Some of you reading this title may think it's obvious. But to many pianists and students of the piano, this is a new concept.
Some people assume that the hammer in the piano is a "blunt instrument." You press the key, the hammer hits the string, the string vibrates which produces the sound, and that's all there is to it, right? You can hit the key harder or lighter to make the sound louder or softer, but that's about all the difference you can make, right? They would say that, unlike the violin where you are in direct contact with the string, on the piano you can't really affect the quality of the sound because you are not in direct contact with the string.
These statements are definitely incorrect. For example, you can get a harsh loud sound with one type of movement (e.g. a wrist "slap"), and a deep resonant loud with a different type of movement (using the whole arm). You can create a sound which decays (fades) quickly, or one that resonates for longer. You can play staccato with only finger action and get one type of sound, but when you bounce with the arm you get a different sound. These are just a few examples.
Every sound you produce will be a function (and result) of the precise coordination of the arm, hand, and fingers.
But it goes far beyond the production of sound of one note. What you do phycially will make or break the whole phrase, and, by extension, the whole piece. As you've read in my previous posts, a technique which employs mostly finger action will be choppy and stilted, what I call "notewise." Only the larger movements of the arm can create the long phrases that we are looking for in order for it to sound "musical." When we listen to music, we are not as aware of the sound of any individual note as we are of the phrase, the musical "thought." You can't just string together a bunch of notes and get a phrase; there must be an "arc" or a shape to it, which must be created by something you actually do physically.
The most important take-away from this is that, contrary to what many believe, you can't just "learn the notes" without regard to the musicality, and then later try to make it more musical at a later point. It just defies logic to think that! If you did specific physical movements when you just "played the notes," you will have to change those when you want to create a better sound and better phrases. If you think it's easy to do that, you are mistaken. The muscle memory for how you played it initially may now be quite established. Essentially you have to unlearn that and learn the piece again with a different set of physical movements. It can be done, but virtually every student who has had to do this will attest to the difficulty of changing your habits at the piano.
The good news is that you are not faced with this challenge on every single new piece of music you take on. The point is that you must change your overall technique to one that employs the whole mechanism (arm, hand, fingers) in a different way, and that becomes "the way you move," and you will automatically play everything that way. The old ideas of technique focused almost exculsively on training and strenthening the fingers, and largely ignored everything else, including how to play musically! Those exercises will have trained you to play un-musically! If you were taught this way, it is possible to learn a new way to play. People such as Abby Whiteside were pioneers in this new approach to how we actually play. (Of course there have been many great pianists who went on to play with suberb technique and fabulous musicality even if their teachers taught by the traditional finger-based technique. They never really played that way, despite the "exercises," due to a great ear and natural physical talent. And, I might add, a strong urge to play musically at all times!)
Students complain that it's just too hard to "learn the notes" and play musically at the same time. Yes it can be challenging. That is why I offer methods such as outlining, that is, playing fewer notes so you can focus on your technique and musicality, then adding more notes back in later. It may be hard to do this but the alternative, learning one way and then having to change it, is much worse.
