Playing With Eyes Closed

 

Most piano students don't realize the benefits of playing with eyes closed. Maybe they just never think to do it, or they assume it's too difficult.

If you are learning a new piece from the written score, obviously you can't play with eyes closed. But if you are constantly looking down at your hands, you will hamper your ability to achieve real mastery and security (see my post "Should you look at your hands when you play"). 

If you are having trouble with a particular passage, memorize it and then play with eyes closed. You may eventually want to memorize the whole piece anyway, so start with a particular passage and do it with eyes closed. If really necessary, do this one hand at a time. You might think you should start with the easiest passages. But you will get the most benefit from doing it on the passages that cause you trouble. They may cause you trouble if your hands just don't know where to go, and/or the auditory image is weak. If the auditory image, that is, REALLY knowing how it sounds, is weak, it would be like trying to see something looking through fogged up glasses. Eventually you can do longer passages, and then even the whole piece.

Eliminating the visual input strengthens the kinesthetic skills. Pianists MUST have a highly developed kinesthetic awareness. I like to call it "knowing the geography of the keyboard." You can see how blind pianists have this ability at a very high level; of course, they had no choice but to develop it. Eliminating the input from one of our senses strengthens all the others. So when you play with eyes closed, you will probably listen a lot better and increase you auditory sensitivity. And the auditory is what music is all about, so you want that to be as strong as possible. Always using your eyes to "find the notes" on the keyboard effectively means the kinesthetic and the auditory just don't have to work as hard.

Playing while looking off into space is not the same as eyes closed. You need to completely block the visual input in order to strengthen the other senses. In addition, looking at something else, such as the painting on the wall, can be distracting.

When you first start doing this, you may find you hit quite a few "wrong" notes. Don't immediately open your eyes! Use you ear to tell you where you are, such as too high or too low, and by how much. Then you can try to adjust as you go. If you always stop and look when you hear something wrong, you won't really get the benefits.

The eyes don't really help you as much as you think, except for reading the score, of course. They can't be looking everywhere at once, and are actually too slow to help with music with a fast tempo.

If you play by ear or improvise, you can definitely do this with eyes closed. In fact, your improvising will probably improve if you play with eyes closed. Looking at the keys won't tell you where to place your hands, because true improvisation means that you yourself don't even actually "know" where you are going next. The auditory impulses should be leading you.

In the end, when you have a degree of mastery of the piece and/or you want to perform it, of course you will play with eyes open. The eyes can certainly help with large jumps. They aren't micro-managing every note, but have a high-level overview of everything going on.

Don't shy away from techniques and methods that seem hard. You might think piano is hard enough already! But I often say, if something seems hard at first, you probably need to do it.