Many minor upsets in the way of small emergencies may occur at any time during a concert which also the artist must not allow to put him out. For instance, he may have a difficult or unsympathetic conductor, if it is an orchestral concert, or the orchestra may be poor and unreliable, and come in at the wrong places. It once happened to me that the wrong parts had been brought for the orchestra, and when I came in to play and sat down, prepared with the E Flat Concerto of Liszt, to my horror they gaily started the opening bars of the Saint-Saens’ Concerto in C minor! There was no time Read more

To recapitulate the whole matter and condense it, the principle set up is that all control on the keyboard should be established by the fingers, the hand and the forearm, the wrist remaining entirely supple. This, in my opinion, applies to all finger technique, and is essential for arriving at a completely successful issue. Care must also be taken not to allow any beating of time by the head or foot, as this may easily degenerate into a nervous trick, and certainly tends to encourage jerky and rigid movements of the body.

How to lift the hand off the keys

It is a good plan to make the beginner, after each exercise that he does, lift the hand off the keys and Read more

We must pass on from five finger exercises to the technique of extended positions of the hand, such as are to be found in scales, arpeggi, chords, thirds and octaves. I propose here to speak of scales and arpeggi only, and shall first say a word or two about scales, for which the five-finger exercises I have just been discussing are, of course, merely a preparation.

Five finger exercises | how to pass th thumb in piano scales

But the great difficulty of scale playing, which consists in learning how to pass the thumb successfully under the other fingers, without causing a break in the continuity of the sound, is absent in five finger exercises, though through them the student learns the right way of holding the hand on the keyboard, so that it is always ready to do its work when called upon in the scales, and also the fingers are trained to exert the necessary pressure on the key.

Piano scales finger.
In order to obtain this smooth passage of the thumb in scales, I advise that the wrist always be kept absolutely loose, and that in slow practice, when the thumb is ready to pass, the wrist be raised temporarily from its usually low position to a higher one; also the finger which strikes the last note before the thumb has to pass (in scales it is always the 3rd or 4th finger), should be slightly inclined towards the direction in which the hand is going to travel. Taking the ascending scale of C major, in the right hand, for example, and illustrating what I want to point out by a diagram thus :

Ascending right hand.

How to pass the thumb : fingers | hands in scales

It will be seen that upon the E, which is struck by the 3rd finger, the line underneath is raised and inclined towards the direction the hand has to go, so as to represent the lifting up of the wrist, and the inclining of the finger. The thumb then passes easily underneath the fingers on to the next note F, without any awkwardness. The same movement is repeated further up the scale after the 4th finger, and so on through all the octaves in ascending scales for the right hand. For descending scales, the process is reversed. The wrist is raised when the thumb falls, and the finger which follows it is inclined downwards in the direction the hand has to go.

Descending right hand.

Thumb passage | wrist in piano scales

In the left hand exactly the same process is used as in the right, only the order is reversed, that is to say, the wrist is raised at the thumb, in the ascending scale, and at the 3rd or 4th finger, in the descending one, the inclining position of the fingers being correspondingly observed. In all scales in every tonality, this action of the wrist and fingers should be similar, and the principle of lifting the wrist at the finger before the thumb passes, and inclining the finger in the direction the hand is to travel, greatly facilitates this passage of the thumb, and ensures smoothness and freedom of motion. In fast scales this movement practically disappears, as exaggerated actions only impede swiftness and look ungainly, but a smooth and undulating motion remains, which is elegant and imparts an elastic and supple articulation, and also gives character to the various passages.

Among the many students who come and play to me and ask me for advice, the majority remind me of a well-known limerick about a certain young lady of Rio, whose skill was so scanty she played Andante instead of Allegro con brio!

Piano scale for young students

I must be excused for drawing attention to the young lady of Rio, but it is because her case is true and typical of so many other young females and also males whose houses are much nearer London than Rio. I should like, therefore, to say a few words about attempting to play great masterpieces of pianoforte music without sufficient knowledge of technique, and especially of that immensely important branch of it, the mastery of scales. It has been my experience that whenever particularly young and raw students come to play to me and want to show what they can do, they invariably attempt such giant works as the Brahms- Handel Variations, or the Appassionata Sonata of Beethoven, or the Chopin Ballads.

Playing piano scales : fundamental drill

After they have finished playing a sonata or two (most often in tempo andante, like our friend of Rio), I ask them to play me a scale. They usually evince astonishment at my request, and answer that they never practise scales at all. If ever they do what I ask, their performance of them proves to be, as a rule, unrhythmical, uneven and altogether unsatisfactory. Yet most pianoforte works contain passage writing which is directly based upon scale progressions. I have known many advanced pianoforte students who are quite unable to arrive at any high standard of performance through lack of technical knowledge and want of proficiency in scale playing.