How do you deal with pianists/teachers making weird claims about touch etc?
I have seen this many times: a teacher or pianist talks at length about e.g. how it is so very important to not lift the finger for a legato section or for a longer sounding note -- while the pedal is (fully) down anyways.
Or about the significance to sound of whether the finger is going down on a key with the tip (more rounded finger) or the soft part (flatter finger).
Now clearly, all of these do not make any sense from a mechanical, physics point of view: as long as the pedal is down, there is simply no difference if you hold down a key or not. As long as the key goes down with a certain speed at the release point, it makes no difference if the key got accelerated to that speed with a flat or rounded finger (apart perhaps the noise of the finger touching the key being different but that is not the issue here).
I do get that it can be helpful to teach or talk about the sound we want to achieve more metaphorically and in images that include also bodily "feelings" and proprioreception, but sometimes I get the feeling that some pianists really believe that these can make an actual perceptable difference and this I find weird and sometimes quite off-putting.
What are your thoughts about this?
17 replies
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Idk if this will help: I’ve been learning and playing the piano since 1967. I started teaching piano in 2005, and since day-one of that teaching journey, I have endeavored to study the writing and lectures of other pianists, pursued higher education, and have observed piano playing in as excruciating detail as I can, all in attempt to describe what I consider good playing in a way that is understandable and useful to my students. All-the-while, for these last 20-plus years, as I learned, each student took my descriptions to be authoritative, in that moment.
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Well, even though it is physics for the string, it isn't always biological for the fingers. You must have a really difficult time with portato then!
Without specific musical examples, it's hard to say. It's all very dependant on the piece, the time period, the tempo, the context. Take an obvious example, like Fantaisie Impromptu. You're telling me you play that legato detached, at that speed, just because physics allows it? Or even in the B Section. You're going to detach notes under each legato just because you use more pedal there? Not to mention flutter pedaling or anything but using full pedaling! When do you ever keep a pedal down long enough for this to take effect? Often the finger needs to stay down, in case the pedal comes back up.
The careful lifting of the hand doesn't just designate phrase structure but imitates the very style Chopin emulates in his music, cantabile! You lift your hand between phrases like a singer takes a breath. Because biology. I think it would be more difficult to properly exhibit phrasing while letting physics and the pedal do it's thing, than keeping the fingers down, playing attached and connected, and pepper legato playing.
I totally understand what you're saying from a physics perspective. And that teachers perhaps phrase it in such a way that appears like it matters in this way. This has come to my mind. In fact, I think I heard Seymour Bernstein speak about this very thing, that once the note is struck, that's it. It resonates, and no amount of any more or less pressure can change what was produced. So yes, if your doing fast leaps, you can't hang out on the notes, but sometimes you have to, because biology. If you detach your legatos because of physics, it may wind up sounding more portato!
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This study might be interesting for you: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/10/251002073956.htm
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As a professional pianist with some science and engineering background, these sorts of claims which I’ve encountered by pianists have long driven me crazy. It should be self-evident that the piano doesn’t “care” whether a key was pressed by a finger or some other random object, and that once a key sounds there’s nothing that can be done to change the sound after the fact (short of adding pedal afterward for sympathetic resonance). The physics of the instrument clearly don’t allow for this.
That said, the most important thing is always to think musically. If we think too mechanically, we risk making our playing sound more mechanical.
Of course the claim that pressing with the “soft” part of the finger produces a soft sound, while pressing with the “hard” part of the finger produces a harsh sound, is nonsense on the surface. However, pressing a key with the pads of the fingers requires curving the hand much more, and this in turn gives us far greater control over the speed of the key press. Simply put, we can slow down the key press and control it much more reliably. It’s much easier to get different degrees of soft sounds, which is a crucial part of what we call tone color. It’s not the “fleshy” part of the finger that produces a softer sound, as many assume; it’s simply the fact that curving the finger in order to press the key with the finger pad provides more control over the key press.
As for legato while holding the pedal, it’s widely considered good practice to connect notes with the fingers wherever possible/practical, and to use the sustain pedal as a supplement for tone color. We shouldn’t do with the foot what the hands are supposed to do.
I wrote a blog post called Demystifying Piano Tone that discusses some of the academic research into piano tone. Hope it’s alright to include it here.
Recently there was a paper called “Motor origins of timbre in piano performance” that purports: “First, our listening test revealed that the timbral qualities pianists intended to express in piano playing were perceived as intended by both pianists and musically untrained individuals, with pianists showing a greater perceptual sensitivity to different timbres. Second, through a motor behavioral experiment using a noncontact, high-resolution sensing system, we identified five specific movement features in piano touch that were intricately linked to three categories of perceived timbre; weight, clarity, and brightness.”
(Personally, I’m not convinced “weight,” “clarity,” and “brightness” are really the most suitable categories of timbre for describing piano tone.)
It would be interesting to reproduce this study using sampled pianos, or even synthesized/modeled pianos such as those by Pianoteq, to find out whether listeners perceive the same or equivalent expression as they reported from acoustic pianos. Since we know that digital/synthesized/modeled pianos simply output a level based on input velocity (speed of attack), with more sophisticated software also emulating sympathetic resonance, such a study could potentially put some piano tone myths to rest.
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I like this article:
"The Piano Voodoo of Tone Production"
https://blog.twedt.com/archives/222
But you will never convince someone that what they believe about tone production is "voodoo" or just misinformed - they have been taught all their lives that what they are doing does make a difference, and they believe they can hear the difference. So when I hear someone say something that I know is voodoo I just smile and nod.
There is something to be said for "visualization" though. How do you voice a chord so that one note stands out more than the others? You visualize placing more weight on one finger, or tilting your hand a certain way, or whatever you can come up with. Maybe tie a string around that finger? Just kidding... However you visualize it, if it works for you, great. Just realize that in the end it is just the speed of the key going down that is important.
A close examination of the piano action will be very helpful, if you are mechanically inclined enough to do it without damaging the piano! Notice in particular that there is no permanent connection between the key and the hammer. The hammer just rests on the series of levers that starts with the key. Pushing the key down "throws" the hammer at the string. Only the speed of the hammer matters, which is multiplied by the speed of the levers attached to the key. The extra "stuff" is for catching the hammer after it bounces back, suspending it for the next strike (repetition), lifting the dampers, and the sostenuto levers. Once the hammer is started on it's way, there is no way to change anything. Only the speed matters.
But, yeah, it s hopeless to try to convince someone who really believes in the magic that it is just mechanical.
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This is an interesting topic. I read recently a book on Piano Playing by Josef Lhevinne( very very esteemed Pianist - maybe an all time great). He writes in there somewhere that playing with the pads of the fingers is absolutely essential to produce a melliflous sound as opposed to playing from the finger tips. This happens to be standard Russian school of piano playing technique from the Anton Rubinstein. ( The lineage extends upwards from Leschetkzy, Czerny to Beethoven - based on another article). On checking this with just one note it appears to be so experimentally. On a grand piano when a key is struck you can see plainly that the hammer hits the string , the damper lifts and then when the key is released the felt falls back on the string and the sound dies out. Since the string is struck the sound appears percusive. Now for the same force of the finger whether the key is struck by the finger tip or the pad of the finger it should make absolutely no difference from a physics perspective. We have Newtonian mechanics at work and so the acceleration of the key will be exactly the same on both modes all else being equal. Now imagine what really happens when the great pianists gently strikes the key with pad - the force is cushioned and so the acceleration imparted to the key is significantly lesser as is the time of release of the key - by virtue the felts will move to the string slower resulting in a longer sustain of the note albeit only fractionally longer and viola you have a more melliflous sound that the great artists have now produced with the stroke of a single key. You can try this experiment on your grand piano at home with just a single note E for example from the middle C and you will see this effect. Hence the idea that you hear better with keys are played with the pads of the fingers than points of the finger tips (closer to the nail ). On observing videos of Horowitz I was a bit surprised to see that in old age he probably didnt even bother cutting his finger nails. He didnt need to - almost all of his breathtaking sound comes from the pads. Hope this helps.
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I love this topic, and the intelligent responses by the tonebase cohorts! Ortmann’s two treatises from the 1920s elucidated the mechanics of “tone production” on the piano using brilliant but for us primitive technology of his own invention in a lab built for that purpose (if I remember correctly) at the Curtis School in Philadelphia. Both books can still be found in online library archives. Somewhere out there, an article discusses how his work was ignored by the next generation of piano pedagogues.
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One thing worth mentioning in this discussion is the subjective sense of touch, of contact with the key. Brendel used to play with Band-Aids on his fingers. A few years back I got to hear Hamelin perform a truly spectacular Busoni Concerto in the Musikverein, and he had bandages on his fingers from practicing it so much. (It’s really a monster of a concerto!)
But when I wear Band-Aids on my fingertips, it seems to ruin my touch at the piano. Objectively I know I’m still just pressing keys and it shouldn’t matter if there’s something in between the fingertip and the key, but subjectively it ruins my sensitivity to the key. The sense of feeling directly connected to the instrument through touch is really crucial to me as a player, even if it’s irrelevant as far as the mechanics of the piano are concerned.