Playing piano with body weight and martial arts

Yesterday my piano teacher showed me how to play piano with body weight. The idea is that to achieve a full and colourful tone, one should not play just with arms and fingers, but rather with the full body weight as if leaning with the upper body on one’s fingertips resting relaxed on the piano keyboard. I do not fully internalised the concept, nor can I perform the technique (that’s exactly the point of learning, right?), but I do understand what it means.

Weight transfer in piano play & exercises

Later in the evening I looked some articles and YouTube videos explaining the concept. There’s plenty of materials explaining what it’s all about: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=piano+play+with+body+weight

The take-away is that this is called weight transfer and there are many exercises to train it. The idea is to create a suspense bridge (feeling) between the upper torso and fingertip, use free-fall drop to play keys and effectively learn to transfer weight between fingers, instead of using force of finger muscles or arms.

This will of course take (probably long) time to develop.

But the concept is not unfamiliar, actually it very much resembles the use of body core to enact movement in Japanese martial arts.

Using your body efficiently in Japanese martial arts & sports

I am only familiar with some (beginner level) swordsmanship-related techniques from Iaido, Kendo, Aikido and Bojutsu. I also know that what I am going to say applies to Karate too. One of the things they teach, is that to deliver a really powerful, controlled and effective strike (be it with hand, or sword), you should use your hara, that is, the power of the hips, the body core. Simple interpretation without all the esoteric garbage is that it is the hips which generate body powerful rotations and thus generally provide momentum in body movements (hara-centric methods). My subjective understanding of this is that the rest is the question of transferring that momentum into useful energy delivered by another body part, typically limbs (strikes using arms, kicks using legs, or throws using the upper torso).

Similar techniques can be found at the core of many sports/moving body experiences. Another thing I am familiar with is running: again the proper technique is all about body core and hips as the engine providing the momentum, legs are to deliver it to the ground. The rest is structural, or dynamic support. Or take gymnastics and especially aerobatic gymnastics. Use of body core and hips everywhere. And so on…

Putting it together

So if I know (to an extent) the experience of using body core for martial arts, how can I transfer that same feeling into piano play?

And in turns out, I am of course not the first one to figure out the connection between weight-based piano play/weight transfer and martial arts. There is this marvelous site , where the author makes the same point in <https://pianodao.com/2015/10/31/piano-technique-weight-in-motion-boxing-taichichuan-and-the-cherry-tomato/>. Specifically:

maximum efficiency with minimum effort.
– Kanō Jigorōi about judo/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kan%C5%8D_Jigor%C5%8D

• the slow/fast judo throw video shows very well (if you are attentive) the use of hips during the throw.

The role of the muscles is to help the body maintain an efficient structure – so we can use and apply body-weight-in-motion.

This will need more elaboration till I get this right…