But students who perform their difficult piece over and over again and never actually practice the piece slowly are doomed to muscu-blur. The greatest pianists never stop perceiving the individuality of every note they play, even when they’re playing 10 or more notes per second, even when they finished the piece five years ago. This is why we notice our students’ pieces will most naturally deteriorate in quality week by week after they “finished” their piece. Shown above: the imagined hand/finger configuration whenever music sounds like it is in desperate need of hammering. When a student cognitively understands what their fingers are supposed to be doing, but their fingers don’t obey in a manner that sounds controlled, I call this muscu-blur (muscular blur).
Consequently, certain fingers play earlier than they should 2, softer than they should, they don’t remove from the keys quickly enough, and there is less control over synchronization between the hands. For example, instead of the brain giving five separate commands to the fingers to play five separate notes, the brain starts to mush all five fingers together into one single command, similar to how we might be tempted to slur words together in a phrase after we’ve spoken the phrase a thousand times. This control problem arises when kinesthetic memory of rapid muscle movements starts to become so fluid that the student begins to forget what it was like to perceive every note in the piece with individual clarity. Lack of clarity (no precision in lifting fingers).Dynamic unevenness (some notes too soft or ghosted altogether, and/or various unintended accents).I define this “lack of control” to be one or more of the following: Such passages could consist of several lines or pages of quick-running notes such as Burgmuller’s “Velocity,” or it could just be quick notes dispersed sporadically through a piece such as Ellmenreich’s “Spinning Song” (especially when the left hand takes over the melody in the middle section). When students play piano passages that push the student to (or near) their limit of dexterity, every student except the extremely gifted will demonstrate a lack of control.
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