Tense wrists
I posted a while back (on the first page of google results for “piano wrist tension”!) about learning to get rid of all the harmful wrist tension in my piano technique. Well, I’ve been sort of following my advice there. What I did was I took one single song, and focused on it to the exclusion of all else. It’s a moderately challenging piece, and I’m just now starting to master it to the point where I can play the whole thing with eyes closed* and without really thinking about the notes at all. If I don’t have to give any attention to the notes, I can give all my attention to making sure I stay relaxed throughout the piece, and noticing immediately when I start to get tense. I was able to learn the piece without tension by simply playing it slowly enough, enough times. As it is, I was terribly inefficient at learning it. I should really have halved the time. But I’ve never been that good at practicing.
* Something I just started to do with pieces a year ago—before I would stare with ghastly and grotesque facial expressions at the keys. The amount of tension I had was really amazing. But I realized one day that, for all that staring, I didn’t really do much looking at the keys. So I tried not looking, and I found that psychological blocks were the main thing keeping me from being able to do that. But I still have problems with quick back-and-forth jumps of an octave and a half or more.
