Independance

[dr1keyz]

Hello to all   ...I am not sure this subject has been posted but how does a pianist acheive maximum independance betweel left hand and right hand? ..Are there any exercises or technical studies that would help? Any advice would be appreciated.


Thanks

[bernhard]

This is a difficult subject to write about because words can be very misleading. You don’t want your hands to be dependent of each other, and you don’t want your hands to be independent of each other either. What you need is a third state. Most arguments and discussions on this topic are due to vocabulary rather than true disagreements.

So here is how you should go about it:

1.   Any piece of music that requires both hands to play will do fine. You do not need any specific exercise.

2.   Learn each hand separately.

By learn I mean the minutiae of movement. Don’t just play a passage mindlessly, but put your total focus and attention on the movements you are using to play the passage.

You see, the score can only tell you the notes. It tells you nothing about the movements necessary to go from one note to the next. Assuming that you have found the most efficient, comfortable, effortless, easy, economic movements to negotiate your passage with one hand, you will end up with a sequence of movements not dissimilar to a tai-chi form, a karate kata or a dance choreography.

Most piano students cannot be bothered to be aware of this in all its minutiae, preferring to go on automatic pilot and let their unconscious (“intuition”) take care of it. Since their unconscious is usually not programmed for the task, their technique usually sucks. Therefore I warn you against such an approach.

Instead have full focus and concentration on each individual movement and make sure they connect in a flowing, cyclical way (avoiding the jerky start-stop movements of so many students). Aim at that from the very first time you approach the passage.

Given the intense mental effort this demands, you will not be able to tackle large passages or even hands together straightaway. However, over the years, your unconscious will get programmed for best movements, and at the advance level you will be able to trust your unconscious and intuitions, being able to tackle perhaps a whole piece straightaway with hands together.

However, and I cannot stress this strongly enough, such advice as “use your intuition” is completely useless and counter-productive for a beginner whose “automatic pilot” has not yet been properly programmed.

3.   Having examined, ingrained and memorised the movements and sequence of movements for a given passage, you must now join hands. You want to avoid two extreme and (apparently) contradictory approaches.

a.   Hand dependence – Most beginners use this approach “intuitively”, since their intuition (= unconscious patterns of behaviour) is untrained and therefore crap. This means that they think in terms of “this right hand note is played with this left hand note, then the right hand next two notes go alone, then the left hand next note is alone, then the next two notes in the RH and LH go together”.

As you can tell straightaway, the moment you start thinking on these lines, the movements you so carefully trained are forgotten and replaced by other weird movements that the unconscious is coming up with due to the pressure. The playing becomes excruciatingly slow and a stuttering pattern of hesitations ingrains itself. The more repetitions the more this terrible playing becomes ingrained. Soon you cannot play any other way.

Users of this approach (usually for ignorance of the proper way of joining hands), then go back to hands separate work, and find that they usually can do it well. They go back to hands together, and again everything falls apart. In some cases, after some months of this drudgery something clicks and they can actually play hands together passably well. This reinforces their belief that all you need is “more practice” both with hands separate and hands together. Most people however never get the “click”, the “knack” of playing hands together, except n the simplest rhythms and the easiest pieces: their repertory is forever limited.

b.   Hand independence. As one becomes aware of the limitations of the above approach, one reasons (ah! Logic!) that surely the way to go is to have complete hand independence: if one hand does its job completely and regardless of the job being done by the other hand, and if both hands are right on time, the lines will come beautifully together.

A good way to demonstrate this is to have two people playing the same piece: one plays the RH, the other the LH. Put a metronome on, and ignoring whatever the other person is playing, follow the metronome. If both players are right on time and make no mistakes, we will have a correct rendition of the piece. Now all one has to do is to figure out a way to pretend that each hand belongs to a different person, and there you are! Hand independence.

Just as with the hand dependence approach above, the hand independence approach is fraught with problems – albeit of a different nature – and just like the hand dependence approach, ultimately it does not work. However, after practising this way for a while, something “clicks”, and the player can actually play both hands together “independently”. This reinforces the belief of the person that hand independence is the way to go, and all one needs is more practice – some times months or years.

What both of these approaches are missing – and no one seems to be willing to play attention to it – is the nature of this “click”, of this “knack”. And this is because the shocking truth is that this “click” has nothing to do with your approach to practice. Either hand dependence ideas or hand independence ideas will not make the “click” happen. In fact they will delay the “click” for several months.

We must examine very carefully what is this click that allows one to play hands together at ease, an ease that leads to the impression that both hands are independent, and at the same time makes one hand completely dependent of the other. I call this extraordinary state of affairs “co-ordination”. ( I have heard the term “interdependence”, but I don’t like it, because it seems to favour the idea of hand dependence, which most emphatically is not the case).

If one can truly understand what is going on here, one can easily avoid months of fruitless practice based on mistaken and misguided notions of either hand-independence or hand-dependence, and instead aim one’s practice at “co-ordination”. Anyone who follows the next directions, should be able to play hands together perfectly (and giving the illusion of independence) in a few minutes, rather than a few months.

Being able to do it, however, is no insurance that the person doing it can actually explain it. It is surprisingly high the number of people who can play hands together perfectly and yet insist in defending either a hand-independence approach or alternatively a hand-dependence  approach and use their prowess in playing as the final argument for their preferred wrong notion. On close observation they can all be shown to be doing something quite different from what they preach. They may walk the walk, but they cannot talk the talk.

In order to understand the “click” we must investigate the hand-independence approach a bit further and see why it cannot work.

[to be continued...]

[bernhard]

[...continued from previous post]

4.   Let us assume that you have learned each hand separately to perfection (an always necessary first step). This means above all that you have paid attention to and memorised every single movement and movement sequence to negotiate the passage (when the forearm must rotate, when you must move the hand forward and backwards to accommodate the different finger lengths, how much to move the arm to place the fingers in position, how to transfer the weight in order to depress the keys, how to transfer fulcrums from knuckles to wrists to elbows and so on) for each hand.

Even if these movements and movement sequences have been practised to the point where they have become unconscious, the moment you try to join hands it will fall apart. Why? Partly because of sympathetic movement between the hands, that is, each hand wants to do what the other is doing. When this happens, the conscious mind being too limited to keep track of everything transfer control to the unconscious mind. The unconscious mind looks for movement patterns but not for the movements you have practised with each hand separately, since these are stored under “separate hands”.

Instead it looks at the “hands together” memory. In there, it will not find anything that relates to this specific passage, since you have never practised this passage with hands together, just with hands separate.

As a consequence it picks up whatever movement pattern it can find there. And then all of a sudden you find yourself playing the passage you practised so much with hands separate, with movements completely different (and inappropriate for the passage in question) from the ones you practised. Fingers tie themselves in knots, wrong notes appear in the easiest spots, and your memory fails you totally. It is as if you had never seen the passage before (and in a sense you haven't).

At this point some people will argue that this being the case, one should practise hands together straightaway in order to create a “hands-together” memory, and dismiss hands separate practice as a waste of time, since we cannot resort to it when joining hands. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Hands separate practice is essential to figure out the movements and movement patterns (which include fingering).

The other problem with the hand independence approach is that memorising hands separate will not help you playing hands together from memory. All you have to do is try. After you totally memorised hands separate, if you try to play hands together by relying on your memory of each hand you find yourself experiencing a most unsettling blank. You simply cannot remember a single note of each hand, which a second ago you knew perfectly well, the moment you start playing them together.

So, how can one deal with these two problems: sympathetic movement and loss of memory (or more accurately, lack of memory)?

5.   The key word is cueing.

Remember when you played this passage RH with another person playing LH? How did you know when to play your notes? You used a metronome, right? By following the metronome and ignoring what the other person was playing, you managed, both of you, to play the piece correctly (albeit not very musically).

The metronome was the cue for your movements. The metronome was good because it was regular and had a single pitch, and in this way you were not confused by the other person’s part, which had rhythmic and melodic variety. However, if you want a truly musical rendition of the passage, at some point you must start getting your cues not from the metronome, but from your partner’s sound.

So now, your aim is radically different. You do not want to play in a dependent way from your partner, and you do not want your playing to be independent of his. Your aim now is to get cues from his playing that will inform your playing. In short, you want to be co-ordinated.

Once you understand this, it is easy to show that the “click” is simply that your unconscious after months of trying, finally picked up an usable system of cues by trial and error (more error than anything, really).

This time can be decreased substantially if you know what you are after from the very beginning: you are after a system of cues. It should be also obvious that such a "cue pursuit" can only be undertaken after you know each hand separately to perfection, otherwise you will be creating all sorts of wrong cues – more about that in a moment.

6.   So, how exactly are you going to create a system of cues between the movements of each hand, so that the movement of one hand cues the other hand to move in its appropriate way? This can be easily demonstrated but it is almost impossible to write about. However I trust your intelligence and now that I have pointed the way, you should be able to follow it. Here is an example that may help:

If you imagine that your hands are connected by strings, the moment the left hand press down the key, it causes the right hand to rotate (say). I hasten to add that the hands are not in a state of dependence. Rather their movements are “cued”, not caused.

By the time you master the passage hands together (after 15 – 20 minutes), the movements of each hand will have been weaved in a co-ordinated pattern so strong as to be virtually indestructible. Think about strings braided together: the braid in incommensurately stronger than the 3 strings together. They are “independent” in the sense that they have not melted or glued together: they can still be separated, but they are inextricably linked and woven together.

The most important point that I can make at this juncture, is that whenever you join hands you will be creating cues. You will be braiding the strands of string. However if you do it unconsciously (= intuitively) chances are that you are going to have all sorts of inappropriate cues and your plat will look a mess. And it is this pattern of cues that we call hand memory. Once it is in place, that is pretty much it. If it is wrongly weaved, it is going to give you trouble for the rest of your life.

7.   Therefore you must put a lot of care and conscious effort on two very different levels:

a.   Hands separate: Here you are going to investigate and select the best movements (including fingering).

b.   Hands together: here you are going to make the movements of one hand cue the movements of the other hand, so that they are independent yet co-ordinated.

You must not confuse these two stages, nor think that you can save time by cutting corners. You cannot, at least not at the beginning. After a couple of years of serious work of this kind, you will have developed an intuition that will allow you to tackle certain passages hands together straightaway. But if you are experiencing any problems with fingering/movement you must master hands separately first, since doing hands together straightaway will just build up an inappropriate system of cues that will weave bad movements forever in your hand memory. Playing hands together slowly will not replace hand separate work , unless you are an advnaced pianist with a large repertory of unconsicous (and correct) techniqeus at your disposal. In fact, for a beginner, playing hands together slowly will be a disaster, since s/he will probably be unaware of the difference between playing slowly and playing in slow motion, and will create a totally inappropriate (and permanent) hand memory for the passage.

This means that a beginner may have to learn every single passage in his piece with hands separate first, an intermediate student may need to do hands separate only in a few bars, while and advanced student may get away with doing hands together straightaway in many pieces.

8.   Finally, how do you actually go about creating cues between the movements of both hands? Use “dropping-notes” and “repeated note groups”, and you will get there. Always. It will be even quicker now that you are aware that this is what you are actually doing. I have described these many times already. Have a look here:

https://pianoforum.net/smf/index.php/topic,1651.msg14344.html#msg14344
(How to gain hand independence – dropping notes)

https://pianoforum.net/smf/index.php/topic,4858.msg46087.html#msg46087
(HS x HT – Example: Lecuona’s malaguena – 7x20 – need to adjust and adapt – repeated note-groups – importance of HS – hand memory – 7 items only in consciousness – playing in automatic pilot - )


9.   As for actual exercises, there is no need. Just apply the concepts above to your pieces. The music style that recquires the most complex sort of cueing, is of course counterpoint music. So most Baroque music (and especially J. S. Bach) is ideal for stretching your capabilities in this area. Polyrhtyhms (3X2, 3x4, etc) are also challenging, but really any piece that requires different movements in both hands will do.

Best wishes,
Bernhard.

[whynot]

By dropping a note (I read the link), do you mean leave it out, or drop as in drop your hand on it and play it?     

[bernhard]

By dropping a note (I read the link), do you mean leave it out, or drop as in drop your hand on it and play it?     

I mean play it.