Piano Technique
Most of us develop good piano technique by trial and error over many years. Dr. John Mortensen, a professor of piano at Cedarville University, says any pianist can acquire good piano technique right from the start using the Four Pillars Of Piano Technique (video). Dr. Mortensen is quick to point out these are not the only way to approach piano technique, but one that he has found most useful in his decades of piano teaching experience.
The Four Pillars
Dr. Mortensen has prepared a YouTube playlist of videos about the Four Pillars Of Piano Technique totalling over 1h30 minutes of content. For those short on time, PianoTV’s Allysia Kerney has made a condensed 20 minutes video about Dr. Mortensen’s Four Pillars.
The four pillars are:
Structure — Keeping the hand position to its most natural form, and not flat as suggested in the past.
Centering — Aligning the hands, arms and body with the notes to be played to maximize power, precision and control. Also known as “avoiding awkward positions”.
Rotation — Using wrist rotation to play notes without flexing the fingers, thereby reducing effort.
Grouping And Surfacing — Knowing when to keep the hands on and off the piano.
In the next few paragraphs, we’ll explore each pillar in detail. These are mostly written notes from Dr. John Mortensen videos.
Structure
Figure 1 — Collapsed, Flat and Hanging hand positions.
Figure 1. shows the 3 main wrong ways people usually approach the keyboard: collapsed knuckles, flat and hanging down.
Collapsed knuckles — bridge of the knuckle is collapsed and wrist up high.
Flat — Hand is kept flat and fingers are expected to go down individually like pistons.
Hanging Down — Hands hanging down over the front rail of the keyboard.
Figure 2 — Arched Hand Position
Figure 2. shows the most helpful way to approach the piano by using the natural arch structure of the hand. If you let your arm dangle down at your side, shake it around and relax, you’ll see that your hand will naturally go back to that shape. The flat hand requires muscular effort even to make it flat. If you flat it out and relax, it will go back back to the natural arch shape. This is it’s happy place. The reason this shape is actually very effective at the piano is that it has this build-in arch shape like an arched bridge. The task of piano playing involves applying force to the keyboard — you have to bring keys down. So force have to pass through the hand. Now, if we have an arch shape, we can pass force through our hand more effectively but any of these other shapes are far less effective.
Centering
Figure 3 — Playing A Note Using Centering
Figure 3. shows the entering of the body. Centering is the idea that as I play, I need to be centred with my forearm and my hand and my finger on the task that I’m doing at the time. The farther off-center I get, the weaker and awkward I will become. Many students and teachers don’t understand this idea and instead use a mistaken idea that actually leads to many problem — It’s an idea I call “hovering”. What they do is the make the forearm and hand hover in the air above the piano and they send their fingers down to hit the notes. Notice the tension in the hand. That’s because the fingers are not made to move independently of the hand. They’re not separate and they all move together. If instead I play my first note, not only with my thumb, but I let my entire hand and arm go off in that direction. And then, as it’s time to play my next note. Before the finger plays, I go over there and I take my finger there and I center.
Rotation
Figure 4 — Playing a Note Using Hand Rotation
As shown in Figure 4., rotation is a physical motion of the arm — sometime referred as “forearm rotation”.
A couple of things to notice about this motion:
It actually raises and lowers the fingers.
The center of the hand is around finger no 2 (pointing finger).
The best example is doing the famous “Alberti bass” chord pattern, often found in Mozart’s music. Isolation will give you problems and rotation will help you. Another point: in music, notes are always alternating between strong and weak. That means that we need a way to alternate between strong and weak. Rotation is perfect for this because it allows us to put the emphasis on one side of the rotation over the other. For the Alberti bass (1-5-3-5) pattern, accent can be put on either side of the pattern. Another advantage is that rotation is reversible, so the accent can be on the first or last note.
Grouping And Surfacing
Figure 5 — Playing Using Grouping And Surfacing
As shown in Figure 5., Grouping And Surfacing is the organization of passage work into groups of notes where you stay in contact with the piano and then let go in between those groups of notes. Effective planning of grouping and surfacing makes extended passage work very manageable. It turns it into small chunks of notes that can be done with a natural strong memorable gesture rather than endless series of notes that wear you out. So grouping and surfacing is the process of organizing those long passages into manageable groups of notes. Staying in contact with the keyboard for a group of notes, deliberately letting go and then entering another group of notes in the next group. Scales and arpeggios are almost entirely made of groups. Any large leap will require you to let go of the keyboard anyway.
Practicin’s Take
Piano technique could be summed up as using the human body’s natural motion to bring a piece of music to life. Practicin’s Technique exercise category shows hand previews positions that follow the Four Pillars Of Piano Technique. Whenever possible, the static and animated hands will show positions and motion that are the most ergonomic and logical for the notes to be played.