Piano Classes should focus on avoiding stress! – Defining negative movements

Piano lessons in London – Piano lessons in London should focus on avoiding performance stress. Our sessions focus particularly on spotting inappropriate muscular tension and explaining to our students how to prevent this from happening. Learning about how excessive tension feels at a muscular level is quintessential if we want to combat it.

Stress is provoked, in general by anxiety. Basically, as soon as we lose control of our movements, our brain starts sending messages to our muscles so they get tensed and ready to react quickly. So one of the ways to avoid stress successfully is to organize what we call negative movements.

We will consider negative any movement that is not directly related to producing a sound. For instance, when we lift our forearm to get ready to release its weight on the keyboard then targeting a key, we are not producing any sound. Of course, this action, while silent, remains a fundamental step towards a quality tone production.

These movements take time and space in our performance, and regardless of their silent profile, they play an important role in the general coordination of all the movements involved.

Piano lessons traditionally do not focus on these aspects of the learning process. The main reason being: they don’t produce any sound. At WKMT, we believe can approach this performance dimension from the beginning.

Movements like forearm, arm, wrist and rotation are called compound movements. These specifically involve very large negative phases. In our piano lessons we will put special emphasis on these preparatory stages which will play a decisive role in the tone production.