Tuesday, February 25, 2014 by Hamdani, Laurie | Technique

Fingering refers to the positioning of fingers on an instrument. When learning piano, students begin in what is known as a 5-finger position, meaning that the fingers of each hand are placed on 5 adjacent keys. As the students progress, they must learn to gradually move their fingers to keys which are non-adjacent. After all, a piano has 88 keys and the pianist must eventually learn to move their 10 fingers across the keyboard in order to play those keys.

Fingering cues are used in the written music to show the most efficient manner for moving the fingers and hands across the keyboard. Surprisingly, students often ignore this vital information. The pitfalls of this are many. Here are just a few:

The student is inconsistent in their approach to reaching the appropriate keys, i.e. they use a different fingering combination with every performance. This generally causes inconsistent performance with frequent striking of incorrect keys or poorly executed articulation (smoothness, accents, etc). It is a formula for playing a piece with several mistakes, perhaps never fully attaining accuracy.

The student fails to learn technical skills related to fingering which enable them to perform new music successfully. For example, becoming facile in using correct fingering when playing a major scale will greatly improve the student’s ability in executing scale-like passages in new repertoire.

Students naturally favor their stronger fingers (the thumb, index, and middle fingers of each hand) and fail to develop strength and dexterity in their weaker fingers (ring and pinkie fingers). This necessarily limits progress to longer and/or more complicated pieces of music.

Fingering is context specific, meaning it is important to look at the notes or chords both preceding and succeeding a note or chord which has specific fingering noted. When taking the given note or chord out of context, it may not be clear why the given fingering was used. However, when looking for contextual clues (where the hand has been and where it’s going to), the student can usually understand the reason for the particular fingering notation.

When discussing this with a student recently, she realized that reading fingering in context was just as important as taking sentences in context with the greater whole of a paragraph (or chapter), or even taking quotes from people reported by the media within context of the greater story being reported. Context matters!

This being said, I occasionally disagree with the fingerings used in a particular piece of music. This is sometimes (rarely) due to obvious editorial mistakes. Or, it may be that the indicated fingering is for a fully developed hand and therefore won’t work for a hand which is not yet fully grown. In those cases, I work with the student to find fingerings which will work for them.