The Myth of Coordination on the Piano
The Belief
Many people believe that learning and playing the piano requires a large amount of multitasking. Although we do occasionally have to do some amount of multitasking, it doesn’t play as big of a role as you may think.
The belief for many beginners is that; we have to read two staves and we have different things happening in each of our hands (and our feet), so we need to split our focus and concentrate on lots of things at the same time. However, this isn’t really how playing the piano works!
That’s good news for those that think they are terrible at focussing on more than one thing at once! It can also help us understand exactly how to learn the piano in a more efficient way.
2. The Myth
So what actually is multitasking?
Well…according to Google it is; “the performance of more than one task at the same time”.
You can try to practice the piano in this way and think of each hand as a separate thing happening at once. Many players will attempt to practice everything hands separately before practicing them together, which is why many players think it's a game of multitasking. However, this doesn’t really help your physical ability to play and the music will sound much less cohesive. It’s a little like trying to eat dinner by first using your fork then putting it down and then using your knife separately. Both the knife and fork operate together to complete the task of getting the food - to the face.
When reading sheet music the aim is to think of both hands as one unit. This means reading across both hands together and perceiving them as one thing. Let's say you have a G and a B in the right hand and a G and a D in the left hand…across both hands you have G, B and D which is a G major chord.
Similarly, if you have a difficult rhythm to play, it’s better to think of coordinating the hands so that they are playing a single rhythm across the hands. Which notes are just the right hand? Which notes are just the left hand? Which notes are both hands played at the same time? Then it is just a series of notes forming one rhythmic pattern.
Don’t get me wrong, there is of course a place for practicing hands separately, but to me, this is a tool to fix specific problems. Let’s say you have a bar of music where your right hand has 21 notes to play with a tricky finger pattern but your left hand has 2 single notes across the bar. Then it might be worth practicing hands separately to allow all of your focus to be on building the muscle memory in your right hand. However, when both hands are contributing to the overall sound (which is most situations)…practicing hands separately can potentially make you start thinking of two things happening at once, rather than one thing happening between the hands.
3. The Exception
Having said this, there is always some exception to the rule and a time when it is more advantageous to consider each hand separately. On the piano, this is polyrhythms!
A polyrhythm is; “a rhythm which makes use of two or more different rhythms simultaneously”.
A good example of this is when we have triplet eighth notes (quavers) in one hand in a piece of music while at the same time having regular eighth notes (quavers) in the other hand. This effectively means you have to play 3 notes in the right hand in the same amount of time as playing 2 notes in the left hand. In this particular example you may be able to easily work out when each note should be coordinated together. However let’s say you have 18 notes in the right hand and 10 in the left hand! This becomes very difficult to coordinate if thinking of both hands together. So, this is one of those situations where playing hands separately and thinking about each hand individually is advantageous!
Matthew Cawood
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