The key to the pianist's world

The pianist must discover infinity in the vertical movement that makes up the small world of key descent. Because it's such a miniscule world--vertical movement of about three-eighths of an inch from the surface of the key to the bottom--key descent may impress us mostly by its insignificance compared to the lateral sweep of hands across the keyboard, but for the pianist the artistry that captivates an audience begins with key depression. In the early 1900s, piano pedagogue Tobias Matthay wrote several essays exploring this small but important universe and published them in a book entitled Pianoforte Tone Production (1903) and also in Visible and Invisible in Pianoforte Technique (1932).

The act of touching a key and putting it down begins our physical relationship with the piano. The link between our tactile sense and aural sense begins with listening to the tone produced when keys are treated differently. Teachers can share the excitement of these beginnings with students. In the Morton Feldman Essays, the American composer recalls taking piano lessons, as a child, from a woman whom he says taught the Czar's children. "She would sit down and show me how to play. The way that she would put her finger down, in a Russian way ... the liveliness of the finger. And produce a B-flat, and you wanted to faint," Feldman says. (1) Mesmerized by the beauty of the tone his teacher produced, Feldman remembered years later her approach to the key.

Natural Curiosity and "Key-Sense"

Like the young Feldman, in their beginning lessons, most children have a natural curiosity about the piano that teachers can use to help them discover more about the instrument. The more we know about our instrument, the more we love it and the more we can express ourselves through it. During a beginning lesson sometime ago with my student Beth, we worked on a piece in her method book that suggested keeping the damper pedal down for the entire composition. When she came back and played it for me the following week, she said she liked the piece, but she wondered why she had to keep the gas pedal down the whole time. I took this opportunity, not only to answer her question and remind her of the proper name for the damper pedal, but also to explore the piano and how it worked.

We decided to look inside my studio piano to see what happened when I put down a key. When I opened the piano lid, the inhabitants of this inner world surprised Beth. She didn't see a gas tank, spark plugs or pistons, but rather hammers, strings, tuning pins, dampers and the inside of the soundboard, to name a few things. Her eyes sparkled with curiosity as she wondered, "How do all of these parts work together to make a piano tone?" I asked her to look at the inside of the piano as I put down a key. As she watched, Beth began to get an idea of the "wizard behind the curtain," the mechanisms that created sound. She saw the hammer move toward the string, and when they met, she heard a pitch. As I kept down the key, the damper was held away from the string. The sound resonated until I released the key and the damper fell back against the string, silencing the sound. Years later when Beth played Mozart Sonatas and Chopin Nocturnes, we experimented with putting down the keys in various ways to get the velvety legatos or sparkling staccatos called for in the music.

To develop what Matthay calls a "key-sense," (2) we should know what purpose the key serves in the sound-making mechanism. Since the piano is a speed-sensitive instrument, it depends on key speed to produce various shades of color and dynamics. The piano keys enable us to convey more speed to the strings than we could by using just the fingers alone. As the finger sends down the key, the hammer moves to the string at about twice the speed of key descent, The key descends about three-eighths of an inch, while the hammer travels about two inches before meeting the string. This extra travel space allows the hammer to collect more speed so, even if we slowly put down a key, the hammer speed will be quite fast. The initial strike of hammer against string sets both into vibration at the same speed for an instant before the hammer falls back and allows the string to continue vibrating until the tone fades into silence or until the damper stops it when the pianist releases the key. The piano tone begins clear and bell-like, then comes the beauty of its decay, wavering and changing shape until it is no longer. Our fingers alone could not set the string into motion fast enough to take a piano tone from its bell-like beginning to its whispering end. The key translates the pianist's energy into speed as it sets the hammer into motion to make this sound effect possible.

As we look at the piano, only a small portion of the key is visible to us--the portion that receives the finger's touch. Keys continue into the body of the piano for another twelve inches or so, making the entire key about eighteen inches long in upright pianos and smaller grand pianos, and almost two feet long in nine-foot grands. The keys also are tilted upward toward us, although they appear to have no tilt at all. As we move the visible part of the key downward, its opposite end, the hammer end, moves upward, creating a see-saw effect. This upward end then sends the hammerhead on its journey to the string, producing sound. Since the pianist may be almost two feet away from the string, which is the source of sound, Matthay suggests that pianists imagine the key as a continuation of their finger and treat the finger and key as one unit, thus giving the pianist the illusion that the fingers actually are making contact with the string. (3) The pianist's job is to have an aural picture of the desired tone and communicate the right amount of energy to a key to produce that tone from the string. When does this tone start? Does it begin when the key gets to the bottom, or does it begin somewhere along the way to the bottom?