Relax
At the end of last month’s column, I said that next time I would talk about relaxation, hand position, and posture, and would begin to address the business of teaching experienced pianists to play organ or harpsichord. Let’s start by discussing the latter of these, then the extraordinary or even transcendent importance of relaxation, a little bit about its relation to posture and hand position, and the role that the concept of relaxation can play in teaching.
Among the students who come to us, those who are already experienced pianists but not organists or harpsichordists present special opportunities. This is made clear by the question that a new student of this sort will almost always ask at the first lesson: “Is it a good thing or a bad thing that I already play piano?” The answer is “both.” The good part, of course, is the skill and experience in choosing fingerings, in practicing, and in just plain playing note patterns at the keyboard. This is a tremendous leg up, and can save a vast amount of time and work. The bad part is made up of any technical habits that are proper to the piano but unsuitable for the organ or the harpsichord. These usually have to do with weight or force, or with playing too far into the keys, but may also include over-reliance on the damper pedal or an approach to articulation that does not translate well from piano to other keyboard instruments, or various listening habits that, if unaltered, can limit a player’s ability to use organ or harpsichord sound expressively. These problems can, in theory, form a tremendous set of obstacles that would indeed negate the advantages from the student’s pre-existing keyboard facility.
Often, out of an understandable desire to not neglect the artistic in favor of the crassly practical, pianists who come for organ or harpsichord lessons will exaggerate in their own minds the obstacles or problems created by their piano-oriented technique and feel reluctant to embrace the advantages that their keyboard training gives them. Many students start out with an almost morbid fear of sounding like “a pianist trying to play the organ” rather than “an organist.” The good news is that it is actually quite easy to overcome all of these disadvantages and to reap the full benefit of any basically sound keyboard training. The key to doing this efficiently and indeed easily is relaxation.
This relaxation is essentially physical: that is, the complete absence of tension in all of the muscles, tendons, etc. that are directly involved in playing, the substantial absence of tension in the rest of the body, and the assumption of a posture or body position that can be maintained without conscious thought and without muscular effort. The ideal is that the player be as relaxed—physically—while playing as he or she would want to be while “relaxing” in his or her favorite and least demanding way: sitting back in an arm chair, lounging on the beach, taking a nice long bath, or whatever.
One exercise for getting to know the feeling of physical relaxation as it applies to the hands is this. Stand up in a posture that seems comfortable (not formal or “at attention”). Allow your arms to hang loosely at your sides. Now raise one arm up to about waist height, without raising or otherwise tightening the shoulders, letting the elbow move out to the side and letting the forearm point more or less toward where you are looking (probably tilted inward a bit: it should feel natural and comfortable). Do this as gently as possible. Let your hand hang loosely at the end of your arm. Now move your forearm up and down several inches, not too quickly, letting your hand flap up and down loosely without attempting to control it in any way. The feeling that you get in your hand by doing this fairly briefly is a lot like the way the hand should feel at the keyboard when it is quite relaxed. (If you do this exercise for too long, say more than twenty seconds at a time, it can get wearing on your arm and begin to create the kind of tension it is trying to expunge.)
(A longer discussion of this exercise can be found, along with several further exercises, at the Princeton Early Keyboard Center website, <www.pekc.org>.)
There are several ways in which extreme physical relaxation helps with organ and harpsichord playing. First, on instruments that have a touch that is in any way sensitive—that is, tracker organs with a good responsive action and at least somewhat flexible winding, and some but not all harpsichords—there is pretty good agreement that the sonority produced by a fluid touch without tension and as light as the action allows will be the most beautiful and the most useful musically. (Of course this is subjective and therefore subject to disagreement. I am reporting what has seemed to me to be a near unanimous reaction that I’ve observed over the years.) On organs and harpsichords whose sonority cannot be influenced directly by touch (non-tracker organs, tracker organs with a heavy or unresponsive action and some harpsichords) a light tension-free touch is neither good nor bad for the sound as such.
A light fluid touch also makes it possible to play faster, and for fast playing to sound less labored and thus more musically charismatic. One way to test this away from the keyboard is through the normal act of drumming one’s fingers on a table. (That is, in keyboard terms, playing 5-4-3-2 or 5-4-3-2-1 on the surface of the table over and over again quickly.) If you keep your hand very light while doing this you can do it very fast, almost infinitely fast, certainly faster than you would almost ever play notes at a keyboard. As you begin to tighten your hand up the drumming becomes slower and the “notes” become more distinct from one another, sort of clunkier.
However, the most important role of physical relaxation in organ and harpsichord playing—and the reason I said last month that I sometimes consider it to be the only technical imperative in playing these instruments—is that a very relaxed hand can make much more subtle distinctions of timing and articulation than can a hand with any tension in it. Whether these distinctions are being used to create accent through varied articulation or to shape a line through slight rubato or to create just the right amount of overlapping to adjust to a particular acoustic or to stagger the releases of the notes in a chord to create a gentle diminuendo or anything else, tension in the hand will force the player to choose between starkly different alternatives, whereas a truly relaxed hand will allow the player to make infinitely slight distinctions, while of course also easily permitting larger distinctions to be made.
There is a lot more to be said about this. In fact it will be the background to much of what is discussed in this column, and there will be more columns about it specifically. Right now, however, let us return to the former piano player who wishes to learn organ. I have found over the years that introducing such a student to the idea of relaxation—extreme relaxation—as early as the very first lesson is a remarkably effective way to do two important things: first, to allay the student’s anxiety about the process of adapting to the new kind of touch; second, to develop a very plausible—or occasionally even really good—organ or harpsichord touch right off the bat.
This does not mean, of course, that the student will instantly have nothing more to learn or will immediately become a knowledgeable or virtuosic performer of all sorts of different repertoire. It will, however, create, very promptly and with little or no anguish, a platform upon which the student can build. This will allow the student to take advantage of the years of piano training without falling prey to the actual problems that piano technique can create for aspiring organists or harpsichordists or to the anxiety created by fear of those problems.
Here are some practical steps when beginning to help a pianist study organ or harpsichord:
1) At the first lesson invite the student to sit at the keyboard and play something—anything—that he or she already knows. This might well not be a piece that is really appropriate to the instrument. This does not matter in the least. In fact, since part of the purpose of this beginning is to allay anxiety, it can be better if the issue of the piece’s sounding good or right on the instrument doesn’t even exist. (Of course most pianists have some Bach pieces under their fingers. These will almost always adapt well to any keyboard.) In any case, do remind the student that this is in no way a performance or audition, and that it doesn’t matter for now how the piece actually sounds. The piece should not be too fast, so if it is intrinsically fast, ask the student to play it under tempo for now.
2) Ask the student to sit in as relaxed and comfortable a way as possible. At the organ this might involve hooking the feet back under the bench or even letting them rest on and mutely play some pedal keys. At the harpsichord this might involve leaning back in the chair or slumping forward a bit or sitting with one foot up on the other knee. Some of these things might have to change later on—though I have a strong bias in favor of any player’s sitting in whatever way is most natural and comfortable for that person’s physique and habits—but for the moment the only role of the whole body other than the hands is to be subjectively comfortable and to provide the student with no distraction or worry.
3) As the student begins to play, remind him or her to think about nothing other than playing lightly. In particular, this means explicitly not caring about wrong notes and, especially, not caring if some notes actually fail to sound because the student has not pushed them down hard enough. I always tell students that if, when first working on organ or harpsichord, they play so lightly that some notes don’t sound, they will discover that after a short time this is simply no longer happening. They will have discovered, subconsciously, the right actual amount of force to play the keys, without having lost the feeling of lightness and fluidity. (I have actually never known this not to happen.) Any preoccupation at the very beginning with making sure that every note sounds will almost certainly lead to the “safe” adoption of a too strong and insufficiently relaxed touch.
4) Concerning hand position, the most important thing to mention to the student at this stage is that it is a good idea to keep the hand more or less in a line with the arm along the side-to-side axis, that is, not to cock the wrist in or out to any appreciable degree. This can be made difficult by certain fingerings, so as a practical matter the student should simply skip any (already learned) passages that seem to make it necessary to turn the hand in or out more than a little bit. In the next phase—that of learning new pieces—this idea can be taken into account from scratch in making fingering choices. I don’t believe that it matters, at this stage, where the hand is at on the up-and-down axis, as long as the shoulders and arms are comfortable. Issues such as high or low wrists or the position of the elbow will fall into place naturally or can be easily dealt with later on. It can be useful to remind the student that the fingers need not be parallel to the keys. Rather, the tips of the fingers must present themselves to the keys with the rest of the hand in a physiologically comfortable position.
For many students, one session along these lines is a revelation. They immediately hear themselves making beautiful sounds, and they hear any articulations that they make as being subtle and musical, not abrupt or jarring. Of course this is just a beginning, but it is a very good one. Needless to say, pianists coming to the organ also must begin to explore the joys of pedal playing. We will turn to that subject beginning with next month’s column.
