Newsgroups: rec.music.makers.piano Subject: Re: tight shoulders > Trouble learning new pieces without getting tight shoulder muscles..I have been > experimenting with yoga to help relax before I tackle new pieces....Took up > piano in adulthood and am now at high intermediate level but I do not have the > fluidity on the keyboard as lifers...Any suggestions?? Tight shoulder muscles are trouble! They need to be dealt with top priority! And they are a habit you can break. Your shoulders tighten up on a new piece because you haven't yet got the piece in muscle memory, and it doesn't flow and you get tense about it. So, arm yourself with a big store of patience, and get the muscle memory first, by practicing one hand at a time, and in little pieces. The main thing is that when you feel your shoulders hunching or tensing, STOP IMMEDIATELY! Don't let yourself get away with it! The shoulder tension identifies a place in the piece you aren't comfortable with. Work on that little piece until you can play it in a relaxed way. (C. C. Chang, elaborate on this, please!) I have found that just playing through that tough place hoping it will get better with practice does NOT WORK. It will never sound right. Isolate it, and fix it! Ane then, just today I discovered a really effective way (for me, anyway) to relax the shoulders! Contrary motion scales, starting from way out from the middle, so your arms are really stretched out. I discovered this while working on a Duvernoy exercise (No. 1 from "Ecole du Mecanisme, Book 1 Opus 120) that has contrary motion and parallel motion scale passages in a few measures at the end. By the way, I think these exercises are great for fluidity, anyway that's why I'm doing them (slowly, carefully, stopping the second I feel (or hear!) hunched shoulders. Happy practicing! Subject: (fwd) Re: tight shoulders Date: Thu, 22 Jul 1999 12:53:02 -0500 > As it often happens "the theory works fine, it's the > practice that kills me". In my long experience the > shoulders raise without me noticing it. Of course they do! It is an instinctive reaction. It's not the reaction that one needs to deal with, it's what triggers it. But you deal with that by noticing every time the reaction is triggered, and paying attention to what triggered it. Which is the apprehension, tension, fear, whatever, that you're coming to a tough passage you don't have confidence you can get through. It's the apprehension that is the habit, that is, we tend to accept it. Especially since once we've started playing something we don't want to stop. My teacher uses Alexander techniques for this. She touches her students on the raised shoulder, or the slouched back, the point of which is to notice it as soon as you do it, identify the trigger and deal with it. Recently I was working on a piece with a couple of appogiaturas that I kept missing. And everytime I would notice that my shoulders were up. Finally I got so tired of having to stop (which I always do when I notice something sounds bad, which usually means my shoulders are up), I found that I had developed the habit of completely relaxing my shoulders just before I got to those notes so they'd come out okay, and I wouldn't have to stop! Of course, next I had to work on why I was tensing up in the first place, but I had to laugh at my attempt to outsmart myself! And I began to suspect that non-tension could be a habit too! One I hope I develop! It may seem that all this fussy attention to shoulder tension would make practice boring, but it's exactly the opposite! It really gets boring when that fast scale passage still sounds uneven, no matter how much you practice, but when you know you can deal with the cause of the unevenness, and see your progress, it really gets exciting! It's even more exciting when you never let the unevenness happen, because of the careful way you learn new pieces. Of course, there are all kinds of other techniques for smooth playing, all of which are hard to do consistently if you are tensed up! Hope this helps somebody!