1-6-8 Goken-cho, Mito-shi, Ibaraki-ken, 310-0063 Japan
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webstaff@arttowermito.or.jp / Phone: (029)227-8111
Takahiro Sonoda
Mini-lecture #6: Shape of the Hand, Posture, and Ways to Touch the Keyboard
Open Seminar for Piano Dec. 5, 1999 (Sun.)
To begin with, this is a mini-talk.
Yesterday I talked to you about urtexts and scores,
and today I would like to talk to beginners, especially,
about the shape of the hand you should use when playing the piano.
I'm sure your teachers have already made a point to tell you about it.
Anyway, there is the simple question of what the best hand shape is for playing the piano.
However, since everyone has differently shaped hands some are long,
others are short, while some people have strong, muscular hands, and others have delicate ones --
we can't make any generalities about it. When I was small,
I was taught that children should play the piano as if they were holding an egg in each of their hands.
When you grow up, then, the egg is replaced by an orange, or a Watson pomelo,
or even a grapefruit anyway, something natural like that.
I don't think that the hands should be kept in an angular form when playing the piano.
But that is not the whole story. Since the piano is a big instrument,
as you can see, the hand spreads out sideways like this when you are performing,
right? Also, even if you started out playing with rounded hands when your were small,
as your body grow bigger and bigger, and you grow taller, it's a bit unnatural, actually,
to curl up the hand too much when playing.
So I don't think that this sort of thing should be enforced that much it's better to leave it up to each person.
Next I would like to move to the topic of how to strike the keyboard.
If you keep the hand close to the keyboard,
and just press down on the key using pressure from above,
you won't have very much success with such things as the loudness or brilliance of the sound,
or the so-caleed release of strength.
We call it touch, but actually it's hitting the key from a certain distance.
When the pianist grows up, then, his hand is made to drop from a rather high position,
with the full weight of the arm and palm, resulting in a good, deep sound.
That made me think of something.
Comparing the delicate, maple-leaf-shaped hand of Japanese people with the baseball-glove-shaped hand of foreigners,
there's a huge difference between the two as far as the force and weight of the palm are concerned.
For that reason, Japanese pianists don't make such a good sound if they just let their hands drop on the keyboard,
whereas foreigners hit the keyboard with their hands and make a rather forceful sound.
For Japanese to make the same kind of sound as foreigners, then,
they cannot just let their hands fall on keyboard,
but have to add a certain degree of striking movement.
That means that the reverberation of the sound,
as well as the kind of touch that comes with it, differs completely from person to person.
When I was still a child, a pianist named Lili Kraus came to Japan.
Her arms were really quite long, and as she was a women you could see her whole arms coming out from the top of her dress.
I remember her arms being stretched straight out and sliding down like this as she played.
She stretched out her whole arms down to the fingertips, and played gracefully that way.
Also, my teacher, Leo Shirota, was a very tall man, and his fingers were big and long.
If he stretched out his fingers straight when he rested his hands on the piano,
they would hit the back board that lies behind the keyboard.
So he had to curl up his index, middle, and ring fingers as he played, like this.
His fingers were also fat like green caterpillars,
meaning that they would get stuck between two black keys if he put them there (laughter).
He played, then, in a way to avoid such a situation.
I think he played by stretching out his hands sideways,
reminiscent somewhat of the sideways crawl of crab (maybe not so extreme, but close).
There was also famous pianist named Sergei Rachmaninov, for instance,
who had really huge hands. His fingers would hit the back board behind the keyboard,
too, so people say he had to curl up his fingers when he was playing octaves.
Although it wasn't so esthetically pleasing,
I do remember that he would curl up his fingertips and play octaves with his hands spread out sideways,
something like this.
Then there was pianist Vladimir Horowitz, who had long fingers that bent backward.
Watching him play, you could see how he would stretch his fingers out and hit the keys with the inner surface of the finger.
What this boils down to is that when it comes to such things as posture and the shape of the hand, everyone goes their own way, I think.
Let me bring the topic back to what I mentioned at the beginning:
the normal way of playing, come to think about it,
is to hold the hand as if you were grasping an egg,
and then letting it fall slightly. As for the various ways to touch the piano,
it will definitely be necessary to press the keys as well as to release strength.
When you strike hard at the keyboard, you exert force,
but unless you let go of the strength then, the power is kept in the whole arm --
from the fingertips to the shoulder -- when you move on to another key.
That is why it is best to play as naturally as possible.
As for the posture you should take when playing,
not all pianists necessarily sit upright in the way that Russian pianists do.
Almost everyone -- including the French pianists,
Samson François and Alfred Cortot -- plays crouching forward slightly,
in this way. For example, there used to be a Hungarian pianist named Andor Földes whose potbelly was so big that if he sat up straight,
it would touch the keyboard. So he sat a little ways back, and crouched forward when playing.
His strength was such that he was able to grab both ends of the keyboard of a concert grand piano and pull it towards him --
that was his trademark. He would appear on stage, sit down,
place his hands at both sides of the piano, and then pull the piano towards him!
He didn't move the chair toward the piano, but pulled the piano toward himself.
That's how strong his arms were. Don't even think of trying to imitate him --
you'll just hurt your sides and back.
But anyway, he had that much power. Everyone laughed then.
Some people have even suggested that the keyboard be shaped like an arc, and that the body swivel while playing.
In the case of Alfred Cortot's playing, for example,
his way of touching the keyboard --
this is for advanced students of the piano -- was to always strike each key with the finger directly above it.
That meant that to play high notes, he would spread his right arm out,
bring his finger to the end of the keyboard, and then strike it like this.
Of course, at that moment, he would let go of his strength,
but when he hit he would put his whole force in,
even it was the ring finger, middle finger, or little finger.
It's the hardest to strike hard with the little finger, because he would spread his hand all the way out here and then hit the key.
Until the moment that he touched the key, though, he would not exert any strength as he played.
That's how Cortot would play, even if it made him ending up looking like this.
Next I would like to talk about how to perform the kind of phrase that has musical tension,
after which there comes a sound that resolves that tension.
When playing such a spot, Japanese pianists usually try to pull it off by keeping their hands rounded.
That, however, is an extremely difficult thing to carry out.
If you look at pianists trained in the French way, though,
they perform by pulling their hands toward their bodies and letting the sound fade out.
So you should assume that there are many styles of performance and ways to play.
Still, the best and most basic way to do it is to keep the hand rounded in a natural way,
and then to let the finger fall toward the key without exerting any force.
Only when the finger strikes the key should you should exert force,
but soon release it thereafter.
Also, there are various other ways to play, such as legato,
where you play by making the fingers roll, or staccato, where the finger is made to bounce simply.
There are two ways of playing octaves: using the wrist, and the whole forearm, like this.
While there's one way of playing where you spread out sideways,
there's also another where you use a posture as if you're going to stand up.
There are just many ways to play.
If you flatly come out and say this way of playing is good, or that way is bad,
then there's no future for the learner.
Or he may experience pain somewhere everyone who gets inflammation of the tendon and its sheath has a bad way of performing.
That's why you should think about this sort of thing flexibly.
Anyway, since this is just a mini-talk, I won't go into extra detail,
because I ought not to divulge the company secrets.
The next time I think I'll talk about pedaling or something like that.
Copyright ©2001 Mito Arts Foundation. All Rights Reserved. Created by TK.
Mail to: webstaff@arttowermito.or.jp
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