Metablog

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.

Note: pretty much everything in this post applies to typing (and probably mousing) tension as well as piano-playing tension. Also note: I’m not an expert in any of this, and could well be completely wrong about the physiology, but it does seem to line up with my experience well enough.

I’m a pianist. I’ve taken piano lessons since I was six years old. I was very serious about piano for a few years in high school, but then decided to pursue programming instead of music as a profession. Since then I haven’t played nearly as much.

One of the reasons I decided not to pursue music was that my technique had a major problem—I tensed up my wrists and shoulders when playing. (I still do this.) Tension, in piano playing, is defined as any contraction of a muscle that’s more than what’s necessary to complete the desired movement. In shoulders, tension is just keeping them raised. In the arms and wrists, tension is when both the extending muscle (e.g. triceps) and the flexing muscle (e.g. biceps) contract at the same time. The muscles’ forces cancel each other, and a lot of energy is wasted. Thus, tension when playing leads to wrists and hands quickly becoming tired. It slows you down, too, so that you can’t play pieces as difficult as you could otherwise. Tension can also lead to various repetetive stress injuries, which are long term, sometimes crippling problems.

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An idea for a way to sculpt music

I am a musician. I play the piano. I don’t play as much anymore, because my wrists are not amenable to such abuse. (My technique sucks. I blame one of my teachers.) I also program computers. My wrists don’t complain as much about this. (If you spend more than a quarter of your programming time at the computer actually pressing keys or moving the mouse around, you’re doing something wrong.)

I think the root of my enjoyment, for both of these, is taking pleasure in creating complex, beautiful things. And yet, I’ve always enjoyed programming more. Why? Because while coding well takes coordination and practice, the end result is an object. And an object that can be improved, more and more, each time you work on it. Whereas with piano, the coordination and practice are an integral part of the end result. The result is a performance, and each performance has mistakes and problems. With every new performance, you get thousands of new chances to make mistakes. The only way to improve a performance is to practice it, over and over and over, until the number of mistakes goes down to something managable. (Even if you get all the notes right, you always make mistakes. Good pianists can intentionally produce around two dozen different loudness levels, and can tell the difference between a note hit at the right time, and a note hit a tenth of a second too soon or too late.) Code is perfectable, and permanent. A performance is not. Working on code, you’re always doing new things. You don’t repeat yourself more than necessary. Once you get something right, it’s right. Working on a performance, you’re slowly training an obstinate and inattentive nervous system to do something replicable.

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