Gyorgy Sandor "On Piano Playing"

[MasterTuner]

I have been reading some of "On Piano Playing"  by Gyorgy Sandor and would like to know if any of you feel this book is helpful.  I am specifically curious about his "Free Fall" and "Thrust" techniques.  It seems to me that if you advocate a free fall or gravity approach that using any type of muscular tension such as thrust would be a contradiction.  I was trained in the "free fall"  method and using Sandor's "thrust" seems like you might produce unnecessary tension-albeit briefly.

[xvimbi]

The way I see it, there is no contradiction. The "free fall" and the "thrust" are different techniques used at different instances for different purposes. In addition, Sandor stresses the fact that the "thrust" does/should not involve tension. Muscular action should ideally never result in tension. I agree that these two techniques are at the extremes of "weight" vs. "muscular action", but there is nothing wrong with that. In the end, any technique must be a reasonable mixure of those two components.

[MikeF]

We all appreciate how difficult it is to decribe such a complicated process as playing the piano.

So books like Sandor's are, I think, useful for pianists who already basically know the tchniques he catalogues, including their nuances. Whether his descriptions are really useful for the neophyte is debatable.

(Imagine learning how to walk from reading a description of how to do it?)

One case is the free fall method you state you knew about already. Which implies you already knew it isn't really a true free fall. I'd guess that this in turn enabled you to properly interpret Sandor's discussion that "clarified" that it wasn't exactly a free fall.