want info on arm weight

[silph]

hello everybody! i'm wondering if anyone can point me to some resources (preferably on the internet) that can teach me about the arm weight school's ideas. i've done a little bit of reading on it so far, and i'm intrigued.

also, i have one specific question for people who have studied under that school:
if your arms and shoulders are very relaxed and heavy, what holds your arms/hands up? that is, if your arms and shoulders are super-relaxed, what prevents them from either sliding off of the keyboard entirely, or from their weight depressing all the keys that your fingers are touching?

[nyiregyhazi]

hello everybody! i'm wondering if anyone can point me to some resources (preferably on the internet) that can teach me about the arm weight school's ideas. i've done a little bit of reading on it so far, and i'm intrigued.

also, i have one specific question for people who have studied under that school:
if your arms and shoulders are very relaxed and heavy, what holds your arms/hands up? that is, if your arms and shoulders are super-relaxed, what prevents them from either sliding off of the keyboard entirely, or from their weight depressing all the keys that your fingers are touching?

I'm not surprised that you're feeling a little confused. While some proponents of this teach the practicality of playing very well, frequently the explanation is loaded with contradiction and impossibility. I wrote a post that refers to various aspects of this:

https://pianoscience.blogspot.com/2011/01/clearing-up-number-of-issues-including.html#

Basically, remember that the arm is not merely on or off. It's pretty remarkable that so few explanations make that clear. Instead some teachers portray it as if gravity does everything and others portray it as if the arm doesn't even have weight. Virtually all playing involves a partially released arm that takes some level of support from the hand on the keys.

[brogers70]

I never understood this arm weight business until my teacher demonstrated, because the written descriptions can be confusing. So I'll try to be non-confusing....

First consider how to play without using arm weight at all. Hold your hand in playing position a fraction of an inch above the keyboard. Then strike the keys using just your finger. Slide your hand up and down the keyboard as needed to get into position, but don't rest on the keys. Move you hand so the appropriate finger is above the desired note, and activate the finger to strike the key. But always keep all the weight off your finger by using your arm and upper body muscles to keep the hand hovering just a bit above the keyboard. Now you know what it feels like to use no arm weight whatsoever.

Now, to get the feel of arm weight. Take your right second finger and play a middle C with your finger perpendicular to the key and your wrist braced. Then relax all the muscles in your upper body so that the full weight of your arm is resting on your finger tip. Of course you have to keep your finger and wrist braced using your wrist and finger flexors (otherwise your hand will slide into your lap and the next sound you'll hear will be a loud, dissonant tone cluster as your forehead stikes the keyboard). So your finger is on C and the dead weight of your arm is resting on your finger. To play a D, just transfer the weight from your second finger to your third finger. You'll be able to see that you've done this correctly by noticing that the proximal knuckle on your third finger will pop up a little bit. Then practice doing CDEFG  by transfering the weight of your arm back and forth between fingers 1-5. That's the basic business of arm weight. Of course you use common sense and lift your hands from the keyboard as necessary, but you aim to produce the sound by letting the weight of your arm, rather than your finger alone, press the key.

When I first started playing around with this I found it hard to tell whether my upper body was really letting the arm rest all the way or not.So consider your are back, resting the weight of your arm on the second finger on a middle C. Pay attention to what you feel at the fingertip. You should feel the key pressing back up against your finger (Newston's Third Law, and all). But it may be hard to tell whether you get that feeling just because of the dead weight of the arm, or because you are using the muscles of your upper body to push the finger down into the key. So to learn what plain dead weight resting on the fingertip feels like, do the following. Keep your right finger, hand and arm just as they were. Then lay your completely relaxed left arm over your right forearm. That will give you the real feel of relaxed dead weight being supported by your fingertip on the piano key.

So that's a bit of a description, but I never understood the written descriptions until my teacher demonstrated for me.  Good Luck.

[silph]

@nyiregyhazi: thanks for linking to your post. i read about 3/4s of it so far. (it looks like i will have to reread these kinds of things a few times over -- and slowly -- to understand them).
` i do have two questions already, though, if you're willing to respond to them?

1) i am learning on an entry-level yamaha keyboard (ie full-sized keyboard, touch response (plays louder the harder you press a key), but with keys that need much much less weight down upon them to go down than with a real piano). am i still able to keep my arm stable by supporting it with my hands at the keyboard at one end, and supporting it at the other end [at the shoulder? (i need to read your previous blog entry to understand better)]? that is, is the resistance of a key going down at a real piano necessary to achieve this "arm balancing / being supported" state that you suggest we learn, with the keyboard that i have?

2) how might some arm-weight school people disagree with what you wrote? what is their take on keeping your arm stable?

[silph]

@brogers70:
thanks for your take on what helped you understand arm weight! your ideas of things to try make sense. it isn't exactly the kind of answer i was hoping for per se (ie i wanted to know what "real arm-weight school trained people" would say, in terms of their "official" or commonly-accepted ideas), BUT your own take on it, i think will be very valuable for me, so thank you for sharing :-)

so if i understand your ideas correctly, you're saying that arm weight is used to help push the finger down into the key (ie instead of whatever mechanism was used -- upper back muscles and arm muscles and such? -- in the first experiment where absolutely no arm weight is used).


i feel that my original question is still unresolved in your ideas, though:

in your second experiment (ie starting with your second finger supporting the dead weight of your arm, then transferring that weight to the next finger, etc), i can see how my arm stays stable -- it's because my finger is supporting the weight of my entire arm. but in this experiment, it's all slow playing where you /can/ almost literally put all the weight onto one finger.
` but isn't it true that in most playing, it isn't the case where your arm is stable by all its weight being supported by the finger that's playing? for example,
` - if my hand were playing eighth notes at a typical tempo, wouldn't it be difficult to continually shift the dead weight of my arm for every new finger that goes down for every new eighth note?


so my question is:
- if my arm is to be really relaxed and dead weight at all times, what stops me from either having my arm slide off the keys, or my fingers to press keys down when they're not supposed to? especially in passages with eighth notes or faster?
- if my arm *isn't* to be really relaxed and dead weight at all times, how do i keep my arm stable without creating tension from my shoulder and arm muscles constantly holding the arm up?

[brogers70]

Sorry, I'm afraid I cannot explain it any better than I tried already. This is one of those things where you have to mess around at the piano, preferably after getting help from a teacher. You can trust that you have to use common sense and that it is not the intent of the method that your hands slide off the piano.

[nyiregyhazi]

i am learning on an entry-level yamaha keyboard (ie full-sized keyboard, touch response (plays louder the harder you press a key), but with keys that need much much less weight down upon them to go down than with a real piano). am i still able to keep my arm stable by supporting it with my hands at the keyboard at one end, and supporting it at the other end [at the shoulder?

Absolutely. You can support in this way just as well on a table top. The key is the static point when the key is at the keybed. This is where weight is most easily stabilised- when the key is no longer moving. So a light action should make no difference at all to that.

"how might some arm-weight school people disagree with what you wrote? what is their take on keeping your arm stable?"

Well, it's not necessarily that they'd disagree. I'd hope that most people with common sense would realise that it's simply a more fleshed out explanation of what really goes on- without all the holes in the explanation.

The explanation the other poster gave is a typical description of armweight. Both examples are well worth trying out and perceiving. They are good exercises to try. But the reality of playing is a long way from either one. The instincts can sometimes fill in the holes, but I believe it's well worth looking deeper into what really happens. Why would finger actions necessitate 100% witholding of the arm's weight? You don't have to do that. Why is it only finger action with a locked arm or an inert falling arm and braced fingers? One is rxaggerated to absurdity and the other merely exists to smear the value of finger actions, by putting them in an absurd context. Why not simply move the key with the finger- but go on to feel (some of) the weight of the arm being stabilised at the keybed? 

I'm writing up various things with reference to the chain idea, because I believe it provides the unifying explanation of what basically all successful pianists do for standard running notes. They stabilise some of their weight at the keybed, but they use actions in the hand to move the keys. They don't play with an arm that bobs up and down, falling into every note. The arm needs to be at least partially supported by the keyboard and the fingers need to actually be moving- but unfortunately most people are intent on only looking at one half of the picture, rather than how the two sides complement each other.Worse still, some people claim weight can do everything (which is impossible) or that the fingers should do everything and armweight is no issue at all (which can leave the arm held up stiffly instead of properly released). The biggest flaw in each approach is to deny the other- rather than explore what unifies them.

[silph]

@brogers70:
thanks for taking the time to give me your thoughts. i'm sure they're worth me experimenting with!

@nyiregyhazi:

===
Absolutely. You can support in this way just as well on a table top. The key is the static point when the key is at the keybed. This is where weight is most easily stabilised- when the key is no longer moving. So a light action should make no difference at all to that.
===

thanks for this answer. i'm going to take a few weeks to read thoroughly some of your posts, and see if i can get a better understanding of your ideas!


it seems that you're saying that these two camps (arm weight vs finger action) have tended to become separated and exaggerated, when in reality, most high-level pianists neither use all arm-weight ("let gravity do ALL the work!") nor use all finger-action ("let the fingers move while keeping the hand and the arm completely motionless").



==
[Successful pianists] don't play with an arm that bobs up and down, falling into every note.
==
in my looking for info on piano technique, i came across video by lister-sink called 'freeing the caged bird', and it really intrigued me, because it seemed so much about preventing injury and playing the piano in a way where no tension accumulates. in the video, it seems that she really does advocate playing with an "arm that bobs up and down". if i am understanding what she is saying correctly, the "basic stroke" of piano playing consists of four elements, and when done together it looks like the pianist lifts her arm, then brings it down on the piano in free-fall; for each of these "basic strokes", she plays one to five seperate notes with her fingers. then to play more, she makes another "basic stroke". in other words, her method really /does/ seem to say that *all* notes start with you lifting your arm up, then letting it free fall .. and repeating this over and over again.

she seems to be a successful pianist, yet her method seems to say that you DO play piano with an arm that bobs up and down. what do you think of this?







maybe some background info on me will help clear up what is making me so interested in arm weight:

- i started trying to learn piano using a method that told me (among other things) to "lift fingers as high as possible" like little hammers, and exersices where (for example) you'd hold all other fingers down except the fourth, which you would try to raise as high as possible, to make it "independant".
` this resulted, in literally three or four days, of REALLY BAD pain in my wrists and up my arms. i couldn't even type at the computer without the pain coming back, and it's still hasn't completely gone away!

- this *REALLY* freaked me out, and now i'm honestly a little afraid of putting any strain on my arms and hands and wrists. so i'm really wanting to emphasise learning how to play piano with really good body mechanics, so that i can play with the least amount of strain possible on my body.

- now that i've got the courage to try learning piano again (just in the past few weeks), i'm finding that i have tension in my arms and shoulders as i try to keep my arms in the playing position (ie it feels like i'm fighting gravity to keep them up), and i'm really wanting to know how to keep my arms in the playing position without feeling so tense and tired.

- so then i turn to learning about arm weight (but can't find much clear info on it on the internet.. not yet, anyways), in order to find my answer.




it looks like your ideas have a lot to do with me trying to learn what i'm looking for, and am looking forward to studying them through your blog!

(but i'm also still very curious what the arm weight school says about it (if anything -- or is it just something they don't explicitly explain?), so if any arm-weight loyalists are reading this, please point me to some good sources of info, thanks!)

[nyiregyhazi]

"she seems to be a successful pianist, yet her method seems to say that you DO play piano with an arm that bobs up and down. what do you think of this?"

I'm not saying it must always be still. But unless each individual sound is produced by an individual arm movement, the arm is not the power source. It can get things going on one note- but it can't result in every single tone. Sadly, this is rarely made clear.


"this *REALLY* freaked me out, and now i'm honestly a little afraid of putting any strain on my arms and hands and wrists. so i'm really wanting to emphasise learning how to play piano with really good body mechanics, so that i can play with the least amount of strain possible on my body."


You should certainly be careful then. But consider that a relaxed hand is floppy and does not hold it's shape. Trying to use the arm instead of the hand can mean the hand needs to be even more stiff to transfer energy than when it's simply moved in the right way- especially at fast speeds. Efficient movement is actually less effort than fixation.
 
"and i'm really wanting to know how to keep my arms in the playing position without feeling so tense and tired."

There are two posts I've written about the arms. The first illustrates the freely hanging but supported arm. The second has an exercise that shows how to use the shoulders to stabilise it- without simply locking.It shows how to get beyond the idea that the arm's weight is merely on or off- when it should have a wealth of possibilities.

it looks like your ideas have a lot to do with me trying to learn what i'm looking for, and am looking forward to studying them through your blog!

Great. Let me know if you have any feedback on the way.

[scott13]

I play very much through gravity and find the most important problem is often over-looked. That being the instant gravity (through arm weight) produces the note/chord, you must use small amount of tension to stop this downward motion and allow the fingers to rest. But after this split-second of tension, release it instantly. This is only done to stop the gravity from you arm.

This does take a while to get used to but once you do it is a fantastic way of playing without developing fatigue.

[nyiregyhazi]

I play very much through gravity and find the most important problem is often over-looked. That being the instant gravity (through arm weight) produces the note/chord, you must use small amount of tension to stop this downward motion and allow the fingers to rest. But after this split-second of tension, release it instantly. This is only done to stop the gravity from you arm.

This does take a while to get used to but once you do it is a fantastic way of playing without developing fatigue.

How are you going to play fast with this approach? Gravity is actually a very slow force. You can test this by simply putting a thumb over a key and relaxing the arm. Only think of relaxing the whole arm- not of playing the note. Most people add active muscular pressure, but think they use gravity. If you can do it with pure release, you'll see it's a very slow process and it produces a very thin sound. Also, seeing as the whole arm goes down, you're going to have to keep raising it up again. It's not just going to have to be stiffening and then releasing. It's going to be lifting, dropping, stiffening, releasing, lifting etc.

In faster playing, it's all an illusion. Gravity contributes vastly to stabilisation and comfort- but it doesn't provide any notable energy in regular running notes. The arm doesn't fall into every single note. Also, if you're resting the fingers, what is keeping the arm up against gravity? Resting involves working the whole of the arm harder. Far from stopping gravity, this moment will cause the arm to be totally unsupported and inclined to fall off the piano- unless countless muscles are forced into instantaneous activation. If you look at the arm side rather than the finger side, the moment of "relaxation" is actually a moment where countless efforts are introduced to stop the arm falling from the piano.

The idea that gravity is easier doesn't add up. It's good as an exercise but only very specific situations can actually literally work that way. Would a marathon runner find it easier to run constantly up and down hills? To only refer to the downhill parts would be missing the point. He has to run uphill in order to run downhill. It's the same with the arm. There's no free energy. You have to keep lifting and putting that energy in (losing plenty of it along the way due to the inefficiency of the process). Thinking that way can be a good way to relieve tensions that should never be arising, but it doesn't accurately portray what is possible.

[scott13]

How are you going to play fast with this approach? Gravity is actually a very slow force. You can test this by simply putting a thumb over a key and relaxing the arm. Only think of relaxing the whole arm- not of playing the note. Most people add active muscular pressure, but think they use gravity. If you can do it with pure release, you'll see it's a very slow process and it produces a very thin sound. Also, seeing as the whole arm goes down, you're going to have to keep raising it up again. It's not just going to have to be stiffening and then releasing. It's going to be lifting, dropping, stiffening, releasing, lifting etc.

In faster playing, it's all an illusion. Gravity contributes vastly to stabilisation and comfort- but it doesn't provide any notable energy in regular running notes. The arm doesn't fall into every single note. Also, if you're resting the fingers, what is keeping the arm up against gravity? Resting involves working the whole of the arm harder. Far from stopping gravity, this moment will cause the arm to be totally unsupported and inclined to fall off the piano- unless countless muscles are forced into instantaneous activation. If you look at the arm side rather than the finger side, the moment of "relaxation" is actually a moment where countless efforts are introduced to stop the arm falling from the piano.

The idea that gravity is easier doesn't add up. It's good as an exercise but only very specific situations can actually literally work that way. Would a marathon runner find it easier to run constantly up and down hills? To only refer to the downhill parts would be missing the point. He has to run uphill in order to run downhill. It's the same with the arm. There's no free energy. You have to keep lifting and putting that energy in (losing plenty of it along the way due to the inefficiency of the process). Thinking that way can be a good way to relieve tensions that should never be arising, but it doesn't accurately portray what is possible.

I suggest you do some reading on the Russian School of Piano in order to actually get the point i'm making.

Also i dispute your opinion that one cannot play with arm weight while playing fast. If you rely solely on muscles then you have a greater chance of developing fatigue. For example, when i trill on 1,3 or 1,2 or 3,5 i 'throw' my arm weight to a certain finger to allow the trill to be faster. For trills with 1, then my weight is focused more onto my thumb and for trills with 5 it is focused to that side of my hand, which results for me, faster and cleaner trills.

Also think of tremolos in Beethoven's Op 13 Sonata (easiest example to illustrate point). Here the LH has very constant tremolos and these need to be played with utter relaxation, and by solely using finger muscles these cannot be played quickly. However, through in your arm weight and they can as you are shifting weight through rotations of your forearm.

Also the Russian School is not solely about gravity, it is very much to do with arm weight and how you distribute this weight. The German School on the other hand in more focused on finger muscles and keeping the arm still.

Perhaps my gravity example can use more substance placed in a piece more applicable to the technique, take Rach's G minor prelude, Any of the Chopin Polonaises, Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto #1, Rach 2 & 3 etc etc. These pieces are all hugely chordal and playing these often huge chords with conscious effort would be very tiring as a player, however if you allow gravity to do half the work for you, it is not strenuous at all.

At the end of the day you clearly have your own way of playing which is fine, but you can't comment on the effectiveness of a method of playing for which you have no experience or understanding of.

[nyiregyhazi]

"Also think of tremolos in Beethoven's Op 13 Sonata (easiest example to illustrate point). Here the LH has very constant tremolos and these need to be played with utter relaxation, and by solely using finger muscles these cannot be played quickly."

IF the hand is stiff. However, on the contrary, my tremolos were always slow and sluggish until I learned to do them with the hand itself. They are vastly faster now and I can also do them quietly- unlike when I moved the whole arm to needless excess. My hand works far better when it moves properly, instead of merely bracing to transfer energy from the arm. Big movements are a good exercise to train muscles to release. But that's all that remains at the end- the release. Nobody does big movements to send notable gravity through those tremolos. They move concisely- with plenty of motion from the actual thumb and 5th.

"Also i dispute your opinion that one cannot play with arm weight while playing fast. If you rely solely on muscles then you have a greater chance of developing fatigue."

Again IF you are stiff. I didn't say it's not good to feel some weight. But it's not what moves the keys. The hand moves- or the arm would be going up and down on literally every note. That is impossible at fast speeds.
 

"These pieces are all hugely chordal and playing these often huge chords with conscious effort would be very tiring as a player, however if you allow gravity to do half the work for you, it is not strenuous at all."
 
Gravity can't do much unless you lift up high. Who does so for the opening chords of the Tchaikovsky concerto? If you hold your hand over the chord and fall, there's very little sound without a large descent. Gravity is not a quick force. Try playing those chords starting from contact and merely falling. You can scarcely get any tone at all- no matter how much you brace your hand. I'm not saying that means the weight of the arm should be withheld via a stiff arm. But the gravity explanation is massively simplified- to the point where it does not accurately represent any conceivable reality.


"At the end of the day you clearly have your own way of playing which is fine, but you can't comment on the effectiveness of a method of playing for which you have no experience or understanding of. "

Having personally experienced the limitations and problems of the method, I have no idea what led you to that assumption. By trying to take the traditional explanations literally (and bracing instead of actually moving keys from within my hand) I suffered severe limitations. The fact is that gravity CANNOT provide the energy unless the arm is literally falling down on every note. It cannot do that in a wealth of ordinary situations- which is why the explanation is so problematic and can cause serious harm to some people. If you read any of my blog posts you'll see how much I talk about what gravity can and does do in healthy technique. But where traditional explanations are simply impossible, I'm not going to accept them. I want to look further into what really IS possible. Gravity is a major part of piano playing. But not in the way many people claim it is.

[brogers70]

This thread is an excellent example of how hard it is to write about the mechanics of playing the piano. Here are a couple of examples.

Somebody has been struggling for weeks because he has to play two voices in one hand and gently emphasize one over the other. He's spent hours trying to figure out how to play one finger more loudly than the other, how to play legato with 1 and 2 and staccato with 4 and 5, and the like. He's played scales in thirds trying to alternately bring out the upper or lower voice; he's worked on angling his hand this way or that, focusing on the mechanics, and generally spent all sorts of frustrating time trying to make the two voices in one hand distinct. Then one day he's playing his piece and he notices that he hears the voices clearly. He notices that if he focuses his mind on one voice, it becomes more prominent and vice versa. He's had a sudden revelation. He thinks, "Ha, all this stuff on mechanics wasn't working, all I need to do is focus my mind on the voice I want to bring out." But what really happened was that by dint of all his struggling with the mechanics, his brain finally worked out a feedback loop where it could produce the sounds it wanted. All the earlier work was necessary. But the guy doesn't know that. So when someone asks him how to bring out one voice among two played by the same hand, he says "Stop worrying about the mechanics of your fingers and arms and just focus your mind on the voice you want to hear." Unless the person he's talking to happens to be at exactly the same stage in this particular struggle, that advice will be meaningless or seem downright foolish.

In the same way, if you've been struggling for months or years to play rapid figures or scales at speed clearly and without fatigue, and if, by chance, a major source of the problem is that you are tensing too many upper body muscles in order to keep you weight from falling into the keyboard (or because someone told you to keep your hands quietly just a bit above the keys), then it is possible that if someone tells you about arm weight, then just playing around with it and figuring out how to use a little arm weight will suddenly resolve a lot of difficulties. You'll think that learning how to feel the weight of your arm passing through your fingertip is the whole key that unlocked your playing. And when you talk about it you'll say things that only are useful to someone who has a very similar problem to yours. To anyone else they'll make you sound like an idiot.

To play anything well, a smooth scale, a shimmering sustained trill, many things have to work just right. When you go from all but one of those things working right, to all of them working right, there can be a huge improvement, so whatever component you added to the mix last, will feel like it was the key. And that feeling will make your description of what you are doing useless to everyone who doesn't happen to be missing that particular component.

So back to arm weight. I think it's safe to say that no matter what any member of the "arm weight school" says, they do not really think that gravity alone can do everything, or that the hands should simply be braced stiffly and allowed to free fall against the keys. Saying stuff that sounds like that may be helpful for students with a particular problem in a particular situation. You sometimes have to exaggerate a point or a motion to help it sink in clearly, but you also have to use common sense.