[...]
Now I will continue speaking of fingers. When I was a child -- a long time ago -- I was assigned the role of a little devil in a children's play, and as such I was supposed to get horns and a tail.
Being already technically inclined, I was very preoccupied with the question of the tail -- how would I move it ? I didn't have the opportunity of meeting a real devil to see how he did it;
instead, I observed dogs, cats, cows, and horses.
Then when I got into dress rehearsal I was disappointed to find that I couldn't wag my tail as they did, holding still, but had to wag my whole body. ( Finally I lost the tail. )
Well, the fact is that after almost fifty years of arm preaching people have lost the awareness that they can move their fingers without moving the whole arm. ( You often see proof of this -- at the beginning of a TRILL, for instance, most people jump with the arm initially, instead of moving more energetically the fingers themselves. )
I think two factors contributed to this:
first, this propaganda, this BRAINWASHING by TEACHERS, writers of books on technique, etc.;
second, people fail to observe good pianists correctly.
A pianist's finger movements should be so minimal, so reduced in size, and are at such a distance, that we sometimes get the feeling he isn't moving his fingers; and this has confirmed in many young pianists what their teachers said -- "roll, rotate, etc., but don't use the fingers too much."
A student of mine once explained my viewpoint to a well-known pianist and teacher, who said with great sarcasm and dishust, "Well, it sounds terribly FINGERY."
If it sounds "fingery" to all of you, the I have achieved my goal.
It HAS to be fingery, and MORE fingery, and VERY MUCH fingery, the more FINGERY the better. I will never tire of saying this.
Only don't misunderstand -- it's never the fingers ALONE; that was the tragedy of this older school, and that is what provoked a counterrevolution.
The extreme of this PURELY FINGER method became the OTHER extreme where, in theory, the fingers were completely abandoned ( although not by real pianists ).
So if you take FINGERS as the MAIN INGREDIENT of our cake, but NOT the ONLY one, we should develop the SENSITIVITY in our FINGERS of a B L I N D M A N who reads BRAILLE.
( Anm. Olli: Na sowas aber auch. Hattet Ihr das mal versucht ? Lasst mal ...SEHN ..... ;);) ( lach ) )
ONLY the FINGER can give the EXACT INFORMATION to the brain about the resistance of the key...[....]
( Hatte ich mal den TASTSINN erwähnt ? Ja ? ...na sowas aber auch... )
Folgt: = > > ARM: "Rotation" und "Triller".
[ ...] And now the arm's other movement, the rotary movement. When it was first discovered, everybody was thrilled to death.
( Anm. Olli: So wie chiarina und mick anscheinend heute noch. Na sowas aber auch. )
People thought they had found a perpetual motion that could do trills, scales, everything.
If you read Matthay, he writes that he uses the rotary motion to play a single note.
( Anm. Olli: Ei verbibbsch ( Stephan, sry, aber ich muss das auch mal probieren. ) )
In a sense he is right; to play at all we have to rotate oru arms to put them in a playing position. But many people misunderstand and believe that to play a single note they have to shake or undulate something.
We should examine more closely the rotation actually used in playing.
First there is the axis of rotation to consider. If you stretch your arm out straight and rotate the forearm, the axis about which it turns is in line with the fourth finger ( not the third, as so many believe ).
( Anm. Olli: Na das ist ja...! Ist ja n richtiger PHYSIKERBEOBACHTER, der Libermann... . Ihr auch ? )
If you hold a pencil in your hand and rotate your arm, each end of the pencil will go through the biggest distance; the closer a given point is to the axis, the smaller will be its arc of rotation. The axis itself doesn't move at all.
Therefore, if we are using the fourth finger in a trill, rotation would be useless.
( Anm. Olli: Genau. )
The most efficient finger to rotate ist the thumb, because it is farthest from the axis.
( Anm. Olli: Wer widerspricht ? )
The next best is second, and three and five are worse, while the fourth is absolutely negative.
If we move the hand so that the third finger is our axis, then two and four are poorly rotated, one and five are equally good.
This should make clear to you that for short distances ( when you use two neighboring fingers, for instance ) rotation is useless, because the arc transgressed is less than the three-eights of an inch through which each key must be moved.
People think that rotation is helping them to trill, but they actually make the trill with their fingers and rotation only inhibits these movements and diminishes control.
If, in another case, there are broken octaves or similar big intervals, THEN rotation is very important, especially for the thumb, since it is most easily rotated and needs the most help anyway.[...]
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