I went Scuba Diving this weekend … very relaxing and prompted me to write this post based on a theory I developed a little while ago.
As I’ve said before, I developed terrible problems with tension in my playing once I reached Grade 8. This probably caused me to abandon the piano in my early twenties as, at one point, just sitting down in front of the piano caused my shoulders to completely tense up.
When I decided to re-learn, I decided that working out how to address this problem had to be one of my major goals. So far, I have watched countless hours of contributions on YouTube about tension in playing. I’ve also read a few books covering the subject.
What is clear is that certain things are prone to causing tension … stretching out your hands and fingers and holding them outstretched causes tension to build up. This is particularly a problem for people like me with smaller hands (as people with a larger hand can reach further without the need to actually stretch).
However, stretching isn’t the only problem. For me, playing anything ‘fast’ (such as Chopin’s Minute Waltz) has always caused my muscles to tense up quite quickly – right up into my forearm. This is debilitating and it is then impossible to even play slowly, never mind quickly.
Here, there is generally no question of stretching per se … although unless each note is perfectly consecutive then you will need to stretch your interior fingers as opposed to thumb and pinky. There is a school of thought that a major cause of tension in this scenario is passing the thumb under the palm when playing (as this causes the fingers to tense up). Not an idea universally shared though.
I have read in a few places that if your body experiences a sensation often enough, it will start to believe that sensation is ‘correct’ and actually replicate the muscular actions required to get it.
After reading this, I noticed that when I play Chopin’s B Minor Waltz (which was one of my Grade 8 pieces) I start to subconsciously clench my teeth whilst playing. Yet, there is nothing particularly technically difficult about the piece that should give rise to tension – no large stretches, no fast passagework, no repeated octaves.
I came to the conclusion that this ‘teeth clenching’ is actually a ‘learned behaviour’ from my Grade 8 days – when the problems with tension really started to take hold. In fact, even after all these years, my brain is somehow replicating the feeling of tension it learned so long ago in association with this piece. It takes a real conscious effort to stop my teeth clenching now!
So, getting back to my original train of thought about Scuba … I’m actually a PADI Divemaster (this is the ‘entry level’ professional qualification from PADI). However, initially I was possibly the most un-natural, nervous and downright awful diver you’re likely to come across. It actually took me almost a year before I’d say I started to be a confident diver – and some people take to it literally like ducks to water!
Probably the most fundamental skill when diving is buoyancy. Once under water, you need to feel weightless so that you neither pop up to the surface nor smash into the things beneath you.
Lots of things contribute to buoyancy control and you learn about them when training. However, the main skill here is actually related to your breathing and the physical impact your lungs have on your buoyancy.
Imagine having a totally empty balloon and pushing this under water. You’d have absolutely no problem doing it. Now even half fill it with air and try again … you’re very unlikely to keep it even more than semi-submerged without great difficulty.
When diving, your lungs are actually working like balloons. As you breath in, your lungs fill with air. This will make your body rise upwards in the water. As you breath out your lungs empty. Now your body will start to descend. Imagine that you are trying to control your position under water – you’re swimming over beautiful corals which, if you touch them, not only might they get damaged but you could end up with a nasty cut or sting. On the other hand, you need to ensure that you don’t go floating up to the surface as that can be even more dangerous.
Your breathing effectively causes your buoyancy to change – which is sort of manageable if you keep moving, however, as soon as you slow down the effect becomes exaggerated. Clearly, the more deeply and rapidly you breathe, the more pronounced this becomes. As you start to lose control of your buoyancy, stress sets in which (in my case at least) makes breathing even more irregular and uncontrolled.
A eureka moment happened once whilst practicing in a diving pool in London. Something sort of clicked. My actual problem was not lack of diving technique, lack of knowledge or even too many years as a smoker! No, it was quite simply that I wasn’t allowing myself to relax. Once I put ‘mind over matter’ and allowed (I think that’s the best word) my body to just relax, my breathing became smoother and slower. This immediately improved my buoyancy (because now the ‘balloons’ were inflating and deflating much more gently) which, in turn, made my breathing even more relaxed and controlled … a virtuous circle.
Don’t mis-read me, whilst I talk about the Eureka moment, I would never have had it if I had not put in the work. I had read everything I could find on diving, I went diving at every opportunity (including cold, dark, flooded quarries in the UK), I had taken a number of courses over and above the standard qualifiers, I had invested in my own equipment, etc. In short, I had been determined to become a proficient diver.
My current line of thought is that the major way to reduce tension in piano playing is very similar. Yes, you absolutely need to learn the ‘technical’ side of how to get the best from your hands but also, you need to actually learn now tolet yourself relax. When the best concert pianists play, the word that generally comes to mind is ‘effortless’. They are doing phenomenally complex things with their hands, yet seemingly without even really thinking about it. They don’t expect to play a wrong note and therefore, simply, they don’t.
I think it’s a little like joining the dots … pulling together all the great advice, testing things out for yourself and then relaxing into it. So, in addition to putting in the work to wake up my old fingers, I’m also making a conscious effort to spot tension as it happens trying to spot both what is causing it and, in parallel, conditioning myself to relax.
