The Craft of Piano Playing

The Craft of Piano Playing presents a new, comprehensive and highly original approach to piano technique with a fascinating series of exercises designed to help the reader put this approach into practice. Alan Fraser has combined his extensive concert and pedagogical experience, his long-standing collaboration with the virtuoso Kemal Gekich, and his professional training in Feldenkrais Method to create this innovative technique. Using numerous musical examples and sketches he shows how many common movement habits at the keyboard can be counterproductive, and provides a new way of manipulating the skeletal frame of the hand to produce astonishing sonic results from the instrument.

This book suggests that in the light of new insights into the physics of human movement, a further development of piano technique is now possible, and that improved physical ability can free musical individuality to express itself more fully. The series of movement exercises presented activates the physical functions necessary to the pianist, helping both students who need remedial work in basic strength at the keyboard, and those who seek a new dimension of musical understanding and a new path for the development of pianist skills - thus synthesizing musical and physical issues. This approach can also serve as an effective antidote to debilitating performance anxiety, increasing one's emotional security by improving the physical and musical basis for it. By filling in a missing link between intention and physical execution, this book truly aims to advance the "craft of piano playing."

Visit Alan Fraser's web site at http://alanfraser.faithweb.com/