Understanding Piano Technique.com's Mission and Aims
Understanding Piano Technique.com is a community-driven learning resource dedicated to understanding the nature of pianistic expertise and the abilities contributing to its acquisition. Its mission is to bring piano students and teachers in contact with perspectives of deeply informed relevant knowledge and insight that can enable them to think about and practically address the fundamental problems of piano-playing in new, highly productive ways, improve their awareness and intellectual grasp of their nature, of the mental, neurobiological and physical processes involved in solving them, and of why particular approaches to learning and practising may promote or hinder developing pianistic problem-solving skills to the highest levels of instrumental performance.
Through its extensive range of facilities, UPT.com's aims are
- to provide direct access to mature and emerging fields of research investigating abilities implicated in pianistic expertise, which, though crucially important for cultivating its various skills, receive little or no mention in the course of piano-instruction or in the pedagogical literature - research shedding light on, for example, the learning-process and general manner in which the brain uses information to control movements; the contributions of perceptual and cognitive abilities to effective practising, finished performance and the skills of sight-reading and memorization; the relationship of musicianship, aural knowledge and technique; the general roles of technique in relation to playing and practising; and what elite-level performers themselves have to say regarding which aspects they give priority of attention to in practising and performing;
- to supply explanatory material that can help users to relate such lines of research to the insights they themselves already possess, and to form an understanding of its implications for practising and teaching the piano productively;
- to enable individual users, and likewise small groups exploring a common interest, to accumulate their own researched material and develop and eventually publish their own ideas by providing facilities within the website that are personalized to them;
- to enable its community of users to evolve an optimally structured forum for exchanging personally gained insights, seeking help with problems, and discussing new lines of research, and so bring about a collaborative advancement of theoretical understanding and practical ability.
- to gain recognition among professional performance-science researchers as a valuable source for informing and stimulating current and future research.
Next page: UPT.com's core articles and tutorials