Levitate!

Like many of us drawn to the piano, my desire as a pianist is to play beautiful music. But making beautiful music is more than just playing notes on the piano. It entails forming a mental image of the ideal music one strives to create. It involves multisensory awareness and coordinated movement. It requires developing technique.

Over decades of learning the piano, I have been taught plenty of good technique, and I must also have been an adept learner myself, to have reached a high level of skill. Whereas technique is the “how” of music making, skill is the mastery of it, the internalization of the ability to execute the technique at will. No matter how good a teacher is at teaching technique, ultimately, the mastery of the skill is in the sole hands of the learner. Thinking back, I have little recollection of my early stage learning, having started at age 7, but the adult me is starting to be curious about how and when skill acquisition occurs, whether and why the practice methods I’ve grown up with are actually the right approaches.

Motor Skill Learning: from Figure Skating to Piano Playing

(I.e. the inspiration for my blog)

I was first introduced to the concepts of imagery and external focus in motor skill learning by my figure skating coach. I had the great fortune to work with a coaching team that was well-acquainted with sports science and committed to applying it to their coaching practice. Not only did they apply scientifically-proven training methods for guiding students towards skill mastery, I was also cognizant, as an adult learner, of the precise pedagogical thinking that undergird their coaching methods. Thanks to their coaching, I successfully overhauled my skating technique and internalized a new way of gliding across the ice.

When I returned to the piano after a long hiatus, this knowledge lay dormant for quite a while. I hadn’t connected the dots between motor skill learning in figure skating, and motor skill learning in piano playing. I defaulted to the practice strategies that my venerable teachers past and present had taught me—excellent pedagogic advice, to be sure—plus some bad personal habits that were hard to break. But one day, a chance discussion with piano friends sparked a lightbulb. It occurred to me that the same principles of motor skill learning should also apply to any discipline involving physical movement, and that includes piano playing!

Thus began a phase of self-exploration of imagery and external focus at the piano, experimenting on the very pieces sitting on my music stand at the present moment. Intent and deliberate about applying my past knowledge, I analyzed each and every practice strategy to identify their nature and purpose in the context of the learning theory, and better understand why they work (or don’t work).

Putting Theory into Practic(ing)

(I.e. What my blog is about)

If you have never heard of them before, the concepts of imagery, focus of attention, autonomy, enhanced expectancies and self-efficacy may sound bizarre and contradictory to prevailing believes. Indeed, they belong to the lingo of a niche group of academic researchers, who developed this modern learning theory only within the past two decades, initially focusing on sports, but more recently expanding to the performing arts [Atkins (2017), Mornell & Wulf (2019), Wulf & Lewthwaite (2016)]. Yet, piano learners and teachers do already intuitively utilize a wealth of age-old methods that align with these concepts, even if they may not realize it. “Keep the phrase moving!”, “Practice different rhythms!”, “Imagine the sonority you want to produce”. On the flip side, many of us still fall into the trap of adopting a contrary practice mindset: “relax your wrist!”, “don’t hunch!”, “play louder!” (and come next lesson, “no no that’s too loud, play softer!”)

So, what exactly is motor skill acquisition and how does it apply to piano playing? Elucidating this connection is the theme of my blog. I will showcase the learning process from my personal perspective, drawing from my own explorations and experimentations as an active performer and ardent learner. By casting age-old and familiar practice techniques in new light, and by developing new ones, I hope to use my own unique experiences from piano and figure skating to bridge the gap from theory to practice.

Because it is impossible to completely detach all mention of pianistic technique or musical decisions from my commentary of the learning process, where mentions of technique or musicality do arise, it is not for the purpose of expounding upon it specifically, but rather to use it as a basis for illuminating the process of the mastery of such. And while I present a learner’s point of view, I also welcome teachers to adopt this mindset to guide their students in their learning process, similar to how my figure skating coaches had coached me.

A Sneak Preview

(i.e. What’s to come)

Why the name of my blog? In a future post, I will explain how “Levitate” became an indispensible item in my imagery toolkit, for promoting good posture at the piano. I will describe how I’ve incorporated physical objects (mirrors, therabands, rulers) as external focuses into my practice routine. I will describe how audiation—auditory imagery—is now a key component right from the start of learning a new piece, and throughout all stages of refinement and polishing. I will reference the research literature at various points within my posts, and occasionally do a more in-depth literature review.

To whet your appetite, I end this post by leaving you with a very simple thought experiment, pared down to near absurdity, but meant to illustrate the two contrasting types of attentional focuses: internal and external.

Suppose I ask you to play middle C. Do you

1. determine what angle to bend your elbow and how much to curve your finger so that your fingertip touches the key, and how much muscular force to apply to depress it; or
2. look and aim your hand towards the targeted key and strike it in one smooth motion?

If you do the latter, congratulations! You’re utilizing an external focus!

References

Atkins, R. L. (2017). Effects of focus of attention on tone production in trained singers. Journal of Research in Music Education, 64, 421–434.

Mornell, A. & Wulf, G. (2019). Adopting an external focus of attention enhances musical performance. Journal of Research in Music Education, 66(4), 375–391.

Wulf, G., & Lewthwaite, R. (2016). Optimizing performance through intrinsic motivation and attention for learning: The OPTIMAL theory of motor learning. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. Doi: 10.3758/s13423-015-0999-9.