Gravity and the Control of Sound

A truly expressive musical phrase on a modern piano is not easy to achieve. Most piano students are not trained for it. The result is that other instrumentalists sometimes denigrate the piano as a mere box on which you press a button and the noise comes out – best for accompanying some single melodic line instrument, like a violin or a flute.

I deliberately use the words ‘a modern piano’, because the piano down the centuries has not remained the same. Slowly from the time of Mozart onwards, its tone, solidity and robustness have been increasing. And alongside that development, people have been devising new ways of manipulating its sound – players and composers determined to treat the piano as a real musical instrument, capable of a singing sound and beautiful proportioning of the phrase.

By the time of Liszt and Chopin, it was growing obvious that the piano’s large, undwindling sound called for a different completely technical approach from that of the early fortepiano. If you simply lifted your fingers off the key at the end of a phrase, the final note sounded too loud and too abruptly chopped off. And that was not the only problem. Tone and timbre had become an issue; merely pushing more or less on the keys was not enough to create a truly musical rise and fall of volume within a phrase. Liszt was convinced that it was possible to change the tone colour of the piano – not just the volume – depending on what exactly you did to the key.

He and Chopin worked with the idea of using the weight of the arm as their resource for playing – relaxing downwards, working with gravity. It was easier than pushing downwards with muscle. And it also turned out to produce the deep, rich, variable sound that any musician would want to hear.

At that time the piano was still smaller and slighter than the instruments we play today. Liszt regularly used to break the piano he was playing on in the course of a performance. To damage a modern concert Steinway, you would surely need more than your bare hands on the keyboard.

So the instrument developed, and so did the methods of playing it. The concept of armweight became a full, inclusive technique in its own right, notably in the hands of Tobias Matthay and his pupils in the twentieth century. To this was added the technique of the flowing wrist.

Relaxation and armweight work to sound a note and to prolong it. But when you want the note to end, how do you do it without tensing your arm muscles? The sound is too big, and needs to be tailed down rather than chopped off abruptly. By letting the wrist move in a relaxed way upwards, to the point where the finger cries out to lift off the piano – what we call a ‘float’ – we can control the sound and reduce it to a whisper, without bringing in tension. This sort of fine control needs no extra concentration or effort once it is learned. The hands and arms flow with the phrases, making for a graduated control of volume. And the player is freed to think of the way he or she wants to express the music.

Essentially, this is all a manipulation of gravity. Relaxed downward weight produces a rich, rounded tone. When the wrist is low, the fingertips want to connect the notes more deeply at the bases of the keys. As the wrist rises, there is less implicit weight on the fingertip. As the wrist goes past a certain point, the fingertip will move off the top of the note (slowly, with no sudden chop) and be poised in the perfect position to apply its potential energy to the beginning of the next phrase.

These techniques, highly developed as they are, are not part of most pupils’ early training. Some people believe that serious teaching should only be given far later on, when the pupil has become advanced. But the effect of that is usually to engrain mistakes and bad habits. It has often happened that a pupil has passed their Grade 8 exam, only to discover that they have to retrain completely in order to go any further, e.g. to a diploma or university degree.

My experience of teaching for many years has led me to believe that the best training should be given from the very first lesson. The pupil’s progress will then be very much smoother. What is more important, at every level and every stage they will be producing musical sounds, as opposed to various harsh noises connected by a rhythmic structure. Progress without relaxation and control is something I know about: with the best will in the world it is fitful, strained and frustrating. I should add that the pupil’s application of good principles will be recognised in their exam results – nothing puts an examiner in a better mood than unexpectedly hearing a breath of music halfway through his or her day.

Retraining can certainly be done. Personally I was lucky enough to find some very good teachers and retrain after Grade 8, and now a large part of my teaching consists of the retraining of adults. It takes determination and a lot of work on the part of the pupil. But many of the basic skills of playing can be taken over from his or her earlier experience. More than anything, it is the musical result that makes people work so hard at it, when their playing until then might have made them doubt their own aptitude.

The music is there, inside yourselves. It only has to be brought out.