[arxanas]

This book has a lot of useful techniques regarding piano practice, but it's light on details about technique itself, such as finger positioning or how to engage which muscles. Does anyone have good resources towards this end?

[wildrhythms]

A book will never teach you which muscles to engage to play an instrument. Find a piano teacher if you want to learn correct posture and exercises to prevent injuring yourself and play properly.

[arxanas]

The piano teachers I've worked with don't seem to know enough about kinesiology to explain the muscle activity. On the contrary, it seems like the mental models they use to explain posture and exercises are primarily correlative, rather than causative. They can tell me that my posture is incorrect and what it should look like, but not what muscles to engage or why, or what angles to apply force at, and so on.

I enjoyed reading a text about weightlifting exercises once. It's not a substitute for carrying out the exercises or having an observer comment, but the underlying principles could be used to explain my performance (or lack thereof) and extend to other exercises.

I have my own notes on piano kinesiology which I've built up, which I refer to as necessary, but it would be easier if someone else had already done it, as it's clearly not the case that a book can't teach you which muscles to engage.

[palimpsests]

this is partly because the muscles you engage, the angles at which you apply force are going to have slight or large differences from another player due to differences in biology and physiology. we are not all the same shape nor strength.

so of course the mental models are correlative _as well as_ causative e.g. "if you keep slamming your finger into the keys you will likely develop RSI and you will have drastically impeded your ability to control your tone or dynamics" <--- doesn't get much more causative than that.

furthermore, what you've asked for sounds like it would be receiving instructions like, "contract your pronator quadratus to 17%, rotate 34° to strike G3 at a 48.5° angle with your L ring finger, and here's all the angles and associated muscular tensions associated with each phalange that you'll need to master: ...." ? Is that what you mean?

I have yet to meet someone who is unable to receive postural feedback if it's not framed in terms of anatomy. Human movement locomotion does not come from conscious direction to move individual muscles, it's a much more integrated experience (e.g. "extend your right leg" -- want to guess how many coordinated actions of muscles and neurons are are involved in that?