UPT.com's Original Content
Among Understanding Piano Technique.com's basic functions as a knowledge-base is to provide a platform for publishing and discussing original, creative commentary about the technical skills of piano-playing and the nature of pianistic talent and expertise. Its core of specially written theoretical essays and practical tutorials constitute its mission's point of embarkation, while the site's widely ranging facilities are all designed to enable visitors to extend its core content with their own original material.
UPT.com's core essays together present a modern-day, all-encompassing theory explaining pianistic expertise and its underpinnings, representing the outcome of some 35 years of still continuing research personally conducted by the site's creator and webmaster, Richard Traub. The essays' aim, though, extends far beyond a statement of the theory; in a carefully ordered, logical sequence, each one provides a plain-language, "pianist-friendly" introduction to fields of scientific enquiry that have fuelled its development, opening up entirely new perspectives on the essential, underlying problems of piano playing that offer deep insight into how exceptionally gifted learners and top-ranking performers are able to address them so successfully.
The wide spectrum of topics discussed in UPT.com's core articles, tutorials and forums includes:
- The concept, nature and fundamental problems and concerns of piano-technique, and its relevance to music-making and learning-ability.
- The general nature and distinguishing features of human expertise.
- The nature of pianistic talent, where it comes from, and how it contributes to the development of technical expertise.
- Pre-empting difficulties through using systematic problem-solving strategies; troubleshooting-methods for identifying unsolved problems.
- The theoretical concept of control and the general requirements for achieving it.
- The trial-and-error process: Why it is essential for developing technical ability, and how it works in theory and practice.
- The roles of visual, kinaesthetic and aural information and imagery in controlling playing-movements.
- Memory: its neurobiological basis and its roles in piano-technique; how the brain accesses the stored information it needs to control individual playing-movements on demand; tactics for facilitating memorization and recall.
- Fluency of execution: what it depends upon and how to promote it.
- Controlling the pace of playing-movements - what it depends upon.
- The "follow-through" effect (well known to sports psychologists and coaches as a reliable tactic for improving the quality of intended movements) and its applications in piano-technique; how to enhance the effect by way of counting, using a metronome and other mental tactics.
- Co-ordinating the activity of muscles and optimizing the mechanical efficiency of playing-movements Synchronizing the actions of fingers and hands.
- Commonly used touch-forms, and how to adapt them to individual musical demands.
- Pure finger-technique: its special importance in acquiring pianistic ability and for approaching piano-works written before 1900, and how to cultivate it.
- Traditionally advocated practising-methods - e.g. slow-practising, practising hands seperately, repetitious practice - and how to use them productively.
- Exercises and etudes: their usefulness and limitations.
- Score-reading and musicianship skills, and how to use them for interpreting a composition's notation in technique-related terms.
- The problems of sight-reading, and effective tactics for solving them; sight-reading as a context for developing general technical and musicianship skills.
- Ensemble playing and the problems of co-ordinating the controlling of one's own playing with that of other musicians.
- The Good, the Bad and the downright Detrimental: Influential contributions to the development of methodological and pedagogical thinking over the past 300 years, and how to evaluate their substance.
- Inherent problems and difficulties of communicating knowledge to piano-pupils.
- Mainstream piano-teaching and methodology today, and its future progress.
- Other perspectives: "Inner Game" methodology, Suzuki, Alexander, Feldenkrais, etc.
- Science and piano-methodology.