Hanon

My current teacher said to do some Hanon patterns. I'm not going to question her; but it's interesting to read some the statements in that book from a Feldenkrais perspective. For one thing, it purports to make all the fingers "equal" by having them all do the same thing. I would think it is more useful to practice making the fingers unequal---and learn to control the degree of inequality. That's useful for real music-making in which the notes are not all the same volume, but also another way to get at the skill of making them equal if you wish. "Equal" is just one choice along a spectrum. Making them deliberately unequal will engage the nervous system to a far greater degree and break up habits. I won't say any of this to my teacher (who is assigned by my school, so I don't have a choice), but I may secretly practice it.

My current teacher said to do some Hanon patterns. I'm not going to question her; but it's interesting to read some the statements in that book from a Feldenkrais perspective. For one thing, it purports to make all the fingers "equal" by having them all do the same thing. I would think it is more useful to practice making the fingers unequal---and learn to control the degree of inequality. That's useful for real music-making in which the notes are not all the same volume, but also another way to get at the skill of making them equal if you wish. "Equal" is just one choice along a spectrum. Making them deliberately unequal will engage the nervous system to a far greater degree and break up habits. I won't say any of this to my teacher (who is assigned by my school, so I don't have a choice), but I may secretly practice it. I think you have to see it from both sides though. For one thing "weak" fingers often end up being noisier due to less control rather than good for softer sounds. They can often be more erratic, rather than have their own character- unless very well trained. If musical execution and shape were defined excessively by the character and strength of each finger, the results would be pretty hopeless. Good fingerings can correspond nicely to individual characteristics at times- but there is no way to to match up all the time. The music has to come first and sometimes there's no way to keep it going unless you have a very wide range of possibility from "weak" fingers. Yonty Solomon used to be able to hear fingerings simply by listening. Of course, this was precisely because their characteristic was too obvious! Presumably he'd hear things like heavy thumb landings or weaker fourths causing a hole and make a simple deduction from the sound. Sometimes to change the fingering is enough, but there are also many times when a "weak" finger simply has to get beyond that to execute the shape that is required. There's a lot to be said for every finger being equally capable.

Hello Mike, I have been following your post about this on our other mutual forum, Feldyforum, although I did lose track when some of the submissions over there got a little 'ranty...' Of course Hanon meant "make the fingers equally capable," or "make the fingers capable of playing equally." He said, "make them equal" just because that's the way they talked about it back then. However, it's amazing how many people STILL talk about it like that instead of in more realistic terms. And maybe they even still THINK about it like that, which is why so many pianists have so many technical problems. But it's actually a very profound point. How evenness with sensitivity rather than mechanically. The mechnical establishment of evenness imposes so many constraints that there's no more room for differentiation. Capable evenness is based on freedom to attenuate - it's the opposite of constraint. AFF