I wrote a post several years ago called Don’t Look at the Keys. I wrote it after having a minor breakthrough when starting to get back into a regular piano practice. When I was quite young, my first piano teacher used to tell me: “Don’t look at the keys when you’re playing the piano.”
At the time I wrote the post in 2019, I was trying to do more sight reading, and this was a very useful heuristic to re-internalize. When you’re sight reading, it’s necessary to read directly from sheet music and use your proprioception to feel for the keys. This allows you to read more smoothly.
I recently ended a hiatus from playing piano and have gotten into a more consistent practice, and it’s made me realize that there is a corollary to my older post: sometimes you do need to look at the keys.
The shift was that I began to do more memorization and mastery of pieces. The goal with memorization is to take a whole piece and internalize it so you can play it start to end without referencing the sheet music. In doing this, it’s extremely helpful to use visual cues, especially when you’re landing chords where you have to jump to them. For example, in playing Franz Liszt’s Liebestraum No. 3, there’s a section where you have to – quickly and consistently – hit the same octave G♯s. You’re doing yourself a disservice if you don’t at least glance in your periphery to see where your hands are landing.
Extending this a bit further, there are a few modes you can have with your visual system when playing piano.
The first is using your sight of the keys in a manual, deliberative way: you’re looking at the keys and translating what each key means and thinking through the piece. Okay, I need to play a C♯, so I’m gonna put my pinky on the C♯, and then I’m gonna put my third finger on F, or make the chord in this shape. This is workable and beneficial when learning, but you’re never going to play smoothly in manual mode.
There’s a second mode, which is characterized by a soft focus. In this mode, you’re not actually thinking about any of the notes at all – or at least not deliberatively. With a sense of curiosity, you’re observing yourself playing the piece. For me, this mode only kicks in once I’ve committed a piece to muscle memory. The automatic part of your brain is still using those visual cues, but it’s neither deliberative nor conscious. You don’t think about the note names or the chord shapes in your working memory. It’s like curiously watching someone else play the piano, but you’re inside the experience of that.
In some ways this is a draw-the-rest-of-the-owl description of what it feels like to play piano well (dare I say). But when I’m able to practice or perform from a place of curious, open awareness, things tend to go a lot better than when I’m strenuously trying to think my way through playing.