Using Hanon in the Quest to Relax My Thumb

I'm working hard on relaxing my thumb, as well as strengthening my other fingers, via thumb-tucking. (I keep wanting to type "thumb-sucking," or "thumb-tacking".) And this weekend I made the brilliant deduction that Hanon is ideal for working on this kind of thing.

I've gone through phases with Hanon. Some of my piano teachers haven't used it, while others made it a central part of my technique work. My latest piano teacher, Carol, who taught me in 2019-2020 (before my COVID wrecked everything and tendinitis wrecked my elbow), loved Hanon. With her, I was coming back to piano after about 10 years away, so we started with the first 20 exercises and then skipped over to various exercises for trills, scales in thirds, etc. (I was just starting scales in thirds when my piano life ground to a halt.)

I hadn't thought about Hanon at all until a week or so ago when I listened to Dominic Cheli's lecture and worked on the octave exercises. (I wrote about that here.) So I had found and dusted off the old Hanon book for that. And then, as I was working on this thumb-tucking thing Friday night, I happened to glance over at the Hanon book I'd set aside on top of the piano and thought ... "Yes!"

Hanon is so perfect for this kind of thing! Here is a video where I'm working through one of the exercises, focusing specifically on the thumb-tuck. It's a very boring video, and if I had any video-editing skills to speak of, I would have cut a big chunk of the exercise out. Anyway, enjoy! (Even though, if I'm honest, it's not that enjoyable a video. It even includes a lovely nose-scratch at the beginning that looks like an almost-nose-pick.)

Comments

Rethinking Bare Necessities

Today's breakthrough moment (there are actually two of them) focuses on "Bare Necessities." As you'll remember, I discovered Jonny May's arrangement back in early March and immediately decided to learn it. I printed out the music, started the course, and proceeded to learn the stride section, posting a few videos of my progress. Ha. I bet those videos make it look like I was making progress. I guess I was ... but not really. And I realized something this weekend that I hadn't before: Because I was thinking of "Bare Necessities" as a "fun" piece, I wasn't practicing it seriously or diligently. I wasn't treating it as something I wanted to master. This mindset might work with an easier piece, but this arrangement isn't easy. The result: despite a little progress at the outset, I wasn't moving forward. I was stalled. Breakthrough #1 The first breakthrough was realizing that if I truly want to learn this piece and play it well,...

March Goals Recap/Looking Ahead to April

It's April 1, and time to revisit the goals I set for last month. I practiced a total of 50.45 hours in March, averaging 1.62 hours (or just over an hour and a half) per day. Realistically, I practice about 45 minutes to an hour a day on weekdays, and I usually get at least one longer practice (or multiple shorter practices) in on one or both days of the weekend to bring the average up. CLASSICAL GOALS Chopin, F Minor Nocturne March Goal: Have entire piece by memory and performance-ready. I have about 90% of the piece by memory, but I still have some work to do before it's performance-ready. The only two sections that I don't quite have are "The Agitation" and the "stretto" section with the seventh chords. I'll work on both this week and will have them both memorized before the weekend. April Goal: Finish memorizing, and polish, polish, polish! My focus now is really on phrasing and dynamics. I have the notes down, even in the difficult passages. Fro...

Maple Leaf Rag Breakthrough

Oh, Maple Leaf. Where to begin? At the Beginning I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I learned the A and B sections of Maple Leaf Rag back in the 1990s. I can’t tell you if it was early, mid- or late 90s, but it was during those 10 years after I’d graduated college, when I was playing a good bit of piano but not taking regular lessons from anyone. I don’t remember teaching it to myself at all. I just know that, at some point, the first half of Maple Leaf Rag was part of my two- or three-song repertoire of pieces I’d be able to play by memory over the next 25 years. It was always sloppy and I knew it, but people loved it, and so I played it if there was ever a piano around. Back in January, I decided to properly re-learn those two sections, and to finally learn the C and D sections of this wonderful piece. I worked on these over the next month or two, learning (and-relearning) the notes pretty quickly ... but it took time to memorize, and also to get everything to tempo surpassing a...

Picking Up the Pieces

Search This Blog