What Every Pianist Needs to Know About the Body

I bought this book recently because I wanted to learn how to stay relaxed and produce a beautiful tone, and also because I wanted to fix things like shoulder stiffness and lower back pain while playing. Reading the book did not magically solve those problems, but while reading and practicing I noticed several things that felt worth writing down.

The way I use the book is to read the chapter related to whatever body movement is not working well in practice. The book analyzes how the body can be used effectively for piano playing from an anatomical point of view and offers practical hints.

Wrist rotation

If you play only with the fingers, the sound can become monotonous. If you play more flexibly and softly, as if rotating the wrist, each note gains smoother dynamic nuance and the result sounds much more beautiful.

When I watch my teacher play, I can actually see a subtle circular motion in the wrist that follows the melody.

The important point is that the scapula, upper arm, forearm, wrist, and hand are all linked together. Of course you can try to rotate the wrist softly by itself, but it tends to feel awkward. The better mental image is to think about rotational movement from the elbow. Because the elbow is connected to the wrist, rotating from the elbow naturally makes the wrist rotate more flexibly.

It gets more cramped as the fingers stop being parallel to the keyboard

When the hand is playing notes near the center of the body, or when it plays several notes including black keys directly in front of the body, the fingers can stop being parallel to the keyboard. It becomes a posture where the thumb and wrist form a straight line.

If you stay in a thumb-led position, the hand feels cramped and harder to use. You can feel the strain in the back of the hand, the shoulder, and the arm if you actually line up the thumb and hand in front of the body.

In that situation, shifting to a pinky-led position so that the fingers become parallel to the keyboard makes the passage easier to play.

How to play chords

When playing chords, if you try to move the fingers themselves, they tend to spread apart. It works better if you imagine moving the lower side of the back of the hand as a unit. That makes it easier to play without the fingers separating.

What struck me most is that during practice, it is important to keep asking yourself why something is not working.