I believe that the development of critical listening and body awareness skills are as crucial for good technique as fast fingers are.  Since musicians of all ages and abilities can only play what they hear, I wonder if the greatest technical skill we teach isn’t critical listening skills.  We constantly must ask our students questions to help them focus their listening: What do you hear?  Are the notes sounding exactly together?  Are the hands producing the same kinds of sounds and articulations?  Is one hand louder or softer than the other?  And then we must ask the follow-up questions:  How can we adjust that?  Change the sound?  Sharpen the articulations?  Correct the balance?  A great deal has been written about how to play the piano, outlining details regarding the instrument’s mechanisms and the physiology of the movements required to produce good sound and technique.  But even with my advanced training and understanding, my eyes often glaze over at such discussions.  In my mind the important questions are:  What do you hear?  Do you like it?  How can you fix it?

While scholarly discourses have their place, the truth is every body is different and the physical gestures that may be comfortable for one player may not work for another.  Glenn Gould’s low-slung posture would kill my back, but I envy the sound he produced.  In my own teaching, I encourage students to listen to their bodies, to observe tension and stress, and to make adjustments accordingly.  When it comes to hand position, I look to help construct a hand position that is strong and firm and makes sense to each individual’s physiology, rather than prescribing my movements and gestures for every student.  I watch for wrists that are neither too high nor too low, and fingers that do not collapse at the joints.  I teach students to find space under their hands:  “Can you fill up a hot-air balloon under your hand?”  I heard one smart teacher ask her students.  I challenge students to sense where they are in space:  to sit ever taller and wider and check to see where they are holding their feet. 

Of course, this approach demands a great deal from a teacher.  I can’t listen hard enough or carefully enough—both to my own playing and to the playing of my students.  If I am to guide them to sharper listening skills, then I have to hear everything myself.  Additionally, I can’t expose myself to enough body awareness and movement techniques.  These days my yoga practice regularly reminds me how my body moves, and what bad habits I carry with me.  Every class, my yoga teacher reminds me to really straighten my arms, lengthen my back, and to keep following my breath.  It doesn't seem to matter how long I practice yoga, or how many classes I have attended over the years, I still need these reminders.  My students are no different.   Our lazy American culture doesn't affirm good posture or much body awareness.  We all need gentle (and perhaps not so gentle) reminders to pay attention.  

I don’t have the definitive answers for precisely how each technique should be accomplished at the piano, but when reading (often conflicting!) discourses on physical movements, over and over again I find myself thinking, Why, that isn’t my experience at all.  So instead of imposing a uniform set of physical gestures on all my students, I encourage students of all ages to discover their own experiences and their own set of physical sensations at the keyboard.  Ultimately, I think piano technique is not a standardized or unified set of movements at the keyboard, but rather that the combination of good critical listening skills and attention to the body informs our technique. 

Much to my surprise and delight, requiring more from students’ listening skills and making them own and develop their physical gestures creates wonderfully diverse and individual playing.  In the end, I do not want to foster generically good piano technique, but to draw out each student’s personality and character.  Little seven year-old Lucy should sound exactly like Lucy, while 47 year-old Camille should sound, not like every other adult beginner, but specifically like herself. 

Technique practice can provide the space to ask critical questions of listening and body awareness.  What kind of sound are we making?  What kind of sound do we want?  Are the hands curved?  Do the finger joints collapse?  Where is your head in relationship to your neck?  Is it tilted to one side or bent over forward?  Are we holding tension in our legs?  If we don’t like what we hear, how can we adjust?

Earlier we introduced the idea of playing the intervals of a third in a variation, but playing the intervals together requires more careful listening and attention.  The next variations are much easier if students play the thirds staccato, listening that the two notes sound exactly together.  As Chopin's etude in thirds reminds us, the fine motor skills necessary to play third patterns legato are much more advanced, and done without great care could contribute to hand and wrist problems.   I assume that legato thirds are primarily suitable for more mature or developed hands and minds, and even then I teach them cautiously.  Watch for those shoulders that can creep up to our ears without our awareness in these two variations.  By now students should be able to move freely between major and minor keys, so take your pick.

 65.  Do/Mi--Re/Fa--Mi/Sol--Fa/Re--Mi/Do

This is simply thirds marching up the pattern and back down.  Slow is good.

66.  Do/Mi--Re/Fa--Mi/Sol  (Repeat)

--Sol/Mi--Fa/Re--Mi/Do (Repeat)

I like repeating each half of the pattern, as indicated.  

This forces one to get out of the keys a bit to reset the next pattern, which helps release built-up tension and works against getting "stuck" or tight.