Knowing Your Fingers

At the piano, fingers are individuals with unique pathways to the brain and separate anatomies. But aside from skilled typing at a computer and thumb wrestling, how much time does anyone spend in life thinking about individual fingers? Maybe I shouldn’t be constantly amazed at how many students I have encountered who try to get around developing a relationship with each and every finger.

At the piano we think about each finger constantly. We have to get used to the hands being mirror images of each other with the lightest fingers (the pinkies) on our lowest and highest notes, and the heaviest fingers (the thumbs) being in the middle, a situation that is usually musically inconvenient. We name the fingers by numbering them so we can address each individually. Almost any person new to piano who has never played any musical instrument will naturally avoid using their 4th fingers (the ring fingers), but in learning to play piano, we don’t avoid the fingers that feel weak. We train them to feel strong.

Fingers help us feel the distance between notes at the piano—what is called ‘intervals’. One of the most fundamental techniques in piano playing is feeling one finger per key, so that if we are playing ‘steps’, we simply use adjacent fingers, and if we are playing ‘skips’ (which make up most chords), we are playing non-adjacent fingers. Standard fingering patterns developed over centuries are usually the place to start, even if we modify them later for large or small skeletons or unique anatomies. Feeling the keys frees up our eyes to look at other people or notated scores, or simply to let our mind wander while we play.