The Scores
Four pieces with a wintry feel, plus a Gade Elegie, a Mozart Andante, a Beethoven Bagatelle and a snazzy Samba
the possibility that no joint is tensed, and nothing can block the passage of weight from upper arm to key. If you think along the lines of connecting with the keyboard in the most natural way possible, then this is it. The pianist’s arm, from shoulder to fingertip, becomes a counterbalance to the key mechanism which leads to the hammer.’
Help! My poor head is now reeling as I try to reconcile the two contrasting viewpoints of Li and Jones. But my suspicion that Ian Jones is slightly playing devil’s advocate, and overemphasising the flat-hand theory, becomes a bit firmer as he goes on to qualify his thoughts. ‘Having said all that, of course you can’t always play with flat fingers.’ (And here he laughs reassuringly.) ‘We need to curve to increase speed and power. Usually the faster we play, the more we’ll need to curve, just as a purely logistical requirement. It’s impossible to play quick passes with straight fingers. But even then, you should always maintain a flexible and imaginative approach to how you use the finger and the whole arm.’
After reading over her comments, Chenyin Li asks me if she can modify her stance – and it turns out she’s closer to Jones that it first appeared. ‘I feel I missed the big picture,’ she says. ‘Perhaps it’s because in my teaching, I find myself spending most of my energy on helping students improve on the moments when the curved finger technique is required – that is, when the music requires clarity, speed and power. But there are plenty of moments when textures require a subsidiary role, such as a light accompaniment, or non-specific tremolos, or homogenous chordal passages. And these types of effects are often achieved by using a flatter attack on the keys, which creates a more diffused tone. In short, both types of touch need to co-exist.’
From the tip downwards
Now I feel I’m getting somewhere. But what does it really mean to play with curved fingers? Ronan O’Hora is keen to broaden out what we understand by it. ‘People talk about the fingers too much, and not enough about the fingertips,’ he says. ‘It’s vital to realize that the fingertip is not just one spot – it’s a whole region, and you must use all the different parts of it. It’s crucial, in fact, because no other part of your body actually addresses the key. Yes, you must consider how the tip relates to the whole finger, and the finger to the hand, and the hand to the wrist – and so on with the elbow and shoulder and bodyweight – but it’s just the tip which touches the key. And if you unlock that idea, then whole ranges of possibility become available.
Fingertips are both strong and sensitive. Just think: they can kill a person, and they can read braille. It’s as if they were designed by nature to play the piano.’
What can one do to increase the possibilities of curving? One common idea often presented to students who are taking their first steps, is to think of the hand holding an orange or apple. But what about at more advanced levels? Here’s O’Hora again: ‘At a primary level, the orange is not an unhelpful idea. But you have to remember that you grasp an orange, and you don’t grasp the keyboard: you lean on it. So I would stress the importance of physical balance, and finding a way to make music in a state of controlled and balanced tension with your whole body.’
I ask Ian Jones if he himself has any visualisations which he uses to help students find this ideal equipoise of Ying and Yang. ‘When I want to help students learn how to play with natural weight, I get them to lean against a wall, with feet well away from it, so that the whole body weight goes through the hand to the wall. It gives the sense of weight without tension. And then afterwards, standing at the piano, and casually leaning into a key with one finger. We have to learn to trust the keyboard with our weight and rid ourselves of any unnecessary physical tension.’
He goes on to explain how using properly-weighted and balanced flat fingers can be vital when playing fugues. ‘What can sometimes help us to highlight an inner voice is the amount of surface area of the finger in touch with the key. If I play E flat and G with my right hand, for example, and want to bring out the lower note, I can put my thumb all the way along the length of the key, and then it’s easier to direct the weight into the E flat.
‘At a primary level, the orange is not an unhelpful idea. But you have to remember that you grasp an orange, and you don’t grasp the keyboard: you lean on it’ Ronan O’Hora
And if I play the same two notes with the second and fourth finger, but want to bring out the upper, I can make the fourth finger very flat on the key and just lightly touch the black key with the tip of the second finger.’
Chenyin Li also has a striking way of helping her students increase their repertoire of different touches. ‘I ask the students to imagine themselves as the piano,’ she says, ‘and then to think what kind of contact they require if they themselves were the keyboard. I get them to tap on the shoulder, or leg, to feel what kind of contact would give better clarity: and then they absorb that technique from the other end, as it were, and understand it more thoroughly.’
Well-rounded repertoire
Sometimes in those heated online forums, the idea is mooted of different schools of repertoire requiring different types of touch. A cantabile Chopin melody, for example, might benefit from flat fingers (though not soft and squishy ones, pace Chenyin Li). Or Hummel’s quicksilver passagework might soar more impressively if played with extra-curved fingers. Is there anything in this theory, I wonder? Ronan O’Hora thinks there might be, although he’s keen to avoid too much generalisation. ‘Without wanting to be too reductive, we might say that the central ideal default sound of French repertoire is something which is crystalline and direct – less sonorous, less weighted, less reverberant. If you want a frontal, immediate sound, you rely more on the tip of the finger. If you want a more rounded sound, you use more of the flesh on the side of the finger.’
Ian Jones takes the idea a stage further. ‘Debussy, for example, needs a whole new repertoire of movements for the hand. There are many bell-like sounds in his music. So sometimes we should convert our hand and arm into a beater; use a finger supported by another finger; or play with a fixed wrist, making our arm the stick, so we feel like a beater striking a bell in the same way as the hammer strikes the string inside the piano.’
I’m mightily impressed by this, but confess that I’d always associated Debussy more with watery sounds, and rippling black-key cascades. Would that be a good time to use flat fingers? ‘It could be,’ says Jones. ‘But when you say ‘water’ my first thought is ‘wrist.’ Let’s take the cascades in Reflets dans l’eau from about bar 24. Yes, the black notes mean that the fingers will basically be flat. But what’s important is the evenness needed to create that watery effect, and that comes from the wrist and arm. The fingers just need to be ready to make contact, asserting a minimum of independence for the fine tuning of control.’
This all suggests that to reduce the possibilities of piano fingerwork just to curved or flat is ultimately unhelpful; there are degrees of curvature, just as there are minute declensions from flatness. (Chenyin Li even encourages her students to play on their fingernails, which she insists are kept as short as possible, to show how far a hand can be curved and still play.) And then, as all three of my fascinating interviewees stress, there is little point in thinking about the fingers without also thinking about the arm, the shoulder, and the whole body.
I’ll give the final word to Ronan O’Hora, who quotes the great Russian pedagogue Heinrich Neuhaus: ‘The fingers are your frontline troops, and the rest of your body is the back-up,’ he says. ‘You can’t win a war without your frontline troops, but neither can you win it without the back-up. So Chenyin Li is absolutely right to encourage different hand shapes. The hand needs to be as malleable as it can naturally be.’ ■
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