[citation needed] As a violinist by birth, he dealt with questions of music making and musicians' medicine at an early age and sought new, scientifically sound forms for the optimal handling of this instrument.His works on piano technique, which are still significant today, were created in collaboration with the pianist Tony Bandmann.
(1861-1916) and the piano teachers Ludwig Deppe (1828-1890), whose pupil Elisabeth Caland (1862-1929) and Rudolf Maria Breithaupt (1873-1945), even if they did not always share all of Steinhausen's views.
[citation needed] Steinhausen studied for years the movements of the violinists' shoulder and arm, also on the basis of his practice as an amateur of the instrument.
The first, based on the use of "weight", is simply the "natural" or "physiological" technique, while the second, which considers the digital movement fundamental, constitutes an artificial and antiphysiological construction.
In order to obtain from the piano all the rich range of sounds the instrument is capable of, it is necessary instead to use, as great pianists have always done and do, the great muscles of the arm and shoulder, which "occurs without stiffening anything, but in a state of relaxation and passivity of the muscles: The "mass", i.e. the shoulder-arm-hand-drop system, is in fact set in motion by fully exploiting gravity, i.e. the inertial weight ("fall"); the impulse is thus given by a movement of momentum ("Schwungbewegung") of the entire arm mass from the shoulder down; the muscular work (contraction) is therefore of very short duration, it simply gives the impulse and then immediately abandons the mass to its moments of inertia; before and after the impulse there is an identical state of passivity, relaxation and absence of contraction of all the muscles".