How we approach our practicing, our technique, and all aspects of learning and playing the piano, will make the difference between great results and mediocre or poor results. There are certain principles which need to be understood and put into practice. Two principles I stress in my teaching are Top Down and Inside Out.
Top Down:
I believe in starting with the whole and then moving down to the parts or smaller details later. For example, starting with an outline when starting a new piece gives you a sense of the whole piece. (See my post titled Outlining for a full explanation.) This process is a cornerstone of my own playing and my teaching. Unfortunately, most people would just start with the first note(s) they see on the page and proceed to the next and the next and so on. This would be like driving without any sense of the destination. If you are a great sight-reader you might manage it this way with some degree of ease, but if your sight-reading is not quite up to snuff, this will be a very long, laborious process, and you will tend to get lost in the weeds, so to speak. As you've heard me say before, virtually everyting we do, from building a house to writing an essay, requires starting with the main structure first and gradually filling in details (assuming you don't want the house to collapse or the essay to be incomprehensible).
Another example of top down is the teaching and understanding of rhythm. If you read my posts on rhythm, you will see that I start with the larger unit (such as a measure), which will, of course, vary with the tempo of the piece, and then train the student to hear that unit of time, and then hear it divide in two, then in four, etc. (or in three). The important skill you get from this is learning to actually hear a unit of time, and then hear it divide into smaller units. If you can reliably hear any unit of time, you will not have difficulty with rhythm. Most methods start with, say, a quarter note, and then try to hear a unit which is twice as long (a half note), etc. External tools such as a metronome and/or "counting" are employed to help you with this, but unfortunately they often don't work. In addition, focusing on the smaller rhythmic units first (essentially going "bottom up") can tend you make your playing sound stiff, and what I call "note-wise."
Inside Out:
This concept applies to many aspects, but most importantly, the physical ways in which we move around the keyboard. Almost everyone you talk to and anything you read will focus on the fingers, and on techniques for training and strengthening the fingers. It is important to realize, however, that the hands and fingers aren't going anywhere that the arm doesn't take them! We can play the piano, with its expanse of 88 keys, only because we have a ball-and-socket joint at the shoulder, which enables us to move our arms laterally, towards the fallboard and towards our body, in circular motions, etc. If you were playing a clavichord (pre-dating the harpsichord), you might get away with using mostly just your fingers. But that would be impossible on our modern pianos, with the range of techniques and the range of dynamics required by all piano literature since the 1700s.
Movement goes from center to periphery. This is a basic rule of physics. You may see the bicycle tire move in a circle and propel the bike forward, but the movement starts at the center, where the pedal is attached to the hub of the tire, which attaches to the spokes, and finally to the rim of the tire. I would challenge you to think of any exception to this rule. When sitting at the piano, the shoulder joint is our center, and the movement travels down the arm to the hand and fingers. (One could argue that the torso is actually the center; see my post titled The Torso.) You may not even realize this is happening, because the movements at the center are small. The hub of the bicycle wheel hardly seems to move, because the movement at the center is smaller than at the periphery. You might ask, if it's happening anyway, why should I care? Because if you understand the role that is played by each area of the pianist's anatomy, it stands to reason you can train it better, use it with more finesse or power or efficiency.
People who have seen or learned with my approach often comment that it is very "holistic," or even very "Zen." While that may be true, what I know for certain is that everything I do or teach is firmly based in that place where the human anatomy meets the laws of physics meets the physical properties of the piano itself.
