Piano Practice and Body Awareness: Didactic Reflections

Type: Short Paper · Article nº 1290

Authors: Renée Rebelo Cicarelli

Presenter: Renée Rebelo Cicarelli

Institution: UNESPAR/EMBAP

Abstract

This study emerges directly from my professional experience as a pianist and piano teacher in the Brazilian cities of Curitiba and Foz do Iguaçu. For over two decades, I have worked as a collaborative pianist with choirs, singers, and instrumentalists, while teaching piano to students with diverse levels of musical and technical development. The high technical demands of the piano repertoire have led me to reconsider my own bodily interaction with the instrument and to reflect on how I could pedagogically approach this relationship in my teaching practice.

The objective is to expand the concept of technique beyond digital performance and to promote a healthy, flexible, and integrated bodily connection with the piano. In this perspective, technique is constructed through the totality of the body and the interactive experience between student and instrument. Understanding students as unique individuals—with distinct beliefs, habits, and musical identities that manifest in performance (Milani, 2016)—piano teaching becomes an essentially personalized process, oriented toward each pianist’s specific goals.

In my pedagogical practice, piano lessons are divided into flexible, interdependent sections lasting about one hour, including technical exercises, musical literacy and development methods appropriate to each age group (Thompson, 2019; Bastien, 1985), and repertoire chosen by the student. Learning occurs through score reading, chord symbols, imitation, or memorization. To cultivate conscious and integrative bodily practice, I incorporate complementary activities such as global body awareness exercises, topographic exercises covering the full range of the keyboard, and awareness-based approaches applied to specific repertoire pieces.

Grounded in the conception of the body as a physiological, motor, and psychic unity, this perspective is based on a holistic understanding of corporeality, guiding the individual toward a state of bodily awareness in which they perceive themselves as an indivisible being, capable of performing motor actions adjusted to their physical constitution (Melo & Gerling, 2021). This conception translates into an adaptable pianistic technique in which the essential element lies in performing movements consciously, comfortably, and in full integration with the body as a whole—embracing not only physical constitution but also each musician’s unique mode of corporeal expression.

References

Melo, M., & Gerling, C. (2021). Corporeidade e performance pianística. Revista da ABEM.

Milani, M. (2016). O corpo na performance musical. Editora Prísmas.