As a college teacher, I find that I do a lot of rehabilitative work with my students, trying to retrain their physical instincts and gestures at the keyboard. A spiral of incomplete technical thinking, over-ambitious repertoire and little time for easeful practice leads to a high incidence of serious injuries. Piano teachers have become more aware of piano playing casualties than ever before - carpal tunnel syndrome, tendonitis, and other repetitive motion related injuries are now familiar terms for many teachers. Piano teachers can hold out a hope for a systematic pedagogical approach, which is based on certain physiological principles of motion. We also need to break out of the mold of traditional finger technique, which is based on historical precedent but needs to be modified for modern application.
Technical training is a purely mechanical procedure, requiring many hours of daily practice.
The teacher is the absolute authority. It was believed that fingers could be trained properly only when their action was isolated from the disadvantageous influence of the hand and the arm. Interestingly, although early forte pianos were criticized for their hard action in comparison with that of the older keyboard instruments, principles of early keyboard technique were preserved. This was characterized by an extremely curved or bent position of the finger, preliminary to the act of tone production. Teachers often advocated lifting the fingers as high as possible, bending them, then striking the keys with the finger tip.