Sometimes, Look at the Keys

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…

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