valid level.

Searching in the right place

So, building on that premise, the most meaningful place to look for tonal variation (both via analysis of the sound waves and blind testing on humans ears) is when the pedal remains open and when notes are played loudly. While I can't say with certainty that nobody has ever tried to test under these conditions, I've never seen the pedal directly mentioned in any scientific paper. Why not? I'm scratching my head here, because nothing would make the role of that thud clearer or more detectable. Now, I already described pedal as a variable, but it can also be used as a tightly controlled constant. If you were to play two successive notes into the same open pedal, they would merge together and ruin the control. But there's no need to do that. Every time the pedal needs to start by being depressed. There then needs to be some delay, to allow any potential noise caused by the dampers to fully decay. If each note is played into these same conditions (always with a full reset to silence, before each recorded note) no controls are compromised whatsoever. All it means is that you have the ripest possible conditions in which to try to determine whether the effect of the keybed thud can be varied independently of the level of volume produced by the musical sound. To exclude the pedal from all testing is irrational.  It's the most probable means of literally amplifying a variable which both creates its own sound and has the ability to exert at least some effect on the musical sound.

Theory certainly suggests that you should be able to vary the volume with some degree of independence from the thud. In this post I have given explanations for how you can affect how you can pass acceleration to the key in ways that either increase or decrease the levels of mass and momentum which is sent into the keybed collision. Look at the diagrams early on, which show a finger either lengthening or being squashed while moving a key. When it's crushed inward, the arm will land with more energy. When it lengthens there will be a sense of  instead bouncing the mass up and out of the point of contact (with the greatest acceleration focused into the finger tip and key). A pianist also has different contact options, from a very pointed finger to a very flat finger (with larger surface area) that should logically affect the noise effect to at least some degree. One study even claimed hitting the key with an umbrella makes no difference. It makes the methods look extraordinarily dubious, if their recordings were unable to capture any difference between the noise effect of a skilled hand and that of an umbrella. A literal absence of difference does not even seem plausible within appropriately sensitive methods for capture of data.

Let's say two pianists are both playing at a similarly extreme volume, but one manages to reduce the severity of keybed noise by some 10% or so, compared to the other player. While I'd expect the difference to be most audible in thick chords, it's feasible that such a relatively moderate difference could affect the sense of sound even on an isolated note, when the pedal is used to boost overtone relationships. Experiments have traditionally either checked notes struck from above/direct contact, or compared strikes made with a "stiff" or "relaxed" arm. Technique is a whole lot broader though. Most relevant to the severity of thud would be whether the hand and arm stop abruptly into impact (thus dissipating the bulk of the energy directly into the instant of collision), or continue out from the point of contact to send momentum away. The difference is basically similar to that between stamping into the ground with a stop, vs pushing out of the ground while walking/running. Identical sounds would certainly not be expected from the different styles of contact.

Those who rule out tone generally say that "ugly" sound is just the result of playing louder than an instrument's limit. I don't find that credible. I once heard a concert where a rather slender pianist seemed to hit the piano with all her might (sending a lot of arm energy into hard impacts) without getting a notably large volume of sound out. However, the noise effect of the keys was so strong that I believe I could literally distinguish it from the direct musical sounds. The next pianist to play the piano had what seemed to be a much "purer" loud sound, without that same percussive thud. For the reasons mentioned earlier, I cannot prove that my hearing was accurate. However, alongside all of the additional variables, it's still perfectly logical to ask whether the superior sounding pianist might genuinely have achieved a better ratio of direct sound to noise effect. Have a listen to Cziffra here.

https://youtu.be/3zGx98fuR4I?t=33

Most of this is owed to contrasts within the most widely accepted variables, but I do not believe that it's an adequate explanation for that something extra which distinguishes his spiky sound from other players. If you listen carefully, there's a particularly audible thud at 36 seconds in. I suspect this may be caused by a slight stamp on the pedal. However, with all the variation in Cziffra's sound, I believe he also exploited noise effects when moving the keys. Much of the effect is down to wild dynamic contrasts, as well as variety between longer sounds and explosively short ones. But I think it's a hell of a stretch to argue that noise effects are not actively contributing to the perceived sound. I believe he contrasts technique that results in "purer" sound with less noise effect, against deliberately sharper attacks, that excite more chaotic frequencies responses into the open pedal. "Ugly" tone is applied to selective moments, but to great effect. When I listen to other performers play the same arrangement, they do not get that same "bite" to their sound. I can't say for sure whether the sound is more about key bed thuds or attacking the key from a height. Coming from above has been proven here to have an audible effect, that actually precedes the musical tone (note that this study didn't try to downplay the noise as irrelevant to perception of tone, like many other had). However, I'm convinced that the most probable explanation is some kind of noise effect that is both heard directly and through sympathetic vibrations within open strings (nb. even his short explosive sounds often involve a very brief pedal during the attack, which is instantly released after the explosion of overtones).

Coming back to an optimal experiment, notes must also be tested in many different registers of the piano and at many different levels and articulations. While I think it's probable that loud playing produces the most audible thuds, it could also be possible that loud playing might serve to conceal them more beneath the intensity of string vibrations. All angles must be pursued. It's also feasible that different registers of the piano would vary in how likely it is for the thudding sound to show up clearly. Very high notes would both carry a lower energy of their own (due to the lighter hammer and shorter strings) and also be expected to offer less direct competition between their high frequencies and the lower pitched thud of the key. There is every reason to think this would be a good place to test, but there's also plenty of reason to look at extreme bass registers. The point is that even when working on an individual note, we need to look at extremes of dynamic, extremes of register and also (above all for me) use the pedal for the purpose it was actually designed for. It's also logical to try a range of different pianos in case some offer more scope for exaggeration/reduction of thuds than others. I tend to feel that older pianos offer more scope for the kinds of edgy sounds we heard from Cziffra, so they would be a good place to test various attacks into the pedal.

Any test which failed to detect differences in tone (without having checked these kinds of options) has not only failed to disprove tone. It has also failed to contribute anything worthwhile to the pursuit of either science or music. Narrow testing no more "disproves" the possibility of tone than the timing of a school sport's day 100 m parents' race "disproves" Usain Bolt's official world record time. Not having observed a given result is not sufficient to declare it impossible. If you get a negative in narrow conditions, you need to ask what alternative conditions might show a clear result- not go out and tell the world you just proved tone to be scientifically "impossible" under all circumstances.

Evidence for tone in existing research and why belief in at least some possibility matters

I already linked the paper which showed that a preliminary noise effect was sufficient to allow many listeners to distinguish struck vs pressed notes by ear. This study has also given an indication that some listeners could distinguish differences on some notes and also shown differences in the resulting tonal balance, even without pedal. It's not a body of evidence that is adequate to start proclaiming that absolute tone is now proven to be a huge issue. They state in the study itself that it wasn't as much as the pianist expected. 

However, there is a world of difference between recognising some possibility (with more research required) and asserting a conclusive possibility of absolute zero. Moving away from the scientific stance and towards an artistic one now- even if it were truly impossible to exert any influence over absolute tone whatsoever under any circumstances, it would still be a bad idea to work based on cold pragmatism first and artistic ideals last. At face value, the piano should be most deadpan and least expressive instrument imaginable. However, when it really does sound that way then nobody is to blame other than the pianist- for playing it so poorly. Deciding that you should think merely of pressing keys faster or slower, in order to make notes merely louder or quieter, is no way to succeed in producing sophisticated illusions of something greater. In the earlier days of the study of tone, people had grown up in a culture founded upon phrasing and musical ideals. The idea that notes can only be louder or quieter was nothing but an intellectual novelty for those artists who were swayed by the research. They might have believed it away from the instrument, but you don't literally see them treating piano playing as founded upon nothing more than attempting to find the right speed to move each key at. The playing was not defined by a strict belief in tonal limitations but by artistic goals. 

Today there are some pianists who are so obsessed with working from (what they believe is) pragmatism, that they have neither learned to control absolute tone nor even to produce any worthy level of illusion. They are so caught up in a premise that is probably not even entirely true, that they have forgotten to be an artist first and a thinker second. If you want to make even an illusion, you're going to need to do a lot more than think of pecking at piano keys at different speeds, in the hope of getting a worthy phrase. I recently saw a post by a pianist who was trying to ridicule his teachers for telling him to think about his tone quality. The joke was on him, however. Whatever else you might believe, tone quality does exist. We can debate whether it can exist independently from volume, but it certainly varies in proportion with volume. If you punch into every note needlessly loud then you will indeed have an uglier sound than a pianist who shapes phrases according to musical principles. Sure enough, this pianist's sound was noisy and brutal- filled with percussion and lacking in close control. Ruling out the very important advice of a teacher (based on dubious science) had done him no favours. He was too busy calling tone impossible to realise how poorly he was controlling even relative dynamics. If you want to make a musical phrase, then you can forget ramming the arm on to every note (and then validating a bad approach by saying science has proved that the piano doesn't care how you move the keys). A musician needs to learn how to move the arm smoothly from side to side- helping to organise the movement of the fingers in better relationships, while also helping to avoid the volume of excessive downward pressures.  I don't think anyone has ever been worse off for striving for tone quality at the piano. However, at least some of those who insist that tone is impossible will be putting themselves at a genuine artistic disadvantage. 

There's something incredibly absurd about the fact that many people are willing to believe that basic musical techniques for expression are on a par with occultism, while basing their view on a religious style faith in what is very low quality and poorly tested science. At the science end, it's about time that archaic assertions were tested with better quality methods- to help prevent this movement of elevating flawed science ahead of artistic goals. Most importantly though, is how to look at things from an artistic point of view. You must at least believe that musical illusions exist- and that you can't hit the piano keys any old way if you want to make them. Especially not with an umbrella.