When I decided to re-start piano, I mentioned it separately to a couple of friends who didn’t know me as a youngster (and so didn’t know I used to play). Interestingly, the first thing both of them said was ‘but you don’t have pianist’s hands!’. More oddly, one of them has never even played piano before so how would he be qualified to have an opinion on how my hands might qualify me to tickle the ivories?
That said, on the face of it, they’re both right. I’ve always believed my hands aren’t ideally shaped to play. They are not ‘small’ per se – my palm span is around average – however, my fingers are rather short. As Eric Morecambe always referred to Ernie Wise’s short fat hairy legs – well, I’ve always thought of my fingers in the same light.
When you look at most (although not all) pianists, they do tend to be blessed with a larger hand (taking the hand and finger size together). If you look at the Chinese virtuosi (Lang Lang, Yundi Li, Yuja Wang as the most obvious examples), they don’t seem to have large European sized hands (in terms of palm size) but do have long, slender fingers. Most western pianists I’ve seen on YouTube also seem to have larger hands.
When I was young, I always wondered whether my ‘small’ hands were an obstacle. I can reach an octave reasonably comfortably (especially on black keys) and can just stretch to a 9th using my fingertips (although not reliably). Needing to stretch like this gives me an intermittent problem in the Moonlight Sonata 1st movement on the stretch to a 9th in bar 9 (from the A to the B 9 notes above). Similarly, I could never manage The Entertainer because of the octaves with a third on white notes in the right hand which cause me to contort my hand into a very awkward and uncomfortable shape making it hard for my thumb and little finger to make the octave.
I have done what research I can and it seems generally accepted that smaller hands should not be an obstacle except in perhaps a few pieces. Even then frequently you can slightly modify the score to get around it. For example, I have a recording of Mauritzio Pollini playing the Chopin Op 28 Preludes. In the penultimate bar of Prelude No. 4 in E Minor, he plays the first chord completely together. My fingers don’t stretch that far so I need to spread it … no great crisis I think.
So, if that is the case, why is it that very few concert pianists have small hands? I’ve developed a theory. If you just hold your hand out and extend your thumb and little finger out to the side and keep them there, you quickly feel tension beginning to build – and the more you stretch, the quicker this tension builds. I’m guessing it’s because our fingers were never really designed to do that – what purpose can that movement really serve? However, to play piano, we often need to stretch our fingers apart to reach different combinations of keys and herein lies the problem. Tension is recognised as one real enemy of good piano playing … the more tense the hand, the more difficult it is to play freely. So, my theory is that if you have larger hands, then you effectively stretch much less and, therefore, are less prone to tension for that reason.
To support my theory, there are several online resources about the importance of ‘closed hand positions’. This basically mens avoiding having your fingers outstretched for anything but the minimum amount of time. I suspect that this advice is probably even more relevant to the smaller hand where even relatively modest intervals are a bit of a stretch. For me, for example, playing an E with my 4th and a B with my 2nd in my left hand is an awkward stretch – for longer fingers it would probably just fit comfortably under the hand. So, two options, either avoid that fingering completely or train the hand to close up quickly so that the slight tension is quickly released before it starts to build.
So, in summary, I think maybe those of us with smaller hands who aren’t taught how to train our hands to close properly will hit a technical wall caused by tension sooner than people with larger hands. Without the right training, perhaps we never get past this hurdle. Now I’m trying to see if I can actually start to eliminate tension caused by this … easier to read about than to do!!
