Piano Video Lesson: The Importance of the Bench

Hi, welcome to virtualsheetmusic.com. I'm Robert Estrin. Today's subject is essential element of piano technique, the bench. Is this really true? Absolutely. How can the bench be so important? Well, you know, I also play the French horn, and you know, working on the embouchure, the exact placement of the mouthpiece on the lips is something that you spent years doing. In fact, when Philip Farkas, the former principal horn of the Chicago Symphony was in his 80s, I accompanied in his studio and I accompanied him, and I remember one day going into his cabin and he was all excited because he had changed his embouchure. Here is a man who played for decades and in his 80s he was still refining the embouchure.

People who studied the violin can take years just to hold the instrument properly. Now the good news for pianists is it's a very ergonomic instrument, you're sitting down and you're playing. However, it's critical that you sit in the right spot and at the right height. Most piano benches are like this, the standard duet type bench. You've all seen them. They open up for your music to go inside, and they're called duet benches because two people can sit at them. And that's very nice for not just playing duets on the piano, four-hand piano, but also with younger students they can have an adult kind of sit there with them and help them guide their practice.

Now, when students get more advanced or even at the younger levels of study, an adjustable artist bench sometimes referred to as a tabouret is a godsend, because it has these handles and you turn the handles to raise or lower the height, so you can have exactly the right position to feel comfortable at the piano.

Now there are even other types of benches. This is actually a chair, a piano chair. Steinway used to make piano chairs, they still make them. You don't see them that often. The benefit to this is that it's slanted forward slightly so it's less fatiguing for the back. There are other benches that accomplish this in other ways, sometimes there's a little leap you can engage in the back of the bench so that it stays up, so that gives you that sense of leaning into the keyboard. So you have to find what works for you.

Now, one ideal type of piano bench and my personal bench is a combination of the duet and the adjustable artist tabouret. It's a double wide tabouret. Now, a good one that's, you know, with leather and everything can cost well over a $1,000, that's a serious bench. But I would like you to take benches more seriously than you ever thought you should because it really is an important component to being comfortable and relaxed to the piano, avoiding injury and making your technique more fluid.

Thanks so much for joining me. Robert Estrin here at virtualsheetmusic.com.

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