The 5 Basic Motions of Piano Technique

Hi, I'm Dr. Marianne Lee and I come from St Amber's College in Davenport, Iowa. If you clicked on this video, you're probably interested in the five

basic

moves of

piano

technique

and I learned these five

basic

moves from my teacher. . at the Juilliard School in New York City he was my first

piano

teacher there and I studied with him for four years to get my bachelor's degree. His name is Yorgi Shandor, he is a Hungarian pianist and in the United States they like to call him George Shandor and I. I learned a lot of valuable lessons from him, particularly because a couple of years earlier he had just published a new book on piano

technique

, so he talked extensively about these techniques and these movements, these technical patterns in my lessons that I would like to share with you.

They are concepts that I have had throughout my life and I have avoided injuries thanks to them, so I wanted to share them with you and then also dedicate this video to his memory and his teaching legacy that I remember in our lessons and everywhere. gave master classes always emphasized the point that the muscles in the piano play our work interdependently and not independently and that it was useless to try to develop muscles in the fingers and all those tortuous finger exercises that the pianists you know had to endure in classical music and Romantic period, not all of them of course, but some of them were, he felt they were kind of feudal, so he told us that they worked independently so that the finger was attached to the hand that is attached to the wrist, which is attached to the forearm which is attached to the upper arm which is attached to the back of the shoulders and then to the back and then to the chest and to the diaphragm and it all started with the diaphragm or breathing which to this day I really appreciate that he understood how important breathing was to play the piano and also emphasizes that it is important to understand the range of motion that each part of your body is capable of performing so that with the finger the finger can go up and lower and the hands can go up and down. and move from side to side with the help of the wrist, the forearm can go up and down and from side to side also with the help of the elbow and of course rotation and then the upper arm can go up and down and with the help of The elbow and shoulder can go from side to side and I'm going to add to this, my own personal opinions, that we can extend it to the lower part of our body, which includes the butt, legs and feet, so um, uh. if you want to reach, especially if you want to reach the extreme sides of the piano, to the far right or to the left, Sean already said to extend your leg to the right to help you center and balance, and I would add that you know, shift your weight towards the right buttock so that you always feel centered and strong, try to avoid moving your butt down one way or another and the same with the left side, you know, take your left foot out and reach comfortably towards the left end and a very good tip is when you are playing, but if both hands have to go towards the end, lean your back and then if you need to play a lot in the center. lean back so you don't squeeze the space here and give your arms, forearms and elbows room to move so I think we're ready to start learning our five basic moves so the first move is free fall.

The general idea of ​​free fall is that it comes from lifting your upper arm and gravity does the rest of the work, you just drop your arm and that's what makes the sound, so I like to use a ball to demonstrate this idea of ​​free fall. Falling and how natural it is, when I throw the ball in the air, that is equivalent to raising my upper arm and then you will see that gravity brings the ball down and then what is very important is to notice the rebound that occurs after the push. of the Fall makes the ball go back up naturally and then I want you to pay attention to the sound it creates, here we go and as you saw the energy was enough to make the ball come all the way back and the sound was actually significant so imagine the weight of your entire arm doing that, so Chander presents some simple exercises that you can do with just single notes and then you can do them with double notes, strings and octaves and now it's completely effortless because you're using gravity, you can't rush the gravity at that moment, it becomes a different movement, so it takes time to fall, so you know you would use these in musical passages where, at slower tempos to moderate tempos, so I would like to show some musical excerpts where they actually you would use free fall, so go ahead and focus on my left hand.

I'm going to use the Chopin Sonata in B flat minor in the opening so you get a really nice big round sound and you know the gravity. I did all the work, so here's an example, a second example from Chopin, the opening of the Third Sonata. You can see that you can get a tremendous amount of loudness and you know, it barely felt effortless because I was being very efficient with my movements and I could feel my torso and my breathing and then I was making those horizontal adjustments that I was telling you about with the body. and it felt great, so it's free fall, our second movement is the five finger scale and the arpeggio Shondor really believed in alignment.

I felt like the finger always needs to line up with your wrist and your forearm, so whether it's your thumb, third finger, or fifth finger, you should be able to draw a straight line from your finger to your forearm, which is a good alignment, okay. , and so I do. I'm going to show you the horizontal adjustments that occur when you play from finger to finger, from the first finger to the pinky and back again. Notice I'm going to put the second finger of my left hand here and now just watch the wrist move. As I play from second third fourth fifth do you see that the distance that he traveled is not small and back, so those micro adjustments are really important so that the hand feels balanced and um and that's why it's very important not to play in a fixed position um and here it is on the foreign left hand in addition to the horizontal adjustment there is a vertical adjustment very at a microscopic level so you know our finger our fingers the thumb and the little finger are our shortest fingers on the right and then we have these longer fingers in the middle , so we have to help these poor little guys out, and if you look at the shape of the hand, you know that the thumb is quite low compared to the rest of the fingers, that's why the thumb likes to stay down now I'm going to point with my other hand where the wrist is now notice how microscopically it is when I play second third fourth fifth how much the wrist has gone up to help the pinky and on the way down I miss so when when playing scales, we use that horizontal and vertical adjustment, so notice how when I play a simple C major scale, I start with a drop and rise and as I go each time the thumb falls from my hand. go down and then when you get to the bottom of your scale as you head towards the center it's pretty easy you just stick your elbow out and bring your back closer so you know.

I was thinking, why is that for One Direction? You have to move and go up and down a lot and then in the other direction you don't have to move as much and I realize that's because you know that towards this part of the right hand you're running out of fingers to play. and you need the thumb again, so the thumb has to jump over all these other fingers to be able to continue, so I suggest that when you're getting to the end of a group, you go to that finger right before. the thumb is very important to give that thumb a boost, bam, so that it can easily move to the next group horizontally and of course it is very important that the thumb actually moves up and down and is active for the left side .

On the opposite side, you know, when you go to the center, you just like, on the right, when you go to the center, you just stick your elbow out, so on the left side you do the same thing, you stick your elbow out and the reason why again it is like that. easy is because when you play it with your thumb you know it can go to the next note and it's much closer to the thumb so it doesn't have to work as hard as you move it up and down, but when you go in that direction again, you need the thumb to be low.

Going up and down makes sense because the thumb is further away from the other fingers and has more to travel, so we have to help it. um, in music, there's one thing I need to mention, except that the rule of thumb is at its lowest point and Pinky is at its highest point, is the idea of ​​when you have a real phrase when you have a real phrase while I'll look at the beginning of sentence rule below where you blurt out, you will always be the shortest at the beginning of a sentence and the tallest at the end of a sentence.

Here's another longer one, look when I have two sets of notes down, up, down, so it's a pinky, normally it would be high, but because it's at the beginning of the phrase, I go down and lift up down and the last example down, up, down, down, down, okay, um, same thing is the same concept for the scale with the arpeggio, except with the arpeggio, the notes are further apart, so I go down, I get up and I reach further to travel and again I bring out the elbow, I would say because the notes are further apart, you have further to travel the elbow and the shoulders are really important when playing arpeggios because you need to cover more terrain horizontally, so I have some musical examples.

You can see the score below. This is from the first movement number two of Beethoven's Sonata Opus 2 after the staccato notes. You can see the phrase with. all the notes run like a scale down in the same direction, that's how you know to use five fingers abroad, another example, so sometimes the technical phrase is different and sometimes it's not marked, um, but if you see, for For example, in Chopini to Opus 10 number four if you see groups of four notes in a row like this, that's when you know you have the five finger grouping movement so you can see the up and down arrows and in the score you can see the dotted technical phrasing indicating technical phrasing like this and then here is the beginning of a group of four notes and down again up down up down and then it goes into a different movement in the Chopin Etude Opus 10 number one.

You can see that the right hand has these larger arpeggio movements. Here's another example where you have to travel a little further, same idea you see that the dotted notes are grouped every four and then there's this fall and Rise and Fall Again strange that it's a five finger scale and arpeggios our third movement is the rotation, so rotation I love using rotation because it's very easy to Look at the sheet music whenever you see a zigzag of notes rising up and down like this, like in the example below, you know you have rotation in this, so the technical term when you rotate towards your little finger is called supination and when you rotate towards the thumb it is called pronation and don't forget that many people make the mistake of not preparing the rotation, so it is very important before spin lift your finger and get enough momentum, it's like when you shoot. a haboo an arrow you have to pull back on the arrow to move forward or in baseball when you know yeah the ball comes out of your hand here but to throw the baseball you have to pull back and then move forward that's how you get the momentum to go very far, okay, so I have some musical examples here in the uh, this is from Bachwell's tempered clef book two, Prelude 15. um, look at the right hand again, we have that characteristic zigzag, thank you and you know in The In the classical period there was a lot of Alberti base.

Alberti's base is just rotation. One thing I forgot to mention from the beginning is that Shondar always told us to be very aware of white, white keys, Flat, white keys and black keys, and that the black keys are slightly higher than the white and that makes a difference in how you play because you are constantly maneuvering between white and black and adjusting, so I realized when I was making the Alberti base that I always had a black key that I had to adjust slightly and anticipate that change, that slight change that is the same in scales.

When you know, if I'm playing D major, I have to anticipate that key ahead of time and I forgot to mention it before. Oops, a famous example of rotation is Winter Wind Etude, which again has the zigzag movement, so you know you have to do that and then Shandor, actually, if you see he does the technical grouping of every four, so he groups them together. every four notes let me slow down speed up the rotation always also great for playing notes that are far away to jump and make big jumps I saw an interesting video where they had two two I think they were physicists and they were comparing how fast one could travel ball if it was faster to go in a straight line or if it was faster to go in a curve and each time the ball that followed the curve beat the ball that was going in a straight line every time, and it gets to the point where the rotation is really useful if you need to travel long distances and afamous example of that is La Campanella, so I'll scale it down so you can see, I even traveled two octaves. and I use the rotation, I could travel three, I could go four, five, as long as you're, you're throwing the arm and of course the further away it is, the more important the elbow is, um, and you always try to keep the elbow in. the middle and then you make these little micro adjustments, whether it's from the white key to the black key, here's another white that we have to adjust and that's the rotation, our fourth movement is staccato, okay, I love doing staccato because it's like a throwing motion and it's actually the uh the cover of the Sean Doors book has this staccato arm cutting motion and it's like a blur because it's a very fast motion um and it's, I would say, similar to dribbling a ball.

I'm a horrible dribbler, but then the arm throws the upper arm throws the hand the wrist the hand the fingers and everything goes simultaneously Then the movement begins it begins with a lift of the upper arm very similar to free fall, but The difference is in the free fall. I drop the ball, I drop my arm but in staccato, you're doing a throwing motion, it's a very active motion and so look what happens when I feel it, my hand bounces back. I didn't do anything and it's an instant bounce, unlike Free Fall which remembers that you fell and then there was a bounce, but it was slower, it came after the staccato action is immediate and because you're actively throwing down, you are generating a lot of speed and when you generate a lot of speed, you get a loud sound, so he gives you some simple exercises, you can do double notes. and octaves.

I have a musical example below from Beethoven's Piano Sonata, so you know it's in Beethoven asking for piano, so I'm using a little bit more like wrist and fingers choppy and then added and oh Free Fall, but um and it's very It's easy to see in the musical score because obviously there are staccato markings there, it's not always like that, but a lot of times it's um and I really um and then there's also um, you can use Arm staccato to play large octave passages, here's a example. from the foreign Tchaikovsky piano concerto all the arm in the staccato arm that you can get you can generate a lot of speed and a lot of sound and that is the key to playing fast octave passages and strong passages, especially in concertos, you can also do fast legato legato passages as in Chopin's famous Etude Opus 25 Number 10.

So here these staccatos are octosticatos. I'm doing it but I stay so close. I stay so close to the keys that my fingers remain afterwards and then I notice everything. the arrows you have up for black Down keys for white up down and that's staccato so the push is our last and final move is move number five and it's by far my favorite because you can generate a tremendous amount of sound um because they're facilitating all the largest muscles in your body and you're, um, you start unlike free fall and staccato, you're actually starting with the keys from the keys and then very quickly you contract your muscles and quickly release them. after the strange, if I had to prove it. this with my ball, notice the difference compared to free fall and staccato, how much bounce is generated once I throw the ball down and that happens because I am incorporating my entire body into that movement, that quick movement and releasing it right after , so when I teach this to my kids, I usually have them go against the wall and I have them do wall push-ups, okay, but I have them push really fast and if they don't, they go. being thrown in the opposite direction, I know that they are not letting go completely and they are not free, if they are doing this, you know, and their body is not coming back completely, then you are inhibited, so you have to let go. you know like the song Let It Go says um and then I have them put their fingers on the wall and then also push okay and then we transfer it to the real piano and if you add petals of course the sound the sound really sounds and it's wonderful um and very fun it's good for extended strings to make big sounds uh in a musical example that I like is Chopin's Prelude in C minor thank you or Tchaikovsky the opening of the Tchaikovsky concerto amazing about that's because you generate so much impulse that when you go to look, when I go to the next chord, there I don't make a separate movement to go from here and then move, I just release it, I'm there and now I look, I have to Come on, I have to travel five octaves down because I need very active fingers to participate, so, and that's why I enjoy doing it because it's easy and you get a huge amount of sound and stuff. is driven so now let's use all our tools and see how we can apply it to our musical scores so you'll see an example of Opus 10 number four and if you just look at the score you'll see it on the right hand that we discussed uses five fingers and look here you see there's rotation because you see the zigzag and then the five finger arpeggio really because the notes are so far away while the left hand is doing uh what is it doing?

I guess you can free fall and and you know the five fingers and then you have choppy motion, even choppy arpeggio, so you can put it all together, so I didn't even need to play that for you, you could have deduced it just by looking at the music. Another example we have is the pathetic Sonata that we have and you can see right away in the left hand you would use rotation because you have that zigzag movement and the right hand doesn't do much so you have free fall and then I got staccato so notice the difference that the staccato it has the short staccato markings and the free fall are the half notes on the next line that you've pushed because you've got these meaty strings so it's really fun to pick up a sheet of music now and start identifying these movements and it's very easy to do and it has a lot of sense and it helps you solve technical problems if you are having difficulties because it gives you tools to analyze and dissect things and it is also a lot of fun.

I would like to thank you for watching this video. If you like this video, I hope you tell people about it and share it. I hope you like it and if you have any comments for me, please leave them and if you have any. questions, I will try to answer them. I would like to especially thank St Ambrose University and the Becky Endowment for Humanities scholarship for allowing me to record this video, giving me the funding to record it, and my great team at Top Notch for helping me prepare this video for you. I had so many wonderful lessons with Shandor and that is why I am happy to now be able to share all this wealth of information with all of you.

I hope you enjoyed it, thank you. to see