Piano Forum

The reading one was interesting, personally.  I have a kind of LD, mildly, where visual cues of space (left, right) can be confusing, especially when symmetry is involved.  As a child I self-taught piano, and what developed was that I would "hear" what's on the page like a singer, and my hands would feel their way for the sound like a blind person.  When I got back to piano and read the problem of looking at hands, I tried looking at my hands and it confused the bejeebums out of me.    I've had to learn to do some looking, in order to solve a lot of technical problems.  If I read new music, I'm looking at the page.  I'm actually learning how to fuse the two, so that I do have a mental picture of the piano.  I'd probably gaze around as I won't know where the piano keys are visually, unless I rely on where my hands want to go.

For the other, where he says he doesn't look at his hands, my reaction was "Why would he?"  If you're driving, you look at where you are going, not at the steering wheel.  When you walk, you don't look at your feet.  So you'd look at where you're about to go, or try to keep both playing areas of the keyboard in your vision - which he does.  This all makes sense.

In the old days, I'd be looking out the window, because looking at the keyboard broke my concentration.  Nowadays, esp. for more complicated music that moves around, I am learning to look at the keyboard.  As an aside, besides looking ahead in advance, you will also see a pianist move ahead in advance --- if the music will go to the far right, he starts leaning to the right even before his arms starting going there (it seems).