On Teaching

Helping Students Choose Fingerings VII 

I start this month’s column by following up on my closing comment from last month, that I would write about how to recognize, in these particular circumstances, when a fingering issue is really a hand distribution issue. I have written at length about hand distribution (as the principal subject of three columns, July, August, and September 2014, and in passing elsewhere). Since fingering choices can’t be made prior to hand distribution choices, it is a necessary part of the student’s autonomous thinking about fingering that they think about hand distribution. I enumerated this among the guidelines with which I would send a student off to work out fingerings. At this current stage, when you as the teacher are watching and evaluating a student’s fingering choices, you need to evaluate whether there is any awkwardness created by playing some notes in the hand that is less easily suited to reach them. 

It occurs to me that this is usually closely bound up with the use of the inner part of the hand. When notes are positioned such that either hand might reasonably play them, then it is (usually? always?) the thumbs and second fingers of the two hands that are in competition for those notes. It is also true that awkward hand position often (though not always) results from choices about the use of the thumb. Also, the decision to use the thumb or second finger to play a particular note will often change what the rest of the hand has to do with the other notes—the notes that “officially” are in that hand, and have to remain so. Therefore, as you watch, listen, and check for matters of concern in a student’s fingering choices, your alertness for hand position problems and your checking for hand distribution issues can largely converge. 

Hand distribution

A hand distribution decision that is an actual issue or question can only arise when there are more than two simultaneous or overlapping notes. Otherwise either one note per hand makes sense, or it is trivially easy to play both notes together in one of the hands, when the outer notes are close enough that either hand can reach the inner notes. If those conditions are met, and there is anything awkward-looking occurring, as I sketched out last month (twisting of the hands, hunched shoulders, grimacing or other uncomfortable expressions, tight-looking tendons or muscles), then asking the student to review hand distribution choices is a good idea. This will not always be the answer and will not always solve the problem to switch notes into the other hand. But perhaps it will, and it is logically the first easy thing to check. 

There are only two hand possibilities for any note, as well as limited fingering choices for notes that are within the reach of either hand. A significant proportion of what look like tricky fingering spots can be solved by correction. Again, it is a good idea to prepare students in advance to think about this, but equally important to keep an eye on it along the way.

Speaking of the thumbs, I am aware of the pitfalls of using thumbs on black notes, as you also know if you have read this column often. I mentioned that as something to send students off thinking about as they work on fingering. And clearly if you see a student using a thumb on a black note and it looks awkward, that is a spot that you and the student should scrutinize. However, the opposite problem can also occur. From time to time I see a student conscientiously avoiding playing a sharp or flat with the thumb when doing so would be best, maybe actually fine, maybe a bit awkward but the best available choice. Beyond just adjusting the fingering, this can be an opportunity to remind the student that guidelines are just guidelines, and that it is the maximum hand-comfort itself that counts. Guidelines are really guesses about what is likely comfortable most of the time.

Fingering forward and backward

One of the concepts with which I suggested sending a student off to work on fingering was that fingering should be accomplished forward and backward: that we shouldn’t always start somewhere and finger ahead in the music from that point. Rather, we should sometimes consider where we want the hand or a finger to be at a certain point and reason backwards from there. This is especially important when there are crucial spots that are difficult to finger. We must give those spots what they need, and work outward in both directions to incorporate them into the overall flow of the fingering. One way to notice when a student has given in to the common tendency to start at the beginning and go forward with fingering is to notice when a fingering crashes (or even crashes and burns!). That is, when everything looks smooth, makes sense, sounds continuous and accurate as to rhythm, and then suddenly falls apart: the hand looks bent out of shape, hesitations or wrong notes occur, and so on. A subset of this is the appearance of sudden, not musically sensible substitutions. An instance of this is demonstrated in Example 1.

I would not expect a student to attempt literally this fingering, though someone, perhaps a real beginner, might. It would probably be an executed but not written-in fingering, since the very act of writing this shows that it is too elaborate. But it encapsulates the principle of starting somewhere, running out of fingers, and not having a good way to recover. If the passage went like that exhibited in Example 2, then the impetus to use the fingering in Example 1 would be more understandable. If the passage went like that in Example 3, then the fingering in Example 1 would be in the conversation as a possible solution. This assumes a desired legato. As always, with non-legato technique, fingering possibilities are expanded.

There is an interesting fork in the road with substitutions in general. They can be either a sensible solution to a tricky fingering moment, preserving the desired articulation and using the hand efficiently, or a desperate attempt to rescue a fingering disaster. We must know how to tell these apart, and in evaluating a fingering that a student has brought back to us we can use a discussion of this distinction to help the student become aware of the best ways to use substitution. If we see substitution, especially if it is executed but not written in, then we should invite the student to talk about the reasons behind it.

Example 4 demonstrates another sample of a fingering’s crashing because of lack of planning. This is one that I have indeed seen frequently in real life. In this case, if a significant overall non-legato is what is desired, then there might be nothing particularly bad about this fingering. It might or not be comfortable or be best overall. But it is the kind of pattern that often or habitually arises not out of a purposeful decision about articulation, but rather from starting somewhere and not planning. If you observe a fingering like this and hear awkward irregularities in articulation, then it is something that should be questioned. 

Substitutions are one way under some conditions of achieving legato. In general, as you watch your student’s new fingering, bear in mind that there are many ways of making successive notes legato, and when they are intentional for the purpose they are important and good. But they are also at risk for not being the simplest way to execute the successive notes. If you see a student using a legato fingering, it looks awkward, and they are not actually executing the legato (that is, having planned out a somewhat complicated fingering for which the only rationale would be to connect notes, and they are in fact optionally releasing fingers and not connecting the notes), then this is a time to query. Sometimes an impulse to use a legato fingering at all costs comes about because that fingering feels like holding on to the notes for dear life and creates a sense of note security. That sense is a false one if the fingering is awkward or if it causes the hand to be rooted in one place when it should be free to move to another. 

One point to notice in watching student’s fingerings is whether there are spots where a finger seems to be falling naturally over a note, but the student plays the note with a different finger. There can be many reasons for this to happen. One of those is that the student is in fact planning just as I have been writing above. In that case, the benefit of starting a discussion about that spot is that it can allow the teacher to ratify the student’s sense that what is being done makes sense. However, it is also possible that the finger that seems to be falling naturally over the next note would have been the right one to use, and that the student hasn’t seen this. This is often because it is just a less-favored finger than the one that the student is using—finger 4 being often less favored than 3, or 5 being usually less favored than anything else, for example. But it can be for essentially no reason. Sometimes if I say, “Finger 4 is almost touching that note. Why not play it with 4?” the answer may just be, “Oh, yeah. That looks good,” or even, “I don’t know why I didn’t think of that.” Not thinking of options is universal, and is part of the reason that we study and teach. Sometimes there is an impulse to look for the more complicated when the simpler would have been just as good and actually better because it is simpler. Moments when a finger that seems to be easily aiming at the next note is not used are sometimes instances of this. This kind of thing happens with everyone, not just students and certainly not just beginners.

Fingering patterns

I wrote earlier about note patterns and how and when they can or cannot be a scaffolding on which to build fingering patterns. This is a key thing to look for when a student brings a fingering back to you. There is the two-headed basic manifestation: is the student missing any opportunity to achieve simplicity by applying good, repeated patterned fingering where it would work, and is the student imposing a patterned fingering where it is actually made awkward by something specific in the notes? There are also a couple of special cases. Is the student using the same fingering when there is an exact repeat of a passage? This can be literally a repeat sign applying to some sort of section or, for that matter, successive verses of a hymn, assuming that they are played the same way as to such things as “soloing out,” etc., or it can be a more limited return of the exact same notes. It can be in one hand or through the whole texture. It can be a full-fledged da capo as in the big E-minor Fugue of Bach among innumerable examples. 

Is there ever a legitimate reason to use a different fingering for two instances of exactly the same notes within the same piece? I am not sure that I have ever decided to do so. Maybe so with hymn verses, even apart from the obvious reasons derived from desired changes in texture, since the player might want to project a significantly different feeling with various verses, and that might make fingering and interpretive decisions result differently. In principle, a desire to project a different feeling when the same notes come back within a repertoire piece is a real possibility. In fact, it should always be considered. After all, a passage is different when it is being heard as a repetition or a hearkening back to something heard earlier. I do not recall that I have ever wanted to manifest this through different fingering: perhaps I have thought of these differences as being more modest or subtle. If a student plays the same thing with different fingering when it occurs at different places in a piece, that is likely to be because of insufficient planning or mistaken execution. But pointing it out could still spark an interesting discussion of the matter! 

Wrong notes and rhythms

What about wrong notes, wrong rhythms, out-and-out unsuccessful playing? The relationship between these sorts of problems and fingering planning is a complicated one. One point of good fingering is to make it as easy as possible to execute the notes. In fact that is what we have essentially been looking at as “good” fingering in these columns, since this discussion has by and large not been about fingering as an interpretive tool or as a tool of historical accuracy. However, it is always true that enough really well carried-out practicing can make almost any fingering work. So in a sense “good” fingering has as its purpose reducing the amount of practicing that will be necessary. And you could say that practicing has the purpose or effect of making it unnecessary to have planned good fingerings, although there is probably never a good reason to use it for that purpose. I have occasionally, just as an exercise, tried practicing a purposely awkward fingering, one that stops well short of being “dangerous” in the sense in which I have discussed that earlier, and trying to get it to work well. This has had mixed results. It has been successful enough to convince me that if I had had any reason to stick to it I could probably make it work, but not successful enough to make me think that that would ever be a good idea.

If a passage that a student reports having fingered carefully and practiced well doesn’t seem solid, it is reasonably likely that the fault lies with the practicing more than with the fingering planning, or that the passage is simply not ready to go at the tempo that the student is trying. Ragged, hesitant, or otherwise unsuccessful playing is not one of the most reliable indicators of non-optimal fingering. But note that this is really about the percentages: sometimes bad fingering is what is going on in these situations. It is quite common for a student to say, “I can’t get this bit right. There must be a better fingering I could use,” when in fact it really is all about the practicing.

I am going to leave it there for the time being. In so doing I am aware that, as I suggested at the beginning of last month’s column, I have by no means exhausted this subject. I have not, for example, talked very directly about how to make a more interventionist approach work. For me, the gist of that is to wear that approach lightly: to let students know that even though you are making the initial fingering choices, you want them to think those fingerings out and ask you questions about them. I may return to this specifically another time. I also could at this point write a whole column just about how my own approach to all of this has evolved during the time when I have been writing these columns! I may indeed return to that at some point, partly for the content of it, partly because it is a bit of a case study in self-teaching. 

Next month, I will be on to other things.

Helping Students Choose Fingerings VI

At the beginning of this series of columns I mentioned (warned?) that I was planning to let myself muse about the subject in a leisurely fashion, spread out over quite a few months. The importance of the subject justified this, and so did its open-endedness. There are many ways of looking at this aspect of our work that are worth talking about and taking seriously; there are several angles from which to approach it. I am beginning to feel, however, that six columns spread out over seven months is getting close to being enough for now. So this column and the next one—which constitute a long “to be continued” on the same specific aspect of our subject—will be the last ones on this matter for a while. 

The specific agenda for these two columns is to talk about what to do when a student comes back with a worked-out fingering. I will also address a couple of loose ends and include a random thought or two. I certainly have not exhausted the overall subject, and I have to take a deep breath and remind myself that exhausting the subject is never possible and is never the point. I will probably come back to it someday, perhaps in part to address some interesting and useful comments from readers that I have already gotten, and others that I may get. Meanwhile, in January’s column, I will move on to other things.

Feedback for student fingerings

If you have sent a student off to work out a fingering for a passage or a piece, perhaps with some guidelines similar to mine from the last two columns, then presumably that student will come back with the worked-out fingering. The next step, in which you give feedback, is crucial: that’s where a lot of the learning comes in.

The actual dynamic of this part of the process is subject to a host of variables: how much of the passage has the student felt comfortable actually fingering, and how much has been reserved for discussion? How much has already been practiced, and how close is it to being learned? (Included in the latter are questions as to whether the student has put the hands together yet, or added pedals, if that’s relevant, and at what sort of tempo is the piece in relation to a possible final tempo.) Questions about how the student relates to the particular piece or the sort of repertoire might be relevant. Is the piece an exemplar of a kind of music with which the student is already very familiar (their sixth Orgelbüchlein chorale, say, or eighth movement from a Widor symphony), or is it relatively uncharted territory, a first step into the twentieth century for a student who has been at home in the eighteenth, or vice versa? Does it happen to be a two-manual passage? 

Then there are the psychological/temperamental matters. Is the student one who is self-confident in general and likely to feel good about fingering choices, perhaps regardless of whether the choices seem good to the teacher? Can the student be relied on to push back against teacher suggestions that he or she really doesn’t like, or at least to be forthright about the rationale for choices? Or is it someone who is almost waiting to be told that they have gotten it wrong—someone whose first impulse will be to shut down in the face of any inquiry and be embarrassed to share the thought process that led to the fingering choices? Or is the situation somewhere in between? Do you know the student well, and are the two of you comfortable together? Or is it someone whom you are really still getting to know?

All of these are surprisingly practical concerns given our delicately balanced goal: to coax students into greater autonomy, confidence, and independence without letting them persevere with fingerings that are going to be really problematic. If we think that a fingering is just plain really bad (to put it bluntly), how do we tell that to the student? It is important not to seem to go back on the promise of autonomy and independence. But it is also important for the student to end up with good fingerings. (Well, maybe. I’ll talk about that more below.)

Of course this is a version, appropriate to this stage of the process, of the whole set of questions about how much autonomy to give students in choosing fingerings in the first place. The premise for now is that we are opting for a great deal of autonomy. But that takes on a different dynamic as the moment of solidifying fingerings in actual use draws closer.

At an earlier point in planning out these columns, I had thought that I would try to concoct a “case study,” that is, that I would choose a passage, create a fingering for it that a student might have come up with, and then go through the passage, reacting to that fingering as I might do with a “live” student. But as I thought about all the variables of the situation, I decided that that would be artificial and limiting. It is a process that perhaps could form the basis of a video or live class demonstration. To be useful it would need to be made up of multiple examples. I think that here it is more fruitful to keep discussing the process, again not expecting to be exhaustive, but to cover enough points to be useful.

To start with, let’s assume that the student comes back with a fingering with which they feel pretty comfortable and that they are ready to play, perhaps (or probably) below the eventual performance tempo. How should we watch and listen, and what should we be looking out for?

The answer to how we should watch and listen is “very carefully, very closely.” And although listening to what our students do is always critical­—this is music after all—in this situation watching is if anything more important. We need to see and keep track of a host of things: what the written fingerings are, what the actual fingerings are, where on the keys the fingers are landing, and, always, everything about the student’s physical being: hand position, tension or relaxation of the hand, and signs of tension or awkward or unnatural positioning of the rest of the body. For this specific kind of work with a student, the most practical use for listening is as an aid in noticing tension. A persistent wrong note, which we might either see or hear, can be a sign of a fingering problem that should be dealt with, but it is more often about practicing. (More about all of this below.) 

Concerns about student fingerings

The bedrock, non-negotiable concern about a student’s worked-out fingering is that it not be dangerous. Everything else is part of a discussion. Fingerings that are non-historical, or different from what the teacher would do, or that create certain articulations, or rule out certain articulations, and so on, might be good, bad, both: everyone will think about them a bit differently. Fingerings that are awkward and inefficient can still be made to work with enough practicing, though that practicing might be less enjoyable than it could or should be. That’s not to say that a fingering that is bad in that sense should go unnoticed or unchallenged: part of the point of this process is to get students to recognize such fingerings and get better and better at avoiding them. Fingerings that might hurt the hand, usually by an uncomfortable stretch or by twisting out, are fairly rare. But they deserve first mention here because it is absolutely out of the question to let them pass.

This does indeed shade over into the next item to pay attention to: anything that looks tense or awkward. Are there spots where the student looks uncomfortable or tense as a matter of overall attitude? Are there moments where you can see the hands, arms, neck, or (especially) shoulders appear to tighten? These signs can mean either that the fingering in those spots is actually a problem or that the student is uncertain about those fingerings. In any case, these are places that should be flagged for discussion. Even if the tension or awkwardness is not so severe that our judgment suggests that it could be harmful, it is still not best for musical performance and should be corrected if possible.

With awkward-looking fingerings, it is a matter of your judgment and the student’s whether they cross a line into being potentially physically harmful. You must bring this up and discuss it if you are concerned. That is one situation in which your sense of the student’s temperament and attitude comes into play. If the student says that something is not painful, is it OK to leave it at that? If a student needs to wring out a hand after playing a passage and says, “no, it’s all right,” is it acceptable to leave it at that? If a student is wearing a pained facial expression, is that more likely to be about general anxiety than an immediate extreme discomfort?

If a fingering is somewhat awkward and we can’t come up with a better one, then we are likely to stick with it and try to relax out of whatever tension it creates as promptly as possible. If the only possible fingering for a passage is one that honestly seems so wrong physically that it could be damaging, then that is actually a reason to consider not playing the piece or slightly rewriting it. This latter is rare—presumably because most keyboard composers write their music to be playable. When it does happen it is often because of a mismatch between the hand size of the player and the expectations of the composer. We are all lucky that composers with extra-wide hand spans mostly bore in mind the needs of the rest of us!

Hand position

Watching hand position is important and is really the foundation of all of what I have mentioned above. If you see an awkward hand position, then it is worth querying the fingering, pointing out what looks awkward, and asking the student about the rationale for the fingering. Sometimes bad hand position is the result not of actually bad fingering, but of holding notes longer than necessary or leaving fingers over notes that they have released when they should be free to float away and wait over other notes. This is actually a surprisingly important aspect of the relationship between fingering and hand position. No fingering in itself implies anything about where the relevant finger should be or what position that hand should be in once that finger has released its note. That can be clearly determined by the next note, but if it isn’t, then the situation is turned around, and the proper place for a finger to be is defined by the act of returning the hand to a relaxed comfortable position. It is possible to be misled as to how good or bad a fingering is by letting that fingering influence hand position more than it actually has to, and in an uncomfortable direction.

When bad hand position does stem directly from a questionable fingering, sometimes that in turn comes from the next thing to watch for: the student’s neglecting part of the hand for no particular reason. As I mentioned in one of my sample guidelines two months back, there is a tendency to avoid fingers 4 and 5, especially 5. If you see a student indulging that tendency, you should question it. And you will see this, whether or not you remind students in advance to think about it. If you see a busy passage being played with just fingers 1-2-3, and if it looks awkward, then ask the student about it. Often there will be a plausible musical logistic reason. Often that reason, though plausible, is in fact a false one: an excuse, not a reason. (And this is usually subconscious, so it is fruitful to alert the student to it.) The avoidance of “weak” fingers is instinctual and can be stubborn. It also reflects different realities for different students: that is, for some people, the fifth finger really is a problem, for some it is just a fear. This is a difference that should be sorted out. My Diapason column from September 2016 was all about the fifth finger and includes my ideas about how to work on it when it really is a problem in and of itself.

Avoiding use of certain fingers

A couple of side notes: I have only fairly recently become really comfortable playing trills, especially long trills, with fingers 4 and 5. I didn’t notice the moment when this happened, but it was probably in about my 25th or 30th year of performing and teaching. I have noticed that the availability of that fingering for trills sometimes can make the rest of the fingering for a passage remarkably more straightforward. This reminds me, in turn, that it is important in all circumstances not to avoid the use of any fingers arbitrarily. Sometimes the avoidance of certain fingers is indeed not arbitrary, but has a musical (often historical) purpose. If a student, in collaboration with you as the teacher, is applying some of the principles of “early” fingering to a piece, and therefore perhaps using at the least the thumb and maybe the fifth finger less than one might otherwise, it is important to do this in a way that is comfortable. That is, almost certainly, a significant part of the actual original purpose of that approach to fingering. The main enemy of comfort and natural hand position with fingerings of this sort is an attempt to hang on to legato when the fingering is specifically geared towards non-legato: for example in a 3-4-3-4 fingering in the right hand in a rising scale passage, turning the hand nearly upside-down between the second and third notes.

Another thing to look for is any place where your student is actually using a fingering different from the one that they have worked out and written in. This is one place where your watching closely comes into play! When this happens, it can be just a random one-off that doesn’t mean anything. It should be queried though, in case it is more than that. It can turn out that the written fingering is really best, and that the task for the student is to be more assiduous about following it. That often means slower, more targeted practice. (Though it can also be a sign that the student needs new glasses. That sounds flippant, but is actually a frequent serious issue. If you can’t read the notes easily, that is always a problem. If you can’t read the written-in fingerings easily and spontaneously, that is a problem as well: a source of inefficiency and potential insecurity.)

It can be useful to go over the reasoning behind the fingering again. This can help fix it in the semi-memory so that the need to read it in real time will recede and eventually go away entirely. It is also very possible that the actual fingering that you saw is better than the written-in fingering. This should be explored in discussion. If it turns out to be true, that creates an excellent opportunity for the student to learn through analyzing and comparing the two fingerings and analyzing why the written-in choices were made and why they don’t seem to be best in practice. 

Next month, in continuing this discussion, I will, among other things, write about how to recognize, in these particular circumstances, when a fingering issue is really a hand distribution issue. As an appetizer to that part of the discussion I include a couple of examples of spots where I happened upon ways of solving tricky fingering issues by what I like to think of as clever hand distribution. (See Examples 1 and 2.) These both arose in my practicing of pieces that I will be performing this fall, and indeed they both arose during the same days during which I have been writing this column. They are both Bach harpsichord pieces. The first is from the fugue of the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue, the second from the fugue of the Prelude, Fugue, and Allegro. No very specific pedagogic point to either of them: I just like them.

To be continued.

Helping Students Choose Fingerings V

I ended last month’s column with a couple of short digressions. I open this column in the same way. Then I will return to the train of thought from last month.

To help myself muse about teaching the art of making purposeful fingering choices, I have done a certain amount of reading: not what I would call “research,” not looking for concrete information, but just part of the process of thinking, gathering, and examining ideas. I happened to come across some extremely interesting comments by the eminent Ukrainian pianist Vladimir de Pachmann, who lived from 1848 to 1933.

De Pachmann became convinced during the course of his career that there was something blocking him technically. He eventually decided or figured out that he was allowing his hands to turn out too far, both out and in, from a position that was more or less straight with the forearm. His own discussion of this in an interview is fascinating. (“Should Piano Playing Undergo a Radical Reform?”, Vladimir de Pachmann, Etude, December 1923.) This is a short excerpt:

I discovered that the whole trouble lay in the wrist. The wrists were not free. Easily said—but WHY?

Perhaps a simple experiment will serve to illustrate. Put your elbow upon the table and let your forearm fall with your hand in comfortable playing condition. 

Now, with the hand and forearm in this position, move the hand (without moving the forearm) as far as possible to the left and hold it in that position for a few moments. You will notice at once that there is a strain at the joint of the wrist. Now move the hand in the opposite direction and there is likewise a strain. It is this strain that, to my mind, distorts the muscular and the nervous condition of the hand and the forearm and results in much horrible playing. The tone cannot be musical and beautiful if the wrist is stiff or strained in this manner. Therefore I never move the hand from side to side. 

Having discovered this, I began to find that, whereas I had been unable to practice for long periods in later years without fatigue, I was now able to play for hours and hours and ‘never feel it.’

What was the result? I resolved to rework, re-arrange my entire repertoire upon this new basis. This meant refingering hundreds and hundreds of pages of music.

This interests me because it ratifies what I have long observed about the problems with turning the wrist, though I feel sure that turning out is worse than turning in, whereas Pachmann does not distinguish between those. It is also interesting to me that he presented this as a new discovery. It seems to have been new in relation to his own work and to whatever he had learned from his teachers. Elsewhere, however, he says about Muzio Clementi, who lived from 1752 to 1832, that he “was against the use of the thumb on a black key. I wondered why, and thought it over until I discovered that Clementi’s reason was that there was an undue strain on the wrist, with consequent fatigue.” So, as with a lot about music and life, this was perhaps an instance of “what’s old is new again.”

Fingering principles to
offer to your students

I resume my list of suggestions of principles or ideas that we might offer students in advance of their working out their own fingerings for pieces. 

6) Don’t finger for something that you don’t want or need to do. That is, don’t make a fingering unnecessarily complicated by asking it to create a difficult result when that result is not what you really want. This usually manifests itself as something very specific: constructing an unnecessarily difficult fingering in order to achieve legato, when that legato is not actually wanted. If you do want legato, and the fingering necessary to achieve that is complex or tricky, then this gets turned around the other way: you have to accept the difficult fingering and practice it enough to make it work. But that is usually not the problem. It is definitely a problem for many students that they think that it is lazy or unconscientious ever to use a disjunct fingering. (Often this feeling is entirely subconscious or reflexive.) But that is only true if you honestly don’t like the musical results of that fingering. The most conscientious and efficient thing that you can do in sketching out a fingering for a passage is to give yourself the freedom to use any fingers whatsoever for any two successive notes or chords that are not meant to be legato, and take it from there. 

7) Concerning patterns: on the one hand, it can be very useful to finger something that is reiterated as a pattern in the same way each time it comes along. This is true first of all because perhaps that fingering is the best fingering, considering everything. But also, the patterned fingering is itself easier to remember because it stays the same, and this has the nice benefit that when you practice one instance of it, you are also practicing the others. This is efficient and enhances security. However, it is even more important to recognize that sometimes a musical pattern is not a physical pattern. This happens most of the time and most strikingly because of the presence of sharps and flats. If the keyboard were all white keys, then this concern would largely go away. The other cause, more subtle, is that the feeling and thus the fingering needs of a repeated pattern can also change because of position on the keyboard. The same note-shapes a couple of octaves apart have different implications for hand position in particular, and therefore, sometimes, for fingering.

The two examples above show situations in which the relationship between musical patterning and fingering come out different. In the first case (Example 1), there is probably something to be gained and little or nothing to be lost by playing each four-note grouping in the same way. For any number of reasons, such as relative finger length, some players might prefer 4-2-1-2, some 5-3-2-3. (Those are not the only possibilities, but they probably cover what would feel best for almost everyone.) 

However, in Example 2, with three sharps, the consistent application of a pattern of this sort would conflict with good hand position and create problems with the use of the thumb. I have put in a fingering that fits the native shape of the passage very well for me, and there are other possibilities. A student could make the choice that the pluses of repeated patterning outweigh the negatives of thumbs on black notes or other turnings of the hand. However, that should be thought about as a conscious and careful choice. (For me, the 4-2-1-2 fingering as a thorough-going pattern would be disastrously bad; the 5-3-2-3 would be rather bad, mainly a problem in the second group of four eighth notes.)

Another thought about patterns is that some students have learned default fingering patterns for certain note patterns prior to working on any given piece. These are usually scales and arpeggios, and the fingering patterns have been learned because the note patterns have served as exercises. This can be very useful and quite a time-saver if the learned fingerings actually work well, given all of the circumstances of the piece. They often will, but also often will not. It is important to use them only when they are right, and not to let them interfere otherwise. 

It is worth remembering that even though it can seem like a shame not to take advantage of the comfort of patterned fingering for patterned notes, abandoning that patterning only brings those passages to the level of fingering-complexity of the rest of the music. It is never a particular problem, just sometimes an opportunity that we would rather not pass up.

8) Don’t confuse unfamiliarity with difficulty. That is, don’t judge the easiness or difficulty of a fingering before having gotten somewhat used to it. In choosing between two or more fingerings, the one that seems the least comfortable right off the bat might just seem the best once you have explored them all a bit. On the other hand, if a student is more or less observing all of the precepts above, is trying out a possible fingering, and that fingering simply cannot get comfortable, then it is probably one that should be changed. And that leads to another principle:

9) If you can’t come up with a fingering that you are reasonably happy with, don’t accept an unhappy fingering or try to get used to one that is really awkward. It is better to leave the passage un-fingered and un-practiced until you have had a chance to bring it back to the teacher or, perhaps, just to go on thinking, analyzing, and finally finding something better.

Are these last two principles in actual conflict with each other? Not quite. Taken together they point to the need for a student to develop the ability to tell when a fingering seems wrong because it is wrong, and when it seems wrong because it is unfamiliar or conforms to a new idea, or just hasn’t been practiced enough yet. This is one of the senses that will be strengthened by independent work on fingering. It is fine if it takes a while to develop, and it will kick in earlier and earlier in the process with each piece that the student works on. 

A list can seem so cut-and-dried. Do these nine headings outline all of what I want to tell a student before that student goes off to create fingerings for a piece? Do I always outline all of these things in this exact way? No, of course not. This outline is in part an exercise in thinking about the sorts of things that I think that we can offer to students as pre-established guidelines in lieu of specific “use this fingering here” input. Someone else might have a different specific set of ideas, or ones similar to these but put rather differently. Someone might decide that a few of these are worth outlining and discussing quite specifically in advance and that others of them can be left to be added along the way, in response to particular situations. I have never yet written an outline like this to hand to students. I do it all verbally. But the act of writing it out for the column suggests to me that I might like to try that. The danger in writing something and presenting it as a sort of document, especially as from teacher (or any supposed authority or “expert”) to student, is that it will be interpreted too hard and fast.

I think that it is necessary, whether this is all done in discussion or partly in written outline, to be very careful to remind students about flexibility and balance. This is reflected in my brief comments about “no thumbs on black notes” last month. I am still very aware that I have sometimes seemed too adamant about that, right and important though it usually is, and that a student has wasted time or even risked tendon injuries by using awkward stretches to keep thumbs off black notes that they should indeed have been playing. (I would love to know exactly how Clementi framed that.)

Students working

autonomously

I have alluded a lot to a student’s going off to finger a piece, any piece, autonomously. There’s an interesting question as to whether is it ever useful to choose pieces in the first place not to (just) teach something about execution or rhetoric or even fingering as such, but as exercises specifically in thinking independently about fingering. I think that this can be a good idea, as long as it doesn’t shade over into asking a student to work on pieces that lack musical interest. What constitutes a good piece for working on fingering choice depends on the student. However, there are things to analyze about how a piece relates to the process of working out fingerings. How much will it be necessary to think about choices of hand as they differ from what the distribution on the staves seems to suggest? (As I have written before, I feel very strongly that staff distribution shouldn’t influence hand distribution in mapping out and playing organ music. But it doesn’t hurt to clear the decks, so to speak, for this kind of work by choosing pieces where that isn’t an issue.)

The next step is to see what sort of work each hand has to do. A student can and should learn to think about fingering with any sort of texture. But it is important to be clear about the fact that different textures require a somewhat different approach, or at least feel like they lead to somewhat different processes. For example, if either hand has only one note at a time, as is true of both hands in something like a Bach two-part Invention, then the hand is free of a whole host of constraints. It’s just a question of mapping five fingers onto a succession of notes. If a hand has actual chords, that is one thing. If it has a more-than-one-note texture that arises out of counterpoint, that is something else. (Maybe the principal practical fingering difference there is that chords often change over all notes at once, whereas counterpoint, almost by definition, does not.) Many or most pieces out there have a variety of these sorts of textures. To choose an example out of thousands, many of the pieces in the Vierne 24 Pièces en style libre have long stretches in which one hand is playing a single line while the other is playing chords or some other multi-note texture. 

It is possible that at first (when a student is relatively non-advanced overall or is not yet too comfortable choosing fingerings), pieces that have one sort of texture in each hand for long stretches might be the most comfortable. That situation allows a student to focus on one sort of analysis of what the texture requires of the hand. Within reason—that is, avoiding real blockbusters—I don’t think that overall easiness or difficulty is that much of a concern. A more difficult piece just takes more time and patience, as much during the fingering phase as during the practicing phase. In fact, an extremely challenging piece can be used as an interesting laboratory for thinking about fingering, whether or not the student goes on to practice it and learn it for performance. Using a piece this way can be a challenge to the yearning for completeness and closure that most of us have, but as a learning tool it is perfectly valid. The most compelling reasons to do it are, first, that a student might actually find it intellectually interesting to think about fingering a piece that would be a stretch to play, and that the student might simply like that piece and want to engage with it. If a beginner or intermediate student works carefully on the fingering of a piece, or part of a piece, that is a real (or unrealistic) stretch now, that student will be well positioned to go ahead and really learn that piece later. That is in contrast with the situation that can be set up by more or less just stumbling through a significantly difficult piece without dealing with its challenges seriously and systematically enough.

A brief closing return to de Pachmann. In my reading I encountered this statement, one that we should all always bear in mind: “If . . . a difficulty . . .
does not disappear after one hundred repetitions . . . play it a thousand times!” (Exclamation point mine!)

Gavin Black is director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey, teaching harpsichord, organ, and clavichord. He can be reached by email at [email protected].

Helping Students Choose Fingerings

After two months spent on something interesting and useful yet rather tangential to organ teaching (the clavichord), I have decided to tackle something probably the most direct and nitty-gritty of anything in the whole field: how to help students choose fingerings for their pieces. This topic is tricky and subject to different approaches.

I have certainly alluded to this from time to time while writing about other things. But I have yet to write about it directly and systematically, or in a sustained way. It is fundamentally important. To start with, there is no such thing as a student’s playing a piece, even playing through it first time slowly, or playing one hand or a brief passage, without there being a fingering. (The fingering on an initial play-through might be largely random, and that might be a problem or might be fine. That is part of this discussion.) There is also a way of talking about what it takes to learn a piece that though laughably formulaic is also not untrue: namely, if you have a fingering and then practice efficiently you will learn the piece. I have written a lot about efficient practicing. I now focus on the first part of that formula.

All of the above also applies to pedaling. I focus on fingering here because I think that the technical issues involved in making fingering choices and those involved in making pedaling choices are different enough that juggling a discussion of both would just be confusing. (Confusing for the writer!) Fingering choices are more multifaceted and the questions more complex, though similar in some principles. I hope that the process of thinking about not teaching fingerings but teaching how to devise fingerings will suggest a useful framework for thinking about the same thing with respect to pedaling. I will write about that in the future, separately.   

It was a premise of the way that this column was originally established nearly ten years ago, fairly short, but appearing every month, that I could afford to write in a leisurely way about an important topic, and that I wouldn’t have to try to get any subject sorted in any one column. I take full advantage of that now. We will probably spend the whole summer analyzing and musing about fingering. If you have a fruitful approach to guiding your students towards making good fingering choices for themselves and also can help them learn how to practice well (and can cajole them into wanting to practice well, at least much of the time), then you have done by far the largest part of what you can or should do as to the practical core of the teaching process. The more soundly and smoothly this can unfold, the easier it then is to delve into interpretive, artistic, historical, philosophical, matters, and to issues arising out of the particular musician-like personality of each student and his or her goals and aspirations.

This month I write about fingering and some of the issues involved in choosing fingerings. Along the way I will mention a few somewhat random ideas, thoughts, or images that I think are interesting.

Let’s start with one of those. I have always found it hard to grasp the notion that the “fingering” used by legendary great composers or performers of the past was the very same kind of thing that we do when we come up with fingerings and apply them. Did Bach or Franck or Sweelinck or Widor really just push keys down with the fingers of perfectly normal hands, and in so doing choose from among the same kind of patterns that we work with? Yes, of course they did. But as with every aspect of the notion that the great figures of old were people just like the rest of us, this is something that I find it hard to comprehend. (This is especially true as to Bach, but otherwise it tends to feel more difficult the farther back I go in time. Did Cabezón or Schlick have hands much like mine and sometimes sit there wondering whether to reach for that note with 4 or 5? Yes!) One point of musing about this is to try to demystify fingering itself a little bit. Everyone who has ever played a keyboard instrument has had to think about fingering and has faced the same broad constraints about how fingers can or cannot grapple with keys.

Not everyone has always been grappling with the physical act of fingering, its logistic limitations as well as its possibilities, towards the same ends. This is true along the various axes of performance style. Some player/composers and their musical cultures were looking to create a lot of legato, others were not. Some were frequently required to deal with thick chords, other much less so, or nearly not at all. And so on. One of the big questions about fingering and about the challenge of guiding students toward being able to choose fingerings is how to integrate our awareness of how any composer might have approached fingering with other (logistic, musical, practical) considerations.  

But there are also two distinctions related to each other that are perhaps even more interesting. First, most players of the past were mostly improvising. This is probably truer the farther back you go. The relationship between fingering-planning (which is pretty much what we mean when we talk about fingering as an act) and the music must be different if you don’t know what the music will be before you sit down to play. That suggests a concept of the act of fingering that must include some blend of real planning and maintaining habits that permit fingering on the fly. Fingering on the fly is something that we mostly discourage when helping students to learn repertoire. What does the ubiquity of that practice over many centuries tell us about possible approaches to planned fingering?

The second point about old-time performing circumstances is that for the first many centuries in the history of organ playing, it was not the norm for players to play much old music or to be concerned at all with playing old music in the way that the creators of that music would have played it. That is not to say that no one prior to, say, the early nineteenth century ever paid attention to music of earlier eras. Some musicians studied such music. We know that Bach studied Frescobaldi and de Grigny, for example, as well as composers who were more recent or more directly part of his own musical lineage, such as Buxtehude and Pachelbel. But there is no reason to believe either that he engaged in public performance of their music or that when he looked through their pieces he was thinking about their fingering or other performance practice issues. He may have done so, and other composer/performers who paid some attention to older music may have done so, but if so it was under the radar screen of history.

The first issue that we have to think about in teaching fingering to students is what students. And the answer is a usual one: that the more of a beginner a student is the more systematically we need to address things that are practical and basic. This is both an obligation and an opportunity. If someone is studying with a teacher as a beginner, then that teacher can do things “right” from the beginning, whatever that means. A student who has already accomplished some playing or who is already quite advanced will already have an approach to fingering. That approach may be fully worked out and successful, or may be deeply problematic, or somewhere in between. It may be intuitive and successful, but still benefit from being made more analytical. It may be intuitive and insufficiently efficient or fit any number of different patterns. Then with organ (and harpsichord or clavichord), unlike with piano, we have the situation that seems like a special case but is in fact the most common—namely, that a student comes to us as an established player of the piano with established piano fingering habits. In this situation, work on fingering necessarily keeps coming back to questions of the differences in fingering considerations between piano and organ. 

I want to sketch out my thoughts about all of this with an eye mainly on the student who is at least near the beginning of studying. It seems like the best way to teach myself or to invite any other teacher to think about how to teach fingering is to start with a conceptually complete picture. How can we teach a student good fingering habits from scratch? What is the overall framework or concept involved in that work? But the notion of re-shaping, steering, helping someone who already has well-established relevant skills, but also possible problematic habits, always must be kept in mind.

Factors in choosing fingerings

What considerations shape fingering choices? There are quite a few, and they sometimes complement one another but also sometimes seem to push in different directions. Some of them are: 

1) What would the composer have done? I mention this first not because I think that it is most important, but because it ties in with some of what I have already discussed above. What do we know about how a composer would have fingered his or her music? Do we know that from the composer directly or from students or contemporaries of that composer? How much detail do we have? How much are we filling in or extrapolating? Whatever we know, or reasonably believe, that a composer did, do we know why? Can we make plausible deductions about why? What were the musical goals if there were any? Or were the goals more practical or logistic?

2) What about physical logistics or comfort? Are there ways of executing passages that are easier than others? The answer to this is sometimes yes. Also, quite often the answer is a modified yes: there isn’t one fingering that is the easiest or most comfortable, but there are some that are more so and some that are less so. The comfort or ease of fingerings may well differ between one player and another. When it seems to differ, the question is whether that results from some legitimate difference that should be respected or just of habit, which perhaps should be respected or perhaps challenged.

3) Habit. This is worthy of its own category. Anyone who has ever played at all has certainly become more accustomed to some patterns and approaches than to others. Some of these habits are limiting. For example, it is common to observe players avoiding the fifth finger as a general rule. That can be a very bad idea: endless problems can cascade from this. Many players have habits when it comes to trill fingerings, usually using fingers 2 and 3 as a default and avoiding 4 and 5, or sometimes orienting trills around the thumb just by habit when that is actually physically awkward. It is crucial, especially when working with established players, to think about what habits can be relied on for ease and comfort and which ones should be questioned. (Come to think of it, this is most important and most difficult working with oneself!) 

4) Hand position. I have written about this in passing quite a bit. In this series of columns I want to explore the relationship between hand position and fingering directly, and with an eye on how it shapes choices. There are ways of holding the hand in relation to the wrist and arm that are physiologically sound and other ways that produce tension and possibly pain, and that can even lead to injury. Since the keyboard is fixed and the player’s sitting position is more or less fixed, addressing keys with particular fingers ties in very closely with hand position. It is interesting to think about the causality going both ways: “this is the fingering I want, so let’s see what it implies about hand position,” but also “this is the hand position I want, so let’s see what it implies about fingering.”

5) Repetition. If the exact same passage is repeated, it probably makes sense to use the same fingering. Sometimes there maybe a reason that it does not, but it’s always worth thinking about.

6) Patterns. Passages that are similar in shape to one another might well suggest similar fingerings. Sometimes patterns that are musically very similar or identical are not the same physically, usually because of something different about sharps and flats. Patterns are useful but should not tie us in to doing things that are actually not the best. 

7) Memorability. Repetitions and other patterns are useful for fingering planning in that they increase our ability to remember fingerings without extra effort. If it is possible to take ease of remembering into account in planning fingerings, that can be useful. 

8) Interpretive considerations. The most common and straightforward of these is articulation. If two successive notes need to be really legato, then the first one must be played in such a way that it can be held through the beginning of the second one. This usually means that the two notes must be played by two different fingers. If two notes don’t have to be legato, or if the choice interpretively is for them not to be, then that fingering restriction is lifted. 

9) The instrument. Are there some instruments that suggest different fingerings? Are there situations in which working out a fingering in the abstract, however conscientiously, will not help produce the best fingerings when it comes time to play on a particular instrument? This could be about feel and keyboard logistics, or about intrinsic instrument sound, or about room acoustics. It can also be about controlling pipe speech or winding in instruments that are sensitive to such things.

These are some considerations about the content of fingering choices. That is a separate thing from how we help students learn to think about these choices, a necessary precursor. The main fork in the road about working with students about fingering is this: how much should I as a teacher give my students fingerings directly, and how much should I talk to them about principles but ask them to concoct their own fingerings? I will discuss that next month.

People’s hands are more different physically than you might think. This has to do with overall size and with the relative long/thin or short/stubby aspect of the fingers. But it also has to do with specifics that affect keyboard fingering directly, like the length and position of the thumb with respect to the second finger, the length of the fifth finger, the question of which is longer as between the fourth and second fingers, and how they both relate to the third finger. The accompanying scan is of my hands: short thumbs, long fifth fingers, fourth and second fingers very close to each other in length.

Take a look at your own!

Gavin Black is director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. His website is gavinblack-baroque.com, and he can be reached by email at [email protected].

Helping Students Choose Fingerings II

This month I want to pose a most fundamental question: should we give fingerings to our students, or should we instead ask them to work out their own fingerings, with guidance from us? It is likely that with most teachers, for most students, the answer will be some of both. But that leaves the question of how to arrive at the right balance. And it also leaves a whole set of questions about how best to carry out each approach. This is not a cleanly separate issue from questions of what constitutes good fingering or what good procedure for working on fingering would be in general. But it is interesting to try to tease it out a bit on its own. 

I will start by confessing my own bias, the same bias that governs my thinking about most matters. My orientation is always towards letting students figure things out for themselves. It seems logical to let students start as soon as possible (not sooner) practicing whatever it is that we want them to learn to do. And that is (almost) always the act of working something out, not the act of executing something. This is true as to interpretive matters, concrete ones such as registration or choice of tempo, and more diffuse or flexible ones such as timing, rhythm, articulation, phrasing, and so on. It is more important for a student to engage in the process of learning how to work out interpretive matters than to give a performance today or tomorrow that you or I would like, or even that the student would endorse or enjoy listening to some years down the road. This is a version of the old “teach someone to fish” idea. 

This is subject to all sorts of nuance. For example, when does someone stop being a student? When does the execution of an effective performance become the most important priority? Are we not all to some extent continuing to learn the various processes, and don’t we all hope that our performances will get better and better, whatever that means to each of us? Looking back on our past performances, we should probably hope not to like them entirely, but to be grateful for what we learned from them. It is not a bad idea to invite your students to reinvent the wheel if you are hoping to teach them not how to use wheels or how to make wheels but how to invent wheels.

I confess this bias not to embrace it, but to push back against it or at least to examine whether and how it makes sense here. There are some things that need to be taught in a different way. The clearest of these tend to be practical. For example, if someone asks me to show them how to make the loop at the end of a harpsichord string, I will not just hand them a piece of wire and suggest that they figure it out. I will make a loop for them and describe to them in detail what I am doing. Then I will repeat that as necessary before asking them to try. There are some wheels that really don’t need to be reinvented. Likewise I don’t leave students to figure out entirely for themselves what sort of practice protocols and strategies work best. I can show a student many things that do work, but it is open-ended; they can also figure out others for themselves. I do take a sort of “re-invent the wheel” approach to the art of registration, for another example, but not to showing a student how the combination system works. When I have out-and-out information that a student does not have, I share it.

Even though no one would disagree that the long-term goal is to teach students how to work out fingerings, rather than to teach them fingerings, there is room for debate about how best to do that. Does an approach of letting students come up with their own fingerings with some discussion of principles, some feedback, and maybe occasional suggestions (what I might call my approach just for short) actually lead students most efficiently towards being able to work out fingerings for themselves? Or does it work better to show the student many examples of really good fingering, in one piece after another, and let the student learn from observation what good fingering is and how to achieve it? 

For the moment, we are taking this to be independent of the question of what good fingering is. For the latter, more teacher-oriented, approach to work, it has to be understood that the teacher knows a lot about how to concoct good fingerings. I will deal with that more directly in subsequent columns, and in the end it interacts with what we are discussing here.

Advantages of two approaches

I would like to outline some pluses and minuses of each approach, as I see it. I start this with a few thoughts about my approach and continue next month with corresponding thoughts about the more interventionist approach. First, a few advantages or strong points about the approach of largely letting students concoct their own fingerings: 

1) It is an opportunity to practice autonomy and thinking for oneself. This is particularly relevant because, largely as a result of editors’ fingerings being found in so many printed editions of music, it is easy for fingering to take on an oppressive feeling of authority. The particular form in which a student asks a question about fingering is often this: What is the fingering for this passage? That reflects an unconscious acceptance of the notion that there “is” a fingering, that the fingering for the passage is somehow a given, handed down by those who know. There is plenty in life that must be treated this way. Fingering doesn’t. Sometimes when I respond to that question with “there ‘is’ no fingering. The fingering will be what you work it out to be.” That is immediately and significantly liberating to the student, even a revelation.

2) It involves practicing as directly as possible what the student needs to learn to do. As I said above, I have a bias in favor of this in general, all else being equal. Every instance of a student’s thinking, “Does this feel better or does that? Does it sound different with fingering x from fingering y? Does using this finger here make it easier to get to that finger there? What specific part of the passage demands a particular finger, and how can I shape the fingering around that, before and after?” makes it easier and more natural for the student to apply that kind of thinking later. 

3) A student knows his or her hands best, or can learn to. Sometimes no matter how self-evident it is to me that a given finger lies naturally over a given note, that conclusion indeed turns out to be just about my hand, and for the student it is different. Take this chord:

If the student and I would both put 2 on the F# and 5 on the C, we might comfortably put any of the remaining three fingers on the A. I would play it with 3, assuming that there was nothing before or after to make that problematic. I could also be happy with 1: definitely not 4. But I have known a player to find 4 much more comfortable than the other two choices in this exact situation. This is something that no one but the actual player knows, whether that player is a student or not. And the differences can be subtle. For this:

I would definitely want 1 on the A, not either 3 or 4. Others could prefer any of the three. A note about this example: I would respect any student’s choice about a finger for that A. However, I would try to convince the student not to play the F# with 1. See #1 below!

4) Working out a detailed, specific fingering in as analytical a manner as possible is a magnificent way to learn the notes of a piece, or to solidify that learning. It is so effective in this respect that if a player becomes accomplished to the point of not needing to work out fingerings in a purposeful manner, that dimension of learning the piece has to be replaced by something else. This is related to the fact that a danger for really great sight-readers is that of giving un-thought-out performances. Executing a fingering that has been provided by someone else doesn’t fulfill this function.

There is an interesting paradox to be found here. If you work out fingerings really well and carefully for a passage, the learning that that process entails would also make it easier and more secure for you to get through the passage without a systematic fingering. But that stage is by then already past. However, it is possible that working out careful fingerings oneself leads to better sight-reading of subsequent pieces.

5) Some students enjoy this process, find it intellectually interesting, challenging, and satisfying. 

6) Every student will from time to time think of a really good fingering that the teacher would not have thought of. Thus learning can become a two-way street.

Disadvantages

What are some disadvantages of this approach, or things to watch out for? 

1) The student may create and use fingerings that are actually physically damaging. That is almost always a result of hand positions that involve twisting the wrists too far outward, or that are otherwise stiff or painful. A teacher should always be on the lookout for this and be prepared to explain to the student what is wrong with such fingerings. If fingering creates a physiologically bad hand position, then it is not acceptable to live with that fingering even briefly.

2) More often than the above, a student will devise fingerings that are just not the best musically or logistically. It simply reflects that we are dealing with something that has to be learned, and that we are in the early stages of that learning. To the extent that we choose to let students work out, and then drill and use, their own fingerings, we are saying that the advantages of that approach make it worth it for the student to live through a period of using “bad” fingerings, fingerings that a more expert player would not have chosen. When these are fingerings that do not have the characteristic of being physically harmful, then that is possibly an acceptable situation. But it needs to be thought about.

3) This approach takes more time. For a student to work out fingerings carefully takes longer than for the teacher, an experienced player, to lean over the music desk and write fingerings. (Even quicker is for the teacher to have worked out fingerings for pieces in advance, independent of who the student is going to be. The quickest of all is for there already to be fingerings in the edition. Both of these are problematic, though, for reasons that I will get to later on.) The trade-off here is between this concern about time and point #4 above. Is the time that is put in this way repaid by learning, or is it just time that could have been spent better—for example, working on more pieces?

4) Some students specifically don’t want to work out their own fingerings. This can come from different places, and an awareness of where it comes from can help us think about how to deal with it. A student may feel incompetent to think independently about fingering. This in turn may be a simple acknowledgement of the fact of inexperience, or may come from a temperamental lack of comfort with autonomy. It is never actually true, it’s just about comfort. A student may be aware of the time-consuming nature of careful fingering work and prefer to spend that time a different way. A student may be unconvinced of the notion that different players’ hands, and other aspects of their playing, may require different fingerings, and therefore simply not be aware of the value of chipping in his or her own perspective. The student may feel unprepared to think about fingering for a specific reason, like an awareness of the historical component of fingering, coupled with an awareness of the student’s own lack of the relevant historical knowledge. 

I will continue this discussion from this point next month. However, I toss in here one fingering example. It is a bit random, just a sort of souvenir of the column. It is a rare fingering that I was specifically proud of when I first thought of it. It helped me turn what had been a difficult-to-impossible passage for me into something at least bordering on easy, and certainly very reliable. It was quite a few years ago, I don’t remember when exactly, a milestone for me in deriving fingering from hand position and in thinking outside of what was at the time quite a small box. I suppose that my particular excuse for including it here is this: that one of the pleasures of fingering is that of sharing neat, surprising, useful discoveries with other people who happen to share this arcane interest. That can be our students, among others, and remembering simply to enjoy that is part of the pleasure of teaching. This is the upper two voices of a bit from very near the end of the fugue from Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in F Major, BWV 540, in the right hand. (See preceding page at top.) Try it out. Does it work for your hand? Enjoy!

Velocity I

This month and next I am writing about the quest to play fast: fast enough, faster than before, faster than the next person, fast and secure, fast and yet clear. This important thread runs through all aspects of learning to play music. It can also touch upon all sorts of insecurities and sensitive spots. Can I play fast enough? Will my soloist or the conductor insist on a tempo that is too fast for me—either one that feels wrong musically or one that I just plain can’t do? If I don’t play at least something—anything—fast, will listeners assume that I am not really in command of what I am doing?

No one’s self-esteem as a musician is ever undermined by the inability to play slowly enough. (Well, it rarely is. Perhaps this should happen more. Playing slowly effectively isn’t necessarily particularly easy.) But many of us worry whether we can play fast enough, either for what we want to do musically or for what we think listeners will expect of us. We also worry that if we choose a slower tempo for genuine musical/expressive reasons, people will assume we just can’t play it faster. We rarely worry that our listeners will assume that we can’t play more slowly.

Long ago I heard it recounted that Rachmaninoff had said that Alfred Cortot always decided that the really hard bits had to be played “expressively,” that is, slowed down. This was of course meant to be a withering criticism of Cortot: not only claiming that his keyboard facility was faulty when it came to velocity, but also claiming that his much-admired expressive playing was actually musically arbitrary, and just a way of covering up lack of skill. I have reacted to this by saying that often the hard bits are hard because they are musically involved and complicated, and maybe should be slowed down, for the listener’s sake as much as for the players. But not-fast-enough seems to open us to criticisms of this sort, and we often worry about it.

Fortunately this (like most things) can also be a source of humor. I recall a moment a long time ago when I was in the company of a fine young musician who was about to play in a youth orchestra concert. An older friend who was there clapped him on the back with a hearty “Play louder and faster than everyone else!”

As far as I can tell, conductors are not likely to be subjected to this sort of criticism if they are inclined to slow tempos. The physical gestures of conducting relate to the music and its speed in a different way. Also, keyboard continuo playing usually becomes actually easier as tempo goes up—assuming that the continuo part is being improvised by the player, or at least has been written by the player with the ultimate tempo in mind. This is because in general, the faster the tempo, the fewer notes or chords are needed in the continuo realization. (If the bass line itself is too difficult at a fast tempo, that can reverse this effect.)

Tempo and fingering

My decision to write about this subject comes specifically from a reader’s suggestion, in a recent e-mail, that a “discussion of fingerings that will work at faster tempos would probably be interesting.” This indeed seems to me to be a good point of entry into the topic. Is the quest to feel comfortable up-to-tempo—especially at fast tempos—best addressed at the point of choosing fingerings (and pedalings—though I am focusing mostly on manual playing here) or best addressed by process—that is, practicing, and specifically the pacing of work on tempo within practicing? The answer is “both.” But how exactly, and in what sort of proportions? Next month I will look at some specific passages and different fingerings, to try to address this aspect of the question directly.

There are different levels and types of playing “fast.” This is obvious, but worth noting. The act of getting notes right—and its important adjunct, which is having it feel comfortable or even easy—is almost always more likely the more slowly a passage is being played. That’s the fundamental fact of learning pieces: it’s why we start practicing passages slowly and then speed them up. For many pieces, speeding up will not take things past a comfortable level of velocity. For these pieces, that process will always work and is not really within the sphere of this discussion. If, however, the goal is to play a piece at a tempo that seems to tax what the player can do with velocity, then there can be different, perhaps more complicated issues. 

The question is how much continuity there is across these two areas. Is the process that we use to make a “normal” piece comfortable and reliable what we should also use to get something very fast—fast enough that the velocity alone makes it a challenge? How are these two processes related? The point of any normal systematic practice is to create predictability: that is, to make us feel certain, as we play the piece, that we know what is coming up. In “normal” situations, this predictability comes from a blend of things—so-called “muscle memory,” conscious familiarity with what is coming up in the piece (whether we are using notated music or not), and the ability to read ahead and combine memory with newly reviewed information. Fingerings and pedalings that have some logic to them or are simple or that use patterns of some sort can aid in this process.

Tempo and fingering

The key to playing fast is predictability. It is natural to believe that if we have trouble playing fast, it is because we just can’t quite move that fast. However, this is rarely the case. Most organ (and harpsichord) music doesn’t tax the physical ability of any player to move quickly. However, above a certain speed—which of course varies from person to person—the conscious elements of “knowing what’s coming next” simply can’t come into play: there isn’t time. The sources of rock-solid predictability that are below the level of conscious thought become more important.

Let’s take this one step at a time. How fast can you move your fingers? The most direct way to explore this is to drum your fingers on the table, the arm of your chair, or wherever is comfortable. That is, “play” five “notes”—away from any instrument—with the fingering 5-4-3-2-1. No beat, no timing: just drum those fingers as quickly and lightly as you can. Make sure that your arm is comfortable and that your wrist and fingers are not turned too much to either side. It is OK—even a good idea—to have your arm resting on whatever surface you are using. 

How fast do your fingers go in this exercise? You don’t need to come up with a number—just a sense of whether the velocity is greater than you are likely to need in playing music. It almost certainly is. See whether there is an appreciable difference between the two hands, either in how this feels overall or how fast you are able to move. There might be, but if one of them is slower, it is also probably still above the threshold of how fast you will ever need to move when playing.

Now try it the other way around: 1-2-3-4-5. This is no longer intuitive drumming on a table. It can feel a bit awkward, and the ceiling on velocity might be just a touch lower, but still comfortably above any real-life musical speed needs. It feels awkward in part because the thumb is more comfortable as a point of arrival than as a starting point: releasing the thumb almost infinitely quickly to go on to 2 is tricky. How does it feel if you just do four notes: 2-3-4-5? With just non-thumb notes, is the difference in feel between one direction or the other less noticeable? How about the difference between the two hands?

(5-4-3-2-1 drumming is basically the same gesture as closing your fist. However, 1-2-3-4-5 does not correspond to any naturally shaped hand gesture.)

Now try the same thing at a keyboard, (ideally an organ or harpsichord), so that you won’t be distracted by thoughts of dynamics. (If you are at a piano, play near the very top of the keyboard where the touch is lighter.) 

(Or whatever notes you want.)

See if you can let the fact that you are actually playing, not just drumming on a surface, not change the feel of what you are doing. Go through the same sequence of directions and hands. Predictability is at 100% through all of these slightly different ways of performing this exercise, but physical naturalness varies a bit. 

One next step in this exploration is to try up and down, or vice versa. That is, play (on the table at first) 5-4-3-2-1-2-3-4-5. Then do the same, but keep it going for a while, several times back and forth. Then try starting on the thumb: 1-2-3-4-5-4-3-2-1-2-3, etc. Is it easier to do this ongoing repeated table-drumming starting on 5 or starting on 1? After the first pass through all of the fingers, they resolve into the same thing, except for perhaps an underlying sense of where the strong beats are—even though in the absence of a musical context there aren’t exactly beats. (For me personally doing this, taking only one pass at the notes, 5-4-3-2-1 is easier, quicker, and more natural than 1-2-3-4-5; the repeated drumming seems easier and faster when I start on 1 rather than on 5. This difference is more pronounced in my right hand than the left. But, again, the fundamental point is that as long as it is utterly predictable, the possible velocity of any of these patterns is greater than the demands of repertoire.)

Another thing to try in exploring predictability and comfort is using the same five fingers, each playing once, but changing the order. You should decide clearly on an order before trying to play and then do so as quickly and lightly as possible. This is meant to be the opposite of improvisation: do not take yourself by surprise. So try, say 1-5-4-2-3, or 2-4-5-1-3—or anything. But again, know before you trigger the five notes exactly what you want them to be. Try this both drumming on a table and poised over five adjacent notes on a keyboard. Try to let those two feel as similar to each other as possible.

As you play around with this, you will probably notice that one time or another through a non-adjacent finger pattern of this sort you will feel a tiny hesitation or notice that the overall speed is less than you thought it would be. If this happens, try to recognize the feeling of whatever it is that is introducing that hesitation. It is probably a split-second of uncertainty about what is supposed to come next. Go back to straight (5-4-3-2-1) drumming for a time or two, then make double-sure of what you want your non-adjacent pattern to be. (Perhaps you will notice a hierarchy of non-adjacent finger patterns as to how easy it is to make them as predictable as scalewise patterns. For me, 5-1-4-2-3 is not appreciably different in feel from 5-4-3-2-1, but I need to think and prepare a bit more to make 2-1-5-3-4, for example, feel that predictable.)  

Another useful variation is to plan and then play non-adjacent note patterns with adjacent fingers, for example:

(or any note pattern that you like).

You can take all of this through the stages described above: each hand, both directions, back and forth once, back and forth repeatedly. Just never do anything that you haven’t mapped out in advance; use predictability to make very high-velocity playing function easily.

So far, predictability has been achieved—and physical ease of movement preserved at the same time—by using patterns in which the hand maintains the same five-finger position throughout. A further step is simple gestures that involve moving the hand. Think of your favorite (for this purpose, easiest) such gesture. For a lot of us that is a scale with the traditional modern fingering: 1-2-3-1-2-3-4-5 in one direction and 5-4-3-2-1-3-2-1 in the other. Try playing this—just in one direction for now—with exactly the same feeling that you used for the five-note exercises. Know for certain in advance what you are planning to do and execute it as one very fast unmeasured gesture. 

There are intermediate practice techniques that you can use to prepare for this—for example, drumming on the table with 5-4-3-2-1-3 without changing the position of 3, or drumming 1-2-3-1-2-3-4-5, again without changing the position of the fingers on the table. Then 5-4-3-2-1-3, moving 3 over 1 for the last “note.” You can play around with this and invent new permutations, as long as the predictability, quickness, and lightness remain. ν

To be continued . . .