You have skilled hands, keys to the advancement of humanity and to your technical development as a musician. Your hands are marvelously endowed in ways you may unwittingly witness every day. You witness these endowments when you flick a speck from your computer screen, when you toss a ball, when you brush away some small annoyance, or fling some foreign object from your fingers. Flinging, throwing, brushing and flicking, mundane though they are, are keys to your musical skills, gifts of your highly skilled hands. We meet here to celebrate those skills, articulate them, and learn how to call on them at will: Key movements.

Form partnerships

So, get a few people together or partner with another person and start a class. Partner by twos or threes in as many partnerships as you can form in the group. Be creative. Work two by two or in groups of three, one acting as a reporter to the class. Switch roles as often as you want. Be a disrupter. The words “let’s switch roles” require change. Mix it up.

Teachers of the moment

Select one member of your team or partnership to be the teacher of the moment. As teacher, you stand behind your student in easy arm’s reach and somewhat to the side at an easy angle, not perpendicularly. Envision your movement and bring your open hand to the back of your student. Ask that individual to meet your hand without leaning back. 

Hands on

Bring your hand to your student as though you were supporting the back of a small toddler. It is little more than support and no less. Develop the contact, the whole of your hand, fingers, palm, and heel in contact with the back and whole of your student. After some seconds, no more than 10 or so, withdraw your hand. Discuss what you noticed, teacher, student, and observer. Relax a bit and come back into the same partnerships and with roles creatively reversed. Freely share what you’ve noticed.

Launch mode

Regroup, come face to face with your partner or into a circle of three. Now, randomly and at will, each of you launch your left hand sideways and away from you without overt guidance. All control is lost at initiation. Toss your hand and arm away as though tossing a ball, as though you were launching some disgusting organic object from the tip of your fingers. Out with you, all at once, toss that nasty thing away. You wouldn’t guide it away, would you? No. You’d throw it. There will be no risk involved insomuch as the arm is truly launched without violent intent. Agonist muscles will reflexively pair with antagonist, the scope of the movement limited, all the gifts of the cerebellum, the lizard brain from which all such movement is instigated: Key movements. 

Still in partnerships, face to face or in circles of three, launch your left arms and then your right.  Do so randomly and at will, reversing roles and asking a member of your evolving partnership to observe. Be creative in your partnering. Switch roles, observe one another. 

Recognizing limitation

You will begin see the limitation of guided, careful movement. It is anti-musical, the cause of most if not all technical faults. What is more gruesome than a bow being guided over the strings of the violin or cello or a voice being guided from note to note? Be brave and point that out in one another. Bring your hand to your toddler’s back now, oops, I mean to the back of your student of the moment. Let it stay there awhile and ask for feedback and exchange. Change roles, a teacher might become an observer, student a teacher, or in whatever arrangement you collectively choose. Mix it up.

The character of movement

Now, return to the same pairings in which you began, the teacher in due time bringing their hand their student’s back, recalling the support of their imagined toddler. The teacher’s arm is no longer launched but informed by the character, release, and expanse of that movement. Switch roles after 10 to 15 seconds or so. Has your connection to your student and the student’s connection to you altered? If so, that’s good. If not, that may be equally good. Now switch roles, all else remaining the same.

 All the world’s a splay

We break for a moment, take seats in our original groups of twos and threes. Now, agreeing as to right or left, let the two or three of you toss your hands and arms away while splaying your hands at the apex of the movement, the back of your hands forming a shallow dish, relaxing in in mid midair and returning to your sides. Stand again, and in new pairing, let the teacher bring their splaying fingers and hand to relax just prior to landing on the neck of student. Freely discuss.

New movement

What shall we call this new movement? Actually, it is quite old, brought to light in a masterpiece entitled The Psychology of Music by James L. Mursell. Mursell was venerated in his time and acknowledged as the center of a new school of humanist thought at Teachers College, Columbia University, where in later days, I briefly taught. Mursell held that ballistic movement enters all skilled movements “especially those of the musician.” No one seems to have taken him at his word. To me, and I hope to you, his meaning is as clear as it is revolutionary. 

Loaded terms

To some, though, the term ballistic is off-putting, suggesting inter-continental violence.  If we extract the first four letters of the word we get the word ball, ball-istic, having to do with that spheroid that generates more fun and games than any other object. Ball-istic movement generates all sorts of fun. Again, it is launched but not guided.

Seeing key movement and its lack

Mursell thought ballistic movement to be the key to all skilled movements, musical or athletic.   We see it in the visual blur of the percussionist’s mallets, in the flight of fingers on the clarinet and on other winds and brasses. Skilled hands. We see them in play, in the catlike movement of the pianist’s fingers on whorled ivory keys. Damn those smooth plastic ones. We can call it key movement, the key to all musically technical skills.

How we can continue

Let me continue to introduce it to you, in a class of those as curious and open minded as yourself. We will open doors and enter through them into a world of musical accuracy and ease. Key movement. Skilled hands. Music in the key of See.