Piano Habits
We have habits in all areas of our life, including our piano playing. Some habits can be helpful to us and others can prevent us from moving freely. Alexander Technique gives us an opportunity to release habits that don’t serve us well, which is how F.M. Alexander formed his technique.
Alexander suffered from vocal hoarseness when trying to perform recitation as an actor. Vocal rest only gave him temporary relief, and he’d lose his voice again when he returned to performing. He decided that he was doing something while performing that was causing his problems.
In order to find out, he placed several mirrors nearby and watched himself recite. During that process, he uncovered certain habits that had been unknown to him–like raising his chin and pulling the back of his head down when speaking a line.
He began a process of unraveling his habits. When he saw himself make an unwanted movement, he’d try to prevent himself from doing that. At a certain point, he felt ready to add in “doing” instead of just “non-doing”
But when Alexander first tried to combine the prevention of an unhealthy habit with the addition of an action that would be helpful to him, he failed miserably. It was a long road to unravel his habits--it took him 13 years to come up with the technique that we study today!
When I reread Alexander’s Use of the Self recently and got to this point in the book, I was reminded of what it’s like to first play hands together in a piece of piano music. We can practice with our right hand and get it working just fine, and we can do the same with the left hand. When we try to play them together, often disaster ensues.
We’re always making some kind of gesture at the piano, and when we combine right and left hand, we have to combine the gestures. That’s where the difficulty lies.
When things are difficult, we’re bound to revert back to old habits. That’s what Alexander found when he tried to combine non-doing with doing, and it happens to pianists when we make our first attempts to play hands together. We haven’t yet coordinated the gestures between right and left hand, and our body will just find some old way to make it work. When that happens, neither gesture works the way we had intended.
This happens to pianists at every level, so it’s something that we and our students face. Thankfully, Alexander Technique offers us tools to cope with this issue.
When we focus on a gesture, it really helps to have the larger muscle groups involved. So when we're initiating arm movement, if we can connect that all the way to the back, it will be more reliable. The following practice will help you learn to integrate arm weight into the back:
Once you’ve become comfortable integrating arm weight into the back, you’ll want to connect from the back to the fingers. The following exercise will help you do that. You can practice both exercises on your own and then introduce them to your students.
When we first play hands together, our focus often shifts to the notes. When we do that, the gesture that we need isn’t available to help us. It’s as if we cut off the support of our larger muscle groups, and we start relying on our hands to do all the work.
Rather than focus on the notes, it can be helpful to coordinate gestures first. That might mean that we don’t even play right away. Alexander did something similar during his experiments. When it came time to recite a line, he’d either choose not to speak the line, choose to make some movement like lifting his hand, or choose to recite the line. This method prevented his habit from taking over.
Try sitting at the piano and thinking of how the arms (which you’re feeling connected to the back) are going to move. Then make the gestures without playing the notes, keeping the hands in the approximate range where they’ll need to play. Let the hands lead the way when making the gesture, but the movement needs to be connected through the arms all the way to the back.
Finally make the gestures while playing, and give yourself permission to miss notes. In other words, get the gestures first, and allow the notes to follow. You already know them since you’ve practiced them hands separately, so allow the gestures to help you get to them, instead of trying hard to coordinate notes between the hands.
At this point, you might be able to get more specific about the notes and fine tune things a bit, making sure that the gestures you practiced are intact.
I’ve always found that my playing flows more freely when I rely on larger muscle groups. In my experience, they seem to function better under performance anxiety. When our fingers might lose their way, the gestures are there to support us.
If you’re open to trying this idea, let me know how it goes for you in the comments below!
And if you’d like to learn more ways to incorporate Alexander Technique into your piano teaching, download this free PDF. You can also head over to the Workshops page to sign up for our next Alexander Technique class for piano teachers.