I was watching a You Tube video the other day and it featured this woman starting to play the beginning of Beethoven’s Fur Elise, which you might not be familiar with the name, but you would have definitely heard it before. I could tell that this woman had only been playing the piano for a short time merely from the sound she was producing (when you’ve been teaching some years, you can definitely hear the difference).
After the video had finished, I listened to it again, this time giving it my full attention and I noticed immediately what I have seen hundreds of times before – that as she was playing the notes, her hand was rocking in a forward and backwards motion as she was alternating between the white key and the black key. This motion was indeed necessary at the time because she was playing with completely flat hands and flat fingers, instead of having her hands gently curved and using the tips of her fingers. If she had used a curved hand and played the notes with the tips of her fingers, then the rocking motion with her hand would have been completely unnecessary.
If you use flat fingers and therefore need to rock your hand to play the notes, the sound you produce can sound “clunky” rather than achieving the nice smooth sound you are aiming for. When I am teaching, I refer to this as needing the concept of what I call the concept of minimal movement.
Minimal movement really means that you keep your hands, wrists and arms as steady as possible and only move them when absolutely necessary. What also helps with keeping hands, wrists and arms steady and only moving when needed is to keep fingers curved and pressing the notes with the very tips of your fingers, not the pads of your fingers where your fingerprints are. If you can keep your fingers gently rounded, then you will be using minimal movement with your fingers as well.
There are two main benefits for using the concept of minimal movement. The first benefit is your chances of playing the wrong note or notes is statistically reduced, simply because the closer your finger is to the note that you intend to play, the less chance you have of accidentally playing the wrong note. If you think about this, it is actually obvious – if you go to play a note with your finger starting to move from 1cm away, your accuracy is much better than if your finger was starting to move to play the note from 5cm away.
The other main benefit is that your music will sound smoother and more cohesive. This is just a natural by-product of the concept of minimal movement. If you ever see a close up of a professional piano player’s hands you can notice, particularly in fast passages of notes running up or down the piano keyboard that it almost looks like their hands are floating just above the piano keys, while their fingers are doing all the work. I’ve often thought these professional musicians’ hands look reminiscent of crabs running over rocks and sand. If you try to minimize the movement in your hands, you will produce a better, more cohesive sound.
I challenge you to try this for yourself and see whether it makes a significant change to the quality of the sound that you produce. I’m confident that you will be pleasantly surprised at how much better you sound.