Mind, Thinking, and the Body:

How Misalinged Perception Resolves Technical Difficulitz in Piano Playing

In today’s lesson, while teaching

by clearly putting my thoughts into words,

I noticed that my own learning

began to clarify and settle.

There was a passage the student found difficult.

“The right hand feels hard to play,” he said.

From my own experience,

I’ve learned that the right hand

is often the clumsier one.

But from what I observed,

the hand that wasn’t actually reaching the keys

was the left.

And the right hand was being pulled along with it.

Looking more closely,

observing and analyzing,

I realized he was missing the places

where the leap was actually smaller.

Ah,

in his mind, the distance felt much wider,

so what his body was doing

didn’t match what he was thinking.

We went through the music,

checking one by one which keys needed to be played.

Then I asked him to play it

while thinking that the leap was smaller

than he thought.

And it worked.

There were also a few places in the right hand

where he never quite landed on the keys properly.

There too,

the distance was smaller than he had thought.

Another spot.

A fast passage

with octaves in between.

It appeared to me that he was trying to play it with the fingers alone,

without involving the rest of the arm,

which is probably why he said it felt difficult.

We worked with the movement of the hand as a whole,

but it still didn’t quite click.

The thumb was not releasing,

so the hand had no choice but to jump away from the keys

to move to the next one.

and because of that,

the flow of movement broke

and stopped for a brief moment.

“Have you ever tried a trampoline?”

The higher you jump,

the more deeply you sink

when you come back down, right?

That feeling.

These octaves are like that.

And the next two notes.

Just think of touching them.

Oh.

That worked.

The body is amazing.

When thinking and movement align,

things resolve themselves.

Because I was able to articulate this clearly

and put it into words in a way that worked,

I can feel that the learning

is beginning to settle.

Maybe I can do this myself too.

Alright,

time to practice.