Steven Schwartz wrote:
>Mark Knezevic says:
>
>>How exactly does a pianist control tone when he or she plays the piano?
>
>First, each key on a piano has an extraordinary number of moving parts.
>One key to one set of strings is an engineering feat in itself. This
>allows for a great variety of "strikes" from the hammer and an amazing
>sensitivity of the mechanism to the way the finger strikes the key.
>Second, the Russian school of piano playing has catalogued many of the
>ways each finger (and thumb) can strike a key. It makes a difference
>which finger contacts the key and how. ...
Allow me as a non-pianist (but one who can play the piano some) to offer
a skeptical view. It should be obvious that the only effect a pianist
can have on a key is control of velocity, the speed with which the key is
pushed down. More properly it should be force (F = ma, if I remember my
physics). Because of the construction of the key-hammer mechanism there
isn't a 1:1 ratio of finger force to hammer force on the string, I think.
(I'm out of my depth here.) That's why if you press with little force you
can depress the key without striking the string. A pianist can, however,
control this force in many different ways, ranging from pure finger action
to "arm weight." I have seen students receive coaching from professional
pianists to try to get them to switch from a tense kind of finger action
to more of an arm-weight kind of activity, with great improvement in sound.
What I think happened is that by shifting the focus to the arm, the fingers
are allowed to relax and flex somewhat from the base joint, resulting in
just enough give to reduce slightly the force applied to the key. The
effect on legato passages can be striking (no pun). When you try to get
volume just from base-joint finger activity you are bound to stiffen those
muscles, creating a hardness to the sound (which may be from a poor legato
effect).
I remember going round and round back in the 60s with a pianist about
this--I was accused of advocating the "umbrella school" of playing, which
states there is no difference between the pianists finger and the tip of
an umbrella (because it's all force). That's not quite accurate, however,
because the finger is the end of a whole system of interacting joints.
A similar situation obtains in the violinist's vibrato, where what
is really producing the vibrato is the oscillation of the finger tip.
However, there are 3 or 4 accepted ways (and combinations of them) of
moving the arm, hand and finger in order to produce this oscillation,
and each results in a slightly different quality of vibrato.
Chris Bonds
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