The Craft of Piano Playing: A New Approach to Piano Technique

CRAFT OF PIANO NEWS

NEW PUBLICATION!

Alan Fraser's latest tome on piano technique, Honing the Pianistic Self-Image: Skeletal-Based Piano Technique has just been published by Maple Grove Music Productions.

HONING THE PIANISTIC SELF-IMAGE takes up where The Craft of Piano Playing left off in the development of Alan Fraser’s comprehensive piano technique. Where Craft focused on the foundational security of the hand’s innate structure and function, Honing shows you how to take that structure up into a new, sophisticated state – unstable equilibrium – to gain an even finer control over the colours and emotion you produce at the piano. You acquire an even greater freedom while losing none of your power, whose refinement actually increases through this process of functional evolution. Honing also relates unstable equilibrium in the hand to a similar state in the body, showing how a whole-body harmonious relationship to the field of gravity is a crucial support to the empowered hand on the keyboard.

The structure of Honing the Pianistic Self-Image is similar to that of The Craft of Piano Playing – explanatory text alternated with practical applications – and the link to Feldenkrais Method is even clearer in Honing than it was in Craft. The latter part of Honing contains several full-length Awareness Through Movement lessons linking hand function to whole body organization.

Honing is not only about technique but musicianship as well – chapters focused on the physical are balanced out by several that deal with specifically musical issues where Fraser links the concept of skeletality to rhythm, phrasing, harmonic colour and orchestration.

And Sonya Ardan, Alan Fraser’s stellar artist from his earlier book, has once again turned her keen eye to sketching the hand in attitudes that evoke not just the numerous unexplored possibilities for hand position but also the gesture – the hand in movement.

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