Type: Book
Name: Water Pianism
Writter: Daniel Bennett
Edition: 1st Edition
Year: 2016
Available versions: Kindle
Number of Pages: 153
Price: Around 4.49$ on Amazon
No audio included
TL;DR
This is not a music theory book.
Water pianism is a mindful approach to playing the piano with both hands, it doesn’t teach you a specific way, rather it helps you explore the obstacles that stop you from moving your hands and fingers naturally on the piano and helps you remove those obstacles.
I would recommend this book for those who feel frustrated from simplified advice about how to make their hands more fluently and independently when playing the piano. I also believe that piano teachers would be happy to adopt some ideas from this book.
REVIEW
The book is structured in a certain way: it addresses the problem, explains it from a philosophical point of view and gives you exercises that help improve your skills.
Pretty good structure for a philosophical book about piano playing. The only things I would change are:
- There are long explanations before you get to the insightful practical point.
- Unfortunately, there are no visual examples in the book, it would have been very helpful to include a link to videos of all the exercises for example.
With all that said, this book walks you through a journey of understanding your mistakes better, knowing better what to avoid and where to focus your attention. The exercises are pretty good and the topics in each chapter are very easily relatable, especially if you have been playing piano for some time.
Why did I choose this book?
Because I wanted to have an easier time fluently improvising on the piano. I used to feel that I was focusing too much on the movement of my hands. Landing my fingers on the right keys in fast moving musical passages was confusing… I got frustrated.
Although I can’t say that this book got me exactly where I wanted, I can certainly say that it corrected bad mistakes that I’ve gotten from watching hours and hours of lessons on YouTube. These mistakes held me back from improving my skills. “Water Pianism” lays down a path to clearly see what you should practice to achieve better hand movement and fluid independency.
A word about practicing
This book would help you see, but the only thing that will get you where you want is practicing, nothing is better than practicing. Take your time, don’t practice for the sake of saying you’ve practiced. Focus on your playing by removing any distractions while you’re practicing. Set some time to do exactly that and you will see results.
Topics in the book:
- Focus, awareness and silencing the ego
- Other effective ways to practice piano playing – away from the piano
- Dealing with the large amounts of information you gather along the way
- Clearing the mind and moving at the right pace
- Identifying weaknesses
- Body-mind connection
- Obstacles
- Playing with two hands
- Creativity and knowledge
- Visualization techniques
- Practormance – Practice and performance
- Left-hand right-hand illusion
- Being in the moment
- The expertise illusion
- Daily practice
- Extremities in practice