joint stability vs curled fingers

[toomuchpolitics]

In teaching beginners and in retraining students with poor technique, I like to talk about joint stability, rather than curled or curved fingers.  Here is  video I made on the topic - it was one of the first I made on my channel, so please excuse the faceless video.  I would very much welcome comments (other than my poor iphone videography skills).   

[anamnesis]

Nice video.

My comment would be that the "stop pressing" cue may or may not be the best cue. Another poster [n on here practically devoted an entire blog that centered around this issue (okay I might be exaggerating), preferring to use "positive movements" as the paradigm to describe what we should do peri-keystrike. (https://pianoscience.blogspot.com/)

The "stop pressing", which is more of "negative movement" cue can cause some people to hold back, never making true contact with the keys, and thus never gain true stability. This can lead to excessive tension in the forearm in students who misunderstand what is really supposed to be done.

My understanding of technique is a modified version of Whiteside's pedagogy (center to periphery playing, rhythmic connection to the torso, the phrase or musical long line being guided by proprioception at the level of the shoulder/upper arm and back) , so I come from a different perspective (as Whiteside didn't talk too much about the role of the fingers and hand while the other poster focused on the fingers/hand to correct possible perceptions from a strct arm-weight perspective), but I found that viewpoint the most compatible, at least for myself.  

There's a certain sense of forward motion, alertness, and taking advantage of momentum that the stop pressing cue doesn't necessarily train.  I think better cues are ones that get a student to use motions that preferentially use the intrinsic muscles in the hand over those that run through the carpal tunnel from the forearm.  

[pianoplayer002]

The "stop pressing", which is more of "negative movement" cue can cause some people to hold back, never making true contact with the keys, and thus never gain true stability. This can lead to excessive tension in the forearm in students who misunderstand what is really supposed to be done.

This is what happened to me when I was told to stop pressing back when I first started to seek out ways to retrain my technique. Instead I started to "hold away" my hands from the piano at the same time as I tried to play, which made for a very poor and unbalanced contact with the key bed. At the start I thought I was doing the right thing because it did feel less tense than my previous pressing down had done. But in the end it just caused more problems; trying to "hold up" the hands results in very poor, clumsy, shaky control which is especially noticeable when you are nervous at a performance, while you still can get away with it when you are more relaxed at home.