Ask most adults to name a great piano teacher from the past and they will mention names tied to a particular method book. Fewer know about Alexander Siloti, though his influence runs through the Russian piano school and, I would argue, through the hands of anyone who has ever studied in it. He is worth knowing, and I think he offers an unusually clear answer to a question adult learners rarely ask: why do I press a key the way I do?
The man in the middle
Alexander Siloti was a Russian pianist and conductor. He studied at the Moscow Conservatory, where his teachers included Nikolai Zverev and Nikolai Rubinstein. After he graduated, he went to Weimar to study with Franz Liszt. Later he returned to Russia and taught at the Moscow Conservatory himself.
Two of his pupils there are names you will probably know. One was Sergei Rachmaninoff, who was also his cousin. The other was Alexander Goldenweiser, who became one of the most influential Moscow teachers of the following generation. Siloti even conducted the first performance of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto, with the composer at the piano. Rachmaninoff dedicated his First Piano Concerto to him.
In my own lineage, the line runs from Liszt to Siloti to Goldenweiser, and from Goldenweiser to Tatiana Nikolayeva and Ilya Romanovich Klyachko, and so down to my teacher Manana Kandelaki and to me. I mention this not as decoration but because the idea at the center of it matters for your playing.
What does it mean to inherit touch?
When people hear “lineage,” they often imagine something mystical, as if tone could be passed through a handshake. It is more ordinary than that, and more interesting. A teacher shows a student how to produce a sound. The student, who hears the difference, copies it, adjusts, and eventually makes it their own. Then that student shows someone else.
What travels in that process is not a list of instructions. It is a physical memory and an auditory one together: this is how a singing tone feels in the arm, and this is how it sounds. A student who has heard a beautiful piano tone made in person knows something a student who has only read about it does not. They know what they are aiming at.
That is what I mean by a direct line of touch and tone. I cannot prove that anything of Liszt’s hands survives in mine, and I would be suspicious of anyone who claimed to. But I know that the way I was taught to sink into a key, to let the weight of the arm do the work, and to judge a sound by how it sounds and not how it looks, came to me from teachers who had it from their teachers. Somewhere in that chain, someone learned it by listening to someone else.
Why the way you press a key is inherited
You have a lineage too, even if you taught yourself. You learned to press keys by imitating what you heard and saw: recordings, videos, a friend who plays, a teacher you had as a child. Your habits are borrowed from somewhere. If you tap each key with a stiff finger, you probably learned that from something you watched. If you play with a hunched shoulder, you copied it, or you invented it out of tension.
That is not an insult. It is useful news, because inherited habits can be replaced. Here is the principle I teach, drawn from the Russian school and from Alexander Alexandrovich Nikolaev’s School of Piano Playing: sound is made by the arm, not by the finger alone. The finger is the point of contact, and the weight comes from behind it.
A small experiment for your next practice session
- Rest your hand lightly on the keys, then let the weight of your forearm drop into one key, as if you were pressing a doorbell with the whole arm and not just the fingertip.
- Listen. Is the tone full and round, or thin and sharp?
- Now try the same key with a stiff, tapping finger. Compare the two.
- Go back to the first way and ask whether it feels easier. It usually does.
Do this with one note for a minute or two at the start of each session. You are not building strength. You are retraining the way you decide to make a sound.
You can choose your inheritance
This is what I find hopeful in the idea of a lineage. You do not have to accept the habits you arrived with. The tradition of piano teaching is, in a sense, a long series of people who chose to listen more carefully than the person before them. Siloti took what he learned from his teachers and from Liszt and passed it on in his own way. His pupils then did the same.
You are in a position to do the same: take what you have heard, listen more closely than you did yesterday, and let the key teach you. Touch is a skill, and skills improve with attention.
If you are teaching yourself and want a guide who learned this way, start with my free course. And when you are ready, record a short piece on your phone and send it to me for free written feedback. I read and listen to every recording myself.