Junior Virtuosos: What is a natural hand position?
One of the most common questions piano teachers have is: how do I help my student to develop and maintain a good hand position? To answer this question we first have to define what a good hand position is and what it is not.
1. What Is A Good Hand Position?
A good hand position is a hand that is in its natural alignment. To find it is simple enough. Drop the arm loosely by the side of the body and voila!
When hanging by the side of the body our fingers have a gentle curve, the main knuckle is prominent, there is a little space between the fingers, and the hand and forearm are in one piece. The thumb acts as an extension of the forearm. The ‘look’ of the hand will vary a bit from person to person but these features remain consistent.
To help the student become familiar with this alignment a mirror is useful. I like to begin each lesson by taking a moment to check the students seating and reminding them of their natural alignment, dropping the hand by the side of the body and bringing it to the keyboard exactly as it is.
Another trick is have the student flip over the hand palm up
and then place it palm down on the keyboard in the same alignment.
There are various images you can use such as: “bless the piano,” “hold a cup of soup” etc. I find “hold a cup of ice cream” works best because when students are asked to hold a cup of soup they often squeeze their fingers together to stop the soup from spilling out.
2. What Is Not A Good Hand Position?
The trouble teachers often run into is our language is ambiguously descriptive. The most common example of this is instructing the student to play with “curved” fingers. But one person’s curve is another’s curl. A student with long fingers is going to look quite different than one with short fingers. Our own lax hand is the perfect model of what our hand should look like at the keyboard.
In many old method books the student is instructed to hold a ball, or an egg, or a bubble.
The problem with these images is they encourage the student to curl the fingers overworking the flexors. There is nothing natural about curling the fingers. The only time we might do so walking down the street is if we saw someone scary walking by.
3. Common Pitfalls
The most common pitfall for students is our human desire to be “neat and tidy.” Students will often try and line their fingers up, one per white key over a five finger position.
In doing so the fingers are abducted (spread apart) causing unnecessary tension in the hand. For a young child their hand will only cover 3-4 keys. Even most adult hands will not cover more than 4-4 1/2 keys in their natural hand alignment.
I find it useful to have students practice bringing the hand to the keyboard with their eyes closed to avoid this problem. Most are shocked how few keys the hand covers.
Another “neat and tidy” issue is the common desire to straighten at the wrist. When our hand is hanging by the side of the body neither side of the hand is in a straight line with the hand, nor is the hand angling towards the side (as if pigeon-toed or Charlie Chaplin’s feet). No particular finger should line up with the forearm. The image I most commonly use for the hand is a “tulip and its stem.” (Thanks Teresa Dybvig for the image and Lauren Sonder for the tulip drawing!)
If I find a student is getting out of alignment I will ask them to take their hand away from the keyboard, shake it out a bit, and bring it back exactly as it is. A word of warning about the word “alignment.” Students, including adults, will often hear “line” and proceed to make a straight line with parts of their body.
The other common pitfall is what a colleague calls negraclaviphobia (“Fear of the black keys”). Students are so afraid of having their fingers in the black key area that they curl them in avoidance.
Some old method books even advocate making the finger tips into a straight line (eek!) to avoid the black keys. It’s hard to imagine a more unnatural use of the hand. For a young or small handed child the fingers will be near the black keys. For an older or larger-handed student the fingers will be in the black key area if the thumb is playing.
(Martha Argerich’s gorgeous hands)
The key is lighter the further away we get from the fallboard. When the thumb is not playing it is preferable to have the thumb off the keyboard provided no black keys are to be played in the near future. The intricacies of moving In and Out in relation to the fallboard will be explored in a future post.
This brings us to another pitfall: dangling thumbs. The intrinsic muscles of the hand at the base of the thumb are the heaviest in the hand. Students will often allow the thumb to drop down below the keyboard causing the rest of the hand to collapse.
In addition to reminding students of their natural alignment, I enjoy the image of the thumb tip being a “ghost with a flashlight (or laser beam).” The light can go up or down, side to side, or shine at an angle but it should always shine on the fallboard when not playing.
4. Developing Awareness
Even more than knowing how the hand should look at the keyboard we need to know how it should feel. The body awareness of children is generally quite low. If you ask them the lift their elbow many will lift their shoulder instead. Two effective approaches to developing awareness are moving in and out of the mid-range of motion and asking questions.
Moving in and out of the mid-range of motion: Our range of motion (ROM) is the motion allowed by the joint’s shape and surrounding soft tissue to allow a specific movement between bones. When the hand is in its natural alignment the joints of the hand are in the mid-range of motion. We can develop awareness by moving in and out of the mid-range. I like to begin by having the student move towards the end-range of motion and back to neutral. For instance:
Curling the fingers and then returning to neutral
Straightening the fingers and returning to neutral
Spreading the fingers and returning to neutral
Squeezing the fingers and returning to neutral
Angling the hand towards the thumb (radial deviation) and returning to neutral
Angling the hand towards the fifth finger (ulnar deviation) and returning to neutral
Dropping the hand at the wrist and returning to neutral
Raising the hand at the wrist and returning to neutral
Over time you can make these movement smaller and smaller so the student becomes aware of when they are using unnecessary tension. Regularly asking the student to verbalize how their hands feel will help them further increase their awareness. At first they may not feel much of anything but the more times you revisit these movements the greater their awareness will expand.
5. Opening The Hand For Larger Intervals
With young beginners there is rarely an occasion in the elementary repertoire to leave their natural hand alignment. Gross motor skills come before fine, arm before hand. I make a point of avoiding legato playing until the student is capable of maintaining a natural hand position and using their arm weight by lifting and dropping the hand-forearm as a unit from the elbow joint. For a beginning four or five year old this might take a year or more.
As the student progresses they will be asked to play increasingly varied figurations including large intervals, leaps, and chords. Our muscles were designed to alternate between tension and relaxation. When playing a large interval like an octave (or for a young student a 6th) the hand does not need to return all the way to the size it would be in when hanging by the side of the body. But it does need to beclose enough to release excessive tension . This is what Dr. Teresa Dybvig calls “open but unstretched.” When the hand is open but unstretched there is a greater distance between the fingers but the abductors are not activated.
To help the student feel this place gently open the students hand for them (always ask permission before touching) so they can feel what it is for the hand to open passively. Alternate between having them actively stretch open the fingers and having them opened passively. In my adult male hand this is somewhere between a 6th or 7th depending how my body feels that day.
6. One Additional Thought
I began by using the term hand “position” but in actuality the goal is not to find a fixed position at all. Rather, when a student is aware of their natural alignment they have a healthy neutral from which to depart from and return to allowing for maximum freedom and ease of movement.
Please let me know if you enjoyed this post. Questions and comments welcomed!