technique and psychology

[henrikhank]

I am on

[lelle]

I agree and think this applies not only to playing the piano but to life. Even if you try to run away from, ignore, suppress or deny your feelings, they are still there. They will still affect you, and forcing it down (or into the dark as you say) often makes it worse.

I think you need to work consciously on technique. Realizing that worrying about things, or stress in general can affect your technique is a part of that. But I made progress with those things by accepting this rather than fighting it.

I hope I understood you correctly. Do you have some examples from your own experiences that could explain your point of view a bit deeper?

[henrikhank]

I agree and think this applies not only to playing the piano but to life. Even if you try to run away from, ignore, suppress or deny your feelings, they are still there. They will still affect you, and forcing it down (or into the dark as you say) often makes it worse.

I think you need to work consciously on technique. Realizing that worrying about things, or stress in general can affect your technique is a part of that. But I made progress with those things by accepting this rather than fighting it.

I hope I understood you correctly. Do you have some examples from your own experiences that could explain your point of view a bit deeper?

eg when play sixths and thirds in the rh. I find those a bit uncomfortable at times. melodies in sixths and thirds.
I also play the (piano)accordion and it is done more on the accordion than the piano even if I do it on the piano.
I had a teacher who told me to play exercices from a book by Czerny-Germer I think.
Just play was the ideal as I remember it. I have even had people tell me to just sing. It did at specific moments help me sing above high C but I still had technique issues. I might have used certain bad habits.
Piano teacher teach technique and not psychology. My current singing teacher speak a lot on psychological issues and my piano teacher to some extent.
I think this issue is a lot about having issues with feeling your body and all its movements.
I miss a lot of fundamental stuff I guess. Sometimes I think too much about the details.
A lot of teachers can miss some of the issues students have with the fundamentals, I think. This is easy when they often teach by using a certain method rather than trying to meet the student. This obviously requiere a student feel safe at the piano. It is often: the students should meet the teacher instead of the other way around. The teacher need to meet the student where he/she is rather than asking the student to meet the teacher where he/she is.
Students are asked to be very adult like and it might work for adult sometimes but not for kids.

[brogers70]

Tension is generally a bad thing both in singing and on the piano. Sometimes tension comes from mostly psychological sources, but sometimes not. My last teacher was very focused on psychological causes of tension, and she was helpful to some of her students who had had traumatic musical experiences or been shamed or browbeaten as young students. But often tension is just a natural response to a bad physical coordination. Like, if you slip on the ice and you make sudden movements to try to regain your balance - that's tension from reacting to a specific physical situation; you need better shoes, not psychotherapy, to get rid of that tension.

An example from singing would be maybe you're trying to sing high at a moderate volume and you have poor airflow, the sound starts to fail, you feel something funny in your vocal mechanism and you tense up. You can fix that tension just by working on control of your airflow without fussing about the psychological roots of the tension. Or on the piano you may have tension in your hand because you are playing big, widely spaced chords without relaxing your hand while you move between them.

I'm tuned into this because I had that very psych oriented teacher and it was frustrating to have her want to do psychotherapy on me when really I needed some specific mechanical advice to get around physical causes of tension. Once I stopped worrying about what the tension "meant" in a psychological sense and just focused on the mechanical causes, things got better quickly.

[henrikhank]

Tension is generally a bad thing both in singing and on the piano. Sometimes tension comes from mostly psychological sources, but sometimes not. My last teacher was very focused on psychological causes of tension, and she was helpful to some of her students who had had traumatic musical experiences or been shamed or browbeaten as young students. But often tension is just a natural response to a bad physical coordination. Like, if you slip on the ice and you make sudden movements to try to regain your balance - that's tension from reacting to a specific physical situation; you need better shoes, not psychotherapy, to get rid of that tension.

An example from singing would be maybe you're trying to sing high at a moderate volume and you have poor airflow, the sound starts to fail, you feel something funny in your vocal mechanism and you tense up. You can fix that tension just by working on control of your airflow without fussing about the psychological roots of the tension. Or on the piano you may have tension in your hand because you are playing big, widely spaced chords without relaxing your hand while you move between them.

I'm tuned into this because I had that very psych oriented teacher and it was frustrating to have her want to do psychotherapy on me when really I needed some specific mechanical advice to get around physical causes of tension. Once I stopped worrying about what the tension "meant" in a psychological sense and just focused on the mechanical causes, things got better quickly.

psychotherapy at a piano lesson? not that good. Is that even legal in your country?

It's always both, ie psychological and physical, when you have technique issues, I think.
How it works I don't know.

Sixths can be difficult because it is a wide interval and certain people worry when they play things like that.

[brogers70]

psychotherapy at a piano lesson? not that good. Is that even legal in your country?

It's legal, I guess, as long as you don't say that that's what you're trying to do.

[ranjit]

While playing the piano, I think your physical motions are largely unconscious yet controlled. If something psychological disturbs you, it makes it harder to execute those movements, and I find it can often force you to consciously think about them. This interrupts the sort of natural flow you need to have while playing.

I think technique issues can certainly be psychological in nature. But at the same time there will be a lot of things which are simply technically out of reach. You need figure out a way to discriminate between the two. My rule of thumb is that if there is something that you used to be able to do fine, but is now causing you problems, the cause is likely psychological. Otherwise, it's lack of technique.

[lelle]

Tension is generally a bad thing both in singing and on the piano. Sometimes tension comes from mostly psychological sources, but sometimes not. My last teacher was very focused on psychological causes of tension, and she was helpful to some of her students who had had traumatic musical experiences or been shamed or browbeaten as young students. But often tension is just a natural response to a bad physical coordination. Like, if you slip on the ice and you make sudden movements to try to regain your balance - that's tension from reacting to a specific physical situation; you need better shoes, not psychotherapy, to get rid of that tension.

An example from singing would be maybe you're trying to sing high at a moderate volume and you have poor airflow, the sound starts to fail, you feel something funny in your vocal mechanism and you tense up. You can fix that tension just by working on control of your airflow without fussing about the psychological roots of the tension. Or on the piano you may have tension in your hand because you are playing big, widely spaced chords without relaxing your hand while you move between them.

I'm tuned into this because I had that very psych oriented teacher and it was frustrating to have her want to do psychotherapy on me when really I needed some specific mechanical advice to get around physical causes of tension. Once I stopped worrying about what the tension "meant" in a psychological sense and just focused on the mechanical causes, things got better quickly.

I think you need a little bit of both, so that you at least do not rule out either or the other as you are working. I know examples both of people for whom a large part of the tension was psychological, who would have been help more quickly if they had been helped in working with that, and I know examples where the problem was mostly mechanical, and reworking what movements were used was mostly what was needed.

Did you tell this teacher that you didn't need psychotherapy but concrete advice? 

[brogers70]

I think you need a little bit of both, so that you at least do not rule out either or the other as you are working. I know examples both of people for whom a large part of the tension was psychological, who would have been help more quickly if they had been helped in working with that, and I know examples where the problem was mostly mechanical, and reworking what movements were used was mostly what was needed.

Did you tell this teacher that you didn't need psychotherapy but concrete advice? 

I totally agree, there are definitely people whose tension is largely psychological, as I mentioned above, my teacher was extremely helpful for people who had had strong negative musical experiences in their youth. In my case, though, most of the tension seemed to have mechanical roots; in any case it improved in response to mechanical fixes. My teacher, unfortunately had a hammer, and I looked like a nail to her. So, I'm in the market for a new teacher once the pandemic makes lessons possible again.

[lostinidlewonder]

One could argue that psychology plays the leading role in everything you do. How you think, act and behave is the main bottle neck for the daily work you get through. It should play a part in all lessons you have with a teacher.