The Craft of Piano Playing

In The Craft of Piano Playing, master pianist Alan Fraser offers readers an original and comprehensive approach to piano technique, offering over 100 illustrations and a series of unique exercises to guide the reader. In The Craft of Piano Playing, master pianist Alan Fraser offers readers an original and comprehensive approach to piano technique, offering over 100 illustrations and a series of unique exercises to guide the reader. Drawing on his many years as a performer and teacher, his long-standing collaborations with pedagogue Phil Cohen and virtuoso Kemal Gekich, and his professional training in the Feldenkrais Method, Fraser introduces his truly innovative piano technique by Teaching how to move your hands with greater sensitivity, power, and accuracy, and honing the skeletal alignments to help you access your innate, structural potency; Linking your physical technique to musical expression, creating an "absolutely natural way of moving at the piano that is powerful, flexible, and musical" (Piano News, Germany); and Keeping your hands healthy while avoiding the threats of tendonitis, carpal tunnel syndrome, focal dystonia, and RSI.This revised second edition joins the DVD of the same name, his study guide, and his latest book, Honing the Pianistic Self-Image, in Alan Fraser's growing line of piano pedagogical materials. This edition includes new chapters, such as "Arm Rhythm" and "The Body's Support of Natural Finger Shape," updated material reflecting evolutions in Fraser's technical and pedagogical thinking, a "cleaner and leaner" literary style, and more extensive, better-organized tables of contents, with cross-references to corresponding chapters in the DVD.

Presenting a new, comprehensive and highly original approach to piano technique with a fascinating series of exercises to help the reader put this approach into practice, this guide uses numerous musical examples and sketches to show how many common movement habits at the keyboard are counterproductive. Fraser provides a new way of manipulating the skeletal frame of the hand to produce astonishing sonic results from the instrument.