As always, great post AJ!!
What about stiff wrist in octaves or repeated chords, or about the technique of "staccato"?
As you know, I'm struggling with these problem with Prokofiev...I watched the Fink's video (it's really useful and full of stimulating insights), maybe I to study it better....
Ciao!
Margherita
Hi Margherita!
I've actually started to make a video for you - I recorded 2 or 3 times last night. I'm not posting anything though because I faced a particular problem. That is that its tough to describe the mechanics of it with accuracy, and that when I demonstrate the right way vs the wrong way for comparison, the 2 look incredibly similar in the video. This makes the whole thing very open to misinterpretation so I'm being pretty cautious.
I'm going to make a fairly loose point here.. perhaps just an observation - I will try to talk about it in the video soon.
Firstly, I found that I can intentionally place tension in my wrist and arm before I even go to play a note and that the most likely reason someone would do that at the piano is if they are conciously positioning the fingers for the chord before moving into the keys.. To explain that a bit better.. if you raise you hand/arm off the keys (lift the forearm from the elbow) and then stretch your fingers out to the position of an octave your wrist will become tense and your arm will feel locked in whatever position its in.
If you do that, you can not effectively "free-fall" into the keys - rather you feel like to bring your arm down and play you have to conciously and deliberately move the forearm every inch of the way. If instead you relax the fingers, it feels like "freefall" toward the keys is a very natural motion. In fact, I feel like its a lot more comfortable to fall into the keys than it is to hold my arm up when my fingers are all loose like that.
You can practice freefall into the keys from a height, say 10-15cm to begin with, to play octaves in this way. The hand begins relaxed and the only tension in the wrist is enough to hold it up so its inline with the forearm. The fingers come out to reach the octave at the decent into the keys, they are not prepared. The reach to the octave distance is combined with a slight "letting go" of the wrist, so that the hand moves down into the keys, but it does not conciously apply pressure from the wrist. When you 'let go' like that you're fingers naturally want to spread out - so you just have to control that spread rather than conciously position them for the notes your aiming for.
If you apply downward pressure with the wrist this natural spread of the fingers does not occur. so you would instead have to press down with the wrist and stretch out the fingers - which would make you enormously tense.
Its really tough to explain this well so the aim for you would be to experiment with it, when you manage something that feels free and easy then thats the motion I'm talking about.. if it feels tense you're misinterpreting what I mean (or i'm badly explaining it).
As far as repeating them and remaining free of tension, I think I will talk about soon - its such an enormous amount of motion to explain - and the first step in playing repeated notes freely has to be playing a single note/chord freely.
EDIT: I would also say that you should be trying this initially with a sense of forward momentum, you're not going to move forward but your weight should be travelling forward into the keys. This should help you avoid a "breaking" of the wrist.