Independence

 

Today is July 4th, Independence Day, and I want to talk about the subject of independence of the fingers.

Most traditional (read: "old") methods promote the idea that the fingers must work independently from each other. There are many exercises given to students that involve such things as holding several notes down while playing another note with a different finger. You are probably told to lift the finger as high as possible before it comes down onto the keys. Supposedly this is to increase the strength as well as independence. 

If you think about it for just a moment, you will realize that you already have independence of the fingers. Virtually all of us type on the computer keyboard (and our phones) with a good degree of skill, and probably accuracy and even speed. How could you do this if your fingers didn't work independently? You don't find yourself smooshing down several keys at once because the fingers can't move individually. Place your hand flat on a table; hold three or four fingers down while another finger moves; unless you have arthritis or some other condition in your hands, you can already do it. Playing hours of exercises will not make it appreciably better or easier. These exercises are awkward at best, and painful at worst. There is absolutely no reason why pain is necessary to learn to play the piano!

Some people mistakenly believe that playing the piano is similar to typing, and that typing is good preparatory work for playing the piano. However, this is not the case at all. If it were true, there would be a great number more good pianists out there than there are, since virtually everyone types. Many of my students have jobs where they type at the computer all day long, but they don't start out ahead of the game at all when it comes to learning the piano. Playing the piano involves a tremendous number of skills that don't get developed at all by typing!

If you do exercises to supposedly improve your strength and finger independence, your playing will probably start to sound like an exercise, that is, very clunky and stiff, what I call "note-wise." How can it be otherwise? You can't practice one way and then think you will flip a switch and play beautifully.

In fact, the real skill in piano is learning to have the fingers, hand, arm, and even torso, work in conjunction with each other. The fingers already want to "get in the act" and take over, so to speak, but a dazzlingly fast and smooth arpeggio, for example, involves a lot more than just the fingers each doing their own thing. I often say we need to "tame" the fingers. If they work independently, as mentioned above, the sound you produce will not be as smooth, even, and with good phrasing as if they work together.

As you've heard me say before, we also do not need additional strength in our fingers. Most pianists do not have muscular hands. We need agility and flexibility. All the strength we need comes from the larger muscles of the arm. If this were not true, how would we see so many young prodigies who play all the big and difficult pieces? They simply haven't had time to develop muscles in their tiny hands.

The only endeavor that I can think of that requires finger strength would be rock-climbing. You can see that an experienced rock climber has muscular hands. If you think therefore they would have an advantage when it comes to learning the piano, because they already have finger strength, you would be wrong. They would have a much harder time, in fact, because they have probably lost a great deal of flexibility in the aquiring of those muscles.

The whole issue of strength and independence of the fingers is a moot point anyway. Almost ALL of what goes into learning to play an instrument is neurological. It's happening in the brain. I like to call it the "wiring" in the brain. There is no physical skill you can develop without it first happening in the brain. Every time you practice, it is good to be mindful of that. The brain, in my experience, responds to intelligently designed technical work done in smaller amounts, rather than brute force strength training.

There was a well-known pianist who, after a long career of concertizing, suddenly developed a type of paralysis in his hands. He was diagnosed with dystonia. Doctors and physical therapists tried many different treatments, all to no avail. Not a lot was known about dystonia, apparently. Ultimately it was discovered that it was a "scrambling" of the part of the brain which controlled the hands. No amount of work on his hands was going to change that. Later on, he was able to return to playing, but only if he played pieces that didn't require a lot of "finger-action." Pieces with more chords and more dependence on the arm were possible for him. 

You probably won't develop dystonia, but pianists who force their hands and fingers into unnatural exercises for "independence" do develop tendinitis and other conditions. Please don't be fooled by the old idea that you need independence of the fingers.