ARM WEIGHT, TONE AND WRIST FLEXIBILITY EXERCISES

At University, my piano teacher used with me (and I still have my copy of the book, of course, and used it to develop and extend these techniques over a few years):

CZERNY Op.821 "160 8-measure exercises for the piano" (Buonamici) - which is published by Shirmer, their volume 147 in their library of musical classics. (My copy cost £5.25 in about 1985.)

These are exercises to free the arm and thereby free the TONE coming from the piano - the singing sound which some pianists do so well. HOWEVER these are exercises, and are not recommended movements (necessarily) for PERFORMANCE of such a passage in a concert - often it would be a freed up arm and wrist that does a lesser or complimentary movement (for example, one would have to be careful about the left hand "down on the thumb" bit in the left hand of Czerny No.2 - unless the movement is used but without thumb weight or a BANG on the thumb. So these are exercises to free the WRIST, ARM WEIGHT and SINGING TONE.

1: Hold one forearm using the other arm, and when you've relaxed the held arm, "drop" it onto your knee, then a note, then a chord - to get used to releasing the weight in your arm. A vital exercise - keep doing this better and better over some weeks, and arm weight will be freed into your playing.

2: Use Czerny No.1 for left to right wrist turning - exaggerate the movement, and do it with relaxed wrist. This is called "lateral" movement, and can be pencilled in the copy as "lat".

3: Use Czerny No.2 for a "flick" of the wrist over the thumb in the left hand - quickly, with an exaggerated but relaxed movement. This can be pencilled in the copy wherever needed as "F" for "flick". Regarding the left hand of the second line, it's the same as the right hand of next instruction below, going down on each thumb, and moving the wrist up over the intervening three notes (and lateral on the G F# G F# group). This can be called a "down-forward-up" and is best pencilled in as an "upside-down V" on the note you go down on (so it's the same idea as in bowing, but a pointed version) [similarly "up" is shown as a normal "V" (used in a moment)], and the forward movement of the wrist can be pencilled in as an upward moving curved line, which looks like a curved tick.

4: Use No.3 for three things: left hand for a quick up & down wrist movement on each staccato chord - a "bounce", which can be pencilled in as a short wavy line consisting of a small "n" followed by a small "v" (as it's a "down" joined immediately to an "up"); the right hand is used first for a "down-forward-up" (over the first 3 semiquavers) starting with the wrist down and moving up and forward over the 3 semiquavers; and then the right hand has some bounces also - for example on the second G quaver in bar 2.

5: Use No.4 for "lateral" in the left hand (mixed in with some "down-forward-up", and combined in bar 7 (twice). Meanwhile the right hand has "bounces", but the crushed note and the note after it are a "down" followed by an "up".

6: Use No.5 onwards to work out (in playing hands separately) the movements and pencilling them in (until you find it obvious enough).

7: No. 12 uses "lateral" movement combined with the wrist doing a "circle" movement over the first half of the bar (I just pencil in "circle").


When mastered, try applying these techniques to Chopin Etudes Opus 10. For example, No. 1 is great with each right hand 4 semiquavers doing a "down-forward-up" combined with a "circle"!

I'm printing this for my pupils' use also, and this was a reply to a post which I'm re-posting in Teachers and in Piano also, in case others are interested.